Internal Communications: Our Online Community is THE Place for Big Announcements

We successfully launched six simultaneous blog posts in our internal community this morning related to a re-organization. Every re-organization, now matter whether small or large, is of major importance for the people directly affected, so it was critical to get the communications right, and we wanted everyone to hear the news at the same time.

We're really maturing in our use of the internal community as the way we handle internal communications. Sure, emails are still sent to all employees when important announcements are made, but these frequently include links to the blog posts in the community, rather than the text of the full announcement. And today we not only coordinated the blog post publication times, but included links within the posts to each other, making it easy for people to connect the dots and see the different perspectives provided by each of the executives' announcements to their teams.

That's a lot of openness and transparency, and we've also set up a special area of the community as a forum for people to ask questions about, discuss and raise ideas related to the re-organization. We've long done such "town hall" meetings live and with audio and video -- now we are taking them into our online community, too.

We also opened up a previously restricted area of the community, after all the content there had been vetted as appropriate for all employees (or more moved to a restricted space, if needed). There are now two new areas devoted to cross-functional aspects of our business, as we push to be more nimble and smart about how we leverage the considerable expertise we have distributed in teams around the world.