Understanding Internal Communication & Tools You Need in 2024

Workvivo is an internal communication platform combining intranet functionality with numerous employee communications features. Workvivo offers a complete digital workspace to optimize collaboration and employee engagement.

Workvivo’s interface is designed to resemble popular social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It includes a feature-packed activity feed, a people directory system to learn about fellow team members, and a high-priority message system for major announcements.

Workvivo Key Internal Communication Features:

• Complete employee communications package - Workvivo combines a social media-style platform, an employee recognition and award system, group spaces, and direct messaging into one platform.
• Powerful analytics dashboard - Team leaders can use Workvivo’s content analytics dashboard to track employee feedback, launch polls and surveys, and strengthen company culture.
• Makes collaboration easy - Workvivo includes its own knowledge-sharing hub with an advanced search system. It lets employees post files, collaborate on documents, and find information efficiently.

Assembly is an employee communications solution with numerous features to maximize your team’s potential. This all-in-one internal comms platform includes everything you need for your team to collaborate more efficiently, enhance productivity, and prevent information silos.

Its social media-style platform is the cornerstone of Assembly’s internal communications and team collaboration features. It uses a minimal, familiar interface for high engagement and performance. 

Take advantage of Assembly’s customizable internal comms features, such as the Group Feed template, to empower your team and create visibility and transparency within your company. 

Assembly Key Internal Communication Features:

• Central knowledge hub - Assembly offers an Anonymous Suggestion Box comms template that creates a centralized space where employees can have their questions answered. This can also help you understand the most frequent issues within your company and create a culture of open communication. 
• Quick progress check-ins - The Standup Meeting template lets teams quickly check each other’s progress so everyone knows who is working on what in real-time. 
• Fully customizable - Assembly supports over 40 different templates, letting you modify and configure how the platform provides its internal communications features. 
• Receive insights on internal communications - Team leaders and managers can use Assembly’s integrated analytics dashboard to boost internal comms. It includes complete summaries and data points to better understand how employees communicate and what to improve.
• Comms-oriented integrations - Assembly supports some of the best internal communications tools in the industry, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

ClickUp is a cloud-based productivity tool with a large selection of internal communication and collaboration features. 

The core of ClickUp’s employee communication features is its ClickUp Chat system. It provides your organization with its own feature-packed internal chat system. It reduces reliance on multiple external applications and centralizes your company’s communication tools into a single platform.

ClickUp also lets team members upload files and internal documents, collaboratively edit them, and create wiki-style knowledge bases to facilitate internal communications. For example, an organization can use this feature to create new employee guidelines.

ClickUp Key Internal Communication Features:

• Built-in chat system - ClickUp features a built-in chat system as a core internal communication tool. All team members connected to the company’s ClickUp can communicate with an instant messaging system. 
• Assign tasks in real-time - Team leaders can create groups and assign employees to tasks directly from the chat system.
• Communicate with rich text - ClickUp’s instant chat supports text editing, formatting, code blocks, bullet-point lists, and checklists for richer, more readable communications. You can also format your work quickly using advanced slash command shortcuts.

Simpplr is a modern employee communications platform fostering social collaboration within organizations. Simpplr describes itself as a human-centered experience, providing team members with numerous features to enhance productivity.

Simpplr uses artificial intelligence (AI) to provide most of its features. For instance, it can analyze employee impressions, opinions, and sentiments on the company’s key issues. It also features a content feed, an internal email, and a newsletter system, letting team members receive on-brand communication from all departments.

Simpplr Key Internal Communication Features:

• Creates a sense of belonging - Simpplr’s instant social feed and content tailoring system lets all employees stay informed and in touch, whether on-site or working remotely.
• Accessible on multiple platforms - Simpplr is a cloud-based application your employees can access from nearly any device, including desktop devices, web browsers, and the Simpplr mobile app. This makes it an excellent communication tool for remote workforces.
• Store and collaborate on any project - Team members can easily collaborate on any document through Simpplr’s file-sharing and document manager.

Monday.com is marketed as a work operating system integrating internal communications, team collaboration, and project management features in one platform.

Monday.com’s project manager enables you to create and manage boards and specific items for each board. A board can represent a project, and each item can be assigned specific tasks. While these features are primarily for workload management, they also include crucial internal communications features.

Each board item can be assigned to one or multiple team members, allowing the notification system to inform them of any changes and updates. Additionally, each item has its own discussion board, where team members can post comments and reactions, facilitating planning and feedback gathering.

Monday.com Key Internal Communication Features:

• Discuss each project task - Team members can use Monday.com to directly discuss specific tasks or projects. This communication system helps organize task-specific conversations.
• Automation features - Monday.com lets you automate repetitive tasks, such as scheduling programmed Zoom meetings or sending automatic emails. This can reduce the risk of employees missing out on company updates or important project meetings. 
• Integrates with other communication tools - Monday.com can integrate with commonly used internal comms applications, such as Slack for instant chat, Github for development, and Mailchimp for emails.

Slack is an instant messaging and conferencing application designed to strengthen your organization’s internal communications strategy. It allows team members to communicate and share ideas through text, audio, and video.

Your company can organize its text communication on Slack using channels, helping organize conversations by a topic, client, or any other subject. Slack also supports one-on-one internal communications and private groups, and all text-based communication methods also support file-sharing. 

If your organization needs a conferencing solution or prefers to communicate via voice chat or video, Slack supports both through its Huddle system. Team members can talk one-on-one or organize large conferences for all internal comms needs.

Slack Key Internal Communication Features:

• Cross-device accessibility - Slack is available on desktop computers, mobile devices and as a web browser application, helping remote workforces stay engaged.
• Multiple integrations for internal comms - Slack can integrate with other solutions for scheduling, file-sharing, video-conferencing, or managing projects. Examples include MS Outlook, Google Drive, Zoom, and Asana.
• Configurable notifications systems - Team members can control how many notifications they receive on Slack while ensuring they continue receiving the most critical updates.

Jostle is an employee engagement platform combining an intranet solution with multiple internal communications features. It is designed for maximum user-friendliness, ensuring organizations of all types can navigate it quickly and efficiently.

Jostle helps organizations centralize and organize various aspects of a company’s internal communications. It features a news and announcements board for company-wide, top-down messaging, and team-specific directories to help employees get to know each other.

Jostle also lets organizations open and configure internal discussion forums, allowing team members and managers to discuss, solve problems, and share ideas.

Jostle Key Internal Communication Features:

• Forums, one-on-ones, and groups - Communicating with Jostle is easy with its highly configurable forums, one-on-one private messages (PMs), and group discussions.
• Employee directory system - Jostle integrates an employee directory feature with complete profiles, allowing team members to get to know each other from day one.
• Keep staff engaged with streaming - The JostleTV streaming system allows you to stream the contents of a company’s Jostle board to television screens. You can use TVs placed around your offices, warehouses, or break rooms to set up a continuous communication feed that is permanently on display.

Zoom is an internal communication application specializing in audio and video conferencing. This app popularized the concept of the Zoom call, allowing remote teams to hold high-quality video meetings in real-time. While Zoom is most well-known for its conferencing features, it also includes additional tools to facilitate your company’s internal communications. They include a text chat built into each conferencing group, poll and survey creation tools, and screen-sharing for guidance and presentations.

Zoom Key Internal Communication Features:

• High-quality conferencing - Whether your company prefers to communicate via voice chat or hold virtual meetings with video, Zoom offers some of the highest audio and video quality in the industry, ensuring clear and pleasant conversations.
• Recording feature- If any of your team members missed a meeting or need training materials, you can save a copy of the audio or video file using Zoom’s recording feature.
• Divide meetings into groups - Zoom meetings include Breakout Rooms, which are smaller group chats. Every Breakout Room operates as an independent meeting with chat and conferencing features so that focus groups can be assigned to a specific part of a larger project.

Microsoft Teams, also called MS Teams, is the software giant’s enterprise-grade communications platform and one of the market’s most well-known internal communication tools.

MS Teams is a business-oriented communication and collaboration platform offering team members multiple ways to work together. It includes a rich text chat function supporting private messages, group chats, and company-wide public channels. 

The Microsoft app is also a conferencing tool supporting audio and video group chats, helping team members create and discuss ideas, participate in meetings, and submit feedback.

MS Teams Key Internal Communication Features:

• Broad range of communication tools - Besides text chat, voice chat, and video conferencing, Microsoft 365 enhances internal communications with screen-sharing, a webinar creator, and many accessibility features. 
• Integrates with Microsoft 365 - MS Teams is fully compatible with nearly all other Microsoft 365 apps, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Planner, To Do, Outlook, and OneDrive.
• Easy conversation organization - MS Teams’s chat feature lets team members create and manage threads. A thread is like a sub-folder within a text chatroom, where your team can hold specific conversations or discuss particular tasks.

Confluence is an internal communication program designed by Atlassian. Although it can support the needs of any company, Confluence is primarily designed as a remote-friendly solution, packing numerous convenient features for spread-out teams.

Confluence can support up to 50,000 team members, making it ideal for larger corporations. Core features include a virtual whiteboard for brainstorming, collaborative content creation and website-building tools, and a file-uploading and storage service.

Multiple payment plans are available, allowing companies of all sizes to scale Confluence’s capabilities to their needs and budgets.

Confluence Key Internal Communication Features:

• Content creation with instant feedback - Confluence’s Editor function is a built-in document editing program for team collaboration. It lets one or multiple team members create, co-edit, annotate, and comment on any text document, allowing team members to receive instant feedback on their tasks.
• Team members can work from anywhere - Confluence’s features are fully accessible on all supported platforms (web browsers and mobile apps). It ensures your team can always collaborate and remain productive.
• Powerful project planning features - Teams can assign project statuses and automatically notify relevant team members of their next tasks. For example, changing a document’s status after drafting automatically notifies a supervisor to review it.