Constantly Connected

With the constant evolution of technology, it is only fitting that businesses keep up with the latest tech in order to withstand competition. However, can this new technology be beneficial to staff? Can it improve engagement?

Well, with different methods of communication out there, we can utilise technology to help our staff out, and more importantly, keep them up to date. This provides a personal approach from employer to employee, which creates a happier working environment overall.

There are many ways of communicating with your staff, but using technology definitely helps. For example, online newsletters, weekly updates, push notifications and email campaigns can all be informative and easy to access. Online newsletters can be created by various different sites, such as Canva and VerticalResponse, and can provide your staff with a wealth of information all at one time. When your staff click on certain content, clicks can be tracked to allow you to see what content is more successful and what isn’t doing as well. This will also give you more insight into what staff interests are, and can give inspiration as future content.

Weekly updates, or e-newsletters, can be used very similarly to newsletters, but these can be more regular, and can be personal to the company rather than just general news. These can contain smaller chunks of information, pictures and click through pages so people are given a brief overview rather than a bigger amount of information less regularly. A good tool for this type of communication is Mailchimp, it is powered by easy, drag and drop options and hundreds of templates so you’re good to go.

A study conducted by ‘Britain at Work’ revealed that 76% of people in the UK had been through organisational change in the last two years, but only 51% of people said this was well communicated through the company. With more regular updates with these things, staff are able to see the progression and feel involved, rather than just being told when the job is done. It was also found that due to lack of communication, 49% of people were unlikely to recommend their workplace to others.

Push notifications allow you to send alerts without the device being in use, making it more likely to be seen than a campaign or an email. This can be sent directly to any device with the app downloaded, but can only display a small amount of information at a time, which is often why people tend to disregard it. Nonetheless, push notifications can be a brilliant tool for staff communication.

Email campaigns however are probably the most used form of internal comms. According to OursCialtimes, the average worker receives over 300 emails per week (oursocialtimes.com), checks these 36 times a day and spends roughly two hours reading and replying to emails everyday. This shows that maybe email isn’t to be overlooked as an obvious choice. Email is easy to use and can be used for almost any purpose. 

However, regardless of what technology is used to communicate within your workplace, the most important thing is that your staff feel informed, included, connected, and most importantly; happy. According to Axero, with the combination of baby boomers and millennials communication is becoming increasingly important, as they have become more demanding when it comes to collaboration, transparency, interaction and feedback. It’s simple, the more connected your staff feel, the happier they are.