Last week, we spoke about internal communication and how important it is to have effective internal communication. This week, we’ll look at some more reasons why it is important to promote effective communication at the workplace.
The social employee: Gone are the days when every employee just wanted a steady 9 to 5 job, minded their work, and took a paycheck home at the end of the month. Today’s employees are socially active and act as the company’s ambassadors when interacting with the wider community.
If they are not aware of the internal happenings of the organization, they run the risk of misrepresenting or spreading wrong information about the organization.
Communication as an engagement tool: Imagine this scenario. A fresher programmer sits in his cubicle and keeps coding away without knowing anything about the rest of the process or the company’s sales or growth numbers.
His superiors either forgot or never bothered to tell him anything about the rest of the company’s activities. His only reward is his salary. How engaged and motivated do you think he’d be?
Now let’s say that the same employee knows that his lines of code are powering a global business enterprise, which in essence means that he is a small part of their success. Now imagine how committed, motivated, and engaged he’d feel.
An informed employee is an engaged employee. An engaged employee is a productive employee. Therefore, Transitive law says that the more informed the employee is, the more productive he’d be.
Avoiding people silos: Anyone who’s worked in mid to large enterprises will be familiar with this. Groups or factions form up, sometimes as early as during induction or training. After all, first impressions do matter.
Though they move on to live production, these groups still share a strong bond, with little or no communication with outsiders. This leads to the formation of little silos or clusters of people who don’t participate and interact with the wider groups.
This also hinders them from being fully productive, if they are to work together with people outside their group. Needless to say, this is a bad practice that should be avoided.
As we can see, effective internal communication is of vital importance to any organization. In the next section of this blog, we’ll look at the steps needed to be taken to promote communication and how online HR software helps with this.
