One of the biggest challenges facing anyone involved in internal communications in the modern workplace is finding ways to cut through the “noise” to deliver important information to employees.
Employees are constantly bombarded with information from different directions: from management, from different departments in the organization (eg: finance, HR, information technology, communications), colleagues, from clients, from peers in their industry and more. This can include emails, social media, social networking and intranet content.
It’s quite easy for staff to feel overwhelmed and often they don’t have the time or the attention span to keep up with everything.
If you’re tired of spending time and effort producing internal communications content that seems to go unnoticed by your employees, consider these tips to get your messages noticed:
1. Do you really need to send a message?
One of the reasons people feel overloaded and overwhelmed by communication is because they receive too much of it. Do you need to send a message telling people to clean the staff kitchen? Do you need to hit “reply all” to an email saying “I agree”?
2. Be authentic
Communicating with employees needs to be done with the right tone where management sounds authentic. Employees can become cynical and don’t enjoy feeling condescended to.
3. Use the right tools for the job
Think outside the square. Investing in an internal communications solution such as DeskAerts will enable you to send information to your employees in an innovative way.
4. Explain the value for the employee upfront
Don’t bury the reasons why the information you are sending is important. The average user wants to know the “what’s in it for me” factor straight up and will lose interest if it isn’t clear.
5. Keep it short and sweet
Don’t fill up words on a page just for the sake of it: keep your messages to staff as brief as possible. Brevity is your friend. If you feel the need to write words for the sake of a word count, you end up with unnecessarily rambling, waffling prose - and it shows.
6. You need to be timely
There’s no point sending information out to your employees when they’ve heard it already. Has your company made an important announcement that’s been in the news? Your people would have preferred to have heard it first-hand from you and not second-hand from the media.
