Internal and External Communication

Question

How can internal and external communications be used to effectively achieve an organisations objectives?

Answer

Both internal and external communications are important for an organisation to use to achieve their objectives. Internal communication is important as it can help facilitate employee ‘buy-in’. By conducting internal communications with employees, management can tell employees what the future direction of the organisation is and what they are hoping to achieve. By internally communicating this to staff members it allows them to feel greater participation in the organisational process and this can ultimately lead to increased motivation and work commitment as employees feel valued by the organisation.

External communication is focused on other stakeholders beyond the formal structures of an organisation. For example, customers, external investors and the government. As with internal communications, external communications are used to influence the stakeholders to help achieve the organisations’ objectives. There are two key things to remember when conducting external communications. First, you need to identify who the most important/influential stakeholders are, and then, secondly, you need to identify what their needs are and/or what their concerns are. The external marketing communications campaign will then need to be designed to show how the organisation can meet these needs or address their concerns. For example, if the objective of the organisation is to increase the sales of a product then an effective external marketing communications campaign would be needed to influence consumers to purchase the organisations’ product. If the external communications can show to consumers that the product fulfils a need they have, then they will be influenced to purchase the product and this will meet the organisations’ objective of increasing sales.