Poor internal communication is a common complaint in most organisations.
In my previous company I was determined that communication should be two way. I am a strong believer that teams work best when everyone is engaged and all team members feel they can contribute.
It was a small team comprising of 25 people but staff were based in 4 locations around the UK, and sharing information was difficult.
We decided to set up an internal blog in an attempt to keep everyone up to date with what we were all working on.
But our first attempt was an big failure. Hardly anyone used it to publish updates.
Publishing information on our blog was relatively easy but the publishing workflow still seemed to obstruct team members from sharing information.
We found a solution in setting up a WordPress microblog using the P2 theme. This added a posting box to the home page – similiar to Twitter. Conversations can be fully threaded and appear in-line on the homepage. Updates appear in real-time without having to refresh the page (again like Twitter). And it can be run behind a password protected login.
This simple change worked and people started updating the blog regularly.
It became a great resource to share information and ask questions. It was low-friction and hassle-free and it made a real improvement on how information was shared between the team.