Choosing an Internal Communications Channel That Isn’t Overloaded

When you have effective internal communication your employees are all working towards the same common goals, your internal culture is improved and your staff understand what your company’s key priorities are.

This in turn bolsters productivity, profitability and levels of customer satisfaction. You’re also likely to enjoy lower levels of staff turnover and absenteeism, and higher levels of engagement.

For your communication to be effective, you need to have a robust strategy – one that is well-thought out. Ad hoc internal communications will not get the results you desire.

And as part of your strategy, you need to consider the ways you are going to deliver your messages to your employees.

All internal communications channels are not equal. In fact, some are almost counter-productive if you solely rely on them to deliver important information to your employees.

These include:

Email

Originally intended to help the corporate world to communicate more effectively, sadly the opposite is true most of the time these days. Email is one of the biggest time-wasting activities that employees find themselves engaged in, with the average office worker spending about 28 per cent of their time managing their inbox.

It’s estimated that in North America, around two thirds of emails that are sent are never even opened. Employees receive so many emails every day that they just don’t have time to open them all – and that means your important information will be missed or ignored.

Intranet

The intranet is often favoured by companies as a place to put important information they want to share with their employees. But guess what? Most company intranet sites have a poor user interface, are hard to navigate and information can get buried away in sections where employees will never see it.

You’re also relying on employees to be proactive and spend time browsing your intranet regularly looking for updates, which is an impractical and hid and miss strategy.

Corporate social network sites

These function much like mainstream social media channels and, depending on which one you use, can be unreliable for sharing information. Not all employees will check this newsfeed regularly, while algorithms and new posts from other users can affect the way your messages are shown.

For effective internal communications, you need a delivery channel that can override the overload.

DeskAlerts can help. This powerful internal communications tool lets you send pop-up messages to your employees straight to their computer desktops. No matter what software they are using, the notifications are designed to be disruptive so you can be sure that your messages are not missed or ignored.

The messages are send in such a way that they cannot be skipped or minimized and require a user response so you can have peace of mind that the information got through.

With an in-built statistics module, you can determine the effectiveness of your internal communications campaigns and see results quickly, in real time.