Keeping your employees informed so that they understand your corporate priorities and can share in your news, achievements and milestones helps to ensure you have a cohesive team all working towards the same strategic outcomes. Good internal communication practices also have a direct link to boosted employee engagement which in turn will ensure your company has higher levels of staff retention, productivity, profitability and morale.

When you develop an internal communication strategy, not only is it important to determine what you want to say, but you need to work out who you are going to say it to, when you will say it, how often you will communicate, and what delivery channels you are going to use to send this information.

Financial details, customer details and personal information, contractual details and intellectual property are just some of the types of information that companies need to keep safe from cyber criminals. This information is valuable to criminals as they can find ways to exploit it and profit from it – at the expense of the company it was stolen from.

The IT help desk operates in a challenging environment. Help desk staff have to juggle many competing priorities and demands while also dealing with unforseen issues that could end up becoming a crisis for the company if not dealt with properly.

Many companies are brilliant at communicating with the outside world, but not so good when it comes to communicating with their own employees. They can tell their own story successfully externally – sharing their vision, initiatives, triumphs and goals with the wider world. They do so using different mediums and channels. But when they need to communicate with their own people for whatever reason it falls well short.

There are times where you need to communicate directly to your employees with a degree of urgency. Other times you might have some breaking news you need your employees to hear directly from your company before they hear it from another source. Or perhaps there is a system outage, or a critical issue affecting your IT infrastructure.

Different industries have different priorities and different needs. What you might need to quickly alert your employees to if you work in a manufacturing plant is going to be different to what a financial company needs to alert its employees to quickly.

At some point, even the best maintained systems have to go offline. Often for maintenance and upgrades!

When you’re running internal communications campaigns, you often need to deliver the same information, several times, in different ways, using different channels in order for your messages to sink in.

Your company’s IT help desk has an important role to play, providing support and trouble shooting technical issues that your employees may be facing on any given day.