|
Below are some general employee communication ideas that have proven their worth in workplaces around the world. Intranets and social media Introduce an alphabetized intranet quick finder – Ever been to Yahoo or other site that organizes topics in alphabetical order? On your intranet homepage, provide the same service for your employee readers to help them quickly find what they are looking for. A “most popular searches” area on the intranet home page is also helpful to users. Have a “beach party” onsite and online to celebrate smart intranet “surfing” – Create a beach party event that is the backdrop for a campaign to increase awareness among employees. Start an idea sharing site on your intranet – Create a place on your intranet where employees can discuss ideas and share them (See the 2-2009 issue of Ideas for Employee Communicators for specific ideas on this subject.) Have a quote of the day on your intranet home page – The message or quote can be a strategic way to reinforce key messages and maintain focus and interest on key goals or programs. Create wikis for project management – Wikis remain a largely undeveloped social media tool in most companies, especially for project management. Wiki software is easy to access and use. You can quickly add, remove or edit content and this ease of interaction and operation makes it a highly effective, real-time tool for online documentation and collaboration. Go inside a corporate meeting and report about it on a blog – Arrange to have a corporate officer or two or three report via blog about the themes covered and the inside view from a big corporate meeting. You can help the execs with the wording to give employees a unique and timely “inside glimpse” at the meeting and the key messages that were delivered. You could do the same for an industry trade show to help bring the dynamics and excitement of the marketplace closer to employees. Consolidate your e-mails – Instead of allowing each department to blast e-mails all week announcing their big activities and changes – the kinds of e-mails that drive overload and irritate employees – try consolidating non-essential e-mails. Package them together attractively and send them out at designated time every week. Form a cross-function team to manage the process.
Start a ‘huddle’ program – Effective face-to-face communication is a vital factor in achieving employee engagement. ‘Huddles’ represent a quick-meet communication solution in our time-short age that sparks higher productivity and performance in many companies. In a huddle, employees meet as a team for five to 15 minutes of highly focused communication at the start of the work day. The manager or supervisor shares shift and business information and, time-permitting, solicits feedback and conducts a problem solving discussion. Huddles are popular in manufacturing environments but work in office environments, too. Some companies may call their program “the pre-work” or the “11-minute meeting” and may do them once or twice a week instead of daily. Contact Motiv8 Communications for more information about huddles. Help managers find internal communication resources – Help your managers figure out how to find information they can use in meetings with employees. Create a visual or brief description that helps managers know where to go to find what they need. Surveys tell us that managers are frustrated by their inability to find what they want and aren’t aware of many internal sources of qualitative information about the organization.
Hold an ideas fair – Work with your business locations to stage ideas fairs where booths or tables are set up with displays that share best practices and recognize effective teamwork that achieves goals and boost performance. Feature participants talking about their ideas and the impact they have had on the organization. Publish stories on collaborative activities – Look for stories where individuals representing different functions and different organizational units team to tackle and solve problems, deliver Improvements, or meet customer needs. Talk about the teaming process and methodologies they used, the behaviors they practiced to succeed, and quote some of the employees about the rewarding experience of working with other parts of the organization to accomplish a task or goal. Run these stories in your publications. Write department profiles – Write profiles about departments and their people and what they do, the services they provide, and how employees can help them. Feature employees and contacts for various services. Create ads in publications to promote services of internal departments – Always bombarded with requests from departments like HR and Purchasing to promote their services in your newsletter? For the usual suspects who always call to "run an article" about an ongoing service or benefit, create a series of newsletter "ads" that you can drop in as fillers throughout the year. These ads promote things like online job postings for associates or proper procedures for business travel and filing expenses. The ads can be a fun, visual way to promote the information without having to create a "news" story. Plus, the ads can be a nice graphic touch to the newsletter.
Employee and manager communication councils – These consist of 8-12 employees and meet quarterly or bi-monthly. Employee council members represent different job classifications and different parts of the organization. The goal is to provide the employee communication staff with feedback on what works and what doesn’t work in employee communications and test new ideas and materials. Click here to see the 6-2008 issue of Ideas for Employee Communications for a detailed example of how one leading company implemented such a program. Meanwhile, a communication council consisting only of managers may provide insights that can help you improve the face-to-face communication process in your business.
Conduct a business knowledge quiz – Arrange for contests that test employee knowledge of the marketplace, key messages and values, business processes and structure, and content of publications or the intranet. Draw a name from a hat among the winners and award a prize! Take employees on a trip to a customer site – If there is a customer warehouse or service location near your office or plant, put together a car caravan and take employees there for a visit. Arrange for the site leaders to show how your product is used and discuss competitor products. Take a video camera and film it and convert it into a video internal news video for later use; include employee and customer comments. Produce podcasts that discuss, feature customers – Make podcasts in which sales/marketing professionals and business leaders talk about products and marketplace challenges and how employees can help. One company even takes audio comments from customer discussions with company marketing representatives and puts them on their podcasts. Feature customers in publications – Write customer profile articles for your print or online publications. Interview a customer rep or business leader for the article, discussing what’s important to them, their history and the marketplace challenges they face and how your organization’s employees can help them. Do a day in the life of a sales rep – Go on the road with a sales representative to capture for your publication readers the excitement and challenge of trying to win new business in a tough marketplace.
Track “wildly important goals” – In one company, each department has a WIG Scorecard listing its “Wildly Important Goals” for the year and the percentage of each goal that has been completed at any given time. Publish inquiring reporter features – We don’t see many of these anymore and wonder why. Employees love it when you post a question – usually on a key company initiative or the business plan or goal – and ask people to comment about it. These usually get strong readership. Do it for your publication or intranet. Influence the “business rationale” part of training program modules – By this we mean that if employee training is conducted for programs in areas like quality systems, efficiency improvement and new purchasing procedures, work with HR and Training to make sure the right business messages are getting communicated that link the initiative to company goals and strategy. A lot of these business rationale pieces added at the start of a training module are written by training people and aren’t very good.
Headlines, subheads and call out quotes are can’t miss opportunities to deliver key messages to employees Every headline and article you write for a publication, e-mail or intranet is an opportunity to deliver key messages and provide positive reinforcement for achievement of the goals of your organization. When you write, make sure you maximize every communication opportunity. In the communications audit work Motiv8 Communications completes, we see too many “label” headings and a general lack of strategic use of subheads and call out quotes to deliver key messages. Communicators sometimes spend hours writing a story but take only a few minutes to write the headlines and sub-headings. Taking an adequate amount of time to write a good headline, subheading, call-out quote (and even the cutline) may be the most important piece of writing for the whole article package. That’s because in our time compressed and sound byte world, the employees see their time as one of their most precious commodities, and the headings and call-out quotes may be all they read, in addition to the lead for your story. It’s vital that teaser/support elements associated with your story deliver meaty information and key messages. Or all your work may go for naught.
An "ineffective” headline would be:
The ineffective subheading supporting it might
read:
The call-out quote might read: On the flip side, consider this effective approach if cost reduction is a prime organizational goal:
Heading:
Subheading:
Call-out quote: The bottom line: don’t make writing headlines and other teaser/support elements an after-thought. Make them an integral part of your article, giving them the time they deserve.
|
