Ways To Keep Your Staff Informed With DeskAlerts

Keeping employees informed about what’s going on in your company is essential if you want your business to perform at its nest. Informed employees are more likely to be highly engaged, productive and will make fewer mistakes. Lack of communication essentially means your workers have to find their own way in the dark. This can cause confusion, mistakes to be made and low levels of morale.

Table of contents

The benefits of keeping employees informed

Ways to keep staff informed with DeskAlerts

Improving employee engagement with DeskAlerts

Keep employees informed during the COVID-19 pandemic

Other ways to keep staff informed

The benefits of keeping employees informed

When you keep employees informed, you provide them with some of the tools essential for success in the workplace.

A report from Bambu found that 80% of employees want updates about company news from their employers. Of these employees, 77% said this information would assist them to do their jobs, while 66% felt that it would help them build relationships with their peers.

The key benefits of keeping employees informed include:

• Boosting profitability and productivity.
• Improving morale.
• Having employees who love to work for your company and talk about it to their family and friends.
• Higher rates of employee retention (it can cost up to 150% of an employee’s salary to replace them if they leave!)
• Preventing gossip and rumors and other misinformation from spreading and undermining your business.
• A more collaborative, cohesive team.
• Creating a great workplace culture.

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Ways to keep staff informed with DeskAlerts

DeskAlerts is a company communication software exclusively designed to improve internal communications and share information within organizations. The software is installed on desktop computers or is available as an app for Apple and Android devices. Using a variety of delivery channels, the system sends notifications to employees in a way that is designed to be deliberately disruptive and grab their attention.

Businesses use DeskAlerts to keep their employees informed in a range of ways:

1. Desktop pop-up alerts

These are pop-up alert windows that appear on an employee’s computer screen, no matter what other software they are using at the time, and can’t be skipped or ignored. The message remains on the employee’s screen until they have read it to the end. 

This is a really great way to send important or urgent information to employees, such as:

• Information about planned IT maintenance and downtime, as well as keeping them informed during any unexpected system disruptions.
• Company policy changes require employees to acknowledge they are aware of the information and act on it.
• Urgent tasks that require your staff to prioritize over their regular work tasks.
• Reminders about important tasks, due dates and meetings.
• Advice about information security breaches that require increased vigilance or active countermeasures to mitigate.
• Urgent notifications about an emergency situation.

2. Corporate wallpapers, screensavers and lockscreens

DeskAlerts gives you the ability to make the most of the entire space on a desktop computer’s screen by deploying corporate wallpapers, screensavers and corporate lock screens in creative ways to keep staff informed.

These can be colorful images or text. You can customize the designs of these to match your corporate branding and make the most of visual communications to convey complex information.

Benefits of keeping employees informed using these channels include:

• Ensuring low-priority messages are seen by recipients at least two to three times a day while they’re not actively working on something. This helps to improve awareness without taking a toll on productivity.
• Having people begin to engage more with company activities, helping you to increase their loyalty.
• Unused computer screens become another channel for company brand promotion – which is especially useful when they are in an open space or a customer-facing environment.

3. Employee mobile app

Employees can download the DeskAlerts mobile app from the Apple or Google Play app stores and install it on their smartphone or tablet devices. 

So long as the employee is connected to the internet, they will receive push notifications on their devices, ensuring they are kept informed with important information from their employer no matter where they are at the time.

Ways to use the DeskAlerts mobile alert system include:

• Delivering critical company news and announcements as well as sending links to intranet posts and other content.
• Sending employees compliance alerts so they know about important updates. These also include delivery and reading confirmations.
• Inviting employees to corporate events and receiving a response in real time.
• Reminding employees about tasks and rules. You can send it to the entire workforce, or to different groups of employees. This can be done as a one-off or more regularly.
• Gathering instant feedback by sending surveys and quizzes.

4. Desktop ticker

A scrolling desktop ticker is a band of text that appears along part of a computer screen… not unlike the ticker tape that appears on TV screens during news broadcasts. 

To keep employees informed, it can be used to scroll headlines and other information that employees see while they’re in front of their screens. The text can be the entire message or can include hyperlinks for employees to click on to get more information.

The benefits of the desktop ticker include:

• It’s a less stressful option for sending information to busy employees compared with the direct on-screen pop up notifications.
•  It allows you to feed continuous updates or display multiple messages in a single scrolling bar.
• The ability to drive people to your intranet, internet, blog or other under-utilized communications resources.
• An opportunity to reach staff who are immersed in their work or can’t be distracted but may require the urgent information you are sending. For example, nurses in a hospital setting.
• When used along with the desktop pop-ups the tickers give you an extra level of message severity which lets you use DeskAlerts features for less critical scenarios.
  
  

Improving employee engagement with DeskAlerts

Employee engagement is challenging for many organizations. 

According to Gallup research, only around 30% of employees globally say that they are engaged at work. Disengaged employees cost the economy in the United States alone around $350 billion every year.

Disengaged employees: are less productive, make more mistakes, have higher rates of absenteeism and presenteeism, have low morale and can create a toxic and negative work culture for their peers. They’re also less likely to stay with the organization.

One of the key drivers of employee engagement is internal communication. Employers who keep employees informed can help to boost engagement, particularly when you using DeskAlerts.

DeskAlerts can help with engagement in the following ways:

• Reducing information overload. When employees receive too much information, usually in the form of multiple emails, the information can get lost meaning the employee might feel like they aren’t being consulted about something when they simply haven’t noticed the email.
• Giving employees more control over what types of information they receive by using the content subscriptions feature in DeskAlerts.
• The ability to send personalized content to boost engagement.
•  A user reaction function that lets employees “like” content that is sent, enabling them to engage with it in the way they are used to on social media.

Keep employees informed during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect businesses around the world. As we have seen, the situation is extremely volatile and can change quickly, with little warning, affecting businesses and their employees alike, which once more highlights the benefits of keeping employees informed.

The challenges for businesses have included having to suddenly relocate employees to remote work, situations changing so quickly that rumors and misinformation can circulate before official information is sent, and a lack of reliable channels to get feedback from employees while they are dispersed.

DeskAlerts can be used for keeping remote employees engaged and informed throughout the pandemic, no matter where they are working. 

Use DeskAlerts to:

• Send important messages to your employees that bypass the email system either via any of the desktop tools or through the mobile app.
• Establish a “single source of truth” where management is in control of the information being sent, reducing the risk of rumors and misinformation spreading.
• Fulfill your duty of care as an employer by ensuring important health and safety information and advice is provided to employees.
• Get instant feedback from employees so that you have a full and complete picture of the situation on the ground. DeskAlerts surveys are 100% guaranteed to be visible and will let you get feedback from the entire workforce within minutes, no matter where they’re located.
• Survey staff to determine that they have what they need to continue working from a remote location.
• Inform employees about any IT emergencies or planned maintenance, reducing the time they spend attempting to access systems that aren’t functioning or to reach the IT helpdesk.

Messages sent via DeskAlerts can either be non-invasive (for example screensavers or desktop tickers) or deliberately disruptive to get attention (such as pop-up or lock screen alerts).

Other ways to keep staff informed

DeskAlerts can be used alongside any other communication methods or channels in your internal communications arsenal. In fact, the best practice in employee communications is that you should use multiple channels for communication in order to ensure that your important information is received.

Different employee cohorts have different preferences when it comes to communication. Some prefer more visual information, while others prefer text. Some prefer in-person communications while others prefer to have remote communication.

Consider these types of communication when you’re looking for new ways to keep staff informed:

• Face-to-face events such as town hall meetings, workshops, focus groups, seminars etc.
• Online collaboration platforms such as Slack, Asana, or Microsoft Teams. DeskAlerts can be integrated with Teams to make both software applications even more powerful.
• Video content such as short information videos, addresses from the CEO, education, and training videos. DeskAlerts can be used to send video content directly to employees’ screens.
• Visual content such as posters, infographics, photos and digital display signage. All of these can be sent to any screen in your company via DeskAlerts.

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Can your business afford not to have an informed workforce? When your employees know what’s going on in the workplace, they’ll be more motivated and engaged. They’ll better understand what’s expected of them, as well as the role they play individually in ensuring your company’s success. 

DeskAlerts makes it much easier to keep employees informed. Get in touch today and organize a free demo or trial (click the buttons below).