Your organization has two key strengths that form its pillars – the products/services it offers and the people it employees. Both are pivotal for its success. Your organization’s external brand is heavily reliant on the strength of its internal brand. And to build on that, you need a strong internal communication strategy.
We’ve been living in the Information Age for some time now. An age where data and information is essential for us to operate, make decisions, and shape our organization’s culture. In the past few weeks I’ve shared with you how you can embrace automation to collate data and information and produce meaningful analysis which can help you exploit your team’s potential and be confident with your decisions.
In the past decade we’ve stepped into the Social Age. An era which gives new meaning to the famous Aristotle quote that humans by nature are social animals. While individuals have embraced this era to reshape how they socialize, organizations have been a tad bit slower at it.
Creating Internal Brand Ambassadors
The sales and marketing teams serve as your organization’s external brand ambassadors to promote its products and services. Your employees serve as internal brand ambassadors who can promote your organization’s culture. And you as their HR leader need to ensure they’re promoting the right image. Social media and marketing have had a long lasting relationship for quite some time now. Even social media and HR have made their impact. Using social media channels to engage and communicate with employees is highly effective. And it’s an essential part of HR now. Together with the automation you’ve implemented, you can exploit your HR team to be marketers of your organization’s culture, values and ideologies.
And communication shouldn’t just be one-way. While making use of social media, make communication and engagement easy and fun.
Get Feedback
What good would it do if you just pushed information onto your employees without hearing what they have to say? The talent that you’ve brought together into your organization have unique sets of skills, experiences and knowledge. You should be able to use the technology you’ve implemented to receive meaningful insights from your employees. These can be vital in how you mold the culture that they appreciate and want to associate themselves with for the long term. Engaging with them can help you understand their needs which would then help you design training and development strategies, alter policies and develop benefits that are suited to them. And all of these have already been automated so it becomes easy for you to analyze their needs against your practices.
Create More Avenues of Communication
Sure there’s social media, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just that. E-Newsletters have been used for decades now as a means of communication. You could even develop your organization’s own intranet / portal where useful documents and information can be shared with your employees. SMS/Text notifications and alerts can also be used. Apps are definitely popular and with your system being cloud-based, not only can employees access their HR related activities, you could be communicating and engaging them as well. For that matter you could also create a chatroom for your organization where employees can chat with each other. SnapComms offers a variety of ways you can communicate with your employees.
Over the years, technology has enabled internal communications to be easier, faster and more frequent. I feel it’s safe to say that annual messages from the CEO are reaching obsolescence. When you invested your time and resources to automate various functions within your organization, you have collected all data points that are relevant under one system. It’s now just a matter of how you use that information to analyze your past and project your future.
The learnings you’ve had and the strategies you build going forward all can easily be shared with relevant stakeholders if you use internal communications effectively powered by the automation you’ve implemented.
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