As your company grows in size, keeping everyone aligned around strategy and goals becomes more challenging. During such times of change, getting communication with your employees right is your key to success.
Done right, internal communication opens up an invaluable dialogue with your employees, drives alignment, and increases trust and satisfaction. Neglecting it can make your employees feel detached and disengaged.
At Slido, our team grew by almost 300% in the last three years. To keep our team informed and create a culture of transparency, we needed to build our internal communication from scratch.
This has raised several challenges.
Reaching alignment in a rapidly growing team
As we grew bigger, our colleagues started to feel disconnected from people working in other teams. Also, having engagement and interaction in our DNA, it suddenly felt quite hard to keep up with those principles.
“We could feel that people lacked information and weren’t in the loop with what was happening around. We started to think up ways of keeping everyone up-to-date,” said our Internal Communications Manager, Kristina.
Having a strong sense of purpose, we wanted to make sure that the growth of the team would not impact our culture in a negative way.
For this reason, we set up these 3 internal communication channels. They help us keep our team aligned, connected, and maintain consistency in our company culture.
1. All-hands Meetings
We started running our all-company meetings when we were about 40 in size. “We wanted to have a meeting that would become an ultimate source of information, shared on a regular basis,” reflected Kristina on our initial thoughts.
Since then, all-hands meetings have become the cornerstone of our internal communication.
We share the information on these meetings interactively. Our CEO, Peter, often reveals the key numbers in the form of a quiz. To boost morale in the team, we crowdsource the top highlights of the month through a Slido poll and then ask our colleagues to discuss them in pairs or small groups.
Also, Peter gives everyone the opportunity to address him in the ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) session, so that anyone can air any issues and concerns. We collect questions in advance and then upvote our favorite ones so that the most popular rise to the top and get answered.
Benefits:
All-hands meetings provide a valuable space for the whole team to get together. They can help you create alignment on the company goals and mission and build a culture of transparency.
Related Story: What Is an All-hands Meeting and Why You Should Start Having One
2. Monday Morning Meetings
To jumpstart the week and get everybody energized, every Monday morning our CEO, Peter, hosts what we call the MMM. It is basically like an all-company stand-up, taking usually only around 10 minutes.
We make a cup of coffee, grab something to eat, and gather in our meeting room for our morning dose of information and updates.
At these meetings, Peter shares the highlights of the last week. He informs us of the key events where Slido was used, he notifies us on product updates, and then moves on to what’s in the pipeline for the upcoming week.
“It is inspiring for our people to jump into each week alongside our CEO, Peter. The fact that he’s the one who keeps us updated on what happened the previous week and motivates us for the upcoming one fosters transparency and the culture of trust we hold so dear, ” reflects our Internal Communications Manager, Kristina.
Benefits:
Quick Monday Morning Meetings are inspiring kick-offs to the week that keep people updated on the latest news. Meeting the CEO on a regular basis also helps boost team morale and motivate people.
3. Internal Newsletter
We could say our internal newsletter is a written form of Monday Morning Meetings. It features a summary of everything important that has happened during the previous week and outlines the goals of the upcoming one.
Our Internal Communications Manager sends one out every Monday to keep us in the loop. As Kristina explained, the reason behind starting the internal newsletter was purely practical: “We have dozens of Slack channels, and we share among ourselves tons of information every day, which can get quite chaotic. We felt we needed to tidy up all this information, sort it, and share it with everybody in a functional, digestible way.”
Since the newsletter contains news and updates shared on MMMs, it’s a great alternative source of information for those who couldn’t attend the MMM, especially some of our remote team members.
On top of that, our newsletter includes the most important social updates, like engagements, new babies, or personal achievements. There’s also a ‘Customer love’ section, where we share positive feedback from our customers. For our teammates, it is a nice reminder that their work really matters and makes a difference.
Benefits:
A newsletter provides a unique space for sharing the most important updates and celebrating people’s highlights. It is a collective source of information that helps keep everyone in the team on the same page.
Over to you
Transparent communication is at the heart of healthy and strong company cultures. A robust internal communication can help you bridge the gap between employees and leadership, create alignment, drive engagement, and promote transparency and openness in the team.
If you’re about to embark on your internal communication journey, we recommend you start with setting up these three channels which are effective and easy to implement.
