If your company needs to overhaul the way it communicates with employees and alerts them to important information, an employee notification system can definitely help. Employee alerts can be sent in a range of different circumstances and scenarios.
What is an employee notification system?
An employee notification system lets you communicate quickly with employees to let them know about urgent situations or other important information. There are lots of different types of employee notification systems on the market, but generally, they use different communication channels (email, text messages, mobile push notifications, phone calls, loudspeakers etc) to send the information to employees. They may use a combination of these channels, some, or all.
The benefits of an employee notification system
There are many benefits of an employee notification system when a company decides to invest in one:
- Improves emergency preparedness
- Can save lives in an emergency situation
- Keeps staff connected and informed, regardless of where they are working – especially with remote employees
- Decreased downtime because employees know instantly about planned maintenance and outages
- Improvements to various business efficiency metrics
- Boostedemployee engagement
- Increased awareness of policies and procedures and other internal resources Better team cohesion with everyone working towards a common goal.
When should you send employee notifications?
Once you have an employee notification system deployed in your company, there are lots of different ways you can put it to use to improve internal communication and engagement and get people to respond quickly when you need them to. This includes:
- Emergency communications: when there is a critical situation that could endanger health and safety and even put people's lives at risk, emergency notifications can reach people within seconds so that they can take the appropriate steps to be safe. This can include fires, active shooters, gas leaks, natural disasters and other adverse events.
- Inclement weather: let employees know about bad weather that might affect them getting to the office, getting home or even just doing their jobs (for example, by sending an inclement weather message to employees). This might include storms, hurricanes, tornados, blizzards, or extreme heat.
- Office closures: if you have to close an office and need staff to work from another location, it can happen without a lot of notice. This might be because of inclement weather, civil unrest or COVID-19 restrictions. Notifications can be sent to affected employees no matter where they are via mobile notifications – for example, if you need to advise them after hours not to attend the office in the morning.
- Compliance reminders: when the company needs to take certain actions by a set date to avoid legal and regulatory problems, reminding everyone can help to ensure that you do not suffer from non-compliance.
- Remind people about deadlines: if there are project deadlines or you need people to apply for leave by a certain time, or complete their annual performance reviews with their manager, the employee notification system is a must.
>>Learn more about how to remind an employee to do a task <<
- Production or freight delays: when your company relies on third parties to provide stock or parts or to ship your products, you may sometimes have your operations temporarily affected by things outside of your control.
- Promotion of upcoming events: when there are corporate events such as parties, town halls, internal training, conferences, awards nights etc, use the notification system to drum up publicity.
- Major company announcements: if you’ve got good news you want to shout from the rooftops, the employee notification system is the next best thing. Got a major new client? Is the share price going to the moon? Is there a merger or acquisition on foot? New products? New services? New projects? Let your people know!
- Potential negative issues: get on the front foot when there is a potential issue that could affect your company’s operations and reputation so that employees keep it front of mind and know to be on the lookout for it.
- System maintenance and outages: when your systems are down or you know that they will be down for maintenance, let everyone know so that the help desk is freed up to take care of the issue. You can also let them know about any benefits of hardware and software upgrades.
- General company communications: there are lots of different types of corporate communication that are sent every day: your employee notification system can help to facilitate this information reaching the right employees in the right place at the right time.
What features should an employee notification system have?
When looking to invest in an employee alert system, there are a lot of options on the market and it can be overwhelming. The best system will be one that suits your company’s unique needs and circumstances. In general, however, these are the best features it should have:
- The ability to send urgent messages to thousands of employees in seconds
- The ability to send to different user groups – for example, all staff at a particular office location.
- The ability to send to multiple channels
- A mobile app to reach employees who are off-site or not at their desks
- A mechanism to get feedback from staff
- Be easy to deploy
- Be easy to operate
- The ability to be used for multiple scenarios – not just for emergencies and crisis situations.
Choose DeskAlerts as your employee notification system
DeskAlerts is successfully used by large organizations around the world as an employee notification system. It is installed on computer desktops and mobile phones and tablet devices and cuts through the digital noise, bypassing email, to make sure that employees receive urgent and important information within seconds.
The system features a range of tools and channels such as:
- Pop-up notifications that can be as big as the entire screen if needed
- Scrolling desktop tickers
- Digital signage displays
- Corporate wallpapers and screensavers
- Surveys and polls
- SMS messages
- Push notifications to phones via an employee app.
See all DeskAlerts tools - https://www.alert-software.com/tools .
Whether you’re using it to alert people to an emergency situation, or for any other scenario, DeskAlerts will let you send it to defined audience groups. You can schedule content in advance, or save more time in an urgent situation by creating templates that need to only be populated with relevant information.
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Every large organization can benefit from an employee notification system. Get in touch with our team of experts today to schedule a free demo to find out how DeskAlerts can be integrated in your organization.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an employee notification?
An employee notification is a message sent to the staff via different channels such as pop-up alerts, email, text message,s or social media. It lets them know about important or critical information that will affect them.
What are the types of notification systems?
There are many different types of notification systems. These include:
- Sirens and loudspeakers
- Email alerts
- Social media alerts
- Text message alerts
- Home page alerts on websites
- Push notification alerts
- Systems that use a combination of these features.
What is the purpose of a notification system?
A notification system is used to send important information quickly to a targeted audience.
