Increasing employees engagement: 5 internal communications tendencies for the year ahead. Part 2
PR communications are sophisticated and comprehensive structures — not only do they convey intended messages across the media, but also highlight subtle attitudes shared within a company. In the previous post, we shared five essential internal comms tendencies to test this year, and in this article, we will offer another five crucial trends to look up to in the year ahead, from change management to employee engagement. Stay tuned for the latest updates in the field of PR!
Employee engagement: Receiving feedback to create a comfortable workplace
Having the workforce engaged and involved in the company’s overall mission and daily routine tasks are the pillars of a brand’s success. Once an employee feels identified with the brand and shares its core values and views, the employee’s performance boosts. So, developing proper communication strategies is a must — it is not enough to just measure engagement once or twice per year in an annual survey. Besides, the efforts and initiatives that follow those surveys often require heavy involvement from internal communications.
When it comes to engaging employees, try to come up with some ideas you can apply on a daily basis. Some of the methods might include developing questions to ask oneself when emailing, for instance. Here are two questions you can ask every single time you send an email to employees: Is this content personalized? By name, team, location, or role? Or, is this content visually engaging?
Additional branding, design efforts, and, especially, personalized messaging make an employee feel heard and make them engage in the following content — a proper method to have employees involved and make them feel included.
Change management: Planning and implementing new development routes
At times, enterprises face the need to make some adjustments to keep building meaningful communications. Change management is all about the need and capacity to implement those changes effectively. The management timeline includes core phases, such as:
- Evaluation and preparation: identifying the current and future states, defining strategy, and building the core team
- Core team planning: building out messages and materials, identifying roles and responsibilities, developing a timeline
- Launching comms: launching internally first, generating small wins
- Gathering feedback: implementing surveys and consistently communicating
- Reviewing the results: conducting debriefs with the core team and identifying areas of improvement
- Improving and sustaining: trying small experiments, reinforcing one’s messages, correcting what’s not working, and celebrating what is.
Rolling out large-scale changes needs through planning and careful implementation. Senior leadership along with the team will have to work closely hand in hand to reach planned results considering each development stage: from initial preparation to improving and sustaining the created systems.
Analytics: Measuring the comms results
One of the challenges the leadership might face when launching internal comms is measuring its outcomes. The following KPIs can be used to measure internal communications: open rate, click-through rate, read time, channel effectiveness, campaign effectiveness, program and event sign-ups, traffic to key internal pages, employee advocacy, survey results, audits, and self-assessments. Based on that, the team might want to further elaborate and implement specific metrics to each of the KPIs points.
Leadership comms: Delivering core messages to the team and back
The core job of any CEO is communication — it is essential to develop a wide variety of different touchpoints to reinforce the company’s mission, values, goals, and performance. All too often, however, the CEOs get up in front of the company only once a month or even less.
One of the ways to ensure the company receives enough information from their CEO is via a weekly email: whether it is direct leadership communications, employee newsletters, change communications, messages on health and well-being, content on company values, or benefits information. All of these will provide the team with essential communication with the company’s CEO.
Events: Building in-person communication within a company
Even though the pandemic is all way behind, in-person events continue to be a high priority.
According to the Workshop internal research, among the internal communications of hundreds of companies, the most highly opened and engaged emails are specifically about in-person events (company retreats, all-hands meetings, etc.), which suggests that even in remote teamwork, one should put extra emphasis and plan behind the communications strategy for any real-life event.
Summing Up
Internal communications are a threshold for a company’s brand, both within the company and among the audience. A brand’s image and reputation start with its employees — so let the content be employee-driven, ask staff members what they want to see, to hear inside the internal newsletters, and regularly ask for their feedback to boost internal communications, which will later on become a valuable asset and profitable investment in the future.
This post included highlights from the Workshop webinar on the 10 internal comms trends to test in 2023.
