It’s an all-too-common scenario: you’re overworked and overwhelmed, either cobbling together internal comms off the side of your desk and on top of your “real job,” or simply bombarded with communications requests for your large company’s workforce.
Internal communicators and the work they do are frequently undervalued—but sometimes, the gap may be an issue of software. If you don’t have some sort of system to manage your internal comms, you can quickly lose track of what you’re sending and who is actually receiving it, making your life even more difficult.
That’s where we come in. Our multi-channel messaging feature is designed around our 7 principle methodology, backed by internal communications experts and 20 years of our own experience. It’s also directly integrated with our intranet software, allowing our customers to move from passive to active internal comms.
This blog post will detail how our software can help you organize your internal comms efforts, engage your employees more effectively, and measure your successes so you can connect your effort to the bigger picture. Companies including Sun Peaks Resort and OE Federal Credit Union have seen their internal comms transformed by our software—here’s a rundown of some of the tools that they now have at their disposal.
Organize the chaos of your internal comms
Let’s start with how our software can get you organized, so that easier, more efficient communication doesn’t seem so far off in the future for your workplace. There are quite a few features in Reach that will help you do this.
Our multi-channel messaging feature seamlessly syncs with platforms like Office 365 and Slack, so you can import and organize your employee lists effortlessly instead of chasing down the latest list. That makes transitioning into using our software incredibly easy.
And once you do, our audience segmentation feature will help you send messages to the right group of employees, every single time. Your lists can be based on everything from location to department, to a specific team. We don’t want you to ever have to send out an “all-staff” email again unless it’s absolutely necessary. Now, you can easily target only your team members based in Toronto to let them know about the downtown office reopening—keeping the inboxes of your Vancouver employees a little less cluttered.
With our multi-channel messaging feature, you’ll never lose track of a message again—organize all your internal comms in folders by campaign, or tag each message for quick content categorization. We make it easy to find messages that have been drafted, scheduled, or already sent.
As the COVID-19 pandemic has unfortunately proven, all of these features can make a huge impact on your ability to communicate to your employees through a crisis. When you can organize your internal comms effectively, issues suddenly become a lot more manageable.
Authentically improve your employee engagement
Engaging your employees through your internal comms begins with compelling, clean messages. With our intuitive message builder, it’s easy to write your message, add an image from the platform’s extensive photo library, and even input a URL from which our tool will auto-populate an image and header.
After you’re done putting together a message, you can choose from that list of audiences you built when you were organizing your efforts—picking individuals, departments, or your entire team.
By scheduling your reminders right out of the gate, you’ll be able to give the employees who haven’t seen your message a nudge—without lifting a finger. No more trying to track who hasn’t opened your important message and following up with them personally, because our software keeps things seamless.
Hopefully, you won’t even need to remind your employees to open your internal comms—they’ll never miss an update again once they can choose how to receive company messaging. For instance, one of your staff members may prefer to get hybrid work schedule updates via text, while another wants to get all communications over Slack. Each employee can set those channel preferences, and you can choose to send out messaging according to them or blast out to all platforms in the case of an emergency. It’s truly up to you with flexible sending options and multi-platform integration.
And, best of all, you’ll receive instant updates as to whether your new approaches have paid off. Internal communicators often invest a lot of time into creating quality messages—but then they send them into the digital void, not knowing how they are being received. That’s where gathering employee feedback comes in. With this feature, you can measure the response to your messaging, and use it to understand your audience and drive employee engagement.
With our multi-channel messaging feature, you have five different features you can use to ask employees to provide feedback anonymously or non-anonymously: five-Likert scale, binary choice, quick poll, feedback box, and action buttons.
Want to ask employees how satisfied they were with the August team-building activity? Use the five-Likert scale. More interested in simply whether a message was helpful or not? The binary choice feature lets employees give you a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. With our technology, there’s a feedback-gathering mechanism for every day of the workweek.
Measure your internal comms success
After all that work, you’ll no doubt want to know if your efforts paid off, especially when the leadership team at your organization asks for updates. With our multi-channel messaging feature, you can track your work with real-time data and analytics tools.
The message dashboard lets you view all of your messages in one central place, whether they’re drafted, scheduled, or sent. You can easily get specific with individual reports for each message, showing you conversion, channels, and employee response rates. We also have high-level data and reporting capabilities that will lend you insight on your channels, messages, audiences, timing, conversions, and sentiments.
That way, when you’re asked to demonstrate all of your great successes, it’s as easy as downloading a CSV.
Start improving your internal comms, with or without new software
Not ready to make the leap and book a demo yet? No rush.
But if you do want to begin searching for the gaps in your internal comms and addressing them, our free assessment might be for you. It’ll take just 10 minutes of your time, and you’ll come away with a personalized grading of your efforts and quality advice from us directly in your inbox.
The field of internal communications is a constantly evolving learning process, which is why we aim to keep up with the mayhem over on our blog and social media channels. Follow us and help create a community of like-minded communicators!
