Internal comms is absolutely essential for early-stage companies. Once your company starts to approach the 50 person mark — the number of people you can easily fit around a lunch table or in a productive Slack conversation, as Molly Graham puts it — you need to start thinking in a systematic way about how you communicate to your employees.
Here are a few key modes of internal comms to set up as soon as you can:
All Hands
When you’re small (<150 people), a weekly or biweekly All Hands is a great way to disseminate information. I recommend you use this forum to cover major internal updates (e.g. new performance management systems, benefits updates, new hires and anniversaries), major external updates (e.g. fundraises), and business/product updates. Make sure the CEO isn’t the only one talking during these meetings; sharing the stage with other leaders in the business helps build trust in their leadership and vision — trust that you will need as the company continues to grow.
For smaller companies, a Q&A section at the end is a no-brainer. I prefer to have questions asked live in Zoom (rather than written in Slack or Zoom chat) so that you can put a face to the question. You can keep questions focused just on the topics in that day’s All Hands or make it a true AMA.
I am strongly against anonymous questions in a Q&A format. While intended to allow people to ask hard questions without risk of retaliation, in practice anonymity seems to lead to a fair amount of trolling, and it makes it impossible to follow up with the relevant person afterward. You can always let people know they can send their questions directly to someone in the business, like a Chief of Staff or a Comms Lead, if they don’t want their name attached to a question in front of the whole company. That way you maintain the anonymity publicly without losing the ability to directly follow up if needed, and without giving people the carte blanche of total anonymity.
Slack
I recommend you have a global channel that automatically adds everyone in your company. If you rely on a lot of contractors, you might also want to consider an additional global channel that includes them. Use this channel for major company updates, both logistical (e.g. an Open Enrollment reminder) and business-related (e.g. a big positive news story).
If you don’t have Slack, this forum can be a companywide email alias instead.
In the early days, this channel might be open to all to post, but you should be sure to set very clear moderation guidelines for what kinds of posts are welcome and assign someone to enforce them. You don’t want this channel to be a place for people to post pictures of their dogs or links to industry news articles; it should be a high-signal place for company-specific news.
As you scale, you’ll want to limit posters to certain executives and give individuals one-time permission to post a particular piece of news as appropriate. There’s no hard-and-fast rule for when to lock it down, but know that it will be a lot harder if you wait until AFTER someone posts, say, an off-topic but thorny question in the channel. Then it will look like avoiding accountability rather than a principled decision about how company channels should be regulated. If you’re asking yourself whether it’s time to lock it down, it’s probably time.
Status Emails
As the company starts to grow, teams start to lose focus of what other teams are working on. An easy way to increase visibility is to set up an email distro like status@ where teams can send regular updates on their team’s work. Weekly or biweekly (plus ad hoc emails for major news) tend to work best for small startups in my experience; any less than that and some of the news will be stale by the time you share it.
Even if this email hits the entire company (and it probably should), making it a separate alias from your global alias allows people to filter these updates and catch up on their own time.
Don’t use email? Make a #status Slack channel instead.
Ad Hoc
The strategies above are useful for establishing a lightweight, ongoing cadence of communication. But there will also be no shortage of ad hoc moments to communicate about, from fundraises to product launches to crisis response.
You should make sure that for every major external comms beat, you’re thinking about your internal comms as well. Build this into your comms planning so it doesn’t feel like an afterthought. If you’re sending a press release or an exclusive is launching about a major piece of news at 10:00am, let your employees know by 10:02 (and before you tweet about it) so someone else internally doesn’t beat you to the punch.
Even something as simple as, “We’re super excited about this news and will talk more about it in the next All Hands,” is a great way to let employees know you’re thinking about them; don’t assume they’ll understand that you’ll talk about it in a future forum.
Up Next
Next week, a guide for internal comms for startups hitting that next stage of growth, where everything I just outlined starts to break down.