The growth phase from start-up to scale-up brings about new challenges. When transitioning from a handful of employees in one room, to multiple teams spread across different rooms or even different offices, many companies experience internal communication issues.
At the end of the summer, we had an HR-ON Team Day event, where our employees discussed what is great about HR-ON and what could be improved. Many positive aspects were highlighted, in particular, our friendly and flexible company culture, which makes people feel confortable at work and enjoy their job. The main aspect for improvement which was highlighted, was internal communication. Many employees feel that there are invisible walls between the different teams and that they don’t have a clear overview of who does what within each team.
Of course we wanted to tackle this issue as soon as possible and break down the invisible walls. Starting from the Monday after the Team Day, we began making small changes to help improve and facilitate internal communication across teams, for example; inviting people from other teams to join team meetings, so we can gain insight into different areas within the company. And making individual efforts to sit and chat with someone new during lunch.
We also began brainstorming larger initiatives to improve internal communication. We are arranging monthly breakfasts bringing all employees together (corona permitting), and Instagram take-overs to give employees the chance to show HR-ON from their perspective. This is interesting for people both outside and inside the company.
We have also launched an internal news initiative, called ‘HR-ON The Inside Story‘. The aim is to share updates from all teams, introduce new employees, highlight team and individual success, and present company updates from the management. We didn’t want to make a long newsletter sent out by email which just gets ignored. Instead, we have created a visual presentation which is shown on large screens around the office, making it easy for employees to get updates at a glance while having a coffee or eating lunch. We also send the news out via our internal messaging platform, therefore this is still possible when employees are working from home.
We hope these initiatives will help break down the invisible walls between teams within the company and improve internal communication.
Follow us on Instagram and look out for our employee take-overs on Tuesdays.
Also check out our Employee Handbook.
