'Tis the season for resolutions — and we all know that keeping them is harder than making them. For all of our internal communication friends out there, here are some tips to staying on track and actually keeping your resolutions.
Using data to inform your internal communication helps ensure that you’re being as effective as possible in terms of driving desired outcomes and delivering a high ROI. Establishing processes to gather metrics, securing necessary software to make it easy and holding regular meetings to evaluate findings are critical to making progress.
In January, schedule data reviews throughout the entire year to keep your teams on track. Make data part of all your planning conversations and ensure that reviewing results of past efforts happens early in the process. Consider employee surveys or focus groups to provide additional insight and regularly ask what data was used to inform communications to employees.
Helping employees understand your organization’s higher purpose and see how their work makes an impact is hugely important for employee retention and satisfaction. Ensure that your higher purpose is reflected in all major communications, especially those introducing and explaining new organizational projects and priorities. Starting at the top, encourage all leaders to use the higher purpose as a compass for decision-making.
Elevate employees at all levels who are leading by example and leverage their behavior as a teaching tool. Consider highlighting different parts of the organization in videos, webinars or podcasts to educate employees about your higher purpose and business as a whole.
One-size-fits-all content just doesn’t cut it — externally or internally. Just like you would with customers, segment your employee audience and personalize messages by sharing content that’s relevant to them. Ask employees what type of information they’re most interested in receiving from your organization and use that intel to drive personalized digital communication, and your larger internal content strategy.
Create segmented email marketing lists by business line, role in the company, content preferences, etc. and develop content strategies for each. Use these unique content streams to test different messaging, CTAs and other communication elements. And don’t forget, it should all informed by employee data!
Many organizations have hard-to-reach employees like field teams, satellite offices or remote workers who have the power to make or break your brand. Do some research to see how well current communication is getting to these employees. Establish a baseline and use this data to clearly see where you need to improve. Try to get deeper than just opens and clicks, find a way to measure understanding and adoption. Check back throughout the year and see how you’re tracking against the baseline.
Target these employees with tactics that make sense in their unique context. Find out what channels are best and explore creative ways to get in front of them. Consider old-school tactics like messages that can be read aloud during morning huddles over the radio during the work day and direct mailings to employees’ homes. For distant but regular computer users, explore the feasibility of pop-up messages with your IT department.
At the end of the day, listen to your employees, learn from the data and be willing to make changes as you go.