If you are reading this you perhaps handle the Human Resources(HR) function in your company and know the strategic role it plays in the workplace culture and employee performance. You are the first touch points for employee’s issues and communication requirements. In this environment, HR communication is far too important to leave to chance. Not doing it right causes employee engagement to drop, productivity to fall and business performance to suffer.

“Companies with highly effective change management & communication are 3.5x more likely to significantly outperform their industry peers. At the same time, only 40% of employees globally are highly engaged with their job – and the rate is declining”

First on ask yourself this question – do you operate across the communication spectrum in a planned way or do you communicate reactively what the management requires?

1. Increasing Engagement: Communication focuses on connect staff and improve their job satisfaction, productivity, and organizational success.
2. Employee Benefits: Communication focuses on increasing awareness of healthcare programs, compensation packages and more.
3. Internal Policy: Communication focuses on new policies and reminders on existing ones.
4. Health and Safety: Communication focuses on informing employees about health and safety issues and ensuring compliance.
5. Communicating Change: Communication focuses on changes within the organization and organizations business environment.
6. Workplace Wellness: Communication focuses on improving employee health, reducing absenteeism, and driving business performance.

Typically items 1 through 4 are overserved and 5 & 6 are underserved. Overall this communication is critical but not always exciting for employees so how do you make this communication stick? First on – use your marketing/ internal/ corporate communication teams’ playbook — better still rope them in!

Designing the communication

1. Keep it fresh: Your employees don’t want to read the same thing. Reframe the communication, highlight a different aspect if resharing. Reduce ‘message wear-out’.
2. Measure effectiveness: How many people opened the communication, how many acted on any follow-up action – always have some follow up action 🙂
3. Use Data: What does the data say about employees’ behaviors and preferences. Capture, analyze, use. What do they need more of? What do they want less of?
4. Focus on User Experience: What is the response you want to invoke? Marketers design for user experience by default and you should too.
5. Mass Personalisation: How do you make the employee feel you are talking to him/her specifically? Is your salutation personalized? Do you communicate using their demographic – aspirational – lifestyle language (like marketers do)? Where do you reach them?
6. Bring a sense of purpose: What makes your employees tick, what are their personal aspirations and how do you connect that to the workplace? What is the emotional connection to this and the emotional investment you see?
7. Go Mobile: In the world where that is the preferred screen – how do you talk?

HR not just helps employees get aligned to corporate goals but increasingly they influence employees’ personal finance, their health, and their future. Creating a great employee experience starts with getting the right person getting the right message at the right time.