What makes a large employer good at internal comms?

October 5, 2021 5:21 AM

Have you ever worked for a large (250+ people) organization that just did an amazing job at internal communications? If yes -- what did they do and why did it work?

I'm trying to set up a robust structure at a university faculty -- defining professors, staff and students as "internal" for these purposes. No tools are off the table, and we're looking outside higher ed for examples of really good ways to keep sets of internal audiences apprised of what's going on.

What's great with internal information-sharing where you are? Are there newsletters? Internal-facing social media channels? Videos or podcasts? Updated signage? What frequency does information come out with? What makes it fun or interesting?

We have the additional challenge of having the "full" internal comms set (faculty, staff, students) as well as needing breakout messaging for each group individually [and sometimes subgroups]) -- but that's our problem. I just want to know what your organization does that keeps you informed and engaged.

posted by Shepherd to Work & Money (10 answers total)

I don’t know as I’d say that my current university does this well, but it is better than all other universities I’ve been at. Surprisingly, mostly through good old-fashioned email lists. Some email purists’ efforts, in combination with us having laughably small amounts of disk space for email storage until quite recently, have folks trained to include text in the body of the email (in addition to the Word documents that some people like to send to advertise events), so the format of emails is relatively consistent. A major software changeover project has had some issues with lack of testing of and training in the new software that everyone on campus has to interact with, but has sent out update emails on a regular schedule and in a regular format that keep people somewhat up to date. The person responsible for dissemination of COVID info on campus has also gotten much better at sending out regular and informative emails. Other departments and groups on campus send out regular announcements as well. There are reminders of internal due dates for things, a note that pay stubs are available with a link to view them on pay days, etc. So this seems to be largely organizational culture that has just fortuitously built up over time.

Theoretically, most of this info is also available on various web sites (internal or public facing), but figuring out which web sites for which information is complicated, so email really seems to be the thing that everyone relies on. But possibly students have a different perspective - I imagine the younger crowd has a different relationship with email, so maybe don’t think the reliance on email lists is at all helpful.

In my local community, for a while there was a local events webpage that everyone posted their events to. It had a convenient posting and search interface, and gave all of the important info about events in an easy to read format. So folks could check that web site and easily find out what was going on locally each week. (The pandemic decreased the overall number of events, and so new businesses or groups aren’t familiar with the local events page, and so seem to rely on Facebook instead, so that has broken down a bit, unfortunately.)

The common denominator in both cases is a relatively simple/straightforward, but informative (easy to find the important details at a glance) common source for all necessary info in a given context, with uptake from almost all sources of information paired with demand from users of information.

As a university student, though, I recall the absolute best way to get info out was posting flyers on the insides of bathroom stalls. If you do have a physical location that everyone passes through regularly (or a fixed number of such physical locations), an organized (eg. only officially approved postings allowed) bulletin board can still be quite useful. Though not for complex info that requires more reading, and only if people actually do post everything there regularly. Consistency and comprehensiveness of use is key.

One thing that doesn’t work as well at my organization is that we’re asked by our managers for essentially the same information in three or four different formats throughout the year, though often in close succession. So our managers try to download the work of compiling information into a common reporting format onto us, and often that means that information doesn’t get passed along. If someone is trying to centrally compile information, make sure that the info is being requested just once, in just one format. And share it as necessary from there.
posted by eviemath at 5:52 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

Its got to be two way! There have to be methods for raising issues back up the chain. How does the CEO/Directors/Head of Dept hear about what isn't working? And comms should be responsive to what is raised.
posted by biffa at 5:52 AM on October 5, 2021 [2 favorites]

do a survey! part of my job entry was to do to surveys, a semi-structured qualitative one with >10 content creators to see how they created, distributed and archived content, what problems they faced, what they wanted from their tools and how they perceived other people and those tools. From that I did a quantitative survey for the end users to answer more questions - how did they get their info, what did they rate that info (likert scales and I forget the name but you take the # of 4 & 5 responses weighted) and how often they ran into common problems.

It took about 2 months to get that data but oh it has saved a lot of time over what I thought were problems and reoriented the team to what the users and content creators see as problems. Plus you get some reasonably hard numbers to wave at higher ups to justify certain actions/budgets.

One major thing is how people get info - there were significant non-overlaps in my groups, so if you send info out by Channel A, you miss x% of users, so you need to get the person who distributes the info to either use Channels A and B routinely or make it automated (the dream) or have a super easy way for some poor bastard to capture and cross-post . Email is great, but I have chunks of people who are so deluged with emails they don't look at it for news but instead scan Channel B for important updates.

Check if you have audit/privacy concerns before you chase some ideal solution down and can't do it.

Identify and pool all the people who regularly create content to distribute and give them something - a slack, a team, an email list - where they can start talking to each other for support and knowledge.

How much authority do you have over those people as well? Sure you want everyone to use the shiny new collaboration platform, but without either a stick or serious pressure from higher-up, people who have A System That Works will resist. Especially if producing and sharing this content is an additional task and not their primary focus - what is the upside for them in learning to use a new tool if their own boss doesn't care?

Also think about how you onboard new staff and students. That's a great place to orient people into where information is shared, how to access it easily and sign them up to whatever distribution systems you have.

Intranets are really good for sharing and archiving this kind of info in a structured way if they're designed and actively managed. You can integrate emails pretty well on most modern platforms.

I actively hate and despise Workplace by Facebook and it requires an additional log in and urgh moderating.

Oh and yes, turn off comments and likes - do not add any kind of forum or social media unless you have resources to moderate it because it is a disaster waiting to happen. Provide contact info on everything to make it easy to reply/reach out to people but social media on intranets is such a DUMB idea.

Also, I found a lot of value in reading first some fairly recent general knowledge management books, then research papers on intranets and library science management of websites.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:05 AM on October 5, 2021 [7 favorites]

Regarding the two-way communication, my current employer (~350 employees, tech startup) uses a tool called Peakon. I believe we get surveyed monthly, possibly quarterly (I haven't been here that long). In addition to rating things with numbers, you can write comments. [Employee surveys w/o comments are useless IMHO.] And, our execs respond! They don't know who wrote the comment (unless you put your name in it).

This is the first time in ~40 years of working that I've had personal responses to my survey comments and I think it's great.
posted by elmay at 7:24 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I work for a giant company (my dept has 80 employees and the division I fall under is 1000+) and I think our internal communications work well, mostly because we have depts dedicated to it. At the division level they provide templates for PowerPoints, color and font recommendations, a bank of stock photos (people working, "customers", buildings) and provide assistance if you have no idea what you're doing. They also manage all our internal business communications at the division level. It's also broken down by region, so there's another communications dept that handles things on a state by state level (again, 1000s of employees).

For any given thing I might get multiple emails (covid return to work, say) but the message is consistent across all of them. The same message is also presented on company internal sites (not everyone reads email daily, they're out "in the field" so to say) and if it's important the company has a way to force informational pop-ups when you log into your computer.

I get weekly emails at the state level with all the latest company information, again most of it is a repeat but it's only the latest 4 or 5 items so if there's nothing new I don't bother reading it. It's not a long email so it takes about 5 seconds to see the latest story and trash it.
All of these communications are stored on the intranet (see above) so the emails usually link back to the internal site so things don't get muddled with multiple versions.
Our internal feedback loop is... complex. It's based on the concept of radical candor, so yeah.
posted by fiercekitten at 8:02 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm in a subdivision of ~90 people within a multinational company of about 500, and most of our internal communication is done over Slack. I'm in a company-wide channel used for general mass communication, plus lots of smaller, more targeted ones: one for the London office, one for my subdivision, one for software developers in my subdivision, a bunch of project-related ones and so on. I mute the ones that I find less relevant, so that I only get notifications for the ones that matter to me, but in looking at the messages I've been notified about, I'll notice and catch up on anything that's gone into the others.

There's no official obligation to be on any of the channels, so for anything really important, we also get email. As with the Slack channels, there are mailing lists set up for the whole company and for various subgroups. Not much goes that route; I get a few announcements per month.

This works really well for me because I prefer communication in written form anyway, I get next to no email other than the important ones (no danger of them getting lost in a flood), and I'm at my desk and on Slack basically all day long, so it's easy for me to keep on top of it all. I don't know if it works well for everyone.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 8:55 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

I work at a large university right now that does not do this well. We get so many emails. You unsubscribe from lists and periodically get resubscribed without any input on your part. I do not like the email situation here.

I previously worked for a university that I thought did a great job of this. They had a daily email that went out to faculty and staff. Departments had to pay to get something in it. Want to tell us about your upcoming event? Need people to take a survey? PAY. FOR. IT. It kept units from spamming people with the same event invite over and over again and it allowed people to opt-in to email lists from particular programs while only being on one email list (for the main email) by default. I loved it.
posted by shesbookish at 9:31 AM on October 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

250+is not that big, really. And it really depends on what needs communicating! Do people need daily information or weekly? Are they collaborating on projects?

One good question is what breakdowns have happened in the past...where are your gaps?

The most important thing is that some person or group owns the communication. There is someone to call when it's not working or to ask for improvement. Without that it won't work.
posted by emjaybee at 9:55 AM on October 5, 2021

300+ non-profit thing that might be closer to your faculty than a commercial company of thousands. We had a lot of communication problems and siloed teams that finally got mostly fixed after a third-party run survey pinpointed the most crucial flows.

What we settled on is just sending everyone the minutes of weekly-ish executive meetings, in the format of "Department X has this going on, that may be an issue next month, and we're setting up a meeting with Y institution to discuss Z". We literally get the same information as our CEO, except with a week or so of delay because all that has to be typed and agreed on. The possibly cunning thing is that HR and Facilities both have their sections at the end, so people at least scroll through to those sections for info about raises, gadgets, floor cleanings etc.

I wouldn't call it perfect, but a major improvement over the previous system where the only way to learn possibly crucial information was to catch the right person in the lunch queue. Plus one email a week or two rather than each department sending out whatever they think important to whoever comes to mind.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:26 AM on October 5, 2021 [4 favorites]

Where I work, if you use Windows Exchange is the best solution. I don't like MS, but I have to say I get emails from DLs all the time that helps me know what is going on (40 years experience). As far as feedback, we send an emails with call back numbers to report problems. Oh yeah, 50,000 people.
posted by baegucb at 5:07 PM on October 5, 2021