Communicating is something companies are starting to look at as a means of constant communication with employees. Internal communications are crucial to boosting the engagement of your employees. With regular internal communication, you can unlock the productivity of your employees and by so doing increase value in revenue. Before you decide to go digital within an office space, you need to come up with a strategy – an internal communications plan. You will need to put together objectives, strategies and metrics to measure your effectiveness.
Channels of Internal Communication
As a good manager, you should be looking for new ways to meet the targets you have set for yourself as a company. Today, there are a variety of ways that organizations communicate. Here are a few of the more common ones:- In person – commonly referred to as face-to-face meetings; this is a commonly used communication channel that is critical for all organizations.
- Email – This is really how most teams prefer to communicate. In fact, most crucial information in companies is delivered via email. Unfortunately, you can find yourself with too many email messages, which can be overwhelming leading the opposite effect – lower engagement by employees.
- Social media – Many corporations have now taken to social media to communicate with their employees. Some of the more common channels are Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It makes sense to take the conversation here because that is where their employees are engaged on a daily basis. On social media, they can foster authentic, open and real-time conversations that involve an external audience and internal employees.
- Intranet - Many companies have an intranet that they use to share information as well as resources. The Intranet does not have to be something clunky and outdated; it can be as simple as using Google drive to a tool such as SAP. This however, does not seem to be a very useful tool of communication today as employees confess to hardly ever using it.
- Internal messaging – When employees need to communicate via chat, many companies have allowed the use of tools such as Yammer or Salesforce Chatter. This tool is an excellent way to get immediate feedback from an employee, share a success or some other information.
- Office displays –Many companies tend to put up notices on the walls as part of their communication strategy. You will often find flyers or posters put up to pass a message to their teams. However, one of the tools that are quickly gaining ground is digital signage. It is rapidly replacing the flyers, posters, and notices.
Why should you Incorporate Digital Signage for Internal Messaging?
If you use it strategically, digital signage can be a very powerful tool for internal communication. You can use it to reinforce corporate culture as well as values, to bring awareness of particular events, to pass on messages and the like. Here are some excellent ways that you can use digital signage for corporate internal messaging- Create a team that is focused on the customer – Once you have trained your team on customer service and they have a clear understanding of why the client is necessary, you can then reinforce this message subtly using digital signage. You can show them in real times, some of the things that your customers are saying. This method of reinforcement works very well if you are a B2C company.
- Get your employees communicating – Whereas in the past, digital signage has been seen as a means of communicating information only to the employees, today it can be used to pass information back to the managers.
- - You can use internal polling – here you can create a poll powered by SMS. It can include voting for team events, corporate training feedback and more. Then you can take the results of the live poll and display them on the digital screens in real time as a means of increasing both interest and participation.
- - You can also use internal social media – this is an excellent way to engage your employees, find out how they feel and strengthen your brand internally. You can display a hashtag on the screens and encourage your employees to share their thoughts with the said hashtag. You can then post these ideas in the cafeteria and break rooms. Some of the fun things to include can be your weekend adventures, travel photos, and culinary creations.
- Recognize your top performers – One of the most coveted forms of recognition by most people is commendation and praise, especially in front of one's peers. With digital signage, you can quickly and easily recognize your top performers in a way that the entire team can both see and appreciate. You may decide to display performance dashboards or to create graphics that show significant achievements. It may also be a good idea to show employee milestones including anniversaries.
- Keep the team abreast of the competition – It is always a good idea to know what the competition is doing. Create an overview of what is happening in the industry and with your competitors and then display it on the screens. It is important to keep your team informed on as much as possible, as you can see in our suggestions mentioned here.
- Connect with employees who may be offline – You may have employees who work on computers daily. For these, it is easy to use messaging, intranet and email to communicate. You may, however, have a workforce working in your warehouse or in a manufacturing plant who may not have access to computers. You can still communicate with these teams by using digital signage to display any announcements you may have, to recognize employees, to reinforce messages on health and safety and the like.
- Connect with staff who may be off-site – Using tools like SimulSignage, the business could easily replicate their digital signage content and display it on their website, so that off-site employees also have access to this information. Any changes made to the digital signage screen will automatically update on the website, which makes it easier to maintain both mediums and maintain identical information.
- Enhance engagement with employees via transparency – This is as simple as sharing vital information with employees. It is an excellent idea to share some of the significant numbers that your company must keep in sight as a means of boosting transparency. This transparency is ideal for employee engagement. The information you provide will give them a sense of belonging that will enhance their company loyalty.