When communicating with a diverse employee base that shares a common workplace, it is crucial to offer tools that meet the varied needs of all employees. The right employee communication tools can significantly influence workplace culture and set the tone for how employees interact with management, collaborate, learn, and engage with one another.
Choosing tools that enhance communication efficiency can foster a positive, collaborative work environment. This article will provide insight into the best internal communication tools to explore for your workplace.
First, what makes a good internal communication tool?
When thinking of employee communication tools, remember that there are different types of workplace communication, and different tools that fit the bill for each.
Instantaneous workplace communication refers to quick, seamless exchanges between employees with the intent of prompt responses, timely decision making, and easy accessibility. Often, this type of communication is utilized for simple conversation that is helpful in building employee relationships, or to put out a (workplace) fire.
Strategic workplace communication is used for structured, intentional communication aimed at achieving specific organizational goals. These targeted, planned, and goal-oriented messages are used to boost employee engagement, improve decision-making, and strengthen culture through meaningful interactions. Email, knowledge management, and employee recognition platforms all fall within this category.
Collaborative workplace communication refers to how employees work together, whether in person or virtually, and share knowledge to ensure everyone is aligned, informed, and able to contribute to the organization’s success. This type of communication fosters a sense of unity among employees, often leading to increased productivity, improved problem-solving, and higher employee motivation. Team calls, often conducted by video conferencing, and project management fall under this type of communication.
Slack, a messaging app that enables real-time workplace communication through direct messages and conversation channels, provides easy connectivity. It offers workflow building, file sharing, search functionality, customization, and collaboration through its many integrations with popular platforms such as Canva, Salesforce, Asana, and others.
Slack enhances employee communication by providing in-app mentions, emojis, and video/voice calls. Its easy-to-use interface and instant communication options enable employees to deal with urgent matters promptly. One area of concern with Slack is its privacy capabilities. Since Slack saves data indefinitely, sensitive information should be shared through another tool to protect against phishing. The several notifications can get overwhelming and make you lose focus.
Slack integrates with specialist HR software like Oracle, Workday, PeopleSoft, and ADP, allowing HR teams to share data with other teams, organize updates, and search for files across applications. Slack can also streamline onboarding for new hires, helping them start productive work immediately. New hires can easily find different channels where they can ask questions, meet other employees, and access important onboarding materials. HR knowledge sharing is faster and easier, which improves learning and development efforts.
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Microsoft Teams combines chat, video conferencing, file storage, and application integrations with SharePoint, PowerPoint, Adobe Creative Cloud, and most importantly, Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams is designed to facilitate streamlined communication within organizations, and they do this well by offering suggested replies, emojis, instant translation, topic-specific channels, and Microsoft Loops that enable real-time co-working.
Teams is highly customizable and offers ample features that make communication between employees easy, once they adjust to the slightly complex user interface. The many capabilities in Teams can cause some confusion as employees are first learning the platform. The only other notable downside is slower load times caused by the connectivity with other programs.
A dedicated channel on Teams helps to keep everyone updated on HR activities and events. Team members can also collaborate and monitor each other's activities. Microsoft Teams has various tools that facilitate HR operations. For example, Shifts is a schedule management tool that allows you to create and manage schedules, review requests for shift swaps or time off, and let your team clock in and out of a shift.
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Gmail, Google’s free email service, prides itself on high security levels, user-friendly interface, ample storage, powerful search function, security and number of integrations. They offer gentle reminders to users, encouraging them to reply to emails promptly and their feature, Smart Compose, supports employee efficiency. For these reasons, Gmail is an ideal platform for email communications.
HR teams can save time on several tasks with the help of Gemini, an AI-powered assistant built into Gmail. Gemini makes recruiting and onboarding efforts quicker by analyzing and summarizing resumes, identifying top candidates first, and creating onboarding checklists. You can also enhance employee performance since Gemini helps to create and update training materials or customize training documentation for specific roles. Something to keep in mind is Gmail’s limited storage offered to free accounts; corporate teams may need to upgrade to a paid account to reap the desired benefits. Also, Gmail doesn’t sync with other email apps. In Gmail, organizations can share helpful information with employees through direct emails, Google Docs, video meetings, and chat.
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Another highly compatible and trusted email platform, Microsoft Outlook, offers free email to organizations. One key attribute of Outlook is its integration with Microsoft 365, which enables synchronicity between OneDrive and Microsoft Teams for easy file sharing and team collaboration. Outlook's other standout capabilities include grammar check, CoPilot AI technology, enterprise-grade security, and connectivity to Microsoft Calendar, Contacts, and To-Do lists. This platform excels at offering team connectivity.
Microsoft Outlook integrates with several HR applications, such as Jazz HR, Workable, Sage HR, and Wave. These integrations enhance productivity and streamline workflow. Outlook also helps you stay organized by synchronizing your emails, calendar, and contact lists, and adding meeting information directly into your schedule. With one click, you can view your schedule for the week.
Again, due to Microsoft’s many features, there can sometimes be a learning curve when first using the platform. Microsoft Outlook also experiences occasional performance issues, such as slow load time.
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SharePoint’s comprehensive features, and seamless integrations with other Microsoft programs, make this a superior knowledge management source. This secure content management platform is customizable, offering team-specific sites where teams can work on projects, share information, and manage documents collectively.
SharePoint merges all HR data in one centralized location, ensuring data integrity and easy access. This centralization removes data silos and streamlines HR processes. SharePoint’s collaboration features enhance communication and cooperation among team members. Discussion boards and shared calendars promote teamwork and knowledge sharing.
Version control and access control are two desirable features of SharePoint, ensuring that edits are tracked and shared data can only be shared with trusted persons. A few downsides of SharePoint that are worth thinking of, are the elaborate interface and unsurprisingly, the program load time.
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Confluence provides a centralized place for team information to be stored, real-time team collaboration, and task management. Highly compatible, Confluence’s integrations with Jira, Google, YouTube, and a surplus of others lead to seamless content sharing. Of course, a knowledge management platform would not be complete without high-end security and companywide permissions to ensure data protection, both of which Confluence provides. These elite features make Confluence a top knowledge management platform.
HR professionals can use Confluence to help employees reach their full potential with internal resources and training. Confluence answers role-based questions with AI-powered auto-suggestions. It also helps you organize professional growth resources into meaningful categories (or spaces) so team members can find them easily. A widely known negative of this platform is its poor search function, making finding things in the app troublesome. You may also experience occasional slow loading time.
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Bonusly is a customizable, easy-to-use employee recognition and rewards platform that promotes peer-to-peer and manager recognition based on company values and goals, including automated milestone gifting. Employees receive monthly credits to reward teammates, redeemable for gifts like gift cards, donations, or PayPal transfers. These public rewards boost morale and foster unity. Bonusly integrates with Slack, HRIS systems, and Microsoft, making it easy to incorporate into daily workflows.
Bonusly helps HR professionals improve team morale and visibility by promoting a positive culture of appreciation among peers. When teammates often appreciate each other, they feel valued, turnover decreases, and productivity increases. While its limited features and high cost are a concern, the benefits of enhanced employee engagement often outweigh this issue.
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Guusto, an inclusive employee recognition tool, knows that not all employees are desk workers. Rewards can be sent to anyone - employees, seasonal workers, contractors, volunteers, suppliers and customers. Rewards are customizable for employee milestones while aligning with company values and goals. The platform offers a variety of reward options, including various digital gift cards, and employees can benefit from a personalized recognition experience as they can choose their preferred rewards.
Guusto integrates with HRIS systems and multiple communication platforms making it simple to send rewards anytime, anywhere. Of course, like any peer recognition platform, Guusto drives employee motivation and job satisfaction up. Guusto has fewer integrations than similar employee recognition platforms, and if the recipient isn’t tech-savvy, they might face challenges redeeming their gifts.
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Asana, a task-tracking platform designed to help teams organize and manage their work, allows employees to create projects, add tasks to those projects, assign tasks to team members, set due dates, and communicate about tasks within the platform. A highly desired feature is Asana’s ability to link projects back to company goals.
Their enterprise-grade security, AI abilities, many integrations (Microsoft, Slack, Salesforce, and more), and innate collaborative interface enable employees to work smarter, not harder. This easy-to-use and highly collaborative tool enables workplace connectivity at its best. Due to the number of capabilities offered by Asana, there can sometimes be many email notifications sent to employees, leading to notification overload. Collaboration and communication on Asana usually happen when you send a message from your inbox, create a status update on specific projects, or assign a team member a task, whether they’re a peer or manager. You can only assign a task to one person at a time.
Asana helps standardize your HR processes with various templates so nothing gets overlooked. Templates like the employee onboarding template, HR project plan, candidate tracking, crisis management plan, interview questions template, and scorecard help you build an action plan for various situations.
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Another well-known project management tool, Trello, uses a card-based system based on the concept of Kanban boards to help teams organize their work through the various stages of a process, gamifying work tasks in a way. Trello allows for easy collaboration amongst team members as they can assign cards to team members, leave comments, file share, and mention team members in discussions. Employee onboarding can even be supported through Trello.
Trello also integrates with various other tools and services, such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Slack, allowing for seamless workflow management. This tool offers simple task management, collaboration, and, in turn, workflow efficiency. As with any project management program, there can be an overload of notifications. Another point to keep in mind is that Trello offers limited advanced features, keeping it a rather simple interface but potentially with fewer desired features than one would hope for.
HR teams and companies thrive on clear and seamless communication and collaboration. Trello makes this happen with its HR boards, which include new hire onboarding, digital employee manual, recruiting pipeline, interview pipeline, and team building boards. These boards help smoothen your recruiting processes and build strong relationships between your departments.
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Zoom is a highly utilized cloud-based platform for virtual meetings, webinars, and online events. It supports various devices and operating systems, making it compatible with any device. Zoom's features, like personalized backgrounds, whiteboarding, file sharing, captioning, transcription, chat, screen-sharing, and break-out rooms, enhance the virtual experience and support accessibility.
For in-person settings, Zoom offers room bookings and meeting reservations. Its many integrations and ease of use make it a top choice for workplace communication, though it requires a high processing capacity and high internet bandwidth, which can be a concern for remote-first companies.
Real-time communication allows HR professionals to have live video calls with team members for in-depth collaboration and quick decision-making. Zoom Whiteboard features several visual tools that help teams brainstorm, plan, and get creative. Your company can share helpful information with employees through Zoom webinars.
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Microsoft Teams, part of Microsoft 365, unifies communication and collaboration for efficient teamwork. It offers features like custom backgrounds, screen-sharing, captioning, chat, and participant lists. Employees can review and edit documents live using Collaborative Annotations, saving time in a remote-first world and fostering true collaboration. Teams' integration with all Microsoft 365 apps allows for smooth transitions between tasks like creating documents, scheduling meetings, and managing tasks within the same ecosystem, significantly boosting productivity and overall company success. While its complex user interface and limited integrations may pose challenges, the extensive features make it a valuable tool.
HR teams can manage recruitment and employment, communicate hiring decisions, and share employee documents to Teams. You can also upload files like HR policies, offers, training or recruitment guidance notes, and feedback forms. Teams also allows you to host training sessions using audio/video conferencing, share presentations, and post-training surveys using third-party apps like Survey Monkey. You can create shortcuts to Microsoft documents like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint for immediate access to frequently used documents.
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Effective internal communication fosters inclusivity, reduces misunderstandings, and accelerates decision-making processes. Team members also feel valued and take initiative on projects, increasing their engagement and morale. Choose the right internal communication tools for your organization’s needs, so your teams can collaborate more efficiently to achieve the overall company objectives.