How to build employee engagement with internal communication

Leaders must intensify their efforts to drive employee engagement through more effective internal communications.

• Why it matters: Employee engagement is on a downward trend and has hit the lowest it’s ever been since 2013, according to Gallup — this is hurting employee productivity, retention, alignment, and the company's bottom line.

To re-engage their employees, leaders must utilize internal communications strategies that put the workforce’s needs front and center.

How internal communication impacts employee engagement

Internal communications are pivotal, affecting everything from team efficiency and productivity to overall engagement. Inefficient communication processes can lead to significant financial losses, with organizations potentially losing up to $15,000 per employee annually due to decreased productivity. 

Conversely, effective communication strategies can boost morale and cultivate an engaged workforce, essential for sustained organizational success.

9 ways to build employee engagement with internal communication

Company leadership can boost employee engagement through strategic internal communication. 

1. Identify the communication channels employees prefer

Understanding and leveraging the preferred information channels of your employees is crucial for effective internal communication engagement.

To accurately identify your employees' preferred channels for internal communication, it's essential to base your decisions on data rather than assumptions.

Our data indicates that employee newsletters are the leading communication channels that employees wish their leaders would use more frequently. But every company is unique, so it’s worth sourcing your own data through employee surveys. 

Some answers worth seeking through pulse surveys include:

• Where do employees go to find the information needed to do their jobs?
• Which channels do employees use to get critical versus casual information?
• Which channels promote meaningful conversations between employees versus employees and leadership?
• Are there any employee communication tools your organization isn’t already currently using that your employees have suggested?

Identifying and utilizing the right channels ensures open lines of communication between leadership and engaged, attentive employees.

2. Create an internal communications plan

As the first of four key pillars of internal communications management, your comms plan should identify and outline critical information like:

• Goals: In this case, employee engagement. Your plan should have an answer to how you’ll keep employees engaged with the information and channels at your organization’s disposal.

• Messages: What information do your employees need to do their jobs effectively? And how frequently can your comms team send messages without overwhelming them? Hitting the sweet spot between relevance and frequency will be key to keeping your employees engaged.

• Communication channels: Internal communications departments use several channels when disseminating information. Which ones do your employees engage with the most? And what are their strengths, limitations, and identities?

To ensure the success of your internal communication plan, it's crucial to involve all major stakeholders from the start and secure their buy-in and support.

3. Maintain consistent communications

Nearly 40% of the people we surveyed for our 2024 State of Internal Communications said they want a more consistent communication cadence from the company leadership.

You can meet this growing need to build employee engagement by:

• Establishing anticipation: By sending email updates and other internal communications on a consistent schedule, employees will begin to expect them, reducing the chance of missing important information due to this established anticipation for messages at specific times.

• Reinforcing alignment: Just as regular updates foster anticipation among employees, consistent communication is crucial for maintaining alignment with your organization's mission and vision.

Consult your communications plan when implementing this strategy. There is a huge difference between excessive internal communications and consistent ones.

4. Personalize your communications

One of the most effective internal communication best practices for engagement involves sending personalized communications to employees, as they are more likely to engage with information that is directly relevant to them.

While personalizing communication for individuals in different departments, branches, positions, and geographies poses a challenge, leveraging distribution lists to segment recipients into groups ensures each receives internal emails tailored to their needs.

Some ideas worth considering include:

• Create multiple newsletters for your distribution lists - one for sales, another for marketing, one for remote workers, and so on.
• Send newsletters through different leaders — CTO for technical updates, VP of sales for sales updates, and so on.
  
  

5. Create engaging newsletter designs

Upon opening your newsletter, employees should instantly grasp its purpose, understand its significance, and know the actions expected of them after reading it. A neat newsletter design is one of the best ways to achieve that. Downloading Axios HQ’s Smart Brevity Checklist can help here.

Our free Smart Brevity checklist employs a writing methodology that condenses newsletter updates to their most essential information, covering what the newsletter is about and why it matters. This information is presented through:

• Strategic bolding
• Bullet points
• Other proven formatting

Applying this to a newsletter yields updates that are 40% shorter than standard communications, making them memorable and easily digestible. On the visual side of things, our internal communications platform provides customizable templates that enable quick newsletter design, ensuring an attractive and responsive layout across desktop and mobile devices.

Reach out to our team to discover how Axios HQ can enhance your internal communication and boost employee engagement.

6. Encourage up, down, and around communications

Nearly 60% of employees deem leadership communication ineffective, with some quitting their jobs because of it. Neglecting the communication concerns of remaining employees can lead to their disengagement and misalignment with the company's objectives.

To avert a potential crisis in workplace communications, facilitate information movement up, down, and around. Take advantage of the various management levels in your organization to distribute critical information and ensure every employee stays in lockstep with the company’s priorities. 

Axios HQ excels at fostering up, down, and around communication by:

• Sharing templates company leaders can use to keep messages concise and highlight the big picture
• Allowing each employee to contribute by jumping in to add critical information to project updates

The end result is maximum visibility, with leaders and employees aligned, reading from the same page, and collaboratively working toward the same objectives. 

7. Prioritize honesty and transparency

Honest and transparent communication not only builds trust among employees, leading to improved retention and engagement but also fosters a culture of openness that significantly boosts morale.

Being transparent during difficult times can reduce uncertainty among your employees and keep them focused. Meanwhile, if you keep critical information from them, the knock-on effects will include:

• Disengagement: If your frontline workers can’t trust your communications during a crisis, they certainly won’t when all is well.

• Missed Opportunities: Sweeping failures under the rug robs employees of the chance to learn from teachable moments and grow.

So, prioritize openness in all corporate communications sent to employees.

8. Collect employee feedback

By weaving employee feedback into your internal communications strategy, you can effectively close the gap between the messages you disseminate and what your employees genuinely wish to receive.

You can kickstart the feedback collection process by:

• Running regular employee engagement surveys
• Consulting the data your dedicated internal communications tool provides
• Asking for feedback during face-to-face meetings

Collecting feedback encourages two-way dialogue between leadership and employees, enhancing decision-making processes and signaling that employee opinions are valued — this should go a long way toward boosting job satisfaction.

9. Track your internal communications

Some 40% of leaders admit to not tracking — or being neutral about tracking — how their employees engage with critical updates. 

This is a problem because you wouldn’t continue investing in a marketing campaign if you can’t demonstrate its ROI. Similarly, it would make little sense to continue investing in an internal communication strategy if you’re not tracking its performance.  

Use analytics to track your internal comms and measure your strategy’s success. Some reliable tracking methods include:

• Open rates: What percentage of employees are opening your newsletters? Or interacting with your team software? Measuring success with this metric will look different depending on the communication channels your organization uses.

• Survey responses: One-click surveys offer a low-effort way for employees to give feedback.

• One-on-one conversations: Directly engaging with employees by stopping and asking for their opinions face-to-face remains another viable option.

Data should inform your entire internal communication strategy and plan—not assumptions. This is the only way to build a communication culture that encourages employee engagement, meaning you must measure your internal comms regularly. 

The bottom line

Leaders have a critical role to play in addressing the alarming decline in engagement levels through strategic internal communications. Effective communication improves productivity and retention and aligns employees with the company's goals, positively impacting the bottom line. 

Prioritize the workforce's needs and preferences in your communication strategies to foster a culture of engagement, transparency, and efficiency, which is essential for sustained organizational success.

Go deeper: How to improve internal communications