Often when we think of content and communications, we think about how we communicate with externals; leads, clients, customers, our marketing base. But, we also need to ensure that our internal audience is being communicated to in the right way as well. For most organizations, internal communications are sent via emails or Excel and Powerpoint presentations which are ultimately turned into PDFs, and while these might seem effective at getting the point across in an efficient way, it isn’t exactly exciting or engaging. Don’t our own employees, team and board members deserve that same level of attention and engaging communications that we give our customers? The answer is yes!
So let’s breakdown the why: Here are 5 reasons you need to rethink your internal communication strategy:
1. Employees need responsive materials too
Your employees are readers too, they have multiple devices, many have laptops plugged into desktops or go back and forth between the two, if you have field employees – they read on tablets and mobiles, and your employees read your content on their phones at lunch or during meetings. The content you send them needs to respond to their device. PDFs are not mobile friendly and are not responsive, this creates a bad user experience for your employees. Read more about the role of technology in internal communications here.
2. You are paying for the internal content you create, make sure it’s read
Creating content for your employees takes time and resources, that’s hours of paid work that goes into your internal communications, you want to make sure this content is being read and engaged with at the same level as your external communications. You cannot effectively track how engaged your employees are through PDFs, powerpoints, or emails alone. Make sure the content you are creating is being read, enjoyed and shared by your internal employees too.
3. Increase your employee engagement
PDFs and emails are boring. They offer static content, there is no multimedia, videos, animations, picture galleries, forms or polls. Sure, they are clean, can be designed well and follow your branding, but they only go so far. Giving your employees an engaging interactive experience will keep them engaged in your content, encourage them to read all of it, and give feedback or take the actions you require of them.
4. Your content should be easy to update and share over and over again
Your content should be easily updatable and you should be able to control how it is distributed, updated and shared. When you send a communication as a PDF, you cannot recall this, edit it or delete it. Not only does this pose a security risk, but it also requires a lot of work to rectify a mistake, or simply update numbers or policy details.
5. Your content needs to be ADA compliant to serve all your employees best
It shouldn’t be just the content you share with the world that gets the accessibility focus, you want to make sure your content is accessible to every single one of your employees. A PDF simply cannot do that, it cannot add alternative text to images, or allow for screen readers to read text aloud, and it cannot be zoomed or engaged with easily. Make sure the content you send internally meets all the ADA compliance specifications too.
Now you get it, what’s next?
The good news is that there are really efficient ways to communicate better with your employees that will increase engagement and morale within your organization. But first start with a strategy, be aligned on the type of information you want your employees to know, how often you want to communicate, and how you want to do it. Putting a strategy in place will make this easier.
Next – find an easy way to communicate instead of emails and PDFs. Use a newsletter platform, or CMS system. Or an easy way to communicate with your employees is by using a content experience platform. A content experience platform will create microsites that are responsive to all devices, can include engaging multimedia content, forms and polls, can be gated and locked, updated on the fly, includes an accessibility validator to ensure your content is accessible to all, and you will have total control over how it is shared and distributed.
Conclusion
The workforce today is volatile, we’ve come through a pandemic, people are “quiet-quitting”, a large portion of the workforce is still working from home to some extent, so we want to make sure that we are focusing on our employee engagement levels, ensuring them that they are valued and secure in their roles and also communicating effectively with them on all company matters to ensure visibility and security. This gains their respect, and increases their confidence with the organization, and ultimately, increased employee engagement will lead to a more motivated workforce of employees who want to stick around for the long haul. So treat these employees the way you treat your leads: nurture them, dazzle them and engage with them.
Experios is 3D Issue’s all new Content Experience platform that allows you to build all sorts of internal communications easily while implementing your company branding. You can create annual reports, newsletters and brochures for your employees as well as your customers. Take a look at Lead Tiles Employee Benefits Guide for inspiration. You can get started with Experios for free today, schedule a demo to find out how.
