Corporations having a large number of employees and various levels of hierarchy often scuffle to manage business communications effectively. Continuous communication between high level management and employees in an organization is required.
Exploring Business Communication in Depth
Business communication is the process to share information between employees within and outside an organization. It’s how employees and management interact with each other to achieve organizational goals and stay aligned with core organizational values. Business communications are intended towards
improving organizational practices, eliminating silos, keeping employees informed, and reducing errors.
Business communication is important in the workplace and is critical for the growth of every organization, and is goal-oriented, unlike everyday communications. Communicating all the rules, core
company values, policies, and regulations to the people within and outside the organization is important for an organization to operate successfully.
Different Types of Business Communications
There are four different types of business communications:
1. Internal Upward Communication
This type of communication generally comes from an employee to a manager or higher level figure. Every manager must enable information to flow upwards to have a true understanding of the company’s operations. Internal upward communications include feedback forms, surveys, and reports that employees deliver to their team leads or managers.
2. Internal Downward Communication
The communication flowing from high level management to one or more employees in the form of a memo, a letter, or a verbal directive is called internal downward communication. Leaders must keep communications professional and clear when communicating with employees.
3. Internal Lateral Communication
It is a workplace communication that happens among the employees within the organization. The employees might communicate through chats, email, messaging, employee communication tools, or directly. This type of communication can be within or among the departments and happens more often than other types of business communications. Most importantly, frequent communication among the employees plays an important role to boost employee engagement in the workplace and contribute to increasing employee productivity.
4. External Communication
External communication happens with external parties such as prospects, customers, vendors, or partners. Such communications happen on a less regular basis as compared to internal communications.
How does Business Communications Contribute to Driving Organizational Success?
Here are a few reasons why business communications are important for every company’s success.
1. Enhances Employee Engagement
According to Ragan’s research on employee engagement, leadership communication is the topmost internal communication factor that statistically correlates to how engaged employees are. Internal communication teams play a significant role in supporting, coaching, and reminding the leaders about
the importance of communication and the role it plays in building employee engagement.
2. Eliminates Communication Silos
Irrelevant content often results in information silos. Information that is actually important to an employee can easily get lost. You must ask yourself why information gets lost in your organization. Using the right employee communication tools to roll out proper internal business communications is critical to eliminating this challenge.
3. Boosts Employee Productivity
Effective internal business communications helps in improving employee performance at the workplace. With the information overhead, employees might spend too much time searching for content that they need to do their job. An average employee spends around 2.5hours in a day searching for the desired
information. The entire week is lost in finding the relevant information. Proper internal business communication will help in improving the draining productivity of employees.
4. Improves Interdepartmental Communications
It is difficult to keep and maintain an effective interdepartmental communications strategy within the companies. For employees to be more productive, they must be able to communicate and collaborate
easily. Business communications help in communicating the right message between the departments and helps them collaborate with ease.
5. Improves Communications with Remote Workers
According to the Global Mobile Workforce Forecast, 40% of the world’s working population will be mobile by 2022. The figures for developed countries such as the US might reach 75%. This will pave way for a new communication, leadership, and management approach. This will require proper communication and coordination across time zones, information silos, and overcoming language and
cultural barriers. Better internal communications will have a positive impact on how remote teams communicate and collaborate.
6. Creates a Better Company Culture
A proper business communications strategy is important to build a better company culture and leads to a positive work environment. It helps in improving employee engagement and communicating transparently to the employees. The employees feel motivated and satisfied when the right things are
communicated to them.
7. Reduces Employee Turnover
Organizations with more engaged and satisfied employees often enjoy much lower turnover rates. To attract and keep the millennials and younger generations active in the workplace, employers must ensure that their employees know what’s relevant to their jobs. Too much irrelevant information might lead to disengagement, stress, frustration, and lower retention rates.
8. Improves Knowledge Sharing Efforts
One of the major goals that companies are trying to achieve by investing in internal communications is to improve knowledge sharing efforts. The employees are constantly learning and growing. Employers need to enable easy knowledge sharing within their organization to help employees in their development efforts. Without having a nicely oriented business communications strategy, organizational knowledge and knowledge sharing suffer.
9. Increases Employee Advocacy
When employers know the trick to communicate with their employees, they are much more successful in converting their employees into brand ambassadors. Happy employees love to contribute to brand ambassadorship programs. Employee advocacy and brand ambassadorship can help the company’s
operations in the following ways.
Boosts marketing efforts
Increases brand awareness
Enhances employer brand and attract high-quality candidates
Boosts sales
10. Increases Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Improved business communication means improved customer satisfaction. If an organization follows poor communication practices, two things happen. First, the employees in customer-facing roles will not have the information they need. Second, customers will sense low employee morale and will have a
negative experience. A study found that employee attitude plays a significant role when it comes to customer satisfaction, which then results in increased revenue.
The Bottom Line
The pandemic has drastically changed the communication strategies in the workplace. It has become more than important to have a well-aligned business communications strategy to keep the employees engaged and motivated in the new work from home culture. Most of the companies have already started engaging employees through internal communications. The organizations failing to adapt to these unprecedented times will suffer leaving a negative impact on their employees.
