Best Practices for Sourcing and Creating Company Wide Information
Optimize internal communication with best practices for sharing company-wide information. Ensure relevance and actionability with Guru's essential questions.
Everyone believes that their announcements are crucial and applicable to everyone. That’s not a bad thing; that’s the job of department leads — to be laser-focused on their team’s objectives and then make sure those outcomes and learnings are shared.
Think about the sheer amount of e-mails, DMs, and other communications the average employee gets during a day at work. Staying on top of everything can be difficult, but this is exactly where proper internal comms practices can come in handy. It’s the job of internal communications professionals to synthesize and translate the information/knowledge they want to communicate so all employees can understand it.
At Guru, we use three essential questions to ensure that when knowledge is communicated, it’s relevant and actionable instead of just adding to the "noise" of work:
Who is it relevant to?
Is it time-sensitive?
Is there an action required?
Capturing, collaborating, and improving content
Our Internal Communications team sends employees a company-wide newsletter via the Guru announcements feature every two weeks. Collaboratively crafting this newsletter with the help of Guru's AI tools like Assist and Answers has sped up the drafting process and made it easier for teams in different time zones to contribute content. Over the past few months, the AI consistently improved the announcements by simplifying language, condensing the content, and adjusting the tone. As a result, our company-wide announcement read-rate increased from 68% to an average of 89% over a four-month period.
Our internal communications team can further enhance the knowledge we share by acting on the announcement and engagement data. For instance, we review in-product engagement data on employees who haven’t confirmed that they read the newsletter and conduct qualitative research to understand why they aren’t engaging with the updates. With the support of generative AI and our collaborative content editor, the team is able to make more informed decisions about what, when, and with whom information is shared.
Team specific communications
Once team leaders have been educated on the logic and process of internal communications, which involves ensuring that communications are reviewed and approved through internal channels, they are encouraged to transmit relevant and actionable announcements to their respective teams. An excellent illustration of this scenario is when leaders distribute a "pre-read" document ahead of a product enablement session at Guru. This practice enhances the quality of synchronous conversations.
One of Guru's revenue team members said that receiving an announcement with pre-read material helped them prioritize consuming all the information they needed to understand the true purpose of an upcoming meeting. In this case, a manager helped their team with volume control and gave them material they could refer back to when joining a meeting vs. just following along in real time. This layer of manager-led prioritization helps create team-specific accountability, rituals, and information recall.
Comprehension and alignment
Scheduling announcements ahead of time has also been a game changer. The ability to schedule communications is cognitively beneficial for the recipients as rituals and cadences establish trust and reduce feeling overwhelmed by unexpected communication. Employees know they’ll consistently receive materials and updates 24 hours before an enablement session or a company meeting. On the flip side, busy team leaders are able to embrace the benefits of asynchronous communications by scheduling their announcements.
Communication without comprehension is just noise. And noise and digital clutter lead to overwhelm and burden. And burden leads to burnout.
According to a 2021 Harvard Business Review report, 25% of people who felt a strong sense of purpose in their work had not experienced any burnout. When we’re able to understand the prioritization of communications, take action, and get back to focus time, we connect to the meaningful parts of work. Instead of jumping to click "I read" to silence notifications and get rid of that dreaded red dot, employees now consume team and company knowledge asynchronously. These rituals ensure clarity on what employees need to know, what they need to do, and by when.
Everyone believes that their announcements are crucial and applicable to everyone. That’s not a bad thing; that’s the job of department leads — to be laser-focused on their team’s objectives and then make sure those outcomes and learnings are shared.
Think about the sheer amount of e-mails, DMs, and other communications the average employee gets during a day at work. Staying on top of everything can be difficult, but this is exactly where proper internal comms practices can come in handy. It’s the job of internal communications professionals to synthesize and translate the information/knowledge they want to communicate so all employees can understand it.
At Guru, we use three essential questions to ensure that when knowledge is communicated, it’s relevant and actionable instead of just adding to the "noise" of work:
Who is it relevant to?
Is it time-sensitive?
Is there an action required?
Capturing, collaborating, and improving content
Our Internal Communications team sends employees a company-wide newsletter via the Guru announcements feature every two weeks. Collaboratively crafting this newsletter with the help of Guru's AI tools like Assist and Answers has sped up the drafting process and made it easier for teams in different time zones to contribute content. Over the past few months, the AI consistently improved the announcements by simplifying language, condensing the content, and adjusting the tone. As a result, our company-wide announcement read-rate increased from 68% to an average of 89% over a four-month period.
Our internal communications team can further enhance the knowledge we share by acting on the announcement and engagement data. For instance, we review in-product engagement data on employees who haven’t confirmed that they read the newsletter and conduct qualitative research to understand why they aren’t engaging with the updates. With the support of generative AI and our collaborative content editor, the team is able to make more informed decisions about what, when, and with whom information is shared.
Team specific communications
Once team leaders have been educated on the logic and process of internal communications, which involves ensuring that communications are reviewed and approved through internal channels, they are encouraged to transmit relevant and actionable announcements to their respective teams. An excellent illustration of this scenario is when leaders distribute a "pre-read" document ahead of a product enablement session at Guru. This practice enhances the quality of synchronous conversations.
One of Guru's revenue team members said that receiving an announcement with pre-read material helped them prioritize consuming all the information they needed to understand the true purpose of an upcoming meeting. In this case, a manager helped their team with volume control and gave them material they could refer back to when joining a meeting vs. just following along in real time. This layer of manager-led prioritization helps create team-specific accountability, rituals, and information recall.
Comprehension and alignment
Scheduling announcements ahead of time has also been a game changer. The ability to schedule communications is cognitively beneficial for the recipients as rituals and cadences establish trust and reduce feeling overwhelmed by unexpected communication. Employees know they’ll consistently receive materials and updates 24 hours before an enablement session or a company meeting. On the flip side, busy team leaders are able to embrace the benefits of asynchronous communications by scheduling their announcements.
Communication without comprehension is just noise. And noise and digital clutter lead to overwhelm and burden. And burden leads to burnout.
According to a 2021 Harvard Business Review report, 25% of people who felt a strong sense of purpose in their work had not experienced any burnout. When we’re able to understand the prioritization of communications, take action, and get back to focus time, we connect to the meaningful parts of work. Instead of jumping to click "I read" to silence notifications and get rid of that dreaded red dot, employees now consume team and company knowledge asynchronously. These rituals ensure clarity on what employees need to know, what they need to do, and by when.
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