A common reason behind why employees tend to feel disengaged and isolated is the lack of or ineffective internal HR communication strategy. Clearly, the most effective way for enhancing employee engagement is a two-way meaningful and relevant communication. It is therefore important to carefully develop an effective HR communication strategy that aims to increase employee satisfaction thus retaining good employees.
Understand the existing corporate internal communications
Before anything else, a good HR communications strategy starts with a good insight of the company core values so you will know the areas where improvement is relevant and needed. You can tap the current strength of communication across the organization or company boundaries using a companywide audit intended to identify communication blockages. Among the questions that should be sent out are:
- Is information sent by the company being understood? Here you can determine if the format and language of information is being delivered in a clear way. If it is not frequently understood, is it because of the length of the message? Is the message delivered through a communications tool or application that the employee does not have? Or is the language used simply too technical for the audience to comprehend?
- Is the information aligned to the goals and values of the company? This will double-check and determine if the employees have an understanding of the company values in the first place.
- Are the employee concerns being heard and addressed? If the prevalent answer is no, then you will see a low level of employee satisfaction and engagement which could be detrimental to the employee efficiency and ultimately company productivity.
- Is the information delivered accurate and sufficient for employees to make a decision? Inadequate information as well as channel to interact with other employees on a formal level will make it difficult for the employee to perform his or her job requirements efficiently. Accessible links to resources as well as collaboration channels will help employees avoid the feeling of being isolated and ignored.
After identifying the areas of improvement, act on it!
This is the time to strengthen your credibility for employee relations and raise employee motivation.
- If results show that employees are not aware of the available communications tool or if they do not know its mechanisms, then perhaps it is time to conduct corporate communications training. Depending on the common job responsibilities of the employee, it will be help the competitiveness by reiterating the norms for business communication. While we use SMS as casual tools for communication inside the organization, it will certainly be more preferable for formal tools like e-mails for a more respectful communication between customers, clients or even superiors.
- If results show that employees do not hear much feedback from the Management, if they feel they are not appreciated or if they feel that their accomplishments are not recognized and acknowledged, then it is time to revisit the communication style between staff and Management. Nowadays, it is not effective anymore to widen the gap between the level of how much the Management and staff knows. An open-door policy is therefore recommended to engage employees to voicing out indispensable opinions that can be useful for the Management.
- If results show there is limited access to information, then check the user-experience of the server, intranet or cloud. Ideally, information is readily available and accessible across different mobile devices and networks. Furthermore, extracted data must ideally allow users for further use and sharing. Setting up barriers to shared data will only drive the tool usage down.
Be careful not to overwhelm employees with information overload, make them use upgraded technology that is not communicated, and send irrelevant incoherent information.
Nearly one of the top reasons why an employee feels quickly buried from work is the immense amount of information it receives --some of which do not even call action, but simply just to inform or amuse. Thus, file management or data management can address how employees use their mailboxes.
Information leaks can be controlled by setting up of communications tool to enable privacy and release of sensitive information outside company premises.
Reinforce your employees as your brand ambassadors
A strong HR communication strategy is a powerful arsenal of a company to improve competitiveness through taking care of its best resource --the people. Ultimately, you want to make your employees the perfect brand ambassadors of your company as prospective and current partners derive their opinion and image of the company based on the conduct displayed by employees online. Therefore, the overall tonality of the organization on blogs and social media should support and reinforce the company’s core values.
You may also explore on keeping media relations updated about the organization’s happy work environment. This will give the potential stakeholders a reason why they should invest in your company – happy employees make happy customers, thus positively impacting the company bottomline.
