By Sabrina Lavi | www.opentext.com
Sabrina Lavi reminds us how internal and external communications should work in tandem with each other.
Almost every corporation, large or small, has a communications team or, at the very least, someone designated to handle the content. This team or person may be responsible for generating social- or web-based content, interacting with the media or acting as a spokesperson.
These are the men and women posting milestone achievements on your company’s Yammer or Slack page. They are behind the company newsletter you receive every month. They may be the ones behind all of the shares and posts from your company’s latest community engagement initiative or the ones working behind the scenes connecting reporters to your company’s executives to discuss the latest quarterly earnings results or corporate initiative.
For most companies, internal communications works collectively with external-facing teams to cohesively tell a company’s story, detail important milestones and celebrate a company’s achievements — on the inside. Part of that responsibility involves working with other key departments to tie in the external-facing content – press releases, investor conferences, social posts or marketing campaign information – into a digestible format for employees to read in a newsletter, email or video format. This information is highly important and relevant to the individuals who work within any organization. Employees need to be “in the know” constantly, as transparency remains key for upholding a positive corporate environment and culture.
Experienced communicators working on delivering these messages to those on the inside know that crafting those key messages for employees is just as time-consuming as when messages are prepared for an external audience. Both involve knowing your audience, utilizing a timely process for feedback and incorporating the right information for each particular channel of communication.
However, in many organizations, it’s quite common for the internal and external communications teams to be split. This division, however, can also affect how information is approved and disseminated. For example, within some government agencies, messaging is required to go through internal channels of approval. Upon approval, those messages are circulated externally and then again internally. Other organizations may approach this process differently. For instance, a corporation may have a planned announcement that affects its employees, customers or vendors. The communications team may opt to gather and draft its core messaging that explains this new process and once that messaging is approved, it can be used to disseminate to all audiences on the inside and outside, and adapted accordingly for context and location.
Regardless of whether you’re communicating for an internal or external audience, it’s important to keep in mind the people you are sharing your message with. On the internal side, everyone from human resources to finance will be reading your content. Their understanding of that content may be varied, depending on their exposure to it, if any at all. An effort should be made to ensure the language used and the overall narrative that is being captured resonates with the masses – leave that technical lingo behind!
Suffice to say, communicating internally and externally involves a lot of planning, due diligence and effort. The process of exporting your company’s latest accomplishment, newsworthy soundbite or announcement comes down to the use of language. Keep it simple, concise and informative.
As the workforce continues to shift swiftly towards the digitization of processes, communicators will increasingly become involved in distributing those key messages to employees – especially as it relates to how these technological innovations will shape a company’s roles. It’s up to us as communicators working to promote an organization externally or those looking to share company updates to employees on the inside, to work collectively to find a process that accomplishes both ends.
Sabrina Lavi works as a public relations specialist at OpenText, one of Canada’s largest software companies. OpenText is the market leader in Enterprise Information Management and helps the world’s largest enterprises find value in their data. To learn more about OpenText, please visit www.opentext.com.
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