Internal Communication | Project
International Organisation
19 Apr, 2023 ยท 4 -minute read

With responsibility for 8 major locations and co-ordinating activity across 22 member states, this international organization has an important job to do. What’s more, with 5,500 employees worldwide, their international communication function faces the challenging task of keeping widely dispersed teams engaged, motivated and connected with their sense of purpose.

New ways of working had emerged post pandemic, leaving leadership teams in need of a partner to help them understand their transformed internal audiences.

How could they build and maintain a sense of purpose across the organization now that their people felt even more widely dispersed than before?

What had truly come to light during the pandemic was the inadequacy of their legacy intranet platform, as well as the limitations of their overall channel infrastructure. That’s why we carried out an internal communications audit, the results of which informed the framework of a three-year internal communications strategy.
1 Challenge

Our first point of call was the employees themselves – we wanted to know more about their day-to-day experiences within the organization. We needed to understand how internal communications were landing with them, so we set about gathering feedback from all geographies on an individual and group basis, through interviews, workshops and a pulse survey. Segmenting our findings according to location, length of service and area of expertise allowed us to create audience personas curated by the concerns, motivations and goals of the people we’d spoken to – which informed truly valuable recommendations.

Life after an internal communications audit

More than anything, employees wanted communications that felt relevant to their everyday roles. They’d had enough of corporate-level messaging and needed more user friendly channels. With this in mind, we outlined a clear set of actions to be delivered via an evolved cross-channel communications framework and calendar that would ensure relevant information reached the right people at the right time.

Before any of this could happen, it was essential that the internal communications team formalize their own mission statement, responsibilities and governance. In defining these, they could build stronger relationships with functions across the organization.

Find out more about our internal communication audit methodology.
2 Solution

The international communications function was able to leverage this work to develop a digital environment that supports more personalized content feeds, and better interactions between colleagues across the world.

Measurement tools have allowed channel usage and levels of engagement to be assessed alongside any significant changes in audience(s) behaviors, the ways they engage with organization-wide content and present their own compelling content – their stories.

We’ve also helped them establish internal communications KPIs to determine targets and outcomes that will ensure consistent delivery.

And, so far, so good. While their team continues to build on our recommendations, the results are already more than promising with a vastly more connected organization, and a sense that employees belong to one organization, despite multiple geographies, cultures and areas of expertise.
3 Outcome