I attended the Melcrum Live 1-day internal communications conference held this last Tuesday. It was a great interactive event, and was very insightful. There were sessions where we shared ‘pain points’ internal communicators face, as well as lots of new ideas and tips for how to address them. It’s a great way to go back into the office energised and ready to try out new ideas in achieving successful employee engagement.
We are Organisational Connectors. Don’t work solo – identify where you can connect with other departments. These relationships can increase the effectiveness of your work, and can remove barriers in the implementation of your strategies. That’s because you’ll be working as one united team towards the same goal – having employees who understand and buy-in to what is being asked of them.
The #1 question we must ask ourselves. Before your team sends any internal communications, ask yourself: Are we adding value or making noise? Do this every single time.
Share metrics with stakeholders. Have the ability to measure all your channels. Share those measurements. Being able to provide insight and measurement to your stakeholder is one of the biggest factors in gaining a place for yourself at the top table. By having that access to stakeholders, you’ll be putting yourself in an advisory role within your organisation. In turn, you’ll be able to help shape future communication strategies – rather than just following them.
Identify gaps in leadership comms effectiveness. Use this pretend scenario to identify company culture. Say one of your senior leaders is in a lift. Do you think employees would get in if they saw he/she was already in the lift? Would they avoid sharing that space and wait for the next elevator – or would they jump in, seeing it as an opportunity to network. This simple little exercise can give you insight into gaps in leadership communications effectiveness. Use this to work with leaders to increase transparency, and trust between stakeholders and employees.
Ambassador programmes are very effective. Whether this is digital ambassadors throughout the work place to ensure that the roll out of your social network strategy is a success, or highly engaged employees who act as brand advocates to attract new employees, this is a big area of growth area within internal communications teams. It has been proven to tap into the power of employee-to-employee engagement to increase the success of your internal communications.
Bring employees into a project for feedback much earlier in the cycle. Many internal communications teams mentioned that bringing employees in during the development of a change management programme and asking for their feedback has proven to be a major factor in the success of the roll out of the project. Asking directly for feedback while there is still time to impact the outcome in the way a project will be rolled out through the organization has been a real boost for employee morale and engagement.
Take into account the ‘trust’ factor. A recent Edelman Trust Barometer study revealed that the perceived credibility of CEOs internally has decreased at organisations, and a ‘person like myself’ as a trusted source for employees has raised by 51%. How can IC harness this knowledge when implementing your own internal communications strategy? Review who your communications are coming from – and how the message is being delivered.