How to Improve Employee Retention With Internal Communication

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

In our latest blog, we described how employee communication could positively influence your recruitment process, especially when it comes to referral recruitment. Referral recruitment is a great way to find new hires. However, when you finally find the perfect match for your job openings, how do you retain your talents? Although this is a super complex topic, we’re convinced good and open communication is part of the trick. This is how you improve employee retention with internal communication.

Matching beliefs, vision, norms, and values

More and more, employees want to work for organizations that have beliefs, visions, norms, and values that match their own. Gallup research shows that this is a key factor in staying with an employer for four out of ten employees.

You’ve probably heard the story of the NASA janitor. John F. Kennedy, on a tour of NASA headquarters in 1961, encountered a janitor who was mopping the floors. When the President asked: “Why are you working so late?” the answer was: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.” All NASA employees felt very connected to that goal, even those who were quite distant from the mission of putting a man on the moon (like the janitor).

This means NASA’s mission was very clear to all employees. Is that the case in your organization? What is your organization’s ‘man on the moon’-story? Clearly communicating your vision, mission, and values is an important factor in retaining your employees (provided it matches what they value).

Highlight your mission through communication

Your mission probably needs some nuance and explanation, but it’s still a good idea to highlight (short messages about) your mission and values continuously via, for example, a corporate screensaver or a digital signage screen to your employees. This way, employees are constantly reminded of what is important in their organization, and they also know what it is they’re working towards together with their colleagues.

Our customer USG Industrial Utilities already highlights its mission through multiple channels. Helen Biermans, Communications Officer at USG, explains: “We enliven our mission and core values, which you want every employee to live by, through short messages in Netpresenter. Via different channels, we emphasize these things for our employees, so our core values are always top of mind.”

Continually showing your core values and mission to employees, like USG does, you keep them alive and inspire your employees daily to act according to your organization’s important values.

Opportunities for learning and development

For many employees, opportunities for learning and development are super important factors to stay with their employer (or not). Gallup found that employees with opportunities for continuous development are twice as likely to stay with a company throughout their career as those without these development opportunities. Regardless of title or position, all employees want to continue learning and growing in their roles.

HR and communications teams can join forces to inform employees of development opportunities within their organization. One way of doing this is displaying information about internal training and courses through an employee communication platform or intranet. An overview of current available training courses and start dates should be shown regularly on a corporate screensaver or digital signage screen. This stimulates employees to ask their manager if they can do a training or apply for a course to keep developing themselves.

Our customers already successfully use Netpresenter to inform their employees about their training and education and to stimulate staff to participate in certain courses. This works great: when they use Netpresenter to inform employees about available training and courses, course enrollments jump with twenty to forty percent.

Regular rewards and recognition

This one speaks for itself, right? Who doesn’t like to be complimented for great work from time to time? 😊 Making sure employees feel valued is a key factor in preventing turnover. And that starts with showing employees they are valued by recognizing their contributions. In fact, employees who don’t feel like they’re being valued for their work are twice as likely to look for a new job.

Many of our customers use our platform to spotlight their employees when they’ve done a great job. Piedmont Healthcare also does this; they use Netpresenter mainly as an employee engagement tool.

Kelli Newman, Director of Internal Communications at Piedmont, explains: “We share employees’ stories weekly. We have a system-wide employee recognition program for which employees can be nominated for making a positive difference. Various winners will be selected for various awards. These are always stories that we want to promote through Netpresenter. People will then be redirected to the complete story on the intranet, where they can comment and engage with the content. They will endorse the person who’s won and congratulate them. It absolutely affects our employees positively; they always engage with these stories. We love that. It’s a really nice way of not only recognizing our employees but also allowing others to celebrate winners.”

Do you think internal communication could have an impact on retention in your organization? Not sure yet where to start? Get in touch with our consultants; they will be happy to advise you and show you what our platform can do for you in a free 30-minute demo. Or download the free self assessment to measure the levels of engagement in your organization.