Calendarize your
messaging:
Look at 2018 as a whole and
arrange your messaging
across the 12 months and
the available channels. For
instance, you might want to create a regular
cadence of leadership communications to make
sure employees aren’t hearing from the top only
when it’s bad news or a major change. Build a
rhythm of employee stories or recognition. Include
themes that are evergreen topics for your culture,
whether that’s safety or wellness or volunteerism.
By breaking topics down into bite-sized pieces
that appear on a regular schedule, you avoid
overwhelming employees with the firehose effect.
You also can plan ahead for topics you know
will be priorities at certain times of the year. For
example, open enrollment happens every fall,
but somehow it can become a mad rush to get
materials out in time.
Commit now to shorter
content next year:
Ironically, we’re more likely to
get the message across when
the message itself is shorter.
When intranet articles, emails,
newsletters and videos are not concise, employees
may look right past the most important take away.
Or, they may take one look at the length and
decide to skip it entirely.
Sometimes it takes some convincing for internal
clients to recognize that a shorter piece might
be more effective. Try setting some ranges as
guidance, such as suggesting that all-employee
email blasts be between 50 and 250 words or
that content for digital signage be between 15
and 25 words. If you’re working with magazine or
newsletter layouts, you can try emphasizing the
benefits of being able to include larger visuals if
you could just cut a little copy.
Build a digital
non-desk channel:
The two default mechanisms
for reaching offline employees
in most large companies are
1) Having managers cascade
the information to their teams or 2) Putting
up a poster in the break room. Both have their
limitations. Instead, you might make a push for
digital signage, or for introducing an app, or just a
better intranet that works well on mobile.
Enable employee-
generated content:
One of the best ways to
build interest in your internal
channels is to have employees
contribute content. The
boldest move is of course to allow employees to
post content directly, whether it’s on the intranet
or internal social media channels. But if that’s too
much for your executive team, you can establish
a checkpoint, or have comments and content
monitored.
A process we’ve used several times is a content-
manager program, using a select group of
employees as field correspondents throughout the
company. For instance, to create a fresh stream of
ongoing content for a global intranet that unites
numerous brands under one parent company, we
developed training materials and how-to guidance
for employees representing each brand and each
global region. On a smaller scale, we trained
employees in a corporate headquarters to create
digital signage content each month to share the
news from each of their departments.
Interested in getting a head start on 2018?
Tribe can help.