A good internal comms strategy is crucial to employee engagement and retention—but employers aren’t getting it right

Ask any marriage therapist: communication is key. And this doesn’t just apply to George coming clean to Martha about what really happened at last year’s endodontist conference in Pasadena—it goes for companies and their employees, too.

Internal communication is an important factor in securing high employee engagement and retention. When leveraged well, it’s a powerful tool for helping employees feel in tune with their company, improving cross-team collaboration, and boosting worker satisfaction, prior research has found.

That said, some companies are doing a poor job at employee comms, a new study from USC Annenberg and Staffbase, an employee communications platform, suggests.

Comms oversight. The research, based on 20 interviews with chief communications officers at large companies including Levi’s, ExxonMobil, and IBM, as well as a survey of more than 1,000 workers at large companies, found that just 29% of workers are very satisfied with their employer’s quality of employee communications.

There are benefits to having a strong employee communication strategy. Workers who felt they received enough information from their employer were more likely to report being happy with their job, and very likely to stay at their company than respondents who were not satisfied with their company’s comms practices, according to the report. Employees who were satisfied with their employer’s internal communication efforts were also more likely to feel in-tune with the company’s goals than all other respondents, and more than twice as likely to report that than those who were dissatisfied.

That said, around 54% of workers surveyed said they were not, or only somewhat, familiar with their organization’s goals and vision. A lack of clarity from the employer can create an attrition problem; 61% of employees considering switching jobs cite poor internal communication as a factor.

To be sure, it’s no shocker that this would be the takeaway from a survey about internal communications conducted in part by a company selling an employee communication platform. What the survey says about attrition, however, is aligned with ongoing research from Gallup about employee engagement. Gallup’s data found that employees’ understanding of what’s expected of them at work, sense of connection between the company’s mission and purpose and their job, and satisfaction with their organization have all declined since early 2021. Additionally, the share of US workers open to leaving their jobs hit a high of 51% since Gallup started tracking the data in 2014.

“Good communication is a powerful indicator of job happiness and retention,” Frank Wolf, Staffbase’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, told HR Brew. “There's a very clear link between how am I communicated to, and how happy I am in the job.”

Areas for improvement. Wolf shared two suggestions that HR leaders can consider for improving their own internal communications approaches: focus on how frequently communications are shared, and how managers disseminate information to their teams.

How often companies communicate with their employees is a key driver in workers feeling in tune with company strategy. Around 53% of workers who received daily or weekly communications from their employer reported being “very familiar” with their company’s goals, objectives, and mission, while only 38% of employees who received monthly or quarterly communications and 19% of workers who received them less often reported the same.

Additionally, employees who received daily communication were more likely to report intentions to stay at their current job than those who received them monthly or quarterly, or less frequently.

“We see that a very regular check-in and high frequency of the communication is definitely better than a lower frequency,” Wolf said. “You need reliable and open and used and sticky communication channels…but also communicate on a very regular basis.”

How effectively managers communicated company news or information to their team also impacted worker sentiment about company comms efforts.

“I think one of the very tactical [pieces of] advice to HR is the question: How do you enable and how do you make sure that middle and line managers are sensitive about the way they act as a communicator?” he said.

So, in the same way that a counselor might bring George and Martha back together, an HR leader can help employees feel closer to their company.