How To Grab Employees’ Attention In A Large Corporation

Top-performing companies are like a well-oiled machine: all the parts work together to do the overall job and everything goes off without a hitch. 

One of the essential parts of the “machine” that is your company is reliable internal communications. This is necessary to ensure that everyone is on the same page, understands the company’s goals and how their individual role contributes to your organization’s successful outcomes. It also means that any news, updates or changes to policies and procedures is shared, understood and acted on with less chance of mistakes being made.

Good internal communication also has an important role to play in building a solid corporate culture, where employees are engaged, morale is high and there is reduced staff turnover.

Why do employees not pay attention in the modern workplace

Getting internal communications working well, however, is not always an easy task. The larger and more complex your organization, the more obstacles and challenges you have to overcome.

Large organizations can be spread over different geographic areas… sometimes there are employees working in different time zones, different countries, different continents and even speaking different languages.

Individual teams within large organizations may operate in a “silo” type of environment where they aren’t good at sharing information with other teams within the company.

So when you have something really important to share –for example an important announcement about the future direction of the company – you will want to disseminate it quickly in a way that you can be sure everyone will receive it and know what it means for them and their job.

Sending an email is often the go-to approach for major announcements of this nature.

But did you know that around three quarters of all business emails are never even opened by the intended recipient, let alone read and acted upon?  This is the product of “email overload” – an increasingly concerning problem in the modern workplace, where office workers are drowning in email communications.

Email isn’t the only thing overloading your employees. People are bombarded with so much information in both their professional and personal lives thanks to our 24/7 world and things like text messages and social media, getting employees’ attention can be difficult.

According to research from the University of California, Irvine, it can take up to 23 minutes for a worker who has been interrupted by something – an email, an unexpected conversation at their desk, other messaging, to be able to concenter on the task they were initially working on.

The negative side to this is that false information can quickly spread too – according to a study by MIT found that false news spreads on Twitter more quickly than real news, because humans are drawn to information that’s unexpected, fresh, novel and different.

John’s story

 John is an IT Director in a large company that spans the United States.  The company has 92 offices in different locations all over the country, with 2000 employees in regional outposts sitting under the same umbrella as the corporate head office where John works.

“Besides our email system, we have no way of contacting every employee in the company, “ John explains. “For instance the company has different VoIP systems. Our VoIP system allows me to send alerts such as texts or voice mail messages to everyone using that particular VoIP system. So that means if I send one in the corporate office, only corporate office staff will receive the messages. All other branches have their own VoIP systems and miss out on the messages I send,” he says.

John says his company has realized that it needs a better solution in place for sharing critical corporate information that every employee needs to know about.

“We need a way to get hold of everyone in the company if we need to, besides email. We need to be able to reach everyone who is on a computer, or tablets or iphones,” he says,

“Our executives have been complaining that communication within the company isn’t effective and are constantly asking me to fix it.”

“We want to be able to alert anyone connected to the domain using a company computer, or everyone on our company wireless plans. We need something that will work on home computers because many of our employees have flexible work arrangements and work at home some or all of the time,” John said.

There are many other internal communications channels that are in use in John’s organization, like in many large companies.

“Some teams are using Slack, Skype, the instant messaging app or phone apps,” John says. “Some are using DropBox to share information. Others are using Google Drive to organize things.”

The problem with these systems is that they are often used ad hoc across an organization, as John’s story demonstrates, and aren’t guaranteed to reach every single employee.  For example, only certain teams might use Slack to collaborate on a project. Only one office out of 20 in the company may use instant messaging extensively.

With fractured communications like this, there isn’t a central and coordinated approach to using them to communicate important information in a uniform manner.

Get your employees' full attention with only one tool

 Fortunately, there’s a reliable tool that can be deployed in large corporations to solve all these communications problems, and more.

DeskAlerts is an employee communications software solution that uses multiple channels to communicate important information to employees, instantly, to a variety of devices, no matter where they are located in the world.

The system works by sending notifications straight to computer desktops or to tablets and mobile devices, bypassing the email system completely. These notifications can’t be skipped or ignored and you can be guaranteed of a 100 % delivery rate… and can even be sent to home computers.

DeskAlerts can be used side-by-side with other internal communications tools and channels within your organization, giving you a more reliable channel for all your critical communications.

Other internal communications problems it can solve include:

1. Instantly reaching employees with pop-up notifications so they can find out when something urgent has happened.
2. Employees who are on the go don’t need to be out of the loop. Whether they’re on the road all the time, or just traveling for business, they’ll always be able to find out what’s happening in the office with mobile alerts send via an app on their smartphone or tablet.
3. Get feedback quickly. When you really need to find out what your employees think about something, a surveys module will allow you to gather feedback instantly. Two-way communication is critical for successful internal communications.
4. Plan your work. Messages can be scheduled in advance to send in different time zones. You can also send multi-language alerts – perfect if you are in a multinational company.
5. Target your efforts. Using Active Directory integration you can also send messages to specific groups of employees, for example all your accounting staff, or employees located in a particular city or company. You can even target individual employees with custom messaging.
6. Create comprehensive communications campaigns using multiple channels by tapping into other tools in the package such as scrolling desktop tickers, corporate screensavers and digital signage.

DeskAlerts will give you a reliable method of communicating with everyone in the company, regardless of which tools you use, cutting through all the other digital noise and clutter that is taking employees’ attention, ensuring your important corporate announcements are never missed.