Ask staff in any organisation what their biggest gripe is and it's a fair bet that communications will be near the top of the list.

Most of the time people complain there's not enough and they are kept in the dark, although there are also grumbles about information overload.

Our latest staff attitude survey saw communications getting the biggest increase in satisfaction of any area. There's always room for improvement, however, particularly in how messages from the very top of the organisation are cascaded.

I've brought in a new system to encourage managers and supervisors to discuss a centrally-provided core brief with their staff. 

We've also published it online on the Intranet as a Blog so people can post comments and questions and provide senior managers with feedback.

Face to face team briefings are always the most effective form of internal communications. It will be interesting to see, however, if online solutions can improve communication between different levels of the organisation - and prevent messages from getting mangled in the process.