Engaging and friendly internal communication translates into happy employees, who know that the company is taking care of them, understands them and wants to make them feel safe. Continually looking to organization’s internal communication should thus occupy a leading position on our to-do list.
Below you will find 11 gimmicks that will take internal communication in your company to a higher level.
Personalization and segmentation – these two words are key. One basic (and quite obvious) thing in internal communication is to get with your message through to the right people. Divide employees into target groups and then match them with adequate messages. Be careful when choosing pieces of news sent to everybody – respect your colleagues’ time.
Read how to be effective in addressing your employees.
Reach for tools which help employees better understand the content and encourage them to read your messages. Use infographics, drawings, gifs, charts, and most importantly – the video. Videos increase the clarity of your message, make it even more interesting, memorable and engaging.
What can help here is a tool which provides information via mobile apps. Just like on Facebook where you get notifications about who liked your profile or that you got an invitation. Push notifications – because we’re talking about them – allow you to reach your audience quickly and make content and alerts accessible even to employees who are outside the company. All they need is an installed application and internet access.
A company influencer is like a celebrity that groups of fans want to follow, admiring and looking for inspiration in that person, believing their recommendation would be the right one. This is how internal influencers can work – they are popular, they like to help others and people value their opinion. An internal influencer will help you reach employees with your message, can speak in favor of your actions, engage people, collect opinions. His or her task can be to recommend internal content, explain corporate culture, motivate people to participate in a project or even… in a corporate trip.
The easiest way to fish out an influencer – carry out a survey among your employees asking them to point to a person meeting the criteria described by you.
Storytelling is a perfect tool for many communication aspects. When talking about your company use employees’ stories, let them feel they are an important part of your organization. It is worth posting short corporate stories cyclically in the newsletter. Storytelling will strengthen the bond between employees and their workplace, will help them identify with it and commit more. Last but not least – a well built corporate story encourages new people to start working at the company.
Find out how to check communication reliability at your company.
Despite pessimistic projections, emailing still plays a key part in internal communication. Most employees need to use their email box everyday, so it is a tool you can use to reach them easily. Everyone can respond to information sent via email whenever they want – depending on the time or place. Another advantage of emails is that you can keep them and return to the content any time you want.
Develop an engaging, responsive newsletter that employees can open on various devices. Send it regularly using one attractive pattern – make your audience wait impatiently for regularly provided news. A newsletter is also a useful tool for observing your readers behavior – opening and link clicking statistics allow you to see what interests your employees most.
Make your intranet a tool which simplifies everyday tasks. Provide there materials, news and documents employees will reach for to streamline their work. Instead of searching the internet or looking for people who have the right information, everyone would rather go to a convenient tab on the company intranet. Even more so if using it is intuitive. Engage people from various departments to create valuable content, let them positively influence the work of their colleagues.
You must not forget about entertainment in your internal communication related actions. Organize quizzes, competitions with awards, not always about job related topics. Create space to share ideas (for a healthy breakfast or stressless organization of holidays), vacation impressions etc. If anyone would like to present an interesting photo, post a movie review, recommend a restaurant – give them space for it.
If you want to be effective, don’t forget to measure internal communication! You must know if people open your content, read it, and then if the content brings the result you want and make employees act or change their attitude. Use the tools available and keep up to date with your audience behaviors – this is the only way to grasp their attention.
Regardless of the topic of your message, always take care of the perfect quality of information. Well prepared content, both factually and linguistically, increases your chances to attract readers and make them more engaged.
Kategorie: school of contentic, B2E