Tag: crisis communication

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4 tips for using technology to improve your internal communications strategy

How to use technology in your internal communications strategy

Summary

  • Strong internal communications help employees feel connected and engaged with company leadership.

  • Digital workplace communications are evolving — employees prefer strategies and platforms that help them collaborate with their coworkers and stay up-to-date with scheduling needs.

  • It’s possible to overwhelm your workers with too many pings and updates. Use technology efficiently in your internal comms plan.

An effective internal communications strategy is to your employees like a lighthouse in the middle of a storm: a beacon of light that they can follow even in the midst of unexpected obstacles and turbulence. They can stay focused on the task at hand to overcome any challenges and arrive safely back at port — or, in your company’s case, to seamlessly reach the goals you collectively set out to achieve.

But fragmented communications and radio silence from leadership can make employees feel lost and uninformed. They might not be prepared to face challenges head-on and effectively meet business needs. And, most importantly, they might lack the confidence and the desire to keep pushing forward if they feel like they’re not getting clear directions from company leadership. One study found that 85% of employees say they’re most motivated in their roles when management offers regular updates on company news.

Internal communication mistakes can also lead to low morale, reduced productivity, and increased employee turnover. If you’re using outdated communication methods or ignoring employee feedback about the way your organization communicates, you might already be suffering these consequences. 

And if you don’t have an internal communications plan at all, you’ll want to get one in place so your workers can receive regular insights from your senior management team, understand the company mission and goals, and send dynamic updates about their own availability. Because technology is the linchpin of internal comms in today’s digital-first working world, you’ll need to make sure you’re implementing these tools in your employee communication.

1. Offer a variety of communications channels

Some employees may feel comfortable asking questions over the phone or via a messaging tool, but others prefer to communicate face-to-face. The same truth holds for workplace conversations, from asking about your PTO or health care benefits to reporting harassment. Don’t assume that “young people” prefer digital communication and “older people” prefer in-person conversations. Employees don’t fit into cliched stereotypes like that, and some will need to have in-person conversations about certain topics. 

Still, digital, mobile-enabled communication is one of the key tools to keep an organization’s strategy from being outdated. For instance, in today’s hybrid, digital-first work environments, many employees prefer collaborative platforms to support their communication goals and needs. At least one-third of business users would choose Slack or Microsoft Teams over a traditional channel like email. And for hourly workers, dynamic, real-time communication is often needed to stay up-to-date on schedules and shift openings.

Give employees options, and make sure that one of the options is a communication tool that allows employees an easy, convenient way to reach out privately to their employer — and their teammates — at any time. Your communication tools should make it easy for workers to communicate with each other and their managers about shift changes, availability, task management, and other updates.

2. Consider how you will communicate in response to a crisis

Whether a natural disaster, PR mishap, or global pandemic, crises are a time when employers especially need an action plan to stay on top of internal communications. 

For example, with natural disasters like winter storms and hurricanes — which may disrupt an employee’s commute or comfort level of going into work at all — organizations can communicate with employees through corporate social media channels, mobile communication platforms, or even simple phone trees to keep everyone in the loop. For employees who have to work remotely following the aftermath of a storm or other crisis, workplace communication that keeps them updated on the facts and that shows sympathy for the struggles they’re going through will be appreciated. That’s important for managing your company culture through difficult times.

This is another situation in which internal communication tools will benefit employers and employees. Managers can give employees time-sensitive updates as soon as possible — and post them more frequently. Employees can reach out to their managers to ask about projects they’re working on and shifts they want to pick up to stay informed about quickly changing priorities and plans. 

It’s also really key to offer your workers the opportunity to give feedback about your crisis communications plan. Harvard Business Review writes, “Organizational leaders must communicate the channels available to offer feedback and should emphasize how much they care about hearing from employees at all levels.” Consider creating an anonymous channel for employees to leave their thoughts and make it clear that they can reach out to HR and their supervisor if they want to talk.

3. Keep remote teams engaged

Of course, even outside of pandemics or blizzards, it’s commonplace for employees to work remotely or hybrid. And more effort to communicate is required to help remote workers feel connected with the rest of the team. 

According to previous Workforce coverage, people are most engaged when their jobs provide them with a sense of autonomy, purpose, and mastery. Autonomy means they are able to work according to their own schedule and the way they like to work. There’s no micromanagement, provided deadlines and key performance indicators (KPIs) are met. Purpose means feeling that the work they do matters and that they’re aligned with the values of the organization. Mastery means performing high-quality work and improving every day.

This is a good thing for managers. They don’t need to overdo their digital communication with remote workers, lest they micromanage. Rather, what managers can do to engage remote workers is let them know what is expected and provide them with clear initiatives and timelines so they know what success looks like. Clear, direct communication is appreciated in this case, and an easy-to-use digital solution is an effective way to keep these conversations with remote workers going. 

4. Watch out for digital overload 

Employees must manage a steady stream of virtual messages, from emails to instant messages and pings from project management and shift scheduling apps. It’s easy to get bogged down by this never-ending flood of information. As helpful as technology can be in a good internal communications strategy, the possibility of overdoing it to the point where employees can’t check all their messages in a timely manner is very real.

Employees can work on their time management skills. That might mean shutting down their email or messaging apps while they work on time-consuming tasks to avoid getting distracted by a deluge of notifications. You could also create some type of request system so that people know when to come to them with tasks (or when notifications are muted for deep work), how much notice they need, and a timeframe to complete it. Your internal communication processes should be designed to inspire deeper collaboration and clear up basic questions instead of creating more.

Employers, meanwhile, can address this information overload by being strategic about how they share information and company announcements. Coordinating schedules and plans, sending out announcements, and receiving automatic updates on shift tasks can all be done through one workforce management platform. 

Keep messages brief by finding a digital tool that eliminates manual scheduling via phone calls and texts. Most importantly, listen to employee feedback if communication processes are getting overwhelming.

Take a collaborative approach to your corporate communications

It might seem natural to take a top-down approach to your internal communications strategy, dishing out company-wide news to employees in a weekly newsletter and soliciting feedback only in a quarterly survey. But true communication is a two-way street. As much as your employees need to hear from leadership about business goals, direction, and updates, company leaders should keep up to date with employees. 

What are their career aspirations? Are individuals and departments on track to reach business objectives? An effective IC strategy, powered by collaborative tools and practices, will enable you to listen to employees on key issues and measure their feedback. Together, you can work towards company goals, improve processes, and raise productivity.

Whether you have a mostly remote workforce or a storefront full of shift workers, Workforce.com can help. Its employee communications feature allows managers to share company or team announcements, send important documents, and give feedback to employees — all with the convenience of using your own mobile device.

Book a call today to find out more about how you can boost your workforce’s internal communication strategy.

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Employee communication how-to’s during a crisis

employee communication

The usual employee communication strategy goes out the door when a company faces a crisis. Special circumstances like natural disasters, workplace shootings and pandemics put employers in a challenging situation. The future is uncertain, people are constantly learning new facts and messaging has to be carefully crafted. 

Meanwhile, emotions may be high while people deal with the aftermath of a potentially traumatic event, and employers must be able to communicate messages carefully and empathetically. Added to this challenge, distance may be an issue. Disease outbreaks, hurricanes and snowstorms may leave a workforce separated from each other, either working remotely or unable to work at all.

employee communicationIt’s important for organizations to develop a crisis communication plan. Within that plan include details that relate to specific crises. Technology will be a key part of these strategies, especially when there’s a possibility that employees and managers won’t be in the same office for an unknown amount of time. 

Here are some tips on how to utilize technology in a crisis communication strategy.

Communicate the organization’s response: 

Whatever the crisis, employees want to know what is going on with their jobs and updates on the company. If a company closes temporarily due to a disaster, for example, people want to know when it will open again. Are their jobs safe? Is the employer taking proper health and safety precautions as they reopen the workspace? Are employees’ concerns and questions being addressed or ignored?

While managers may not have all the facts, they can set up weekly calls or send ongoing communication that gives employees whatever information is available. That way, people don’t feel out of the loop and know that their concerns are being considered and addressed by management.

A mobile communication solution is especially valuable since employees can access the information they want whenever and wherever on their own device.

Share only trustworthy sources and facts: 

In times of crisis, misinformation and myths can be spread just as easily as facts, as crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and mass shootings show. Coronavirus myths include that antibiotics kill the virus and that only older people and people with chronic conditions are at risk. Mass shootings myths include that people with a mental illness are more likely to commit acts of violence (they’re actually much more likely to be victims of violence). 

The important lesson for employers here is that rather than relying on the opinions of random people online — even if they seem credible — they should rely on basic facts from the experts. 

As managers regularly communicate with employees as part of their crisis management strategy, they shouldn’t further spread misinformation.

Show empathy: 

Just sharing facts won’t show empathy for the anxiety, trauma or other negative emotions employees may feel during a crisis. Compassion and a sense of understanding can go a long way to easing employees’ fears.

This is also an area managers can practice. They don’t have to go in blindly when they want to show a human, vulnerable, empathetic side to employees. Practice could be role-playing with someone else and analyzing what responses worked. Or it could mean researching how to communicate with people who have been through a crisis and practicing how to say it genuinely to another person. 

In the case where managers and employees are separated, managers can show their team members on a personal level as well via their company’s mobile chat tool. It could be as simple as asking someone how they’re doing or communicating to them that management cares about their well-being. Just be sure it is genuine. 

Don’t ghost employees: 

Even though employers have enough on their plate when dealing with the aftermath of a crisis, they shouldn’t neglect their employees , who often are hailed as an organization’s “most valuable asset.” Ignoring the impact of the crisis on these people won’t reflect well on the manager or the organization. 

It can be easy to keep in touch with employees and keep the lines of communication open with the right tech tools. Workforce.com allows managers to communicate with employees, whether it’s to share important information with them or just to reach out and show empathy for their situation. 

Tools like this exist and can make managers’ crisis management responsibilities more effortless and streamlined. Utilize the latest communication technology in your crisis communication strategy. 

 

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The role of businesses in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19, coronavirus, public health crisis

Workplace policies, benefits and culture can have a big impact on public health.

The basics of what employers can do to address the coronavirus is to allow employees to work from home and make sure they can access and afford the health care they need, said Elise Gould, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. 

COVID-19, coronavirus, public health crisisWhile many employers may be concerned about their bottom line and the loss of productivity, the reality is that loss will be even greater if employees come in sick, potentially with the coronavirus, Gould said. Passing this virus onto coworkers and the public is not good for the bottom line. 

Some research about the flu shows that employees having more sick days is linked to reduced contagion, she said. With the coronavirus, “it’s time to do that. It’s not even a big, bold thing to think about, giving people paid sick days when they’re sick. It is a smart move,” she said. 

Currently, even people with paid sick days don’t have enough days to recover from coronavirus, Gould said in her EPI blog “Amid COVID-19 outbreak, the workers who need paid sick days the most have the least.” 

“The United States is unprepared for the COVID-19 pandemic given that many workers throughout the economy will have financial difficulty in following the CDC’s recommendations to stay home and seek medical care if they think they’ve become infected,” she wrote. “Millions of U.S. workers and their families don’t have access to health insurance, and only 30 percent of the lowest paid workers have the ability to earn paid sick days — workers who typically have lots of contact with the public and aren’t able to work from home.”

Many are calling for national paid sick leave, but the future of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act is still uncertain. 

“We know that national paid sick time is realistic in the sense that many industrialized countries provide for it,” said said Janie Schulman, partner in global law firm Morrison & Foerster’s  Employment + Labor group. However, “mandatory paid benefits in the U.S. have been and continue to be a politically divisive issue.”

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Also, in the U.S., there is always a question as to which matters are reserved to the states and which may be legislated at a federal level, she said. While the federal government has yet to enact a paid sick leave law, several states and some cities have done so in recent years. 

“It remains to be seen whether the COVID-19 outbreak will create a paradigm shift at the federal level,” Schulman said. 

With employees staying home, one key issue that organizations have to deal with now is employee absenteeism, said Roberta J. Witty, research vice president at Gartner, Risk and Security Management Programs. They have to understand what their mission-critical business services are and determine how to staff them if they have a high-absenteeism rate. This may be done through cross-training, moving work from one location to another or other kinds or workload balancing. 

“For those business services where a face-to-face interaction is required, you might have to shut down some of those services due to best practices regarding controlling infection between people as outlined by the CDC,” Witty said. “Also, there may be a hard decision to be made – what is the minimum percentage of your volume you can support with a degraded workforce, and then shut down if you go below that level.” 

Businesses, like individuals, must cooperate in our generally accepted social contract that requires each of us to do our part in trying to limit the spread of disease for the overall public good, Schulman said. 

“[We have already seen businesses around the country step up and do more than they are legally required to do,” Schulman said  “Many of the steps we have seen businesses take in the past few weeks are not mandated by law, but rather demonstrate the proactive efforts of businesses to limit the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) to protect their employees and the public.” 

These steps include encouraging remote work, cancelling large public events, offering extra paid sick leave and limiting visitors coming to company premises, she said. 

Many of these tough calls will undoubtedly hurt businesses’ bottom line and affect productivity, revenue, profits, and stock price and may interfere with relationships with customers and vendors, she said.  In many of these cases, companies are weighing the costs of these short-term sacrifices against the potential long-term harm that would occur if they did not take these steps.

One effective best practice some companies are following is creating a pandemic team or crisis management team, said Tracy Billows, chair of law firm Seyfarth’s Chicago office Labor & Employment department. Team members —  which include individuals from many departments including HR, legal, health and safety, security, operations and finance — work together to create a holistic strategy. 

A pandemic team should also include the COO or CEO to give the team the leadership needed to and to ensure the committee is acting consistently with the company’s culture, policies and expectations, Billows said. 

Even companies with crisis management plans in place already may have a need for a committee. 

“I’ve worked with employers who have had pandemic plans and emergency response plans for years and, to be frank, they’re all updating them for this. The old rules are out the door. This is new. This is different. This is not the same thing we’ve dealt with before,” Billows said. 

Companies should be responsive to any Centers for Disease Control and Prevention updates as well as local or state public health guideline updates, she said. 

“It’s important that employers show that they are staying up-to-date on the latest and update their policies and protocols accordingly,” she said. “It can feel like you need a dedicated team just to do that, but those who are doing so are being successful at it.”

To learn more about the recent legislation around COVID-19 and what it means to your organization, register for our free webinar, What HR Needs to Know about Coronavirus.

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During COVID-19 outbreak, utilize internal communications in your company crisis plan

employee communication

Internal communication is a vital part of crisis management, whether it is a pandemic like COVID-19, a natural disaster or a workplace shooting. 

As the people and organizations worldwide deal with the implications of the coronavirus, it is vital for people to communicate accurate information about the virus, check what they’re retweeting and make sure not to spread disinformation. Businesses have a similar responsibility, but on top of that, their communication must be strategic. It should be part of any crisis management plan. 

Employees will be getting information about the coronavirus from somewhere, and coworkers will realistically discuss the company’s response to the pandemic among one another, whether their response is appreciative or critical. 

Whatever standard message a business publicly announces during a crisis, if employees have issues with how the crisis is being handled, it doesn’t matter if the media paints the company in a good light. There still may be low employee morale and high levels of frustration internally. 

Despite the immediate importance of communication, many organizations have yet to create a strategy.  According to a report from Gallagher’s Benefits and HR Consulting Division, 61 percent of organizations have developed a communication strategy related to COVID-19, with 82 percent of health care having a strategy compared to 49 percent of non-health care organizations.

In another survey of 300 communications senior leaders, the Institute for Public Relations found that 44 of respondents said their crisis communications plan did not specifically address an infectious disease outbreak. Ten percent of respondents did not have crisis communication plans at all.

There are some basics that employees should understand about coronavirus symptoms and the course of the illness, which should be an integral part of a communication campaign. 

First, COVID-19 is not airborne. It’s passed by droplets. That means when someone who is infected coughs into their hands and touches a surface, someone else can catch it by touching that surface and then touching their face. As strange as it may seem, that’s good news. It means that if people wash their hands frequently with regular soap — especially after you may have touched surfaces that a lot of other people touch, like doorknobs, the keypad for clocking into work or shaking hands — they’re much less likely to be infected.  

Second, some people have compared COVID-19 symptoms to the flu, but that’s not completely accurate. The two most common symptoms are fever and a dry cough. People with COVID-19 rarely have a sniffle. They also aren’t likely to be nauseous. What they are likely to have is bad upper respiratory problems. They tend to develop a severe cough that makes it hard for them to breathe, which is what is making COVID-19 dangerous.  

Finally, it’s also true that for most younger workers, the symptoms are milder and people who have it may only think they have a cold. However, older employees or anyone with a compromised immune system are much more likely to have serious symptoms that require medical assistance. The medical assistance that is often required is intubation and the use of a ventilator. 

The reason why COVID-19 is such a big deal right now is because the number of people who require medical assistance is overwhelming the medical system in the places where the number of cases has grown, like Italy. The medical system has been overwhelmed even in places that have a consistent ratio of doctors and hospital beds to people (Italy’s is better than the United States’, for example). There are only so many beds in the hospitals and only so many ventilators. 

That’s why there has been a push to slow down transmission through actions like social distancing and remote working, because if it is slowed enough, it won’t overwhelm the health care system. The mission is to flatten the curve and buy time for the health care system to adequately care for those who fall ill.

If someone has been exposed, they are likely to have symptoms within five days of exposure and can also be a carrier for up to 14 days, even if they’re asymptomatic. This is why quarantine periods are generally 14 days long. 

According to recent guidance from consultancy Deloitte, the most important players in your communications plan are front-line managers. Employees expect accurate, authoritative and transparent information. “Trying to conceal risk can potentially create more,” the report stated. Leaders should outline communication plans and make sure that managers know what to expect and understand and define their role. 

Further, companies need to prepare plans for site disruption and reactivation. “In the event an entity has to close its doors for non-critical workers for a period, determine a communications plan about how you’ll communicate with all workers, including contractors and vendor partners,” according to the Deloitte guidance. “Have a clear playbook for how to initiate a closure and how to reroute operations and employees to other locations within your network. Moreover, finalize a checklist to determine when employees can return to work once the all clear is given.”

Employees are bound to talk about the coronavirus outbreak on social media, and there are certain steps a business can take to temper this, according to Deloitte. One solution is to provide employees an internal communications channel through which they can express their issues about what they’re seeing within the organization. It’s a smart business move to “ensure direct communication as much as possible as an alternative to social media,” the report stated.

For Workforce.com users there are features on our platform available to keep communication lines open during this difficult time. Chat with your staff, schedule according to operational changes, manage leave, clock in and out remotely, and communicate changes through custom events, among other things.

COVID-19 is rapidly changing how businesses operate. We recognize that organizations need an extra helping hand right now. So we’re offering our platform for free to new sign-ups over the coming months. Sign up today and our Workforce Success team will gladly provide a personal, online walkthrough of our platform to help you get started.