There’s a lot at stake when choosing the right tools for your internal communications.
If the tool clicks, it can be the catalyst for your team’s productivity and collaboration. If not, it’ll be a hassle.
In this article, we’ll share the 5 tech tools that transformed the way we communicate internally. On top of that, they all helped us build a culture of transparency in our workplace.
1. Slack
Internal emails have always been a pain. Slack has put an end to endless email threads and helped streamline the communication for more than 10 million daily active users.
We hopped on Slack’s bandwagon when there were just seven of us. Since then, Slack has become the lifeblood of our internal communication. It’s useful for sharing resources with colleagues – anything from links and documents, to photos or videos.
Our #general channel is our main avenue to reach the entire team. That’s where we share the most important company news and internal announcements, such as upcoming events or product releases.
We also like to create separate Slack channels for our recurring departmental meetings or larger projects. This allows our teams to have all the important stuff in one place.
Then there’s one channel where our company culture truly comes to life: #random. It’s our go-to channel for sharing quirky pictures from our work life, weird gifs, and even weirder memes.
Our Slack channels help us to collaborate better with each other every day, wherever we are.
2. Zoom
Remote work has become the new normal. Actually, in the last five years, the number of people working remotely grew by 44%. This trend, however, poses quite a challenge to distributed teams. Often, remote workers feel isolated or disengaged from the company activities.
Things are no different for us. Every day, Zoom helps us connect with around 50 of our remote colleagues.
Zoom has become one of the pillars of our internal communications. It enables our remote teams to seamlessly join our departmental meetings or all-company town halls.
Having them live with us on the screen makes our teammates in the room more aware of their presence. This improves the conversation and makes our remote colleagues feel more connected.
As Priscilla Barolo, Zoom’s Communications Manager said: “For us, the two-way video and audio has been vital in communication with our remote employees. We want them to be able to talk to us.”
We couldn’t agree more with her. That’s why we always display our remote colleagues onscreen. We want to see their faces and make them feel as if they are in the room with us.
3. Slido
Listening to employees and learning what’s on their mind is the bread and butter of every internal communications professional.
Creating a safe space for people to bring their concerns to light leads to more transparency in the team. Also, it allows leadership to address these issues and take action.
To achieve this at Slido, we rely on our own tool. We constantly crowdsource questions from our teammates and encourage them to go forward with any concerns they have. For our all-hands, we collect questions a week in advance, as well as during the meeting. To increase the level of honesty, we allow our colleagues to post questions anonymously.
We identify with what Adrian Lowther, the Senior Employee Communications Manager at Marks & Spencer, told us in an interview: “Thanks to the anonymous feature, we’re able to hear more voices of the people who wouldn’t put their hand up in the room. People find it comforting and it’s very useful for us.”
With our Slido x Slack integration, our team members are able to submit questions and ideas for our all-hands meetings straight from the dedicated channels.
4. MailChimp
Even if most of our communication happens on Slack, email is far from being dead. It is still an effective avenue for sharing the most important news across the team.
After our Monday Morning Meetings, our Internal Communications Manager, Kristina, blasts out the weekly stats, along with the biggest updates of the past week, in a weekly internal newsletter. It is a useful tool, especially for our US and APAC regional teams who cannot always join the meeting in person.
To create beautiful internal newsletters, we trust MailChimp.
Besides the most important product and business updates, our company newsletter called The.Dot is also about people. We share social updates, remember people’s birthdays, Slido anniversaries and celebrate collective successes.
And our newsletter gets quite an exposure: every week, it is read by over 80% of our teammates. As Kristina told us: “MailChimp makes it super easy to track each newsletter’s performance; that gives me so much insight and helps me improve its content.”
5. Confluence
As our customer care team grew larger, making all the necessary knowledge accessible to everyone including remote team members became a challenge. If you have a client waiting on a chat or needing urgent help on a live event, you need to find an answer almost instantly.
Confluence by Atlassian helped us solve this problem. It’s a shared workspace where we collectively built a centralized knowledge database. There, we store articles on our internal best practices, technical product information, or guides on tools we’re using.
Such a knowledge hub is priceless for our customer care and customer success teams. They can access everything within a minute, without having to sync with other people, which is a huge time-saver.
Having all the resources in one place helps other team members as well. For instance, if they join our support rotation – an initiative where members of other teams join customer care champions on support shifts – they can find all the info our customers may ask quickly and easily.
Confluence also helps us make employee onboarding more effective. With all the knowledge under one roof, we are able to improve the learning path for our newbies.
In summary
These five tools can help you streamline your internal communication and increase the level of transparency in your team.
Together, they create a functional digital ecosystem that’s easily applicable to most work environments.
