Achieving proper reach with your team members and getting good engagement can be determined by your efforts to create an appropriate employee communications platform. Great content, campaigns, and ideas typically complete the first half. The communication platform you use within your organization represents the other half.
Every internal communicator has two primary metrics: reach and engagement. Reach indicates the number of views your communication receives. However, more than reach is needed to guarantee that your employee will act per the information you share or change their behavior to suit the organization’s needs. Therefore, building a relationship with your team members would be wise, hence the need for engagement.
Engagement indicates your interaction with your employees, including clicks, likes, comments, and shares. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand how to simultaneously achieve high reach and engagement to facilitate a good employee communications platform. Employee communication tools can significantly improve business operations. The outline below highlights the factors worth considering when choosing an employee communications platform:
1. Current Digital Communications Set-up
It’s also essential to understand what you have for your current digital communications. For instance, you might have a working intranet but lack a team member app, and vice versa. An app might be easy to find. However, you must conduct an intranet comparison to determine the most appropriate platform for your business. Change some technologies within your organization to integrate them with others. Understanding your current digital set-up can help you get your desired team member communications platform.
2. Access Across A Variety Of Devices
Every team member has a different role in an organization. Some are desk-based employees, while others deal with customer interaction, production lines, warehouses, or spend their time on the road. Therefore, the internal communications platform you choose should have the ability to serve all these different work styles. For a great communications platform, giving your employees appropriate access to shared computers, cell phones, and tablets is essential.
3. Tailored Communication
Getting a team member communications platform that can personalize news and deliver unique information to every user is crucial. You can give several team member groups personalized user experiences by customizing the content they see on their feed or homepage. Tailoring your team member’s communication to ensure each receives relevant information can encourage engagement. Communication is the key to producing more products and improving team member satisfaction.
4. Crisis Communications
It’s tricky to predict when a crisis can occur in an organization. Turning to social media during an emergency can expose your employees to significant risk in various public forums. You should also communicate with your team members when the organization changes.
As an investor, you need to find a communication strategy that’s simple, searchable, and offers centralized access to procedures, protocols, and policies to support every team member and the organization in times of crisis. Therefore, your internal communications platform should be able to reach your staff outside of working hours and offer regular updates. It must serve as a secure channel for delivering credible and trustworthy information to your personnel.
5. Communication Across All Boundaries
Organizational silos are a significant concern in many organizations. Organizational silos are when a business has a group of experts separated by location, specialization, or department. Restricting information or sharing information across various departments can have significant impacts as time progresses. Therefore, you need a communications platform that can connect all your employees, regardless of their department, location, or work specialization. This communication platform should aid collaboration and motivate them to look to their colleagues for help, discovery, or inspiration.
6. Rich Content
While most of the content you post might be read by your employees, lacking effective media can fail to make the information’s desired impact. To make an impact, incorporating hostable formats like podcasts, videos, PowerPoint presentations, and infographics within your internal communications platform would be wise. Incorporating these formats can help make your message more engaging, entertaining, and digestible than the written word. Therefore, you need to consider a team member communications platform that supports and incorporates these rich formats to provide a superb user experience.
7. Team Member Interaction
Your team member communications platform needs to be a two-way street to make it more effective. Your employees need a platform where they can comment or discuss crucial matters related to the organization. Offering them the privilege of having a say in business operations can make them read messages and engage with you. Therefore, choosing a team member communications platform that allows users to comment, tag people, ask questions, and explore would be wise.
8. Communication Integration Within Employees’ Existing Tools
Employees have various tools they use while accomplishing organizational goals. You can use these tools and embed your communication platform into them, making it easier for them to conduct their daily routines and still get corporate information within the same instrument.
For instance, most office workers use Microsoft Teams to collaborate and host virtual meetings. You can embed your internal communications platform in MS Teams to ensure seamless viewing, sharing, and commenting, eliminating context switching. It also prevents team members from switching between different platforms to view and interact with your content.
9. Source Of Reliable Information
Some organizations might have a confusing and neglected digital workplace. With staff members leaving, the organization might lack proper governance and accountability; hence, policies, data, regulations, and other crucial information are prone to replacement, duplication, or alteration.
These aspects might make the journey of employees to acquire correct data pretty hectic, leading to mistakes. Therefore, it’s best to consider creating a well-managed communications platform with excellent search options and an easy-to-use interface. Having a single source of truth guarantees personnel adoption of the communications platform.
Conclusion
Getting the right team member communications platform is crucial to the success of every organization. However, there are many factors you need to look for when choosing a team member communications platform. You need to consider a platform that’s easily accessible, has an easy-to-use interface, and engages with the users. The guide above presents some essential factors you’ll need to consider when selecting a team member communications platform for your organization.
