Communication is a powerful tool that can have a massive impact on the success of any organisation. Effective communication will increase employee engagement, boost work productivity and drive business growth. It is the cornerstone of an engaged personnel. A company’s personnel represents it’s most vital investment and ultimately determine the success or failure of the organisation.

Engaged employees’ are far more likely to demonstrate the dedication and commitment that are essential to the long-term growth of any company. One amongst the foremost tough challenges for any organisation now a day is to find ways to effectively speak to its employees. 

Effective communication is very important to employees, managers, senior leaders, and different stakeholders. These seven best practices can help increase open, honest, and effective two-way communication throughout the organization:

A clear and strategic internal communication strategy is the lifeblood of any company and the engine that drives employee engagement.

Establishing a two-way flow of information fluidly and consistently carries information from the top to the bottom and then moves feedback from the bottom back up to the top. This reduces ambiguity of messages, eliminates inaccuracies that are inherent to the corporate grapevine.

Make sure that communication is relevant and targeted to avoid unnecessary contribution to information overload. While the core messages should be consistent at every level, tailoring messages and delivery to the appropriate audience is critical to accessibility and understanding.

By offering employees’ a choice in how they access information, it creates a sense of empowerment and respect that immediately makes communication more engaging. It is important for managers to establish a safe place where employees’ can voice their opinions without fear of how their honesty will affect their position.

Assess the success of an internal communication programme during regular performance evaluations or through employee-satisfaction surveys. Are employees’ receiving communication too frequently or not often enough? Do they feel like leadership hears and values their opinions?

Employee retention is increasingly influenced by communicating effectively between leaders/managers and employees’. Specifically, communicating strategies about career development and management can be essential to retain an existing work force, and engaging employees’ to perform at their peak ability. Research shows that keeping employees informed with personal, relevant, and engaging communication gives companies a competitive edge and has direct results on the bottom line.

Boosting employee engagement is often at the forefront of HR and management initiatives, which often leads to countless surveys, meetings, reward schemes and other new programmes. But the simplest way to increase engagement is sometimes overlooked – it starts with the day-to-day communication. So how does an organization ensure that the messages they want to get across are communicated effectively and that it does in fact help to improve employee engagement? Line managers can be significant contributors to improving employee engagement. Coaching and training to increase levels of self-awareness are vital ingredients of their personal development journey. Once each line manager in an organization fully understands themselves, they are better able to identify the similarities and differences with others which helps them connect with those people on an individual basis. Since these are the managers that have the most day-to-day interaction with your people, they should be the focus of your leadership development in the area of communicating to increase engagement.