3 facts: Dry January is over, most New Year’s resolutions have failed, and you only have 11 months left to do a great job this year. Cheers to that 🥂 and here are a few tips that will make those eleven months more fun and more efficient.
TL;DR - improve your internal communication and you will be more successful.
Your personal KPI's or goals for ‘24 probably include a few of these:
improve the eNPS
create a high-performance culture
improve collaboration
create more engagement
improve onboarding/offboarding
attract more people
💡 Every single one of these can be achieved by improving your communication. And you will solve so many more things. When the communication in a company is strong, when it’s transparent and easy to absorb, TRUST goes up. Trust in the leadership, and trust in the company. It leads to higher retention, higher morale, and more resilience.
🤯 Knowing all this, why don’t you have a dedicated comms person? Strange right? Most of the (smaller) companies we know think ‘they aren’t big enough for someone to be paid for communications’, even though it’s the most important thing they need to change to become better. Most companies say ‘It’s everyone’s responsibility’ or ‘We’re fine, it happens organically’.
Yet they wonder why people don’t feel informed enough about company goals. They wonder why employees get lost in the roadmaps KPIs and OKRs, the Rocks and the OGSM. They wonder why key messages don’t come across, even though they have been communicated. It’s because no one owns this like a pro!
Generally, when people know what is happening and what they are supposed to do, they’ll get it done.
Take control! Not because HR or the people team has to completely own internal communication. That would be silly, it’s everyone’s job to communicate. But when your end goal is improving the employee experience, you can take control over how and when they receive key messages.
Here are our tips:
1️⃣ Ways we Work Communicate With Slack/Teams, email, phone, whatsapp, real live conversations (they still happen!), intranet and more… it’s easy to get lost in where to find what. It can cause anxiety (worst case) when you try not to miss something!Most likely it causes loss of focus. Because when you don’t know where the next message is coming from, you’re likely online in at least 5 channels at the same time. It’s distracting as hell. The solution: create a ‘ways of working’ for your communication tools:
List all the channels you use in the company.
Make sure your employees know how and when to use which channel.
This gives people the peace of mind to turn them off and focus. Preferences for certain channels can also vary per person or team, so discussing the tools and ways to communicate with your team is key. Make sure to include this in onboarding as well.
2️⃣ Nail the Newsletter
We all know the ‘newsletter’ concept, and it’s really fun to send them. The problem: they can be a lot of work to put together, and people might not read them.
How to tackle this? Make sure you don’t write it yourself, but involve people from different teams on the topics, and give everyone 1 section per month. This way it’s easy to key nice content from all departments, and you create internal engagement. The issue with people not reading them - keep reading until tip number 7. 👉🏾 Slack User Tip: They have cool new free templates available, no need to design much at all!
3️⃣ Upgrade your Employee Handbook
No excuses. (You can skip this tip if you already have a wicked Notion page!) Some companies still have a .pdf file as their employee handbook. The latest version is always out of date, and its pages and pages full of policies and plain text. If this is you… shame on you 😜. Sending this type of handbook to an employee and expecting them to:
1) read it
2) understand it
3) remember it
…is wishful thinking and also highly unlikely to happen.
We recommend getting rid of that pdf ASAP. Create something fun to read, easy to remember, highly engaging and scalable. This should be your goal at least for ‘24 if you don’t have a live and searchable handbook online, which employees can access 24/7 and where all the important information can be found. Gif Policy Challenge - try to replace each policy with 1 Gif. Add this image to the handbook, ideally instead of the policy - but more likely next to the policy. We bet that employees will now understand what’s in the policy and are more likely to remember it!
4️⃣ Co-write Key Content
Have you ever read a company-wide email and thought cringe ‘I should have written this!’ Next time, offer the person who wrote it to review the message before it goes out. Don’t offer to write the message, but help them find the right tone of voice. Small edits can make (or break) how an important message is received by a big group. Add those emoji’s or take them out, but offer your help.
5️⃣ Weekly Wrap Videos Summarise the week in a short video, in which someone talks through the highlights, failures, key updates etc. Share this on Friday, and we guarantee employees will look forward to this video each week. It’s also great for when you’ve been away and need to catch up quickly: When you come back from holiday and you’ve missed 250+ slack messages in over 20 different channels, or you have 300 unread emails… it’s not easy to find out what was really important. Watching 1 or 2 short videos would be IDEAL right? Tools like Loom are ideal for this.
6️⃣ Hold OKR Competitions (or something similar)
If you regularly report on key numbers, try turning this into an event to look forward to.
One of our clients holds a monthly OKR competition. Each team presents their OKRs in the most creative way they can think of, and employees vote 🏆. The winner takes home a prize. This way, every time again, listening and watching the OKRs is a lot of fun!
7️⃣ The 7x7 Rule Our favourite rule is of course the 7x7 rule. The 7×7 rule in communication in summary means: you’ll get people into action if you communicate the SAME thing seven times, through seven different channels. Does it work? Well, it’s definitely over-communicating, but it doesn’t hurt either. Either way, don’t rely on 1x1, and now…
...get out there and create those irresistible organizations! 💖
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