Best Practice Internal Communications for Hybrid and Remote Working

Internal Communication that delivers value to the organization and builds engagement among employees has never been an easy responsibility to get right.

Yet, according to Forbes, remote and hybrid working steadily increased from 4.7% of employees pre-pandemic to 40% of employees in 2024. This is another evolution in the world of work that IC must adapt to.

Follow these key best practices for communicating with your hybrid and remote workers to rise to the challenge and ensure your communication efforts still hit the mark.

Give your people a voice to inform your approach.

Never assume you know what works best for your people when it comes to communications, engagement, or anything else for that matter. The autocratic age belongs firmly in the past.

Instead, do your research. Understand your people, their challenges, their communication needs, and habits. Find out what’s working for them and what’s not. Listen. Observe. And listen some more.

This approach not only helps you understand the realities, challenges, and opportunities for developing and delivering your strategy to connect and engage with dispersed employees effectively, but also activates the employee voice.

When people know they are being listened to and heard, they feel more valued and respected and consequently more engaged and happier at work.

Of course, these feelings are only sustained if your people can see their feedback informing change and improvements in the comms landscape, so be sure to deliver. More importantly, remind them of the links between what they said and what you did regarding implementation.

Help support a culture of trust.

The highly respected Institute of Internal Communication’s 2024 Index Report highlighted the critical role of trust at work in boosting morale, motivation, engagement, and organizational performance.

For hybrid and remote working to be successful for both the organization and its employees, trust must be built. Leaders must trust their people to perform and deliver—and let go of the traditional ways of working and overseeing people. Employees need to feel trusted while being supported and enabled to perform at their best wherever they work.

Internal communication can help to get this balance right by supporting Managers to be more effective communicators and helping build the relationships between them and their teams.

It’s a known fact that the manager-employee relationship can account for up to 70% of an individual’s level of engagement at work, so efforts in this space can pay huge dividends.

You should:

• Provide your managers with key messaging packs for key business initiatives or updates so they feel valued, informed, and enabled to lead better and support their people.
• Work with managers who excel at driving high levels of engagement and well-being in their teams and showcase best practices for other managers or teams to adopt.
• Promote real-life examples of colleagues who dared to fail or pushed themselves out of their comfort zones and the lessons, outcomes, and personal growth they experienced from it. This only happens when there is a culture of trust and can be a great way to encourage more people to work and think differently.
• Support leaders to be more transparent, honest, and open in their communications to foster greater trust.
• Provide opportunities and channels for leaders and managers to be more visible and connected with staff, whether online or in person, to enhance the ‘know and like factors’ that go hand in hand with trust. 

Provide clarity and consistency for the use of your comms channels.

There is nothing more disheartening than the feeling of missing out. For communications to have the impact they need in the hybrid world of work, employees need to feel a sense of inclusivity and belonging more than ever before.

Therefore, IC must be clear on how best to connect with their audiences and know and articulate the purpose of each communication channel.

As reinforced by IC, the consistent use of each channel is key. This helps to effectively keep employees in the loop on critical news and relevant information and enables purposeful connectivity across the organization for knowledge sharing, networking, and community-building.

When people know where to go for what information or what event to attend and why, engagement and a sense of purpose increase, and frustration and miscommunication are alleviated.

Reinforce the strategy to cultivate belonging.

Your organizational values, strategy, and culture connect your employees to a shared purpose. They add meaning and value to your employees’ jobs and a sense of personal satisfaction at work, enhancing motivation and engagement.

Many employees feel disconnected because they don’t understand how their daily work contributes to the bigger picture and organizational strategy. Since one of IC’s main roles is to help drive strategic outcomes, IC can play a critical role in helping every employee feel more connected to the overall mission and direction of the business. This also helps create a sense of shared purpose and belonging for the collective.

• Host regular Town Halls to keep employees updated on key business news, progress, and challenges. Include an open forum section for employees to ask questions or raise their ideas or concerns with leaders to feel heard and more connected to senior leaders.
• Enable and encourage your business area leaders to reinforce and ‘translate’ the organizational strategy via their regular business updates. A more personalized approach for a given market, country, or business area helps make it more relevant and relatable to employees. These could be supported by online or in-person breakout sessions for employees to contribute ideas and solutions to key business challenges. This serves to not only help employees understand the organizational strategy and its importance, but also to make them feel like they can contribute to its future success.
• Facilitate reward and recognition of efforts supporting the business strategy, sharing employee or team stories demonstrating their impact. Encourage peer-to-peer recognition of what was done—and how it was done—in line with the company culture and values.
• Create an online hub that brings the organizational strategy and culture to life, showcasing the diversity of work, people, ideas, and challenges. Make it representative of your workforce so employees can see themselves represented in the stories and case studies. Make it real and relatable so it paints an honest picture of the business's challenges and opportunities to inspire and encourage an open, supportive culture where everyone’s contributions are valued and welcomed.

There is no silver bullet or one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with and engaging hybrid or remote employees. Still, these four best practices will undoubtedly enable IC to make a more valuable and impactful contribution to the world of work.

Take a people-centered approach and involve your employees in improving your communications, and you won’t go far wrong!