How you treat your employees is how you treat your customers.
Well, so to speak.
Employees are the face of your company. They’re the ones who interact with customers the most—and who a customer interacts with can make a big difference, for good or bad.
This is where you come in.
To do their jobs well, your employees need to be engaged and connected to the company, so you’ve got to connect with them first.
And here’s how you do it. Follow these 12 steps to write a quality internal communications piece:
Okay, you got us. This isn’t exactly a step.
But it is important, so we’re telling you up front: you’ve got to keep your eyes and ears open.
If you’re going to be consistently writing to employees, you need to know what’s going on in your company—and how employees are handling it.
How else are you going to know what issues need to be addressed?
Or that you need to change your approach?
You won’t. So pay attention now, and you can apply what you learn later, every time you write a piece.
Don’t start writing without a plan.
If you’re on a time crunch, you might feel like spending a few minutes to scratch out some rough ideas or a mind map is a waste of precious time, but we’ll have to disagree.
If you know where it is you’re headed, you can figure out the best way to get there.
If you don’t know, you might find yourself wandering in circles.
And if you’re in a hurry, you just don’t have time for that.
Here’s what you need to think about to get pointed in the right direction. Be sure to jot down some notes while you’re thinking:
So you know where you’re going.
But do you know how you’re getting there?
Time to draft a rough outline. Take a good look at any of the thoughts you wrote down earlier and start to put them in a logical order.
Break your purpose down into parts. If you’re writing about safety hazards, for example, create a section for each of the three hazards you’re covering.
If you have lots of points to make, organize them into categories to make your line of thought easy to follow.
Be sure to jot down an idea for a solid intro and a conclusion that wraps everything up.
You can even give it a title before you start, if that helps you find some direction. Just know that you might scrap it before you’re done.
Literally. The louder the better.
Okay, not really, but you do need to get their attention right away.
Readers don’t always stick around, especially not online, but you need to draw them in before you worry about keeping them.
Start off with a good hook.
If you’re pressed for ideas, try asking a question, using humor, or make a statement that makes you curious, like “How you treat your employees is how you treat your customers.”
What? You’re still reading, aren’t you?
On the flip side, don’t “bury your lede,” as they say in journalism. Put your most important information—what you really need employees to know—at the beginning of your piece, preferably within the first couple of sentences.
Remember, your readers can stop reading at any time.
Okay, we’re off to a good start, so now what?
Follow your outline!
Go point by point, filling each section in with the information you want to get across. Don’t worry too much about how good it is, and don’t start editing as you go.
Remember, you will have time to edit it later. For now, just concentrate on creating content.
That being said, keep these things in mind to make that editing step a little less work:
Remember how readers can stop at any time—and many do?
Make it easier for them to stick with it.
Write content that’s easily scannable. How?
The end is in sight!
Wrap things up neatly so the piece feels complete. You can do this by briefly touching on some of your earlier points, but please don’t rehash everything you’ve already said. Your employees get what you’re trying to say by now.
Even better, incorporate a call to action. Be specific and tell employees what you would like them to do in response: fill out out a survey, give feedback to a question, etc.
Even if you’re writing an informative piece, give them something to leave with that they can do.
If you’re on a time crunch, you may feel the need to skip this step. That’s your call.
But taking a break gives you a chance to rest and think about something else.
And when you come back?
You’ll get to look at your piece with fresh eyes. And fresh eyes are a lot more likely to catch poor word choices and weird sentence structure than tired ones are.
Not that you have to be unproductive. Respond to some emails, work on another project you have, make a phone call, etc.
Speaking of things you could do while waiting…
Why not track down some helpful visuals? We know that you’d technically still be working on the piece we just told you to leave alone, but maybe we can make an exception here.
Since you’re not doing any writing, after all.
Not all pieces may need images, but visuals can help break up text or clarify a point you’re trying to make.
Look for relevant images on free stock photo sites, or if your company already images they want you to use, track them down in the company file system. Always be sure to give attribution where it’s needed.
Bonus: While you’re browsing, download any images you might find helpful in the future and set them aside in a folder for easy reference.
Done already? Well, then it’s probably time to take another look at your post.
Welcome back.
Whether you’ve taken a break or not, you need to finish what you’ve started and fix this piece up.
If you can, get someone else to give you feedback—they might catch something you’d miss.
Here’s what you both need to look out for:
And if you’re worried about clarity, you can always run your piece through an app that calculates readability, like Hemingway.
Wait, didn’t we already do that?
If you created a title during the outline stage, great. We hope it helped you focus on the focus of your piece.
The important thing to ask now is, does this title still work?
When you rewrite a piece, you often cut points and rearrange sections, and sometimes when you’re all done, you find yourself looking at something totally different than what you were planning on.
And the title has to adapt.
But how do you create a good title? Here are some ideas:
This is the last pass.
Make it a good one.
You’ve already done all the major editing and rewriting, so now you need to do one last proofread. Again, it’s always good to have a second set of eyes go over your work, but you can do this yourself, too.
The one trick we would suggest?
Read your piece backwards. Not word for word, of course—that wouldn’t make any sense.
Go back through your work line by line, starting from the end. Sometimes when you read in order, you fill in gaps or slide over mistakes automatically, meaning those errors slip right by.
Reading out of order takes a little more time—which means you’ll be reading a little more carefully.
Bye-bye, mistakes.
You may have finished your work for now, but don’t think you’re done.
Part of creating good content—especially if you want to do it quickly—is being prepared.
Keep talking with employees and listening to what they think and feel. Create a running document of ideas to use when you write more content. Cultivate a folder of images and diagrams you can use to illustrate your points.
Always be adding to your stash, and you’ll save your future self a lot of time and stress.
Way to be ahead of the game.
What’s your process for creating solid content? What’s your biggest hurdle for creating content? We’d love to hear your thoughts!
