Every business, no matter the industry, needs to have an internal communications platform in order to maximize performance and the company’s overall well being. However, just having this platform is not enough. The platform needs to provide many features that enhance your communication efforts. Here are a few key features that every internal communications platform should have in order to get the best results possible.
Mobile Accessibility
For most companies, work does not end as soon as you walk out of the door. With so many employees relying on their mobile devices to receive workplace updates, even when outside of the office, any effective communications platform needs to have mobile accessibility. This way, even if the employee has left the office for the day, they will not have to wait 16 hours to get new information.
This is especially crucial with frontline and deskless workers. Contrary to popular opinion, almost all of your employees possess smartphones. Coupled with the proliferation of BYOD programs at work, mobile devices become an easy and almost imperative way to reach out to your employees.
To do this, make sure that there is an easy way to access the platform on a mobile device and enable push notifications, so that you do not have to rely on your employees proactively going on the app to check for updates. Instead, ping the updates to their mobile devices, which will be sure to get their attention.
Easily Segmented Communications
Not every update or new piece of communications is relevant to every employee at the company. Sometimes, certain messages only concern a particular group of employees. The last thing that your employees want is to receive dozens of updates a day when half of them aren’t even relevant to their position. Information overload can cause your audience to check out and ignore all future communications, no matter how important. That is why your internal communications should have a method of easily segmenting the employee groups so that messages are only ever sent to the employees who need to see them.
Utilization of different communication channels is a tried and true concept within your marketing department, but one severely underutilized for internal communications. Different segments of your audience may be best engaged through different channels, so leverage your employees’ self sorting to best reach them where they live.
Automated Onboarding and Offboarding
As a larger company, especially one that employs a lot of Millennials, you will likely experience a decently high amount of employee turnover. Having employees quit and new ones brought onto the team can present a real challenge to some internal communications platforms because they do not have a way of making sure that everyone gets on and off the app efficiently.
Without a proper system in place, this requires someone from HR to regularly go through the system’s mailing list to manually purge and add new employee contact information. This can be a very lengthy process that takes away employee time better spent on other areas. A simple way to deal with this is to include an automated system that takes care of onboarding/offboarding active and inactive employees.
The most effective platforms will automatically integrate with your HRIS or other existing systems to reflect any changes in real time. This way, effort only needs to be spent once, and your HR teams can rest easy knowing that it only reflects a single source of truth.
Detailed Employee Engagement Analytics
It is important to know when and how your employees are engaging with your communications. This can give you the insight on where you can improve your communications platform in order to maximize employee engagement. Without this detailed feedback, you are essentially just taking a shot in the dark each time you send out a piece of communications because there is no way to know how it is being received by your employees.
Effective A/B testing is a cornerstone within a lot of organizations when developing their communications. Detailed employee engagement analytics gives your team quantitative data on the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign, allowing your team to iterate and improve any future internal communications.
Having an effective internal communications platform is vital for any company to achieve success. Contact us today to find out how to set up or improve your internal communications to be the best that it can be.
