Ensuring employees can communicate effectively with colleagues and their management teams has proved crucial, especially with new hybrid ways of working. The pandemic has highlighted flaws in many internal communications plans around the country so whatever you have in place this year, it needs to be robust and flexible enough to deal with new – or in some cases fewer – staff, new management and can counteract any effects of future covid outbreaks.
By focusing on your internal communications, you can help improve productivity and profitability and create a motivated workforce based on a transparent culture.
Evaluate your existing internal communications systems
Take what you’ve learned from the past two years of disruption. Review your existing systems and decide which elements were successful or not, during the pandemic. With staff being asked to work remotely, then in the office, then a hybrid style, internal communications teams everywhere have been fighting an ongoing battle.
Being honest about what has worked and what has been terrible is a great basis for your new and improved plan for this year. Ensure any goals you set are in line with your company’s aims. And most importantly, find out how best to measure the outcome of all communications and how effective they were.
New ways of working
During the pandemic, your teams had to work remotely. They needed technology in place to work from wherever they were. It’s likely that a hybrid workplace will remain the norm for most people, despite the covid restrictions finally being lifted.
Poor internal communications in workplaces can quickly lead to unrest: staff getting frustrated that they missed vital job promotion opportunities, others missing out on benefits or important deadlines.
How can you achieve good communication and collaboration? With a modern-day intranet like Attollo. In the pandemic days, people were sent home with means of communication being implemented so quickly there wasn’t time to test its effectiveness. Now it’s time to implement a one-stop platform where everything can be stored, shared and accessed quickly.
Encourage collaborations
No one wants remote workers to feel disconnected from their colleagues. But with no one able to spin around in their office chair to ask a quick question about a project, collaboration is made more difficult.
One way to allow workers to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily is a modern-day intranet system. Attollo, which sits on SharePoint, allows staff to share ideas in many different ways.
Often, a company’s decision to invest in a new intranet is to address major stumbling blocks including lack of communication, or an inefficient document-finding system. Onboarding an Intranet like Attollo is a good place to start as it’s an incredibly user-friendly platform for older staff and works with features they may already be familiar with including tagging and liking for instant responses.
Check in on your staff
If staff are working from home, you’ll need a good system in place to keep tabs on them – to make sure they are coping with workloads and feeling well physically and emotionally. Employee satisfaction is a crucial part of retaining staff and so checking in regularly is important.
Employee engagement is vital so focus your energy on time spent communicating through Microsoft Teams or via a blog and find the time to reply to requests or comments.
Each staff member should be able to find the information they need and have the chance to comment on it, without feeling too overwhelmed. Bespoke communications to each department is the most likely way to get good feedback and conversation flowing.
Futureproof your communications strategy
An omnichannel approach is the way forward to work in an increasingly digital and agile era. Without having a central piece of reliable technology in place, you may find delivering effective communications an uphill slog.
Now is the time to invest in an intranet that will supercharge your business now and in the future by having everything you need on one platform.
If you think your business could benefit from a better internal communications system, give our team a call and we’ll be happy to give you a no-obligation demonstration of Attollo Intranet.