Having effective internal communication practices in place helps ensure that your employees are working together towards common goals.
You might wonder why internal communication is important. It has real benefits for productivity and profits, and it helps boost engagement and morale, so your company can retain the best staff. That is why it is crucial to improve internal communications.
According to Axios HQ's 2025 State of Internal Communications Report, 63% of organizations that increased their investment in communications saw new business revenue compared to just 37% of those whose investment stayed flat or decreased.
Companies that communicate effectively outperform their peers, and the cost of getting it wrong is measurable: ineffective communication costs the average organization the equivalent of 35+ lost working days per employee per year.
Unfortunately, many companies are falling behind in the internal communications space and aren’t unlocking their potential.
According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2025 Report, global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024 — the steepest decline since the pandemic. In the US, only 31% of workers are engaged. This means the majority of employees are not deeply invested in or aligned with what their organization is trying to achieve.
Gallagher's 2026 Employee Communications Report, found that 61% of companies have no formal approach to change communication, even though it ranks as their most pressing skills priority.
The same report found that 83% of organizations say information overload is a growing problem, and that high-volume internal messaging environments carry a 30% increase in leadership trust risk and a 24% rise in employee burnout.
Keeping employees connected is increasingly challenging as workforces become more distributed. Most organizations now manage a mix of on-site, hybrid, and fully remote employees. And the expectation of seamless, timely communication applies regardless of where people work.
Table of contents
29 ways to improve internal communications in the workplace
How to improve internal communication in a company with DeskAlerts
Whether your company doesn’t communicate internally at all, or if it does communicate but doesn’t make it a priority, this is how to improve internal communication in an organization:
According to Gallagher's 2026 Employee Communications Report, 61% of companies still have no formal approach to change communication, and only 18% of internal communications teams operate as true strategic partners within their organizations.
Having an internal communication strategy in place will help guide your internal communications efforts. It sets out your goals and objectives, key messages, communication methods and channels to be used, and who will be responsible for delivering the information. This is the most important foundation for improving internal communication in the workplace.
Regular communication helps to build trust. Without communication, there is a lack of direction, and misinformation and rumors can take root, spread, and fester. This has flow-on effects on productivity, morale, and even how your employees interact with your customers.
However, this doesn’t mean that you should just send constant messages. It’s important to prioritize quality over quantity because too much information can have consequences, such as information overload.
Having a strategy that you prepare in advance helps to keep you focused and takes the pressure off when it comes to developing content. You might not know everything that you will need to communicate throughout the year – after all, things do happen that aren’t anticipated – but it can serve as a guide to tell the stories you want to tell that are important to your company.
There’s no point sending out information to employees that is presented in a bland, boring way. If you want the information to be retained, the content needs to be high-quality and engaging. This means that you need to produce it with the end-user in mind, whether you write something, show images, or videos.
There should be some value to the employee in the content that is being delivered to them. In many cases, there should be a call to action, such as what you need them to do (eg, fill in a survey, modify their behavior, participate in training, etc.)
Not only should your communications be engaging, but they need to be professionally written with correct spelling and grammar, be written in plain language that avoids unnecessary jargon, and be as concise as possible.
Brevity is also important: busy people don’t have much time to wade through documents to determine what is important and what they need to know.
According to Axios HQ's 2025 State of Internal Communications Report, a single employee earning between $50,000 and $100,000 loses the equivalent of 35+ working days per year due to ineffective communication. It's a salary waste of over $10,000 per employee annually.
People want to hear from their employers, but do they?
A multi-channel approach to internal communication is one of the best ways to improve company communication in today’s digital age. You can’t just send an email and expect to get the results you need. To ensure your messages cut through and reach the intended audience, deliver them across the channels available to you.
Best-practice internal communication in organizations involves establishing two-way dialogue. Employees want to be able to contribute feedback and ensure that their opinions, recommendations, and questions are heard.
You can do this in many ways, such as surveys, anonymous feedback forms, workshops, focus groups, and Town Hall consultations.
If you want to embed any kind of change in your company, it won’t succeed unless your leadership team is on board with it… and this includes better internal communications. Leaders often don’t realize that good internal communications are more than just a KPI… and it shows.
Research by Gallagher (2026) found that 87% of internal communications professionals say manager communication capability is a significant organizational risk. Yet only 21% of organizations provide managers with communication toolkits to support them.
This gap between expectation and resource is one of the most consistent findings in IC research.
You need to show your leadership team how to improve internal communication in your organization, get them to commit to communicating regularly and authentically, and ensure that they are listening to their employees.
A good way to improve company communication is to have champions in different work teams who can encourage their teams to communicate well within the team and with others outside of the team.
Don’t be caught off guard if there is an emergency or any other crisis or urgent situation that requires you to contact employees quickly and in a highly visible way. Having an emergency communication system that is fit for purpose will ensure you can reach your employees quickly when it is critical to do so.
Who are the people who work for you? There are many different demographics within any organization… and as with all demographics, they will have different communications needs and preferences.
This can include different generations in the workforce, different occupational groups, people who are based in different geographic locations, specific work teams, and levels of seniority (creating documents called “workplace persona” can help).
Understanding who your intended audience is will help you to develop and deliver content to them more effectively.
“Content batching” refers to creating and scheduling content in advance to save time. Setting aside time to write and schedule a lot of content at once can free up time to do other things.
Corporate storytelling is an art form in itself, but it can help to get your message across. When you present something as a story – whether it’s an anecdote or you’re profiling a real person and the work they do – you are more likely to resonate with your audience.
Researchers Dan and Chip Heath found that 63% of people who have seen a presentation are more likely to remember a story compared to 5% who will remember statistics that they heard in the presentation.
Employees want to be heard; they want to know that it is safe to speak up and give their opinion and that they can trust the information coming to them from their employer.
Intranets and network file systems make it very difficult for people to find the information they need when they need it. They are often a dumping ground for documents that are hard to locate or are outdated.
According to Forrester's Data Culture and Literacy Survey 2023, nearly half of employees lack the ability to search for existing organizational insights, struggling to locate reports, data sets, and relevant documents when they need them.
A separate Forrester study commissioned by Airtable found that knowledge workers in large organizations spend 30% of their working time looking for data, across an average of 367 different software systems.
A common problem in many organizations is that different work teams don’t communicate with each other. This can mean that important information isn’t shared, and there may even be duplication in work.
A Queens University of Charlotte research found 39% of employees feel that there isn’t enough collaboration between teams within their organizations.
Having opportunities for teams to get to know one another and collaborate can help to break these silos down.
It’s more than just communicating between teams, though. Communication needs to be thoroughly embedded in a company’s culture in order to thrive.
A McKinsey Global Institute study found that there is a 20-25% increase in productivity in companies that establish better connections between their employees.
This means you need to have managers communicating with employees, employees communicating with their peers, and employees communicating with managers.
Does your organization reward and recognize excellence and effort?
A Globoforce study found that 69% of employees will work harder if they feel that they are getting feedback and recognition for their work.
This also helps employees get to know about other people in the organization and the work that they are doing.
First impressions count… especially when it is a new employee starting with a new company. In many organizations, they are inducted and onboarded in an ad-hoc fashion, and whether that is successful will depend on how strong their manager is at communicating important information.
You guessed it: this can vary wildly, and the result is an inconsistent onboarding process where new recruits aren’t always empowered with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed.
Developing a consistent process that any manager can use will help to establish a level playing field.
If something big happens in your company – good or bad – you need to tell your employees first before hearing it from the outside world! By not prioritizing them, you are sending a message that they aren’t necessary.
Depending on the nature of the information, your employees may also be resentful if they find out about it from a second-hand source.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, most workers around the world weren’t sitting at desks all day.
Around 80% of the global workforce — approximately 2.7 billion people — are deskless workers who perform their jobs away from a traditional desk. They work in healthcare, retail, manufacturing, logistics, construction, and dozens of other sectors.
This includes, but is not limited to, a diverse range of sectors, including healthcare, transport and logistics, construction, mining, technical trades, sales, retail, hospitality, agriculture, manufacturing, and more.
Having an employee communications app is one of the best ways to improve internal communication in an organization and ensure that you reach all your employees with a smartphone quickly and easily. They don’t need to be on a computer to receive important company communications.
As part of a good culture of communications, it’s important that managers communicate with their teams regularly and share important information.
An Interact/Harris poll found that 91% of employees thought their managers lacked communication skills.
If your CEO is removed from employees all the time and has little to no interaction with them, it will be hard for employees to relate to the CEO and vice versa. There are lots of ways your CEO can meet people (town halls, focus groups, meet and greet sessions, social functions, visiting individual work teams or sites, etc.)
A good way to bring people together is by celebrating success: whether that’s a milestone, an anniversary, or amazing results for the company, let your people share in the glory!
What has worked well in the past for internal communication in your company? What didn’t work? If you haven’t been with the organization for a long time, talk to employees who have been so that you can gather the information that helps you replicate successes or avoid things that didn’t work.
People are used to using social media in their personal lives and find it an easy and efficient way to communicate with family, friends, and acquaintances. There are ways to incorporate social tools in your internal communications, including in your intranet, to provide a similar experience and method of interaction with others in the workplace that employees are comfortable with using.
You might use ‘exit interviews’ in your organization as a way of gathering feedback from departing employees about why they are going. A ‘stay interview’ is a concept where managers have one-on-one meetings with their employees to find out what is working for them and what isn’t in terms of their satisfaction with the company. Not only does this improve internal communication, but it can also help you to identify any cultural issues in the workplace that need to be fixed. It will also help you to retain your best employees.
According to the Work Institute, stay interviews can help organizations predict whether or not employees will leave 20% more accurately.
If you aren’t already creating and distributing internal newsletters, you should consider doing so. They are a good way to group a lot of information in one place without overloading employees with many different messages.
No matter what steps you take to improve corporate communications in your company, it is important that you have a mechanism in place to evaluate your work. Without a proper system of evaluation, you will be operating in the dark and won’t know if your efforts have been successful or not.
When you’re considering tools to utilize in your internal communications efforts, you can’t look past DeskAlerts. It’s a powerful internal communications solution that can be used in multiple ways to keep your staff informed.
These are some of the key features you can trust to keep your employees up-to-date with important information:
When you use DeskAlerts as your corporate notification system, messages are sent straight to your employees’ computers in the form of a pop-up window that can’t be skipped or ignored.
The pop-up alert will always be the top item on a screen, no matter what apps or software your staff is using – even if it is locked or in screensaver mode.
You can send rich content, including images, audio, video, and HTML. The DeskAlerts corporate notification system supports Windows and macOS. You can customize your alerts to match your corporate branding and create templates in advance. The system will also confirm in real time who has read the messages.
Video is proving to be an effective way to communicate internally within organizations. You can use DeskAlerts video alerts to send messages containing videos in an assortment of formats. They are sent to recipients as desktop pop-ups, just like any other DeskAlerts messages.
DeskAlerts can be used as an emergency alert system, enabling you to send urgent information to your employees in an emergency or disaster situation.
You can send the emergency alerts to your entire workforce, or just those employees who are affected: for example, your office in one particular city, staff who work on a specific floor of an office building.
The user-friendly platform will minimize the time it takes you to send an emergency alert, which is essential during time-critical incidents. You can save even more time by sending a pre-defined message to a pre-defined audience.
The DeskAlerts Digital Signage solution helps you use LED, LCD, and projection displays to show the content of different formats, such as videos, images, graphics, and text. This is a good way to reinforce the information in your internal communications campaigns and share information, corporate news, and product and service promotions to employees inside the office and clients in your public areas.
The desktop ticker is a less intrusive and interruptive method of relaying messages. It’s a narrow window that scrolls, moving text at the bottom of your employees’ computer screens. It can be used to send news, article follow-ups, updates, and links to internal communications resources such as SharePoint and intranet sites.
These are more passive solutions, letting you communicate with employees directly to their computers. Your materials will appear in the background of their computers as wallpaper or on their screensaver when their machines enter screensaver mode – or you can do both.
When you want feedback from employees or want to test their knowledge, the surveys, polls, and quizzes module will give you the results that you need in real time. This is a great way to send internal communications surveys, pulse surveys, or even just to conduct a mini poll.
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Internal communications help just about every aspect of your business, from business results and financial performance to making your workplace a pleasant one for your employees. You have everything to gain and nothing to lose from improving internal communications in the workplace… why wait any longer?
Get in touch with us today to find out how DeskAlerts can change your business.
Internal communication is the term used to describe the way that information is shared within a company. This can include management communicating with employees, as well as the way that different departments communicate with the rest of the organization, the way teams communicate, and the ways that employees can communicate with management.
Internal communication in the workplace can be improved by implementing a strategy that outlines who you will communicate with, what you will say, how often and when you will communicate, and which channels you will use. Performing quantitative and qualitative analysis of your communications can help you determine if it was effective, so you can refine your methods and make improvements in the future.
Employee communication can be improved by sending relevant and timely information to your staff members that helps them to do their jobs and contribute proactively to your company’s overall success. This involves using a range of communications channels that provide for the effective and efficient distribution of important information.
Send urgent notifications to any corporate devices: PCs, phones, tablets, etc.
The high visibility combined with our 100% delivery rate guarantee. Bypass information overload. Deliver key information even if the computer is on screensaver mode, locked or sleeping.
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Caroline Duncan
