USING MULTI-CHANNEL STRATEGY TO COMMUNICATE WITH DIVERSE WORKFORCE

To be most effective, successful communications must include multiple internal communication channels.

A diverse workforce can be a challenge to reach. Depending on just one channel to communicate to employees will not work. Adopting a multi-channel approach will better enable you to engage with all of your employees

To accomplish this, internal communicators need to join the dots between strategy, behaviours and technology, to improve the flow and quality of communication and collaboration.

Have a communication strategy

First review your general communication strategy:

• Do you have goals and objectives for your communications? Everything should be aligned with your company’s business objectives. This includes general goals per campaign, and goals relating to your internal communications
• Select the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that measure your success in achieving your goals. Good KPIs to review include content popularity, survey responses, take up of safety initiatives, response to change management, video views, event registrations, or an increase in intranet or social network traffic – to name a few. Match the metrics you use to measure your success to the KPIs you have selected.

Review your content process

You’ve gone through your communications in general, now review your content. Here’s where you identify what you are trying to achieve through your communications (content), for both regular and urgent messaging.

What to look at:

• Do you know your audiences? Are you communicating effectively to each of your employees, wherever they sit in your organization?
• Access to data is essential. Can you access data that will allow you to communicate more personally to them – increasing relevance, and decreasing overload?
• Can you consolidate and coordinate communication with other areas in your organization to tackle overlapping and duplication of communications?
• Your strategy should include creating a calendar that clearly outlines timing, what channel will be used and who is responsible for delivering messages to each audience

Conduct a channel audit

Up-to-date technology

While you are reviewing channels available to you, also take the time to identify where you need to update your channel technology, such as email and intranet, to technology that saves you time, and delivers the real-time metrics and analytics you need. Having this type of insight will help you assess the channel popularity and audience preferences.

Channel strengths

Take a look at the existing communication channels available to you. Understanding their strengths will help you improve how you use them -– and what audiences to target as part of your multi-channel communications strategy.

Here are four of the most popular and accessible channels:

Intranet

Strengths: Centralized information storage, offering a consistent message to a broad internal audience. It is often enhanced by social capabilities to attract engagement between employees across the organization.

Use to your advantage: Social features allow for collaboration and discussion around initiatives and other time-sensitive communications. Use intranets to store multimedia elements, such as photos or videos. Generate deep links to include in the communications you send through other channels, such as email, to drive your staff to further reading.

Tips for optimum engagement: Keep it up to date include the latest news or essential further reading and support materials. Encourage conversation around the content. Your employees will only use an intranet if it is easy-to-use, and easy to navigate. Plus, it should be mobile enabled so it’s available for remote workers to use it on their mobile devices. Build a community of contributors to populate the intranet with regional updates and posts for different functions within your organization.

Enterprise Social Networks

Strengths: An Enterprise Social Network (ESN) can improve productivity, collaboration and the flow of information and knowledge within the organization. It increases engagement because it enables employees to share their knowledge, find localized information, work with colleagues -– all without the barrier of where they sit in the organization.

Use to your advantage: Don’t think of ESN as a technology; think of it as a business solution. Success formula: Encourage sharing + Capture knowledge + Enable action = Empowered more productive employees.

Tips for optimum engagement: Have a plan to drive the success of this new collaboration tool. This should include: a usage policy, a clear purpose as to why employees should use it, a strategy for driving adoption and publishing updates, and the ability to get metrics to measure engagement. A tip is to identify super users throughout the organization to become ambassadors and help stragglers.

Video

Strengths: An effective way to disseminate a communication that is closest to the impact of face-to-face. Videos capture the intent of the message with facial expressions, gestures, voice tone, and posture. An increasingly popular tool, and one that really connects and engages with employees beyond HQ.

Use to your advantage: An increasingly mobile workforce requires flexible and time-efficient ways to engage with internal communications. Videos can be embedded and sent to a remote workforce, and watched on any device, anytime anywhere.

Tips for optimum engagement: Ideas for using videos are endless, but here are a few: CEO messages, live events, recorded webcasts, tutorials and user generated videos. Don’t just post videos on an intranet, and hope employees find them, actively highlight them in emails and across your social networks.

Email

Strengths: Surveys consistently find email an essential and effective channel for communicators. The push aspect of the channel means they can reach out to employees, rather than waiting for them to come to the channel. It’s easy to reach mass audiences fast – and is highly measurable.

Use to your advantage: Make the most of this channel by personalizing and targeting information to each of your audiences. Embed and deliver rich media such as videos and podcasts. Include links to important areas of your intranet and social networks to drive awareness, adoption and collaboration.

Tips for optimum engagement: Employees expect the same digital experience as they have externally. Email templates should be visually high-impact and created as a responsive design – meaning it’s viewable on any device from desktop to smartphone. Content should be easy to consume on-the-go.

A multichannel tip: Use your email to drive the awareness and adoption of your other channels

Email can sit at the center of a multichannel drive to increase awareness and take-up of other channels, such as events, intranets and social networks.

Here are a few examples, all offering metrics for insight into engagement:

?     Drive intranet awareness – Emails can signpost important content on the intranet by featuring snippets of news stories and an embedded direct link to the full article on the intranet

?     Encourage social conversations – Highlight conversations and embed links to widen awareness beyond the employees already using a social channel

?     Reach offline staff – Generate a PDF version of email newsletters. Remote workers, or those with sporadic online access can download to their device to read offline at their convenience. Alert managers to the PDF of the newsletter, so they can print it out and put it up in the canteen – or circulate to offline staff

?     Distribute flyers and posters to floor staff – Place a link to posters and flyers in an email newsletter. Designated employees can then print them out and place in their area

Despite using multi-channel communication, always remember that face-to-face personal engagement remains critical and important to make your strategy successful

The next step is to put yourself at the center of your communication channels. This will let you orchestrate an aligned and consistent flow of information. Instead of hoping you’ll reach and engage them, you’ll be able to drive the success of your communications, more easily measure their impact and ensure important messages reach all your employees, no matter where they are.

The role of insight and measurement in your success

Measurement lets you understand the impact of what you’re doing.

Review your access to measurement in each of your channels and use those selected metrics to help you gain insight into your campaigns. In the selection of metrics, you use, try to be consistent in your choice across each of your communication channels. By doing this you are not looking at channels in isolation – you are getting consistent insight into engagement across all channels, allowing you to make decisions based on these insights. For example, measure adoption and engagement, collaboration and rich media consumption (video, podcasts), and device consumption (desktop or smartphone). Collate your most influential users and top contributors, plus content, posts, pages and comment trends and popularity.

The future in multi-channel measurement

Having access to individual channel metrics is the first part of your journey. To understand your channel effectiveness you need the ability to measure globally by campaign across all your channels.

Taking a multi-channel approach – using all your channels to communicate and measuring across your channels – will empower you to improve your communications going forward and show real business impact to stakeholders.

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