Companies often need to abide by many regulations, rules and laws. Communicating this information with your team is crucial for business and employee success. An effective communication compliance strategy empowers businesses to share this data and other crucial information, such as deadlines, recent findings and policy changes. Here, you can learn more about establishing a strong communication strategy and what to include in your plan.
What Is Compliance Communication?
Compliance refers to standards that form your organization’s operational guidelines, policies and procedures. Compliance communication is the process of relaying this information to employees, stakeholders, customers, suppliers and investors. Effective compliance communication plans include critical elements about your organization, such as key messages, objectives, missions, communication channels, staff responsibilities, deadlines, deliverables and external marketing.
These plans are crucial for aligning employees with company goals and establishing a foundation for passing along information. Internal communications should empower employees to feel like a part of the company culture and be engaging while keeping each member informed of their roles and contributions.
How to Create an Internal Communication Plan
An effective compliance communication strategy is essential for any successful or growing business. But creating an internal communications plan involves understanding your current communication, where you can improve it and what steps you need to take to get there. Follow these steps to create and tailor your effective communications plan:
1. Track Internal Communication
Before making any changes to your current processes, it’s essential to evaluate how things work and what you can change to streamline communication and ensure you meet business and employee needs. Tracking your internal communication highlights how your company interacts and whether employees can easily obtain essential information. Tracking methods like surveys, consultant audits, focus groups, and interaction and rating monitoring are excellent ways to capture this data. As you evaluate your current channels, ask tough questions like, “Do you feel the company communicates well?” and, “Do you understand how your role and responsibilities aid in achieving company goals?” to engage employees throughout the process.
2. Define Objectives and Goals
You should define your goals and objectives early to align your team and inform your stakeholders of your intentions and efforts. Create specific, measurable and relevant goals, and design a timeline for achieving them to ensure they’re achievable and realistic.
3. Identify Key Stakeholders and Audiences
Everything your business does should have your audience in mind, including creating your communications plan. All stakeholders, including employees, partners and investors, should have access to your internal communications plan, which means you must first identify your audience. Furthermore, you should consult each of these people or groups when you make changes or further develop your plan. This collaborative process can help your team adjust to changes and ensure they feel included in your company processes.
4. Choose Communication Tools
Your communication tools will be crucial for ensuring your messages reach the right audience. Along with considering which tools will integrate with your current operations, you must consider which channels your audience is most likely to interact with. A comprehensive solution like SMS Gateway API can transform your current system and drive efficient and seamless operations. These tools allow you to send messages, receive automated alerts, deliver communication to hundreds of people at once and employ other tactics to enhance communication.
5. Create Your Message
Once you know how to get your message out, it’s time to create the message itself. Depending on your target groups, you’ll likely need to establish several messaging styles. However, each should be informative, clear and engaging to inspire action. Try various methods like asking questions, using visual layouts, writing appealing headings and similar tactics to make your messaging engaging. Evaluate what works best and make changes to enhance your process effectiveness.
6. Schedule Communications
Sending messages is a start, but well-timed updates can make a big difference. For instance, your message will likely be more effective for employees if you send it out on Tuesday morning as opposed to Friday afternoon. Consider the type of message and how to optimize engagement. For example, social messages might perform best during lunchtime or evenings when people are more likely to browse online.
7. Measure Your Strategy
Like any institutional change you make, it’s important to evaluate messaging performance and whether your actions do what you need. Asking for feedback, monitoring your reach growth, establishing new trends and evaluating peak times for engagement are great ways to measure your communication plan’s effectiveness.
8. Keep up With Regulatory Updates
Communication plans often need continuous assessment and adjustment. Continue monitoring emerging risks and incorporate regulatory changes into your plan, ensuring your audience can easily find these updates and make changes accordingly.
Internal Communication Plan Policy Enforcement
You can craft the most detailed and valuable comms plan, but it will only be effective if your team adopts the necessary practices. Plan enforcement is essential for success. You must monitor compliance and determine how to address noncompliance if an issue arises.
Noncompliance refers to actions that do not adhere to internal policies, regulations or laws. Identifying and correcting noncompliance is essential for maintaining business integrity and protecting your teams. Often, noncompliance results from a lack of awareness, insufficient resources or inadequate training. Addressing these root causes can help you avoid noncompliant actions and minimize risks, but you must have action plans to address noncompliant actions if they occur.
Strategies to address noncompliancy include:
- Implementing training programs: Training programs can establish essential information regarding communication compliance. You can tailor training to various roles, address assessment methods, help measure effectiveness and ensure workers can access critical information easily. Use real-world scenarios and offer updates to address new regulations and keep everyone on the same page.
- Cultivating a transparent culture: You must develop a transparent culture to correct noncompliance. Ensure visibility regarding company values, missions and goals and craft an engaging method to recognize employee efforts and actions that align with these elements. Creating an open discussion forum about compliance issues and solutions can form a proactive environment that aligns each employee with your mission.
- Forming incident reporting processes: Define communication incidents and their severity. Establish when to report an incident to your customers and stakeholders. Templates and guidelines can ensure message consistency and prevent your team from using noncompliant communication methods. Lastly, choose your communication channel and tailor your alerts and communications to the right audience. For instance, you can use SMS messaging to communicate through emails, text and browsers.
Strengthen Your Communication With Red Oxygen
Red Oxygen is your one-stop shop for SMS solutions. With more than two decades of industry experience and out-of-the-box solutions to meet unique business needs, we have the technology and experience to transform your communication processes. Our solutions sit right at your fingertips, empowering you to send SMS through email, texts and browsers. Our features increase communication with employees and customers while allowing you to personalize messages, access support and expand your reach to up to 7 billion worldwide devices. Request a demo of our solutions to see what we can do for your business
