Everyone is well aware that – whether in their personal life or at work – good communication is a necessity. It is probably no exaggeration to say that, regardless of our environment, communication is the sinews of war. For a company, for example, it is crucial to improve your internal communication so you can communicate more effectively, whether it is with your prospective clients, customers, suppliers, or even your employees.
Let’s worry about this last point: how can you improve communication within your company?
Read also: 3 reasons why using an enterprise social network is essential in 2020
Nearly 15 years after their birth, social networks have taken a prominent position in the way we use our smartphones and have become central to our personal lives. However, in recent years, they have also become increasingly common in companies, and rightly so: developing an enterprise social network is one of the best ideas to facilitate internal communication.
Here is why.
Promoting real-time communication
Communication between individuals, employees, or partners is becoming ever more important. While media coverage is regularly consumed by big data, artificial intelligence, automation, and productivity, internal communication in companies also needs to be transformed for greater speed and efficiency.
Just like the popular instant messengers WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat, and Telegram, the advantage of corporate social networks is that they enable real-time internal communication.
Best of all, exchanges on a corporate social network are more open. Hierarchies are less noticeable than by email. Everyone can easily express themselves, express their opinion, and bounce back on the arguments of others. Communication is more natural, less formal, and more interactive.
Of course, the chat and video call functionalities are also very valuable, as they often avoid time-consuming meetings.
Communicating on corporate life events
Whether it’s important meetings, follow-up work, or seminars, the corporate social network is inherently the ideal medium to share information with all employees. It’s certainly much better than a “coffee machine 2.0” as the first internal networks once were.
Today, the corporate social network has advantageously replaced mailing lists, which are based on listings that have never been perfectly up to date and whose handling sometimes leads to venturing into the “grey zone” of the GDPR …
In addtion, communicating about events in the corporate life always has more impact when you can add photos, videos, support, and – above all – react with emojis, animated GIFs, or comments.
Finally, once an event in the corporate life is over, the internal social network is the ideal tool to conduct a survey that will collect the maximum amount of feedback. This way, you can do even better the next time! All these elements contribute to improving your company’s internal communication.
Relieving your employees’ inboxes and brains
Who enjoys coming to work in the morning and opening their email application to find 50 unread emails ?
The answer is quite simple: no one.
This excess of messages is counter-productive and sometimes downright frightening. Nevertheless, it’s still a reality that no one can escape. Executives estimate that they spend more than 5 hours a day, on average, checking their emails. In the United States, the figure even exceeds 6 hours. And since nobody has been able to invent the over- 24-hour day, this causes dramatic damage in terms of productivity, stress, and work-life balance.
Using corporate social networks offers three benefits:
- Reducing internal email exchanges
- Improving information sharing with all employees
- Avoiding meetings that are … avoidable, thanks to clear and instantaneous exchanges.
Thanks to the corporate social network, information is made available to all the people concerned, via discussion groups and communities (by project, by profession, by geographical site, etc.) and it no longer remains hidden deep in personal inboxes. This is an opportunity to work more collaboratively, to bring out new ideas, and to spread information more effectively.
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Setting up a corporate social network is undoubtedly an excellent idea to improve your company’s internal communication. However, this should not be improvised. It is important to proceed step-by-step and methodically.
Here at Talkspirit, we are at your disposal to advise and support you in the implementation of your collaborative projects.
Read also : Top 12 best enterprise social network software
– Author: Paul Maubareyt
