Employee communication guide: 5 tips to improve it

Imagine a workplace where every employee can instantly find the information they need and get support without delays—that’s the power of effective communication. When communication flows seamlessly, teams work smarter, problems are solved faster, and employees feel more connected and empowered. In this article, we’ll dive into how strong internal communication drives productivity, increases employee satisfaction, and fosters a more engaged workforce.

More in this guide:

• What’s the importance of communication at work?
• Employee communication examples
• 5 tips to improve employee communication
• How to measure the effectiveness of employee communication
• Tools for improving employee communication
• Frequently asked questions
• Improve employee communication with better employee service

What’s the importance of communication at work?

Employee communication is essential for building a productive, engaged, and informed workforce. It also ensures seamless employee service, providing workers easy access to the support and information needed to perform their jobs effectively.

Here’s why strong communication is vital in the workplace.

• Boosts productivity and efficiency: Effective communication boosts productivity by providing employees with access to critical information and streamlining processes. For instance, an internal customer service team can use a knowledge base to share company policies with employees, reducing the need to submit support tickets. This lightens the support queue and ensures employees have 24/7 access to the information they need.
• Streamlines the flow of information: A well-organised communication strategy helps employees easily find the right information, reducing the time spent searching for answers. For example, using multiple channels like Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, and employee portals provides convenient options for employees to ask questions and access the necessary information.
• Drives employee engagement and satisfaction: Effective, personalised communication makes employees feel supported, boosting engagement and satisfaction. When communication is unclear, inaccurate, or impersonal, it can lead to frustration and disengagement. Clear, tailored communication ensures employees stay informed and aligned, fostering a more positive work environment.
• Reduces costly mistakes and miscommunication: Clear and consistent communication can help prevent misunderstandings and reduce costly mistakes, like a delay in delivering support for higher-stakes HR issues that can lead to employee churn and impact brand reputation. AI-powered quality assurance tools can autoscore employee service interactions to help identify where mistakes are being made that may impact employee satisfaction.

With the right tools, these improvements aren’t difficult to achieve. Next, we’ll explore some examples of communication in the workplace to see it in action.

Employee communication examples

While there are many communication styles in the workplace, there are two primary categories of employee communication: formal and informal. You and your people use both every day, so let’s explore their meanings.

• Formal communication typically involves official company channels and structured messages. This might be a company-wide newsletter to share important announcements, knowledge management tools to gather and organise information, or a survey to ask for feedback about a recent initiative.
• Informal communication is more casual and often involves personal interactions. It might involve a live chat to discuss goals, a coaching session based on conversation insights, or a company-wide team-building event.

Businesses must balance formal and informal communication to keep employees in the loop. A lack of informal communication might make leadership seem rigid and detached, while not enough formal communication makes it difficult to find important information when it’s needed.

5 tips to improve employee communication

Strong communication can help remove silos between individuals and teams so that knowledge and information flow freely. By implementing these tips, you can enhance communication in the workplace and help drive up employee engagement.

1. Deliver faster employee support

Employees need fast, consistent, and accurate support. AI agents are intelligent bots that speed up access to support by being available instantly, around the clock, regardless of time zone. They provide personalised support to complex service issues all on their own. With conversation analytics and quality assurance (QA), they can flag employee questions that are prime for automation.

2. Listen and learn from your people

Your employees’ concerns, ideas, and feedback are essential in creating a company culture where perspectives are valued. Regular opportunities for feedback can result in mountains of key insights into how employees feel and where you need to improve communication. This feedback can come from surveys, meetings, or sentiment analysis to assess employees' needs and wants.

3. Encourage two-way communication

Listening is only half of the equation—good communication also requires following through. Make sure you actually respond to and resolve employee service requests so that your people trust that you hear and value their needs. You need to have the right tools to ensure that no request goes unanswered, no matter where it comes from.

Two-way communication requires giving HR teams access to a help desk that makes tracking and responding to employee requests easy so that nothing gets overlooked. These tools can escalate higher-stakes requests and route them to the appropriate person or team to ensure timely resolution for your employee support tickets. Then, automate responses on your messaging channels so you always set an expectation for an answer, regardless of whether a human internal service rep is available. Or, take things one step further with AI that can resolve requests without human intervention.

4. Deliver employee service on channels that are convenient for them

Convenience is key to getting your employees’ buy-in to use communication channels. Omnichannel support allows people to choose their preferred method of communication, whether it’s an asynchronous messaging channel like email or a live channel like a phone call. More support channels mean more ways for employees to seek help when they need it. Omnichannel support connects those channels so that all requests go to one place and internal support teams have information handy to personalise requests. That way, employees never have to repeat themselves to provide context.

5. Address conflicts quickly and focus on continuous improvement

Conflicts are a natural part of any thriving workplace, but addressing them promptly and effectively is essential. With conversation analytics and quality assurance (QA), negative employee sentiment gets flagged in real-time so that potentially higher-risk conversations escalate and you can resolve them faster.

These tools can also identify employee pain points and patterns in where your employee service may be missing the mark. That way, employee communication consistently improves over time.

How to measure the effectiveness of employee communication

To get the clearest picture of how your employee communication strategy is doing, you’ll need to gather and analyse information quantitatively and qualitatively. Measuring your communication strategy in both ways gives you a more comprehensive picture that you can use to refine your existing communication channels and methods, develop new goals, and ensure that employees are well-informed, engaged, and aligned with those goals.

• Quantitative measures are concrete, numerical data like satisfaction surveys, engagement scores, and employee turnover rates. These metrics give insights into how well communication initiatives contribute to employee morale, job satisfaction, and retention. You can also measure communication channel usage with metrics like tickets submitted per channel, knowledge base article views, and comparing satisfaction scores across channels.
• Qualitative measures focus on gathering employee feedback and insights to understand their perceptions of communication efforts. You can interview them, conduct focus groups, or ask open-ended survey questions to listen to their perspectives. This not only helps you figure out how to improve your strategy but can also help uncover communication gaps or see what resonates most with your workforce.

Using an employee service solution with reporting and analytics can help you capture and analyse data historically and in real time. Alongside valuable insights from interviews and surveys, this data helps you quickly change your communication strategy.

Tools for improving employee communication

Effective communication is a strong cornerstone for any successful organisation, but you’ll need the right tools to enact an impactful strategy. Opt for intuitive, AI-driven tools that make communication and decision-making more efficient and effective.

Here are some of the best tools to facilitate and improve employee communication.

• AI agents: These intelligent bots are pre-trained on billions of service interactions and your internal conversation data. They can deliver personalised resolutions to complex queries and communicate just as your human IT and HR agents would.
• Portals: These centralised employee self-service hubs centralise information. They allow employees to find answers to pressing questions on their own and track the status of their support requests, improving internal communication by deflecting tickets from your already-swamped support agents.
• Surveys: Reaching out to your people for their thoughts helps identify new insights on communication gaps. That way, you can add a quantitative understanding of how effective your communication strategy is.
• Messaging channels: This is where your employees do the bulk of their communication day-to-day, such as Slack or Microsoft Teams. They’re excellent support channels because they’re convenient for employees to access—since employees are used to using these channels, you’re meeting them where they already are.
• Service desks: Your people need to be able to reach support quickly via a help desk or service desk when they have issues. When support is reachable around the clock with automation, your people don’t have to wait around for help.
• Knowledge bases: Knowledge management tools facilitate better communication by helping you keep articles, system guides, and FAQs fresh and easy to find. An AI-powered knowledge base can even flag content that has gaps or is outdated and generate new content from just a few bullet points.

Leveraging these tools can help you deliver better employee service and create a more connected workforce with polished communication.

Frequently asked questions

Improve employee communication with better employee service

Employee communication directly impacts satisfaction, engagement, and overall well-being. When employees feel heard and supported, they have more reason to be engaged and productive in their work. Effective employee service is a key part of any employee communication strategy because it helps deliver timely assistance, comprehensive knowledge resources, and frequent opportunities for feedback. All of this helps increase employee satisfaction and productivity for a better overall work environment.

See how an AI-powered employee service solution like Zendesk can boost productivity and take your internal support communications to the next level.