When it comes to internal communications, your organization can’t afford to be complacent. Technology is always evolving, disrupting just about every aspect of the business world, including communications.
Many studies have found that organizations with good internal communications practices have happier staff, can recruit and retain top talent and enjoy better productivity and profitability than those who perform poorly in this area.
The new year is the perfect time to give your internal communications a much-needed overhaul. If you feel as though you’re a bit out of the loop with what’s going on in internal communications, these are the biggest trends for 2018 that you need to know about:
1. Enterprise social networks – are you using too many?
There are a range of enterprise social networks that companies use these days from Slack to Yammer to Facebook Workforce to SharePoint to BaseCamp and everything else in between. In fact, in some workplaces, it isn’t unusual for staff to have access to several of these – some for teams, some for the entire organization and some for when collaborating with partner organizations or clients.
The more enterprise social networks your staff are given access to, the more time they have to spend trying to keep up with information in various locations. Consider consolidating the number of enterprise social networks that your company uses.
2. Peer-to-peer content
Traditional internal communications is usually top down -management delivering information to staff. A new trend in the internal communications space is for businesses to recruit ambassadors or advocates from within their employee ranks to deliver messages to their peers.
3. Mobile communications
Communicating with your employees on their mobile devices makes a lot of sense, especially if you have a workforce that is frequently on the move, works remotely or even if you just want to have a system in place for when computer systems go down.
4. DeskAlerts
Many companies around the world are implementing DeskAlerts in their organizations. This is a sophisticated internal communications tool that sends messages direct to employees’ desktop computers in a way that can’t be ignored or minimized.
Messages appear no matter what computer tasks the recipient is engaged in, and even if their screen is locked or on screensaver mode. This is a great way to quickly send out information knowing it will go to everyone who needs to see it, cutting through all the other digital “noise” they have to deal with.
5. Video
Video has been an important internal communications tool for the last few years, and 2018 will be no different. From producing videos for your internal audience to hosting webinars, livestreaming and conferencing, this medium has the ability to enhance your internal communications on just about every level.
