How to Plan an Effective Internal Communications in your Organization Post Lockdown

With the spread of COVID19, we are currently living in unprecedented times, where a large part of the world has gone under lockdown. From New York to Rome to Moscow to Delhi, the streets were empty, businesses were shuttered and people were staying at home. But, work didn’t stop.

Work from home during quarantine became the new normal, one which most businesses had to adapt to quickly. When your whole team works remotely, you are confronted with many issues. Slow work execution, drop in efficiency, miscommunications, crisis management and more. Work from home was fun initially, but it brought with it a ton of challenges and continues.

While we are overcoming these challenges bravely and now entering another phase- Unlocking the lockdown. Businesses are moving, streets are no longer empty and work is getting much more flexible. However, unlocking brings with it certain challenges too, so how can businesses still continue to work productively during this phase?

Here’s how organizations can effectively work during Post or Partial Lockdown

Communicate Optimally and Empathetically

Whether you’re continuing to work from home post lockdown or are beginning to work with a small team on the field, optimising contextual communication given the condition becomes the key. Working from home can cause employees to feel isolated. The aspect of a team working towards a powerful goal is missing. The more people communicate with each other in a cohesive way the more they still feel like a part of the team and eventually, more is accomplished.

Whether it is through Zoom, Hangouts, WhatsApp, make sure all channels are open so that teams can communicate. Organizing daily video calls is a perfect way for everyone to stay connected.

Inspire the Team

As a Leading digital agency, we completely understand how important the spirit of people is. So, the more inspired the team is, the better they perform.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, every company has seen a spurt in internal communication. Anand Mahindra crafted an internal message to his employees to use this time to “dream bigger dreams”. Twitter embraced the WFH attitude completely by allowing employees to work from home indefinitely.

Take action that inspires your team and let them know that we are all in this together.

Level-up Your Planning

Miscommunication, poor internet, family interruptions — working from home due to Covid-19 or shifting half of your team to work from the office, neither is not going to be a walk in the park. Good planning becomes even more critical during this stage — it does 3 things:

• Brings focus on the work
• Collaborate keeping in mind the virtual silos to improve efficiency
• Breaks down large projects that require coordinated efforts into smaller tasks

If your organization hasn’t, now is a good time to use a project management tool that is pro your organizational needs. A tool that can be customised to sound your unique process, team function, workflows and operational hierarchy. This way the whole team can keep track of tasks and monitor the project’s progress and assess productivity.

Be Transparent

Your whole team is antsy with all kinds of worries. You may have had team members ask and write asking about their professional stability, salaries and job security.

This is not an easy time for businesses and all the answers are not pleasant. A time like this can often lead to:

• Mismanagement
• Disgruntled employees
• Depletion in productivity & morale
• In extreme cases a PR nightmare

The need of the hour requires transparency and an open dialogue. Opt for an inside out communication approach to prepare or avert any future crisis. Some ways of tackling could be:

• Audit your current employee channels and enable them for better management
• Plan a unified communication
• Break the internal communication into smaller huddles for better crisis management
• Prepare your leadership for a two way communication channel
• Be open and empathetic

In this environment, problems will come. Organizations should deal with it openly and hide nothing under the carpet.

Lend an Open Ear

Whether it is your HR, manager, Assistant Manager or Team Leads, everyone has to be empathetic to unlocking problems as they would to lockdown issues.

• Balancing the workforce
• Social distancing the office
• Exhaustive preemptive measures
• Spreading awareness & education on the new normal
• Issues pertaining to work life balance

If problems still arise which they will then in these times, all that can be done is lend an ear and listen. Sometimes the solution lies within the problem. As a leading communications agency we advise:

• Keep a unified channel of messaging
• Trust people and enable them to spread the awareness
• Visual aid is quick, easy and most effective way to share information
• Opt for shorter format of communication
• Check the pattern that is most suitable for your workforce communication hierarchy
• Adapt communication with the company enterprise channels
• Build a dialogue that can be easily adapted between digital-physical environments

Adapt to the New Normal

Change starts from us and if we want to see a future, we might as well do the right things now. Running an organization during a lockdown was tough but with the unlocking phase, one can relax more and stress less at least.

If anything, the lockdown has taught us how to communicate better.

More than work, we really think that taking care of our people is the biggest priority. The future is uncertain and it is even more important that our employees are motivated, engaged, and know that we have their trust. That’s how we believe an organization should work and as one of the best communication agencies in India, no one knows these issues better than us.

In the end, whether we work from home or work from the office, we are all a family together.