Can more effective internal communications raise your market premium by 19.4%?

Can it help you deliver 57 per cent higher shareholder return?

On average, that’s what happens when companies install and maintain an effective internal communications program.  Equally important, there is a strong correlation between a company’s communications and its employee engagement and retention levels.

You may think you are communicating effectively, and perhaps you are.  That doesn’t mean you couldn’t be doing it better.  It also doesn’t take into account the pressure that’s being put on people in your organization who in the past were rarely, if ever, called upon to write.  Enter e-mail.  Which, unfortunately, has pretty much become written speech.

Unless they’ve had proper training, more than half of your employees would rather have root canal than write a short note.  They don’t know where to start, or what to say, or how to say it.  And the ones who don’t dread writing generally write far too much – just the way they talk.

That’s not a problem around the water cooler, or at the lunch table; it can create havoc on the job.  Your people need to know how to write a focused email, letter, or any other form of communication so it establishes a dialogue with the recipient and accomplishes what they set out to accomplish.

So it doesn’t come out looking like this actual e-mail, sent by a systems analyst:

"I updated the Status report for the four discrepancies Lennie forward us via e-mail (they in Barry file).. to make sure my logic was correct It seems we provide Murray with incorrect information ... However after verifying controls on JBL - JBL has the indicator as B ???? - I wanted to make sure with the recent changes - I processed today - before Murray make the changes again on the mainframe to 'C'."

If you haven’t seen this kind of non-communicating communications among your people – and much, much worse – you’re simply not looking.  Because it’s happening everywhere, from the basement to the board room.

You can improve it dramatically, by imparting just a few simple communications secrets to your organization.  In about four hours, they can learn how to approach a written or verbal communication, how to plan it, and how to write it so that it accomplishes their purpose.