🧠 TL;DR: boosting internal communication is not just about picking a channel. It means embodying company values, celebrating wins and learning from failures, staying on top of the news that matters, being genuinely transparent, sparking real interactivity, recreating connection in a hybrid setup, and adding a bit of game mechanics, all directly inside the Microsoft 365 tools (SharePoint, Teams, Viva) your teams already use every day.
1. Build on the company's values and sense of belonging.
The mission (the reason a company exists) and the vision (the long-term goal an organization sets for itself and the means it uses to achieve it) are the pillars of any corporate culture.
This mission and vision take shape daily through values, embodied by leaders but also by the projects carried out and the products or services delivered. These values encourage cohesion and involvement, and they play a key role in building and affirming a corporate culture, one of the pillars of any internal communication strategy.
According to a Walters People survey, company values and culture rank second among candidates' hiring criteria (41%), behind role attractiveness and pay (75%). A Mission & Culture study by Glassdoor across four countries (US, UK, France, Germany) confirms this: 77% of respondents factor in a company's culture before applying for a job, and 79% weigh its mission.
Within the digital workplace, company values should therefore get top billing and real visibility. Not just on the intranet homepage, but also in Teams communities, SharePoint news feeds, and through regular surveys. An intranet that actually centralizes this information avoids the showcase effect: values stop being frozen on an "About us" page and start living in everyday use.
2. Highlight successes (and learn from failures)
Internal communication teams are tasked with staying on top of nearly every initiative launched across the company, and highlighting the ones that succeed. Celebrating individual or collective wins is a source of motivation and engagement for the rest of the staff.
By identifying with colleagues who succeeded, employees get more involved. Through imitation or inspiration, they take on tasks they might not have felt ready for before.
It is just as useful to shine a light on failures. Why did a market never open, why was a product launch delayed? Analyzing the real causes lets the whole company, at every level, own the context of a project that "failed" and avoid repeating it. In practice, a dedicated SharePoint news feed for lessons learned, or a Teams page called "What we learned," is enough to build the habit, no extra tool required. Several Jint customers see participation in internal communities pick back up within a few weeks just from a visible wins feed on the intranet homepage, with no dedicated communication campaign.
3. Have a sense of timing, stay close to company news
A digital workplace is, by design, the beating heart of many organizations. It is where everything happens: exchanges, collaboration, knowledge management, access to business tools and portals. Internal communication teams need to make the most of that central role by publishing high-value content, kept current and shipped on time.
In 2026, good timing is as much about major internal shifts (rolling out a new tool, a reorg, adopting generative AI across teams) as it is about the wider economic backdrop. A company going through a reorg or rolling out new AI use cases without explaining the "why" to its teams creates more anxiety than saying nothing at all. The habit worth building: publish quickly, even with partial information, rather than waiting to have "every answer." It also pays to stay close to employees' day-to-day reality: their tooling frustrations, their tips for working better, their feedback on new digital habits.
4. Be transparent, no matter what
According to a 2024 Ipsos study for Talkspirit (conducted in France, though the pattern holds well beyond it), only 12% of employees consider their company fully transparent, while 44% believe transparent communication directly boosts company performance. That gap between what employees expect and what they actually experience is significant.
This appetite for transparency covers security, strategy, investment, and results. The days when only the leadership team knew about decisions affecting the company's long-term future are over: strategic decisions now get shared broadly, without unnecessary filtering.
When bad news hits (a lost contract, a missed target), employees used to that transparency tend to stay loyal to their employer. When they are not, the risk is that everyone protects their own turf instead of looking for a shared solution.
5. Focus on interactivity, above all
The digital workplace is the ideal tool for pushing out company messages and values, in a mostly top-down direction. But to do its job, it also has to collect feedback from the field. That means encouraging comments and reactions within communities, and running regular surveys (a simple Microsoft Forms poll shared in Teams is enough) whose results then get analyzed, communicated, and turned into concrete action.
According to the Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2024 report, the most engaged teams are roughly 23% more profitable than the least engaged ones. Engagement starts with listening: internal communication that only pushes information down, and never lets it flow back up, hits a ceiling fast.
Internal communication should also be cross-functional. Any employee should be encouraged to share ideas, remarks, or suggestions with colleagues or the whole company, including in groups built specifically for that purpose, in line with a code of conduct they agreed to upfront. No manager or communication team should be allowed to censor the message.
6. Recreate moments of connection, even hybrid
Hybrid work is now the norm across most organizations, and it remains a real challenge for preserving the informal exchanges that hold a team together: the improvised coffee break, the joke before a meeting, the spontaneous help between colleagues.
Some companies have set up regular rituals, like team lunches or virtual coffees. Others lean into surprise, celebrating a new contract or an individual or team win, remotely, in a dedicated Teams channel. Others recreate in-person conditions with virtual co-working sessions: employees join a video call and work on their own files separately, while staying free to ask a colleague a question anytime.
This is not a minor detail: according to the Microsoft Work Trend Index 2024, 68% of employees say they lack uninterrupted focus time during their day. Well-designed moments of connection, rather than another stack of unstructured meetings, help break up that fragmentation without adding mental load.
7. Light gamification, built into the tools you already have
Nothing beats using game mechanics to encourage the right behaviors and deliver messages in a lighter way. You do not need a dedicated game platform to start: a Microsoft Forms quiz before a leadership announcement, a badge system in SharePoint communities to reward participation, or a friendly leaderboard between teams on a shared goal are enough to spark some healthy competition.
Before a major announcement or a video call, a quick quiz can test how well teams know the topic at hand. After the announcement, a collaborative game can validate that the message landed, or even help co-build new ideas, for example around a new strategic direction. The goal is not to gamify the entire intranet, but to use these mechanics sparingly, at the moments when attention is hardest to capture.
There are plenty of ways to boost internal communication within a digital workplace. Whichever option you pick, simplicity should come first: the digital workplace is a single space for work and exchange, so it needs to stay that way rather than being overloaded.
For more specific use cases, two resources build directly on these 7 tips: the 2026 guide to internal communication on SharePoint for the technical rollout, and the HR internal communication guide for the employer brand and onboarding angle. If your frontline teams have specific needs (no access to a fixed workstation), the 2026 frontline internal communication guide covers that in depth.
Things to remember
- Put company values front and center, and embody them in daily use, not just on an "About us" page
- Celebrate team wins, but also analyze failures together
- Get the timing right: publish quickly on what matters internally, even with partial information
- Practice real transparency, especially on strategy and results
- Give employees a way to send information up, not just receive it
- Recreate structured moments of connection, even in hybrid work
- Use gamification sparingly, through tools you already have (Forms, Teams, SharePoint), no dedicated platform needed
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