With asynchronous communication on the rise, internal blogs have gained a lot of attention and were the primary choice for many teams looking to simplify, centralize and facilitate internal communications in their organizations.
With the combination of diverse usability (from sharing news and knowledge through improving employee engagement to boosting company culture) and extreme ease of use, internal blogs have quickly become a central, indispensable tool for internal communication for many organizations and different teams inside those organizations.
Here are 8 reasons why you should consider using an internal blog in your organization.
1. Share the Vision
An internal blog is one of the best resources to relay your company’s vision to employees. The vision of your company is more than just a statement on a wall, it has a direct impact on how your business is run and the type of culture that is set for employees.
An internal blog is a perfect resource to share the vision of your company and continue to reiterate your vision until it becomes ingrained in your company’s DNA.
Once you publish your company’s vision on your internal blog, you can use it as an evergreen resource to share your vision as your company grows. An internal blog can help explain any major decisions your company makes and how that directly relates to the overall vision.
By sharing and communicating your vision, you can reap the benefits of a vision-driven organization.
2. Centralize Communication
The modern enterprise runs on a variety of internal communication tools like Slack, Zoom, etc. A single employee can be using a handful of tools just to communicate with their own team. An internal blog is a solution to help centralize all long-form, asynchronous communication for your organization in a user-friendly manner.
With an internal blog, you can announce the news, share knowledge, ask questions, leave comments, get feedback from colleagues, and more. It’s an all-in-one two-way communication tool for organizations and it's proven to improve employee engagement.
By centralizing the communication in your organization, you can save money and discard all the other communication tools you are currently using.
3. Build a Community
Building a community is always mentioned when building a product, but the most important community is your company’s employees. Without a sense of community, employees are far less likely to go above and beyond for their colleagues and customers.
The world’s best companies attract and retain clients with their internal communities.
An internal blog enables your company to have a sense of community by facilitating internal communication.
With an internal blog, employees can communicate informally and start building relationships that are both personally and professionally beneficial. Team members can share what they are working on and get immediate feedback from colleagues within the company. You can also encourage employees to use visual business images to raise engagement and keep close attention to the writing content.
By facilitating communication with an internal blog, your company can be more transparent and build a real community of employees that have many personal relationships across the company.
The camaraderie provided by sharing ideas and knowledge on internal blogs can significantly improve the sense of community of the entire organization.
4. Boost Company Culture
Company culture is one of the most important factors in any company’s success. Not only is culture important for the growth of the company, but it’s also important for the overall well-being of employees.
The right culture can help employees perform at their best while deriving a sense of meaning and purpose in their work.
Managers and executives can help set the tone for culture and communication with an internal blog.
An internal blog is a great medium to explain the core tenets of a company’s culture like values, expectations, and different practices.
By clearly communicating the culture of a company, employees will know what the expectations are and can help convey that to new teams and hires.
5. Improve Employee Engagement
Employee engagement is extremely important for the retention and productivity of employees. The vast majority of employees are not fully engaged in the workplace and many companies are deploying many strategies to improve employee engagement. An internal blog can be a great affordable strategy to do this.
An internal blog is inherently designed to improve employee engagement. There are different features in an internal blog that can help improve employee engagement dramatically.
For example, BlogIn allows employees to follow individual users and topics, publish unlimited content, and organizations to be able to track activity. This can help your company measurably improve employee engagement.
6. Facilitate Remote Work
Remote work is becoming standard for companies globally. Although different tools like laptops, writing utensils, and software can help facilitate remote work, an internal blog can serve as the ultimate resource for all the standard practices for remote employees.
When working remotely, an employee has to get onboarded to the company’s remote networks and get trained.
The company can store all of these documents and guides in its internal blog. This makes it much easier for remote workers to access and they can keep referring to those resources for all of their remote working needs.
Since many remote workers live in various time zones, they can’t always get support from a colleague. The internal blog can be a hub for all remote working needs for a company.
7. Overcome Internal Communication Barriers
Internal communication barriers are some of the most challenging obstacles for teams to overcome. Not only are teams struggling with internal communication, but 60% of all internal communicators are not measuring their internal communication methods.
Internal blogs help managers and decision-makers within organizations adequately track and improve their internal communication methods. With an internal blog, you can overcome internal communication barriers by directly improving the KPIs related to the specific issue.
For example, if your organization is struggling with a lack of engagement from your employees, an internal blog can help analyze specific data points that can help you maximize engagement based on employee behaviors.
The analysis tools within the internal blog will help you figure out the best time for announcements based on employee behavior and how to improve the click-through rates. Utilizing tools like this within internal blogs can help you make measurable improvements to internal communication issues in your organization.
8. Increase Productivity
An internal blog gives your employees the ability to search up information quickly and reduce the time they spend looking for solutions to frequently asked questions.
In fact, McKinsey found that internal blogs can reduce the time it takes for employees to find information by 35%. Since all of the information on the internal blog is searchable, employees can just enter a keyword into the search bar and get all of the relevant content related to the keyword.
The McKinsey report also found that employees spend up to 1.8 hours a day searching for content related to their work. This average multiplied by the number of employees your organization has can lead to hundreds or thousands of hours per day wasted on searching for information. Incorporating an internal blog into your organization can reduce this number dramatically.
An internal blog comes with a variety of integration and search features that allows your employees to find information quickly. BlogIn anyone in your organization to follow specific people and topics on your fully hosted internal blog. Any topic covered in the internal blog will stay in your systems and employees can quickly refer to it to accomplish their day-to-day tasks.
To learn more about how BlogIn can improve your productivity, try BlogIn for free here.