You want to share the latest business results with your colleagues to celebrate victories? Reveal a new ambitious project? Announce the date of the next company birthday dinner?
All of these actions fall under internal communication, that superpower often underestimated that allows you to relay key information, stay in touch, reinforce company culture, and unite your teams around a common goal (or at least around a pizza).
Explore our examples of digital tools and some tips to make your internal communication both smooth, effective, and maybe even a bit fun!
There is a multitude of digital tools that can facilitate multichannel communication and collaboration within your company. Here's a list (non-exhaustive) of 10 families of tools that are very useful for streamlining everyday communication!
The intranet network centralizes all the important information in your company. These range from institutional resources, such as the company’s organizational chart, internal regulations, or training modules, to news and management messages. Unlike the bulletin board, you can deliver more confidential details here, as the intranet is only accessible to employees with a username and password.
Example solution: SharePoint.
More fun and less suited to official communications, your company’s social networks facilitate informal conversations between your employees. They allow, for example, the creation of thematic groups gathering employees working on the same project. Of course, we’re talking about internal communication platforms, like Yammer, and not your LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram accounts meant for public communication.
Example solution: Microsoft Viva Engage (formerly Yammer).
Messaging apps allow quick exchanges ("The meeting starts in 5 minutes!") or more informal discussions essential to team cohesion ("Who's available for lunch?").
Examples of solutions: WhatsApp Business, Workplace, and Microsoft Teams.
More than just internal communication tools, document-sharing software facilitates collaborative work within teams. People working on the same project can co-edit shared documents, add comments visible to everyone, or make real-time synchronized changes. This way, every user has the same level of information at all times.
Examples of solutions: Google Workspace or Office 365 are the most well-known.
Synchronous and asynchronous communication tools allow for sending instant or delayed messages (depending on the urgency of the information). They are mainly used to organize online meetings or video conferences. If your employees are spread across several locations or if part of your team works in a hybrid mode, you won’t be able to do without them!
Examples of solutions: Slack, Zoom, and Google Meet.
.webp)
As the name suggests, project management software facilitates coordination among stakeholders in a project. The manager can assign tasks to each team member and track their execution. A great way to have an overview of a project and ensure that everyone has the same level of information, whether they are working from the company’s premises or not.
Examples of solutions: Trello and Asana.
Have you ever wondered what your employees think of the company? What they would like to improve? Or, on the contrary, what they wouldn’t change for anything in the world? This is possible thanks to survey and poll platforms that allow you to give them a voice and gather their suggestions, reasons for satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and their feedback, all anonymously.
Example solution: SurveyMonkey.
The primary goal of online training portals is to encourage the personal and professional development of your employees by providing online educational resources. But have you thought about using them to communicate about internal programs? It’s possible! For example, you can create training modules following updates to your security policy or the launch of your new anti-discrimination strategy.
Examples of solutions: LinkedIn Learning or Udemy for Business.
The stars of HR services in recent years, digital onboarding portals facilitate the integration of new employees by offering them centralized access to a wide range of information about your organization, from the company history to HR documents, initial training, and integration paths. They represent a powerful internal communication tool offering a first entry point into your company culture.
Example solution: BambooHR.
Unavoidable, email is a very effective internal communication channel. You can use it to send official or more informal messages to all or part of your team. Your emails can even include a link directing to content from another medium, like an article from your newsletter or a post on your intranet portal. A small tip to stand out: personalize your professional email signatures.
.webp)
Don’t know what a mail signature in Outlook (or any professional email platform) is? Yes, you do! It’s the small personalized text block that can be inserted at the bottom of each of your emails and those of your colleagues. It contains corporate information, such as the sender's name, position, and contact details, as well as the company logo, colors, or motto.
For example, you can add a banner in your internal email signatures to:
As with any internal communication action, don’t forget to follow some best practices, such as maintaining visual coherence between your banner and your brand image, regularly updating the information to avoid it becoming outdated, or prioritizing simple messages. For this, feel free to use a ready-to-use Outlook signature template like those offered by Letsignit!
Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to this question!
Written media (also called internal communication touchpoints by purists) includes all paper channels through which information circulates, black and white, within your company. From pages in your internal newspaper to informational posters pinned at the entrance of the cafeteria.
If some of your employees don’t work on computers, such as those in manual jobs or on production lines, the bulletin board is sometimes one of the only internal communication channels available.
But when should you use it? You could, for example, pin:
It’s often forgotten, but oral communication is probably the most obvious communication channel. You know, those times when you or your managers speak at an info meeting or team lunch to announce good news (and not-so-good news…). Or those speeches where you subtly deliver key messages during a seminar, team-building event, or the company’s traditional annual or Christmas party.
More broadly, oral internal communication is also what you use daily, without even realizing it, during your informal exchanges with your employees, which helps strengthen the bond with your teams.
The effectiveness of an internal communication tool largely depends on your internal communication strategy, your managerial practices, and your ability to leverage its potential.
Here are some examples of best practices to optimize your internal communication:
It's your turn!
Want to optimize your internal communication strategy by adding banners to your email signatures?
Letsignit is a tool that allows you to add advertising banners in an automated and centralized manner for all employees in your company.
Want to learn more about our solution?
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
