15+ Internal Communications Best Practices for 2024

Alex Cleary

Internal Communications

Whether you’re an expert or beginner internal communicator, it’s important to stay up-to-date on the latest internal communication best practices. We’ve collected our most effective best practices for you to apply to your business’ communications.

No two companies are identical, and every internal communicator approaches their work differently to match how their workforce is structured. But they can still apply internal communications best practices.

Why do these trends matter? Because the nature of business communication is always changing, internal communications best practices are based on communication trends. We’ve compiled a list of 14 important internal communications best practices based on the latest internal communications trends.

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15+ Top Internal Communication Best Practices

Effective internal communication in the workplace is a stepping stone to more innovative products, better customer service, and more engaged employees. But it’s often easier said than done when it comes to improving your internal communications.

Start by incorporating these employee communication best practices into your strategy and building on your success.

1. Track your key metrics for success

If you’re an internal communicator in an organization that has shifted to remote work, you’re dealing with an entirely new challenge. Our Number One best practice for internal communications: tracking your emails.

As part of a data-based approach to internal communications, email tracking consists of gathering quantitative and qualitative information about what you send to your employees.

Quantitative data consists of metrics like open rate, click-through rate, opens by device and location, read time, open time, and more, and give you an idea of how your employees engage with your content. This is what that information looks like visualized within ContactMonkey’s campaign dashboard:

Measuring internal communications metrics - ContactMonkey

But this is only one half of the situation. To get a complete picture of your email engagement, you have to understand how your employees feel about your content. This is where qualitative feedback comes in.

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Gather invaluable information by collecting employee comments, conducting surveys and polls, and creating a feedback culture with your internal communications. It can be as simple as including a question at the end of the email that asks, “did you like this email?”. ContactMonkey’s email template builder has numerous options for survey questions:

Employee surveys for measuring internal communications metrics

You can make easy improvements to your internal communications with ContactMonkey’s all-in-one IC software. Learn more by booking a free demo.

2. Personalize your internal communications for more engagement

Personalization is a major internal communications strategy best practice. With the advent of remote work and the prevalence of dispersed teams, it’s easy for employees to become disconnected and disengaged.

Personalized communications address employees directly and help them feel seen and heard on an individual basis.

With internal communications software like ContactMonkey, you can personalize email subject lines and body copy to create more direct and engaging comms.

Adding your recipient’s name, for example, is proven to boost open rates—which is why it’s one of our favourite internal comms best practices.

Email personalization for internal communications best practices

In addition, focused, personalized emails sent at regular intervals can help build your internal brand voice among employees and cement trust in the organization.

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3. Create and send a regular employee newsletter

A fundamental internal communications best practice is utilizing an employee newsletter. An employee newsletter is a recurring internal email that updates employees with the latest company news, announcements, events, or any information that employees would find valuable.

There are countless advantages for implementing an employee newsletter. A well-designed newsletter will quickly inform employees about information they need to know, but will also help emphasize your company’s culture and brand voice via well-designed layouts and content. Combine your internal communications protocol with a variety of employee newsletter ideas to encourage employees to make checking your newsletter a regular part of their communications routine.

Weekly newsletter template for internal communications best practices

4. Save time with an AI-writing assistant

The advent of ChatGPT and similar AI tools has transformed every aspect of our lives. And internal communications are no exceptions. The latest internal communications strategy best practice involves using generative AI to improve communications efficiency and optimize content to be more clear and concise.

By leveraging AI for internal communications, IC teams can expedite the process of drafting emails, reports, and other written communications. 

With ContactMonkey, you can leverage OpenAI integration to create content when you’re stuck or improve content when you feel your creative juices flowing. In addition, you can use ContactMonkey’s AI-powered writing assistant to instantly generate multilingual emails to engage employees across multiple company locations and linguistic groups.

Have an idea of what to say but not how to say it? Give our AI writing assistant the relevant info and we’ll have it generate copy for your email.

OpenAI ChatGPT3 integration for internal communications best practices

5. Segment your audience with list management

In this day and age, you can’t expect to captivate your audience with generic communications. In the 2020’s the bar is set high.

Audience segmentation is one of the latest corporate communications best practices, enabling you to create tailored communications that are relevant and engaging to different audiences.

ContactMonkey allows you to easily implement this employee communication best practice. The internal communications software makes it easy to segment email audiences based on criteria like department, location, or role.

By strategically dividing the email lists, users can tailor their messages to specific groups, ensuring more targeted and relevant communication. This not only enhances the overall effectiveness but makes your internal communications more efficient and impactful.

Segmented email stats for internal communications audit and employee communication best practices

6. Engage employees with interactive media

With the advent of social media, we’re all wired to respond to visuals. Incorporating visuals into your internal communications is one of the most important corporate communications best practices to keep in mind these days. It can help you boost engagement and increase reader retention.

You can enhance the visual appeal of your emails by using an HTML email template to incorporate video internal communications, social share icons, and personalized elements.

ContactMonkey’s HTML email template builder lets you easily implement these best practices for internal communications. You’ll be able to create stunning internal communication email formats, embed interactive content like videos and pulse surveys, and ensure your internal emails display correctly on whatever device and email platform your employees use. 

Examples of multimedia content you can add into emails with ContactMonkey, including HTML, GIFs, Video, and Social Links

7. Increase your reach with email at scale

In an increasingly dispersed modern workplace, employers might need to reach large teams across different time zones, locations, and even international borders. Unfortunately, Outlook and Gmail users will likely encounter constraints on the amount of emails they can send

That’s why using email integrations that allow you to reach employees from anywhere is one of the leading business communication best practices.

ContactMonkey’s email at scale feature instantly eliminates email-sending barriers and allows users to reach teams of any size from anywhere.

The internal comms solution makes it easy to follow business communications best practices by offering a streamlined approach to sending mass internal emails and significantly reducing the time involved in the process.

Email at scale - innovative internal communications.

8. Demonstrate Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Your employees are people in the world and are aware of these issues. If your organization ostensibly supports Black Lives Matter but doesn’t contribute to any related foundations, or worse makes donations to groups working against BLM, you can disillusion your employees and shake their faith in your authority. Not to mention gravely affect your public image.

In other words, integrity matters when it comes to your business communications best practices.

Here’s what we recommend: set up fund-raising initiatives like pledge drives and donation matching to get your employees involved. Highlight worthwhile organizations and the good work they do and encourage employees to donate and get involved.

Keeping your promises as an employer helps keep your employees dedicated and passionate about their workplaces. This is a crucial internal corporate communication best practice.

9. Communicate clearly and succinctly

As an internal communicator, it’s easy to get caught up in producing content. But if you want to follow internal comms best practices, it’s crucial not to overlook how your business communicates not just what it communicates.

If slow communications are bogging down productivity at your business, you may need to look at optimizing your internal communications. After all, if employees are overwhelmed and not opening emails, then work isn’t getting done.

An example of an easy way to improve communication in your organization is to reduce the number of superfluous emails employees receive. You first create different groups of employees based on the information they need to receive, eliminating as much unnecessary crossover as possible.

You then create different distribution lists based on these groups to which you then send focused email content. Use ContactMonkey’s segmented email stats to track email metrics by department, location, and more to measure your success.

Create distribution lists in case of emergencies, so you can quickly act on your crisis communication plan to ensure employee safety.

Weekly newsletter template for internal communications best practices

With ContactMonkey’s List Management feature, you can create your own custom email lists without needing IT. Your custom email lists can be integrated with your Human Resource Information System (HRIS) like Workday and ADP, as well as Azure Active Directory, so they’ll update automatically.

Using an internal communication software like ContactMonkey you can send and track emails to your Outlook distribution lists and Google Groups.

10. Gather employee feedback regularly

One of the leading best practices in internal communications is creating dialogue (rather than monologue) with your teams.

Workplace culture and internal communication are closely linked. If you want to build a strong, collaborative company culture, your employee communications shouldn’t be a one-way stream. Instead, they should create a conversation between your teams.

You can start building dialogue by asking company culture questions, embedding employee pulse surveys, and adding comment features in your email newsletters. With ContactMonkey, you can enable commenting to let employees leave anonymous comments after clicking on a survey option. These comments will appear on the same dashboard as your tracking data:

Image of employee survey responses and anonymous employee feedback within ContactMonkey's campaign overview.

Email tracking is an essential email newsletter best practice for any internal communicator. By collecting employee feedback, you can easily hone in on your best content, see which employees are most engaged, and prove the value of internal communications to the C-Suite.

You may ask employees what they think about a piece of industry news or how they feel about your company’s new change management initiative. Whatever the topic you choose, the conversational dynamic will promote a healthy two-way communication stream across your workplace.

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With ContactMonkey, you can easily boost your internal communications and create conversation through an easy-to-use pulse survey tool. Whether you’re sending a monthly employee newsletter, higher education communications, or yearly leadership communications, pulse surveys can help you gain employee feedback from all your internal emails.

Employee survey analytics for multilingual emails

Employees can react and comment on newsletter content using emojis, star ratings, anonymous feedback, and more. On your end, you’ll be able to track survey response rates and see comments using your analytics dashboard:

11. Celebrate team successes with employee recognition

Employee recognition is a key driver of employee engagement, not to mention, one of the leading best practices in business communication. When employees feel that their own efforts or those of their team are being recognized, they’re much more motivated in their work.

And who wouldn’t be? We all want credit where credit is due.

Celebrating employee successes is a business communication best practice that also helps showcase your company’s strengths and inspires your employees through shared goals.

That’s why incorporating employee recognition ideas into your internal comms best practices is key.

As you begin on your internal communications plan, look for opportunities to recognize employees and showcase team successes. It could be something as simple as an associate of the month feature in your employee newsletter. Or it could be spotlighting a new project that one of your team’s completed.

ContactMonkey’s drag-and-drop email template builder makes it super easy to add these features into your email newsletters:

Adding image tile to row within ContactMonkey's email template builder.

12. Conduct an internal communications audit

Conducting an internal comms audit is non-negotiable when it comes to following best practices for effective internal communications.

There are tons of reasons why an internal communication audit is an important best practice for effective internal communications. If you’re an organization that’s looking to figure out how to make sense of your internal comms data and need a baseline to measure certain things against, an audit may be the way to go.

Or perhaps you’re looking to create an internal communications plan and want to conduct an audit in the hopes that it’ll help you be more strategic with your decision-making skills.

Measuring internal communications through click-through rate and open rates.

Whatever your reasons are for conducting an internal communications audit, it’s an excellent idea to do so at the beginning of the year so you can gauge what worked previously and what didn’t and set some concrete goals to help you succeed this year!

This is definitely one of the top internal communication best practices you should aim to adopt in 2024.

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13. Measure and optimize your internal communications

While internal communications audits are usually performed at lengthy intervals, there are other things you can do to refine your internal communications in the short term. We’ve already mentioned how internal email metrics can help you pinpoint what content your employees prefer to see, but that’s just the tip of the email analytics iceberg.

Setting internal communications KPIs and measuring your comms compromise some of the leading best practices in business communication.

Using ContactMonkey’s Reporting feature, you can regularly measure your internal communications to determine your best-performing content based on a handful of different criteria. These include: email views, clicks, read times, survey responses, comments, and so much more.

ContactMonkey’s segmented email stats show you a breakdown of your email metrics by department, title, and office location:

Campaign comparison analytics - innovative internal communications ideas

These statistics work in two ways. They show you your most (and least) engaged segments of your internal communications recipients. And when combined with campaign comparisons, they help reveal what email content drove that engagement. We explore how to use these features in conjunction with each other in our blog on internal email campaign analytics.

Does your organization have internal or external email regulations around email privacy? With ContactMonkey’s anonymous email tracking, you can gather email metrics while maintaining your employees’ privacy.

14. Keep it relevant

Making your emails feel relevant post-COVID can be a challenge, but utilizing some of what we have covered already will help grab and hold your employees’ attention:

  • Keep your emails to the point; only include information relevant for that audience.
  • Send emails regularly at peak times to maximize open rate.
  • Use engaging multimedia to convey information.
  • Personalize subject lines and body copy to grab their attention.

Ultimately, getting your internal communications to matter to your employees will differ depending on the situation at your company. But making an effort to build employee engagement via internal communications should be an employee communication best practice for every business in 2022.

15. Schedule your internal emails in advance

Planning your internal communications in advance has numerous benefits:

  • Avoid last-minute scrambling to send out internal emails.
  • Keep content fresh and avoid overly-repetitive emails.
  • Boost email engagement by sending emails when your employees are most likely to read them.
  • Schedule weekly, monthly, and yearly emails to build your internal brand voice and avoid overwhelming your employees.

Using ContactMonkey’s internal communications calendar combined with our email scheduling features, you can ensure your send your employees the right emails at the right time.

Email scheduling - internal communications best practices

16. Leverage the latest internal communications tools

Internal communications is always changing, and IC pros stay on top of the latest internal communications tools, methods, and procedures.

Make internal communications research a part of your internal communications strategy. Set time aside for your team to learn about the latest innovation in internal comms. Try scheduling a weekly lunch-and-learn meeting where your team can discuss internal communications trends and share resources.

17. Expand your IC channels with SMS

The best practices for effective internal communications will depend on how your employees interact with your emails. Many companies have employees who do not have easy access to computers or laptops, instead relying on their mobile devices as the main internal communications channel between them and their employer.

SMS employee communications is an employee communication best practice for businesses with a frontline, deskless, or on-site workforce. When you follow SMS best practices, text messages can reach your employees in an instant. It becomes easy to quickly and concisely convey information and updates employees need immediately.

Crisis communications, shift changes, weather updates, and more can all be communicated effectively via SMS text messages—and even faster using SMS text message templates.

Using ContactMonkey’s SMS text features, you can draft and send text messages using the same CSVs you use to organize your internal emails. All of this is easily accessible within your SMS text message dashboard:

ContactMonkey SMS system for business

Easily manage your employee SMS text messages alongside your internal emails with ContactMonkey. You can also download a free set of SMS text message templates here:

18. Promote company events for team-building

While company events aren’t technically employee communication best practices in themselves, how you manage them via your internal communications certainly is. After all, if your employees aren’t properly informed about your upcoming events, your overall attendance and engagement is going to suffer.

Formalizing your internal communications approach to advertising your events and collecting RSVPs is an effective way to improve turnout among your employees. Use your internal newsletter to feature reminders about your upcoming events, listing the date and time when they’ll be taking place.

With ContactMonkey you can take this approach one step further. ContactMonkey’s event management features make it super easy to embed event invitations directly into your internal emails. These invitations list all the details of your event, and allow employees to RSVP directly from their inboxes:

ContactMonkey's event management tool that shows an event being embedded into an email and an example of the invite that will open when it is clicked on

Not only can they send in their RSVP, but employees can also include comments with their reply. These comments can help inform your approach to the event, like what parts will be most useful to your employees. This kind of employee feedback can help you refine your events to be more engaging and insightful.

19. Share your newsletter across workplace messaging apps

In a fast-paced modern workplace, instant messaging apps like Microsoft Teams are becoming increasingly important. An important internal communication best practice is to share your newsletter across these platforms in addition to email. This helps maximize the reach of your internal newsletter and keep employees informed about key workplace updates and alerts.

With ContactMonkey’s Microsoft Teams integration for email, you’ll be able to instantly share an online version of your sent emails to Teams channels. After selecting the specific channels where you want to share your newsletter, you’ll be able to create a text-based preview link to a custom HTML copy of your email. These will display within your employees’ web browsers, giving them instant, easy access to your newsletter.

Microsoft Teams integration for ContactMonkey - internal communications best practices

Get Serious About Internal Communications

Our 2022 internal communications best practices are applicable for all businesses. Whether your internal communications department is in its infancy or consists of 20+ team members, changing your strategy to reflect communication trends is essential.

If you’re looking to boost your internal communications, we highly recommend learning how to use an internal communications software like ContactMonkey.

With ContactMonkey, it’s a breeze to create, send, and track employee emails and newsletters. Make our all-in-one internal comms software a part of your New Years internal comms resolutions!

Ready to crush your new year internal comms goals? Want to learn how to track your internal comms using ContactMonkey? We can set up a personalized demo for you and your team. Just click on the button below to book your demo!

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