Businesses come in all different shapes and sizes, but many of us work in large organisations with widely spread footprints across the world.

As a consultant who advises, for the most part, companies with a large international presence, I am frequently surprised by the regularity with which relatively big companies are behind the curve on using appropriate technological tools to support their internal communications strategy.

The challenges are common. Employees operating in different time zones. Language barriers. Absence of communication, often due to a combination of remoteness from senior management and lack of access to channels that most office-based workers take for granted.

Many big international businesses appear to be struggling to engender much trust from their staff. Indeed, recent research from the Institute of Internal Communications suggests that the larger the organisation, the less likely it is that employees feel the organisation operates in their best interests, decreasing from 54% amongst organisations with 500-999 employees to just 35% for organisations employing 10,000 or more people.

1. Common complaints. I’ve spoken to or commissioned research amongst a wide range of employees in such businesses over time and some anti-management sentiments, such as leaders not understanding challenges, and feeling a general disconnect from the company are commonly heard. These are common problems that can have a massive impact on a business. If you’re not engaging a large proportion of your workforce, you’re not getting the best out of them and you’re missing opportunities to educate, create a culture, foster a sense of belonging and create brand ambassadors within your business. Technology can be a huge enabler to overcome many of these challenges. It has moved on considerably in recent years and there are specialist digital platforms that can provide a powerful framework on which to base a more inclusive and impactful internal comms programme.
2. Accessibility. Depending on your needs, platforms exist that can work across mobile, email, other apps like Teams, and more, so employees can access information on the devices that work best for them, whatever their work environment. Some platforms even enable the translation of content into multiple languages.
3. Personalisation. People won’t read content that they feel isn’t relevant to them. Technology now exists to segment audiences and personalise content so they only see what is relevant to them. Companies can still prioritise the most important communications by doing things like sending push notifications, pinning priority posts to the top of feeds, or requiring acknowledgements (e.g. for new policies).
4. Two-way communication. Engagement is about listening as much as broadcasting, and digital collaboration tools allow employees to enter the conversation with “social” functionality, helping them to feel more included. This enables people to post success stories, staff shout-outs or advice, in turn helping others to learn or be inspired. Smaller “communities” can also be created so team members in certain types of role or with common interests can liaise with each other and collaborate. To many employees, this can be at least as valuable and practical as communications from or with senior management.
5. Engaging. Many tools now allow the user to easily create or import rich content such as podcasts or video, giving organisations a much better chance of engaging staff than with traditional wordy written content alone.
6. Measurable. Platforms of this nature also often come with advanced analytics so you can better analyse what is and isn’t working, and adapt your strategy accordingly.

Of course, technology alone can’t solve the challenges of global staff engagement. The human touch is still essential for the production of content to ensure all those essential intangibles like nuance, tone and context. But working hand-in-hand with human skill, tech can be a powerful enabler to help internal communicators transform the impact of their companies’ comms output, not just from the top-down but also between employees at all levels.

Given the right tools, skilled internal communicators can much more effectively support their organisation’s goals, whether it is by promoting understanding of company strategy and decisions, enhancing a sense of belonging, enabling knowledge sharing or improving company culture.

So why isn’t every company embracing it? I suspect, as I pointed out in a previous column, evidenced by headcount freezes and tight internal comms budgets, that business leaders are not seeing the value that this kind of tech-enabled transformation could bring. Given the importance of an engaged, happy and productive workforce, denying internal communicators the tools with which they could thrive is surely a false economy.