With the increasing complexity of today’s business landscape, effective communication within a company has become more important than ever before. It’s essential to have a well-thought-out strategy and plan in place to ensure your internal communications campaigns are successful. In this blog post, we will discuss the unique challenges of internal communications, the importance of strategy and planning, and tips for creating successful campaigns. By incorporating these insights, you can drive employee engagement, improve collaboration, and enhance overall business performance.

Unique Challenges of Internal Communications

Diverse Audiences

One of the main challenges in internal communications planning is catering to diverse audiences. Companies often have employees with different roles, responsibilities, and levels of authority. This makes it necessary to tailor your messaging to resonate with each group effectively. Understanding the needs, preferences, and expectations of various employee segments is crucial in crafting targeted and relevant content and it’s worth taking the time to map out audiences at the beginning of a campaign in order to maximise engagement throughout the campaign.

Information Overload

The digital era has brought an influx of information, making it increasingly difficult for employees to keep up with the constant stream of updates and announcements. Information overload can lead to disengagement and decreased productivity. Too often, the answer is to try a new channel but an effective internal communications strategy can help you find the right balance between providing essential information and avoiding overwhelming employees.

Remote and Hybrid Workforces

The rise of remote and hybrid workforces presents new challenges for internal communications planning. With employees spread across different locations and time zones, ensuring consistent and clear communication becomes more difficult. Remote workers may feel disconnected from their colleagues, leading to a sense of isolation and decreased engagement.

Rapidly Changing Business Environments

Today’s business world is characterized by constant change and evolution. As a result, internal comms must be agile and adaptable to keep employees informed about organisational changes, new initiatives, and shifting priorities. This requires a proactive and flexible approach to planning with a willingness to iterate on strategies when necessary. 

The Importance of Strategy and Planning

Aligning with Organisational Goals

A well-defined internal communications strategy is essential for aligning your efforts with the overall goals of your organisation. By setting clear objectives and KPIs, you can ensure that your communications campaigns contribute to driving business success. This alignment also helps to secure buy-in from leadership and other key stakeholders.

Enhancing Employee Engagement

Effective internal communications planning is critical for fostering employee engagement. Engaged employees are more productive, motivated, and committed to the success of the organisation. By delivering targeted and relevant content that resonates with each audience, you can create a strong sense of connection and purpose among your employees.

Facilitating Collaboration and Innovation

A strategic approach to internal communications planning can help break down silos, encourage cross-functional collaboration, and promote innovation within your organisation. By creating a culture of open communication, you empower employees to share ideas, provide feedback, and contribute to the company’s growth.

Managing Change and Crises

In times of change or crisis, a well-structured internal communications plan can help maintain stability and ensure that employees are informed, engaged, and supported. By providing timely and transparent updates, you can build trust, manage expectations, and guide your workforce through challenging times. Set time aside to create a template for crisis communications so you have it when you need it.

Tips for Creating Successful Internal Communications Campaigns

Develop a Comprehensive Strategy

To create a successful internal communications campaign, start by developing a comprehensive strategy that outlines your objectives, target audience, key messages, and desired outcomes. Ensure that your strategy aligns with the overall goals of your organisation and addresses the unique challenges of your internal communications landscape.

Use the Right Channels and Tools

Select the appropriate channels and tools for engaging with your audiences. Consider a mix of traditional channels (email, intranet, newsletters, townhalls) and modern tools (team collaboration platforms, social networks, mobile apps) to reach your diverse audience effectively. Make use of analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of each channel and adjust your approach as needed to optimize engagement and reach.

Personalise and Segment Communications

To increase the effectiveness of your messaging, personalise and segment your audience based on their needs and preferences. Create targeted content for different employee groups, considering factors such as job function, location, and seniority. This approach ensures that your messaging is relevant, engaging, and impactful. You can download our stakeholder mapping template here and adapt it to your needs.

Encourage Two-Way Communication

Successful internal communications campaigns foster two-way communication between employees and the organisation. Encourage feedback and open dialogue by providing channels for employees to ask questions, share ideas, and voice concerns. This not only helps to identify potential issues but also promotes a culture of transparency and trust.

Measure and Evaluate Success

Continuously measure the success of your campaigns by tracking key metrics, such as employee engagement, open rates, click-through rates, and feedback. Analyse this data to identify areas of improvement and refine your strategy for future campaigns.

Leverage Storytelling and Visuals

Engage your employees with compelling storytelling and visuals. Share success stories, case studies, and employee experiences to create an emotional connection with your audience. Use visuals, such as infographics, videos, and images, to make your content more engaging and memorable.

Train and Support Internal Communicators

Invest in the professional development of your internal communicators by providing training, resources, and support. This will help them stay current with best practices, improve their communication skills, and ensure the success of your internal communications campaigns. Get in touch if you would like to find out more about how our consultants can help.

Conclusion

A successful internal communication plan is an effective expression of your company’s values and overall strategy whether it’s for the entire company or simply a part. It contains the elements of a solid understanding of the situation, a clearly defined set of actionable goals, a set means of delivery, and measurability. When you make time to set it up, making sure you’re informed by employee data, it can become an effective tool in your arsenal.

The post Mastering Internal Communications Planning: Strategy, Challenges, and Success appeared first on ICPlan.

The Current State of Internal Communication Planning

If you’re without one, you’re not really alone in lacking an internal communication plan. The most recent State of the Sector report pushed out by Gatehouse has found that only 50% of businesses had a clear internal communication plan to begin with. Even fewer had an overarching strategy to guide their internal communications efforts. This goes to show that many companies are simply reactive or opportunistic when it comes to internal communications.

On the surface, there’s really nothing wrong with that. After all, internal communications seem to serve their function best when they are fluid with what is going on within a company at any given time. For example, most businesses go in to reaction mode and are quick to push out reassurances from top management when a something impacts the overall organisation structure. This is an effective way to ensure that employees are kept abreast of current developments and reassured with the direction of the business.

The problem with this reactive mentality is that it doesn’t take into consideration the usefulness of internal communications in many other aspects. It’s more than a tool for broadcasting corporate announcements and ‘fire-fighting’. It can also be used to continuously align employees with your overall corporate strategy. It can help promote better visibility of leadership, actively drive support for initiatives, and can improve the discourse between employee and employer. For all of those needs, however, you need a good internal communication plan.

The Necessity of Planning

Business planning is a mixed bag for many companies. Many, for example, argue that it’s better to do things rather than sit down and talk about it. While there is some weight to be had in the idea of action over planning, it all boils down to a simple, fundamental misunderstanding. Many assume that a plan needs to be overly long and fleshed out to be viable. In actuality, a simple framework is a good enough place to start.

You see, the value of any business plan is in its ability to clarify your goals, guide actions towards them, and address any issues that may crop up. An internal communication plan is no different. These don’t have to be comprehensive from the outset. After all, the best plans are constantly evolving in the face of newly discovered challenges and opportunities. What they should be at the start are solid and measurable guides for action.

Strategy Versus Plan: Which One Do You Go For?

The answer here is both. Your strategy is the grand view of things and tackles questions of why. Well-established and long-standing businesses already have this set up.  Your company’s values, its unique selling proposition, and its overall character are the heart of the strategy that should guide your internal communication plan. Anything that you formulate in this regard should always be in alignment with your strategy.

For example, if your company strives to build itself as an environmentally-friendly venture, your internal communications can and should be supportive of this. Communications will likely include pushing to reduce carbon initiatives, the removal of plastics from day to day use, and highlighting the participation i Earth Day initiatives. Strategy flows into plan flows into action here, and should be the consistent order that is followed.

Numbers Support Planning

A look at recent surveys fully supports the idea of having an internal communication plan as opposed to being merely reactive and communicating on the fly. A Gallup survey, for example, found that businesses that engage their employees via effective internal communications saw a boost of up to 20% in productivity. On the financial side of things, a 16% increase in profit margin was seen in employees that experienced high engagement again via internal communications. That was in a case study from Standard Chartered Bank. These case studies definitely speak to how creating a sound plan is definitely the way to go.

The Key Elements of a Successful Internal Communication Plan

Now, when talking about planning, you quickly get down to specifics. A good plan effectively answers questions of who, what, when, where, and how. A great plan does all of that while being consistent with several key elements. Here are those elements that you should always take into consideration when assembling an internal communications plan:

Proper Situational Awareness

In order to build an internal communication plan for the future, you need to be fully aware of where you are at the moment. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your existing setup allows you to make key adjustments moving forward. Begin by asking yourself what the overall purpose of internal communications has been. Is it to announce important events in your company? Is it to promote corporate initiatives? List all these down and make sure that you cover everything. Bear in mind that – depending on the size of your company – you may be looking at communications for a specific project or business area, or the entire company.

The next thing you need to look at is how effective you have been thus far. Have many people received previous communications? Did you see the change in behaviour and actions that you were going for? When you have the answers to that, take a step back and list down the different channels that you used for each specific piece of communication. This will be invaluable down the line when you work channel options into your internal communication plan.

There are several ways you can gather the data you need. One is to conduct surveys. By going straight to employees, you can learn not only whether or not you’ve gotten your message across, as well as which means of delivery were most effective. Ideally, you should have a central means of gathering data and statistics on your internal communications like channel and audience splits. Something like ICPlan with its built-in analytics suite will help provide the quantitative data to support the qualitative data you gather through surveys.

Clear Goals and Objectives

The next element of a great internal communication plan is a clear set of goals and objectives that you are aiming to achieve with it. You should start with more general objectives. The most common of these include alignment of employees with your corporate strategy, support for your initiatives, improved discourse and efficiency, leader visibility, and more. You should then break each down into more focused specifics. For instance, “improving efficiency” can be broken down into “increasing sales numbers by 20%”, or “lowering staff turnover rates by 10%.”

Confident Direction and Procedures

At the heart of every great internal communication plan is a clear set of directions and procedures that will guide its execution. The best way to go is to have a step-by-step listing of what activities are necessary to achieve the goals you’ve stated. It all begins with the message. You want to make sure that the message is always clear, concise, and carries a clear call to action. You can opt to be specific and write down what you want to say, or you can just present clear guidelines for your communicators to follow.

Included in the element are the various channels that you will use to carry out the task. Here’s where the data you’ve gathered from employees comes in. A great internal communication plan is adaptive to what works. If audiences aren’t opening their emails, you shouldn’t push its use—at least not in isolation. You’re always free to have channels support one another. For instance, you could send a longer policy document via email then send out a message via Workplace by Facebook or Yammer mentioning it with a link for people to read it.

Measurability

Finally, a great internal communication plan has clear measures of success. This starts with the tools. As mentioned earlier, employee surveys are a great way to go to get qualitative data, but this needs quantitative support. The good news is that most channels have analytics baked in to help give you numbers for opens, reads, and even engagement. The key here is to clarify in your plan who is gathering this data as well as the timeline in which data should be collected.

A key component to this element is also the tool you use to aggregate all the data you collect. It’s tempting for many companies to utilize something like Microsoft Excel. There are certainly advantages to this. For one, many are at least passingly familiar with it. For another, it does allow for the use of formulas for tracking. That said, it is a very inflexible platform—requiring in-depth knowledge to manage successfully. Remember, it isn’t purpose-built for the task of managing internal communications.

It is worth mentioning here that there are some enterprise solutions that make all of this wholly simpler by unifying everything under one platform. Purpose-built, all-in-one options like ICPlan allow you to have all the measurable statistics that you need in one place. It’s certainly worth the investment because it saves you both time and effort getting data that you need. This is one of the more important elements to consider because they aid the refinement and robustness of your internal communication plan.

Case Studies

Siemens – Internal Communications Done Right

From the offset, it’s clear that Siemens had the right idea in its internal communication plan. As their head of International Communications, Shelly Brown, put it, their goal was “to foster engagement while helping employees understand the company’s business objectives and how they fit into them.” They achieved this by having a very human approach. Their communications didn’t straight out reiterate their strategy, but rather resonated with it across many levels.

One of the keys to their success was the effective use of multiple channels. They leveraged internal social media and essentially went to meet their employees at their level—paving the way for meaningful interaction. They also made use of videos and blogs to better communicate their ideals to their people. This was all supplemented with the use of traditional print media via their monthly global newsletter.

The other key to their success was in fully integrating their values into their internal communication plan. With accessibility as their starting point, they took into consideration where their employees were at. Communications to factory workers who didn’t have access to online channels were heavily focussed on print. They even strongly leaned on employee engagement via participation in community activities. All in all, what they managed to create and execute on was a proactive and very dynamic internal communication plan that worked.

British Airways – Rising From The Ashes

In the early 2010s, British Airways was the poster child of communications gone awry. Along with the weight of the global recession, they were also wrestling with cabin-crew strikes. Morale was at an all-time low and it was clear that internal communications had broken down terribly. They went back to the drawing board and came up with a cohesive and working internal communication plan—a tall order if there ever was one.

Facing an already hostile us-versus-them situation, further challenges to this effort lay in the fact that you’re talking about a highly disparate and scattered workforce. The response was to refocus on what was at the centre of the brand. The sponsorship of the Olympics was an excellent starting point. The internal communication campaign sought to ignite pride in the company as being at the forefront of welcoming the outside world into the country—as well as the specific roles each employee played in that, and they went from there.

Royal Mail – Meeting Their Employees Where They Are

Finally, the Royal Mail Group bears looking at as the perfect example of effective channel selection. With many of the 150,000-strong workforce regularly on the move around the country, it was clear that communication was going to be tough. Face-to-face communications are hard to implement, while email is often a non-starter with so many deskless employees. So they leveraged their printed newsletter the Courier.

It made perfect sense. It required no power to read, it could be taken everywhere, and it was easy to pick up and read. They completely overhauled the Courier to have it tabloid-like with catchy headlines, punchy images, and quick, concise reads. This gave their people the facts in little bites that could be consumed at down times. Better still, they supported this printed newsletter with a digital copy so as to allow more ways for employees to access their communications. An internal communications plan that meshed both traditional and modern channels.

Bring It All Together

A successful internal communication plan is an effective expression of your company’s values and overall strategy whether it’s for the entire company or simply a part. It contains the elements of a solid understanding of the situation, a clearly defined set of actionable goals, a set means of delivery, and measurability. When you make time to set it up, making sure you’re informed by employee data, it can become an effective tool in your arsenal.

The post What Are the Key Elements of a Successful Internal Communication Plan? appeared first on ICPlan.

Once again, we want to At ICPlan we’re on a mission to see the latest shifts and trends when it comes the pitfalls and barriers to planning across the Corporate Comms function. We have collaborated with author and consultant, Liam FitzPatrick, to develop a comprehensive 2022 updated study on the issues that influence the way organisations plan communications.

On that note, we’ve launched the 2022 survey aimed at communicators from across the spectrum – from internal to external. We want to hear how they plan and are asking them to take just a few minutes to tell us what influences and affects their approach to planning.

You can take the anonymous survey here: Planning in Communications Survey

Better Planning in Communications: The Necessity of Study

As communicators, for us to be able to navigate the challenges we all face in terms of planning in communications, it’s critical that we continue to understand what the common barriers and roadblocks are. The survey we have created will only take ten minutes of your time but will still cover a lot of key areas of interest. These include what kind of planning takes place in your organisation at the moment, what planning approach you apply to individual projects, and even what factors help or harm implementation. Finally, we also explore who you involve in the development of your comms plans and ultimate sign-off.

It’s not just for internal communicators exclusively. We also want to incorporate the views and experiences of every kind of comms professional from across the diverse comms spectrum. Do internal communicators view and approach strategy in the same way as those in media relations or public affairs? How tightly integrated—or disparate—are these plans? Is there overlap in the utilization of tools? Do comms teams in a company strive for consistency in their messaging?

We Learn and Grow Together 

Please also note that this research project is also open to communicators from around the world. In fact, we are hoping to get a more diverse global perspective on planning in communications. We are interested in learning how comms professionals across the world view, approach, and deal with the problems we all face as a community and a profession.

What’s in it for YOU?

We will be carefully analysing the collected data and publishing the report early next year. Respondents who want to receive a copy of the research report can leave their email address at the end of the questionnaire. Additionally, we are also making a donation of $1 for each completed survey to Befrienders International (the international charity that provides confidential support to people in emotional crisis or distress).

The world still continues to change a great deal as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, yet the challenges of effective communication planning remain. In seeking to understand what the current status is and what continues to need to be improved in terms of planning, we believe that we can make a lasting impact for the communications profession.

You can take the anonymous survey here: Planning in Communications Survey

The post Our 2022 Planning in Communications Survey is Open appeared first on ICPlan.

I can’t remember where the conversation started but it eventually reached the point of “well how many communicators really take planning seriously?”

Throughout the Spring of 2020, I’d been chatting on Zoom with Dan and Maddy of ICPlan. We’re old friends and been sharing the highs and lows of lockdowns, home schooling and debating what the new world would look like for us; them as communication software providers and me as an advisor on good practice in communications teams.

So, we thought we’d ask our friends and contacts to fill in a survey. It seemed to resonate with many people – the questionnaire got shared around the world and eventually, hundreds of practitioners from every communications sub-discipline took part. And in the second half of 2020 we started sharing the raw results in a series of 1:1 conversations and virtual discussion groups with experienced professionals.

You can download the full report here:
Communications Planning Report 2021

No masterplan

The most striking message was that many communicators do not have a masterplan for what they are trying to activate with their operations. They may have specific timelines and tactics for individual projects but an overall view of why they exist and how to develop is not universal.

The people we spoke to linked this to another fact emerging from the data; people who plan are more likely to report having an educated set of internal stakeholders who appreciate what communications can do for them.

In short, if you work in an organisation that doesn’t value communications why bother thinking ahead or trying to implement a vision of reputation management or employee engagement? You’ll always be involved too late in the day to make a real difference on projects and getting leaders to engage with messaging will be a struggle.

Educating stakeholders

In contrast, communications teams that can align with organisational goals and strategies find they are more likely to be consulted and appreciated by their peers in the organisation.

The message seems to be that if you want to be valued you need to educate your stakeholders about what you can do; and you need to be educated yourself about the strategic goals and plans of your organisation.

Initially, this feels like a fairly obvious statement, but the data suggests that it’s a message that as many as four in ten communicators need to hear.

And it’s an observation that is reinforced by the finding that barely half of communications plans include anything much about audience insight or evaluation let alone links to detail about underlying business goals. However, the probability that many practitioners were still concerned with tactics rather than results did not entirely surprise our expert consultees.

They said that the profession still has a way to go to catch up with other professional disciplines in working to a structured plan.

Size matters

The research also found that size of team seems to matter in how people approach planning.

We found that the smallest and the largest teams seem to be better at planning and being aligned with each other. For the former it is probably a matter of living in a simpler world and for the latter it’s a question of necessity.

Yet mid-sized teams seem to struggle to gather intelligence, get involved in projects at an early stage or align communications.

Five key questions

After listening to the views and experiences of senior communications leaders it seems that there are five essential questions to test how planful a comms team is. There may be more but the consensus from our research is that the most universal issues are covered in these five questions:

• Do we have a master vision of communications that is aligned to business or organisational goals?
• Is there a clear methodology for planning communications – and does it involve our internal stakeholders?
• Have we a governance process which tracks the plan, keeps messages, audiences and projects aligned, and reflects on successes and failures?
• Have we the skills and mindset of planners who can engage with stakeholders, cope with change and overcome inevitable barriers?
• Is our planning driven by data, insight, evaluation and tracking?
Please download the report – we hope it proves useful to making your communications operation more effective.

And of course, if you need help to make your communications more planful get in touch!

You can download the full report here:
Communications Planning Report 2021

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The second aspect is internal communication, or communicating to employees. The messages can vary from anything as simple as corporate announcements to larger strategic shifts and – increasingly – employee collaboration. As with external communications, the channels through which messages can be sent varies—from chat applications to intranets. Whereas before there was a clear differentiation between the two, there is now a blurring of the lines that needs to be addressed.

The Importance of Building and Maintaining a Brand

You can’t talk about internal and external communication without also touching on the importance of branding in today’s business landscape. We live in a world where access to information is near instantaneous. Any business can get a social media post or website update out that exposes it to a very wide audience. With so many businesses offering the same kinds of services, the key differentiator has been branding—what the business values, what the characteristics are and – ultimately – what the business projects itself as.

If there’s one thing that makes any one particular brand successful, it’s consistency across the board. If a brand touts itself as being family oriented, then its marketing message will often reflect a light-hearted friendliness in its website content and social media posts. More than that, however, it also needs to reflect the same value within the company and among its people. For example, it doesn’t work to project a family-friendly image to the outside world, but then force too many hours on an employee—preventing them from quality time with their family.

The Blurring of Lines Between Internal and External Communications

That’s where communications come in. Through the effective balancing of internal and external communication strategies, a business can communicate its values and its brand consistently and effectively to both employees and target audiences without creating this disconnect and confusion. Naturally, this has led to the trend where the lines between internal and external communications teams are starting to blur, if not overlap entirely. And this is a trend, which is very positive.

Simply put, a unified internal and external communication strategy makes it easy for a business to be both uniformly authentic and wholly transparent. This leads to two critical avenues of success. Externally, this means that people will get to know your brand and respect it for how it resonates with them through your messaging. Internally, this means that your people relate to the communications being reflective of your values—effectively becoming your ambassadors and representatives through their interactions with the outside world.

The Influence of Social Media

You can’t talk about the blurring of the lines between internal and external communication without talking about the impact of social media on communications as a whole. Before social media, companies could get away more with lack of consistency between the internal and external. After all, employees only really had their immediate circles to complain about any disparity that they might experience. In fact, it was only when things were bad enough to hit local and national news that companies ran the risk of finding themselves exposed for a lack of consistency.

That’s changed with the increasing popularity of social media and their use as a way for people to self express. Nowadays, it’s easy for any one employee to complain about contradictions to a company’s stated value. It’s then just as easy for that message to spread beyond one’s immediate circle to a much wider audience. In the Philippines, for example, there has been a trend of boycotts being organized around companies whose poor labor practices have been shared on social media—which has had a negative impact on the companies being exposed. To a certain degree, it’s also the ease by which information can be had that caused the temporary bans imposed upon Huawei for alleged data breaches.

It’s clear that in today’s world, a company can no longer afford any disparity between internal and external communication. Companies that do not endeavour to unite the two in a meaningful way risk exposing itself to the very audience it wants to get onside.

Developing an Overarching Strategy for Communications

Now, all the understanding in the world means nothing if your internal and external communication teams aren’t guided by a plan. The first step towards this is educating them fully on the nuances of your brand and your values. This is important because it will not just dictate the content of the messages you send out, but the tone and character of your message as well. If you don’t have it yet, it helps to have a brand bible that dictates all your values in the clearest sense, its practical application to communications, and the overall goals you seek to achieve.

Once that is done, you can then focus your attention on the overarching strategy that will guide your internal and external communications efforts. This can be achieved by following five simple steps.

Prioritization

The first thing your need to do is identify what exactly you need to communicate at a given moment. If it’s more than one thing, you need to then identify which should come first. Nothing defeats effective communication more than sending out too many messages at once. One trick to prioritization is to figure out which messages have a bigger impact over the others. 

Planning

The next crucial step involves identifying the most effective channels to transmit your chosen messages. The key to doing this is to clearly define your intended recipient and analyze which channels they are most likely to use. From there you can then move on to creating the message itself. It helps to create several variations of a message and then studying which ones meet the criteria of your values and intent the best.

Production

It’s in this step that you decide what form your message takes. There are many options available to today’s communicator. Email is the simplest and easiest to produce, while videos can catch the eye but are more time consuming to make. Overall, how you produce your message is defined by a number of factors including purpose, audience, budgets and other things happening across the organisation.

Publication

When you’ve sent your message out through your chosen channel, it can help reinforce the message by using other channels. For instance, you can post a Workplace by Facebook message informing colleagues of a vital email that’s just been sent to increase the chances of it being read. That’s an internal communication example. For external communications, you could support a robust PR campaign with social media efforts, for instance.

Analysis

Finally, you should go back to your message once it’s out there with an analytical eye. How many people did it reach? How many people opened the message? Most crucially, how did people react to the message? Did it generate the intended response? Did it result in the desired change in behaviour? Uncovering the answers to these questions will help your efforts for internal and external communication down the line.

Special Considerations for Internal Communications

While those steps are universally effective in communications planning as a whole, there are special considerations when you’re undertaking internal communications. The first is the type of communication you’re pushing out, and this can fall into one of three categories:

While those steps are universally effective in communications planning as a whole, there are special considerations when you’re undertaking internal communications. The first is the type of communication you’re pushing out, and this can fall into one of three categories:

Reactive

This type of content is usually pushed out because of events and incidents that haven’t been or can’t be anticipated. This includes personnel changes, crises arising within and outside the company, or any changing demands made by business partners. Reactive messages take into consideration three things: an honest relaying of the events as they occurred, the company’s stand on that particular event, and what steps are being taken by the company.

Proactive

Furthering employee understanding, far-reaching policy changes, and announcements all fall under the category of proactive content. The aim is almost always to drive a change in employee behavior, establish a deeper understanding of a particular topic with employees, or to elicit aspecific change in behaviour. Messages of this nature need clear wording to avoid misunderstandings, the right channel to get the message across, and a clear set of desired actions or reactions.

Opportunistic

As the name suggests, this type of content takes advantage of content that already exists. The aim here is to utilize what’s already there to send a message that’s consistent with your values. A fine example of this is the retelling of employee success stories to reflect the potency of your company’s values. This can be used to inspire or even improve performance from your employees as a whole.

The second key consideration to internal communication are the channels themselves. Many companies today utilize a wealth of communication channels without properly considering what their people actually use. It’s important for you to take a step back and look at what your employees favour—be it email, chat, or the intranet. If you don’t meet them where they’re at, you risk your message going unnoticed.

Understanding What Makes External Communications Successful

When talking about external communications, the key differentiator with internal communications lies in the form of the message itself. Yes, it’s important to reiterate the importance of consistency with your branding and your values, but you aren’t going to win people over by sending out your corporate policies in their raw format. You need to focus on selling your brand and your product in terms of the value that they offer people.

That’s why values expression in external communications tends to be more subtle and nuanced as opposed to overt. Rather than simply stating that you’re a brand that cares for its customers, you would be better served by highlighting the effectiveness and efficiency of your customer service channels. Simply put, you get your message across without unduly labouring the point. You can do this by leveraging the many channels available to companies nowadays.

Those That Have Done It Best

As great as theory is, it’s always good to look at companies that have taken these many ideas and used them to flourish when it comes to internal and external communication.

Bosch China

This company hasn’t yet fully integrated their company’s internal and external communication teams, but has pushed for strong collaboration between the two. Buoyed by the corporate belief that “the brand is not an accessory, it is the main point”, Bosch China has made sure that its initiatives engage both employees and customers alike. This means that everyone is united behind who and what Bosch China is all about—allowing for all messaging to come across loud and clear every time.

GE

GE is the perfect study in the benefits that uniting internal and external communication efforts brings. This is because they fully recognize the part played by their employees in delivering their messages inside and outside the company. Any big changes or exciting product releases are first communicated internally. This transparency means that their own people help them communicate their brand’s values to the outside world by sharing what’s going on internally, externally.

The New York Times

Because the organisation thrives on information, The New York Times has built itself around a culture of free sharing that sees no differentiation between internal and external audiences. The very heart of the company—its processes, procedures, and programs—all focus on information sharing. This very open culture has enabled them to effectively and efficiently deal with day-to-day issues and problems as well as the production of consistent and reliable content internally and externally.

FedEx

What makes FedEx unique is that everyone from cargo handlers to the executive team play a huge role in their overall communication plan. Their C-suite executives never slow down in their interaction with one another, their personnel, and their audience on a daily basis. This openness has helped their corporate communications team maintain transparency and openness that effectively spills out to their external audiences as well. This means that messages come across as more authentic and, ultimately, more relevant.

Final Thoughts 

A proper narrative can only reach the audience when the content is released at the right time, making a calendar outlining content production and publishing essential. Scheduling also relies on deep knowledge of the audience’s behavior down to an almost individual level. 

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What is a crisis?

A crisis is defined as any event or sequence of unwanted events that have a strong impact on a local or even global scale. It can be anything from a natural disaster, an outbreak of some disease, or generally anything that can cause physical, mental, and psychological disturbance to your workforce and business operations. It also brings with it the potential for escalated panic and worries when not properly addressed and dealt with.

Why it’s important to have a crisis communications plan

The key watchword is “preparedness”. When a crisis hits and hits hard, your employees are going to react like any reasonable person would: with fear and confusion. This can escalate into a full-blown panic—especially when there isn’t a word coming from their leaders within a company. Regardless of the specific type of crisis that you’re dealing with, having a strong crisis communication plan in place and ready to go ensures that you are able to mitigate even the worst of circumstances.

The challenges of crisis communications

In order to come up with an effective crisis communications plan, you need to first identify the specific challenges inherent to this particular aspect of internal communications. There are five that you need to focus on.

A flood of information

Major crises often come with a deluge of information—and not all of this can be reliable or verifiable. It can quickly become overwhelming when it first hits. If you aren’t discerning and careful in sifting through this information, you won’t be able to effectively condense things in a meaningful way. The key is to think ahead about where you’ll source your information from. This, of course, should mean going to credible first-hand sources depending on the specific crisis.

For instance, outbreaks and diseases will fall under the purview of the World Health Organization. Localized economic crises are likely to be monitored by your local financial authorities. It might seem like a lot to think about but it’s far better to have these listed well in advance so when a crisis hits, you’ll know exactly who you should be listening to. It helps to have a centralized dashboard where all this is organized and accessible to all so you can turn to them at the very onset of a crisis.

A lack of information

Some crises are so subtle in their buildup or so mysterious in their origins that you might face the contrary to the above challenge. Either that or you don’t have an effective means to disseminate information and it’s your employees who find the information lacking. For the former, it’s all about clear organization and having a far more comprehensive list of sources. For the latter, it’s ensuring that you have the best channel mix at your disposal and the proper management of each of these channels.

Crises often come unexpectedly and can create waves in your workplace. Certain channels might become less viable than others and you want to make sure that you have effective backups to stay connected with your employees. Social media is one of the most reliable and popular means to share information, but you should also consider SMS or even in-office newsletters which would be effective should your internet connectivity take a hit.

Inadequate contact information

If you look at your employee contact list, you’re likely to find all their work contact details, naturally. While that’s great for the day-to-day operations of your business, it could prove to be inadequate in a crisis. Apart from their work email, you should at least get one other email and a number that they can be reached via your crisis communications. This allows you to reach your employees in the event that their work email becomes inaccessible for whatever reason.

Most companies have their databases stored securely, often in the cloud, for easy access. This is a smart way to go, but you should also have at least one printed-out hard copy just in case. You can never tell what kinds of disturbances a crisis will bring, and it pays to have your contact databases on-hand to ensure that your communications aren’t disrupted. This should be given to specific people responsible for internal comms at a time of crisis.

Unpredictability

By default, crises are unpredictable—not just in their arrival, but also as they run their course. This might make planning seem like an impossible task. While it is difficult, it isn’t impossible to be prepared. You can take a look at historical crises that have hit us in the past as a more or less comprehensive guide as to what you can expect down the line. After all, there are several categories that have cropped up over the century that cover everything from financial meltdowns, viral and disease outbreaks, and even terrorism.

As a preparatory measure for your crisis communications plan, companies should craft placeholder messages that address your company’s policies for each incident. If you don’t have those yet, then they should form a central part of your overall planning efforts. These can then serve as templates down the line when a crisis of an identified nature actually strikes. These should be written with clarity in mind—detail where you stand, what employees should expect, and even who is in charge of ultimately disseminating official information.

Insufficient visibility

Crisis communications isn’t just about sending the message out. It’s just as important to remain visible. A company’s visibility in a crisis can serve as a strong anchor that panicked or worried employees turn to for strength and comfort. Make sure that you have a dedicated channel in which your employees can direct their questions or even just vent their fears and frustrations. Your leaders should also take point in a crisis because employees draw a lot of strength from them.

More than that, you need to more closely monitor the effectiveness of your crisis communications. You want to ensure that there is full understanding of what you send out especially if there is some desired response that you are expecting. Analytics will be particularly helpful here for both distribution statistics and readership. Complement these with follow-up inquires to ensure that your employees got the message completely.

Developing the plan

Crisis communications plans can be painstaking and time-consuming to undertake. The thing though is that they ultimately will save you time, resources, and even energy when a crisis does strike. So, any efforts put into making one are truly worthwhile. The key is to approach it thoughtfully. Here are the most essential steps that you need to take to make sure you have a smart crisis communications plan.

Form a crisis communications planning and execution team

The very first thing your need to do is create a crisis communications team. Apart from planning, they’re the ones responsible for the eventual execution of the plan when a crisis hits. Your comms team should be core members of this team, but it should also include a human resource contact, representatives from each department and team. You should make sure to include a senior leader also.

This crisis communications team should take time to consider the challenges mentioned in this post and craft at least a working outline of your crisis response plan. To start, you need to clearly state the goal of your plan. You should detail your expectations of the plan and what exactly are the desired responses when they’re executed in a crisis. This doesn’t just guide the rest of the planning effort, it makes the plan easier to execute by anyone else in the organization should the crisis communications team be indisposed.

List your affected stakeholders

The next task for your crisis communications teams is to identify all the stakeholders that you wish to keep informed in a crisis. You should also list the hierarchy and priority order with which communications is going to flow. This activity allows you to designate other point people to facilitate faster dissemination of information. More than that, it allows you to more easily identify which stakeholders are more affected by one crisis or another.

That said, it’s best to create hierarchy and lists for the different types of crises out these are each one is unique. Viral or disease outbreaks are likely to concern much of your employees, for example. Financial crises might affect your leaders and investors more initially. Terrorist attacks might affect a particular region where they take place. The uniqueness of many crises means that you can’t get it all right at the get-go, but having a framework makes it easier to adapt down the line.

Create holding statements for fast crisis communications

Placeholders are critical to crisis communications because they allow for a more expedient response just as a crisis hits. This expediency doesn’t just comfort your employees, it also imparts in them a sense of confidence in your ability to get them through a crisis. Again, it might be very difficult to anticipate every potential crisis out there, but you can at least craft general policies as a response to the chaos and uncertainty that a crisis brings.

With the recent NCoV and COVID-19 crisis, Google has enacted work from home measures to keep its employees safe against exposure to the virus. It’s an effective move and one that is worth considering for other potential crises or disaster. Other policies can cover things like evacuation procedures, company support for affected employees and the like. You can craft whatever works for you, just make sure that the messaging is detailed, understandable, and clear.

Select your emergency channels and educate your employees in their use

While there’s nothing wrong with using the most effective channels that you use day-to-day, you should consider that crisis communications might take place in a drastically affected world. Common communication tools like social media, the intranet, and even employee apps are sure to be affected by crises that cause the loss of internet connectivity. Old-fashioned SMS messaging can work as a great backup in a pinch.

Even then, being dependent on technology, it can still be vulnerable to failure. You need to be ready to distribute printed fact sheets that detail your stand in a particular crisis and steps that your employees might need to take. Support these with in-office bulletins. Remember: as effective as online communication channels are, they’re very vulnerable to disruption. List offline channel options in your crisis communications plan as a contingency.

Identify the biggest risks depending on a crisis and craft potential policy responses

It will help your planning efforts to identify the biggest risks to your company and your employees. Again, this might seem like an overwhelming task in the beginning but there are some common threads that you can study. Business continuance is a big one and has to do with how you keep the company operational and functional depending on the scenario you face. The health and well-being of your employees are equally as important—as is their income and job security.

When you start to realise the many risks inherent to crises, you can start by thinking up the appropriate responses to combat the risks. This task is best done with the participation of your decision-making leaders as well as your human resources leads. You might even end up with lasting solutions that you can actually implement when a crisis does hit down the line. You should be as comprehensive as you can in this exercise, making sure you cover as many potential crises as possible.

Test run your crisis communications plan

Before you wrap up your planning session, it’s very important that you test it in action. A quick dry run with a few employees—paying particular attention to simulating the speed by which information is spread through your chosen channels—should reveal how effective your crisis communications plan is. Make sure that you collect a lot of data. Analytics from the channels themselves should show some critical information regarding distribution and readership.

In addition, you should get feedback from your leaders. Their input can be invaluable in refining key parts of your crisis communications plan especially when it comes to response policies that you came up with. Get feedback from your employees as well, especially when it comes to the ease by which information is delivered, how clear information is presented, and even what they expect from the company during the crisis. All these details should go into revisions if necessary.

Face the future

To say that crises are unpredictable is an understatement, but there is no excuse to be unprepared. A proper crisis communications plan will ensure that your business and your people stay on their feet no matter what hits. Yes, there are a lot of challenges that will be faced as you sit down to think things out. In the long run, it’s all worth it as it can ultimately save you in time, resources, and effort. A great plan lets you face the uncertain future with confidence and preparedness and also help calm your employees and their fears.

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Different companies, different reactions. Which one is best for your company, your teams and your operations? The first and most crucial priority of companies during this crisis should be strong coronavirus internal communications. Now, more than ever, it is on communication teams to provide accurate details, promote effective practices, and clearly explain your company’s policies and efforts to deal with the SARS-COV-2 outbreak.

Coronavirus Internal Communications: Five Critical Dimensions of Crisis Response

At the most basic, there are five dimensions that you need to balance out to ensure that your response to the SARS-COV-2 crisis is effective for both your company and your employees.

Communications

A lot of information can change hands pretty rapidly among co-workers—and not all of this will be entirely accurate. Businesses should take charge and ensure that policies, their company’s stance, and other key information is delivered in a clear and timely manner. Always have context for coronavirus internal communications—particularly changes in the way things are done to ensure that there is a clear understanding of what’s going on.

Employee Needs

The rapidly evolving situation around the virus spreading and any changes you have to your workplace practices will have a strong disruptive effect on the lives of employees. For example all non-essential employee travel may be banned, supplier visits may be canceled and town halls may be postponed. Companies need to not only have a clear set of procedures in place to account for these changes and they need to communicate these clearly to their employees.

Remote Work

In areas where SARS-COV-2 affects the population IBM has begun to allow workers to work remotely. The key to implementing this at a widespread level is being absolutely clear about the policies – specifically how to move from physical to virtual meetings, working hours, staying in touch with line managers and other key affected functions. Your coronavirus internal communications plans need to take these things into account.

Business Reporting

Any change in how a business is run or operates can cause stakeholder tension. This is why it is very critical that you pay special attention to stakeholder communication. Be more mindful and focused on key details that will put stakeholders at ease. Developing a cycle of rapid reporting will also allow you to identify key problem points that might arise down the line.

Cooperation

More than ever, your internal and external comms teams need to practice cooperation, especially with human resources to ensure that your company’s response is unified and decisive—while still being very conscious of the needs of your employees. On top of that, you need to cooperate and coordinate with efforts by your county or region’s responsible governmental body through whatever initiatives they implement to stem the spread of the virus.

Verify the Facts Before Releasing it via Your Coronavirus Internal Communications

While many companies will naturally provide updates on SARS-COV-2 to their employees, an issue that is key to consider is the source of the information they provide. In times of crisis, our connected world tends to be flooded with information. Whether it’s a result of panic or over-zealousness, there are a lot who—intentionally or not—propagate false information. When we ourselves are in a state of confusion, worry, or fear, it becomes easier to jump on the next compelling headline.

The SARS-COV-2 has thrown up its fair share of false news and false information. On social media, for example, there seem to be a thousand ‘cures’ and ‘prevention measures’ that have proven to be false. Companies—and their coronavirus internal communications efforts specifically—can’t afford to be careless. While a lot of this fake information is as harmless as it is useless, it doesn’t contribute anything meaningful either. At worst, communicating something that is untrue harms your credibility with your employees and could – ultimately – harm the colleagues themselves.

Rely on a primary source

The World Health Organization (WHO) is your best source for information on SARS-COV-2—including the best response measures that people can take. Apart from tips and even statistics regarding the spread of the virus, they provide comprehensive and very informative reports on their responses globally. You can even take short courses on SARS-COV-2 response practices for further information. Equally reliable are your governments’ disease response departments provided they also source their information from WHO.

Verify secondary sources

News outlets also make for great sources of regional information. The BBC, CNN, Washington Post, the New York Times, and others are very useful for companies that need information that is most relevant to them. Many of these even have sections dedicated to rolling updates on a regional and global level. It’s still however good practice for communication teams to verify the information before passing it on to your employees.

Carefully craft content

On a more practical note, it’s important when creating your content—be it an infographic, a blog post, or even a brief message—to be very accurate. Sources like the World Health Organization make all their content available under Creative Commons, meaning organizations are allowed to freely use the content. In fact this is encouraged to reduce the risk of misinformation. For other sources, it’s important to stay as close to the info you’re sharing and to have proper citations. This will allow your employees to fact check themselves if they want.

Preparedness & Planning in Coronavirus Internal Communications

Given how much the virus affects their workplace, this crisis goes beyond just informing employees, companies and their employees need to also be effectively-prepared. Employment search engine Indeed is a great example of preparedness. Though the Ireland office was based in a country with few cases so far, they preemptively ordered their employees to work from home. All of this after an employee in Singapore reported a potential third-degree exposure. In spite of all this, the company still reports effective continuance of its business without significant interruption.

Whether or not your company is doing similar and offering work from home opportunities or you have your own custom response plan, the role of communications is to ensure that people understand exactly what they have to do and where they can go for support. Remember that you need to be as detailed as possible with your coronavirus internal communications—covering key information like how leaders will issue communication updates, how to keep in touch with colleagues, and even how things like meetings will work. Processes and procedures clear up the chaos.

Evaluate your channels

In times of crisis like this, communication is more important than ever. And one thing that you need to look more closely at is the channel mix you need to use. This is especially true if you opt for measures that take your employees away from the office for a longer period of time. Employee collaboration tools like Workplace from Facebook and Microsoft Teams are particularly useful given the amount of media that you can post as well as the expedience by which information can be delivered.

Julien Codorniou, VP Workplace from Facebook, recommends creating an open and default group to provide a single source for daily updates and safety recommendations and then ensure these high-signal updates reach everyone effectively by marking them as important on the platform. You should also ensure that chat and conferencing channels are being leveraged also. Rachel Miller of AllThingsIC has created a useful guide covering a variety of options including Teams, Yammer and Microsoft Stream.

Messaging apps like Skype and Slack are good options for quick notifications should you need to get information out quickly in your coronavirus internal communications. Ultimately, your channel mix will depend on what has worked for you in the past. Just make sure to constantly check if your setup is effective for the situation.

Consider timing and gravity

Timing is critical when you’re talking about updates regarding the SARS-COV-2 situation. While you want to be up to date as constantly as possible, you also want to avoid spreading panic. Consider the timing of updates – perhaps once or twice a week depending on how things are developing on a local and regional level. What should be more constant are communicating tips from organisations like the World Health Organization regarding best measures to take to deal with the crisis.

Coordinate with authorities

It’s especially helpful if you also coordinate with your local authorities to find out what measures they have in place for the crisis. Particularly important are the contact tracking efforts that are being conducted globally. These are efforts to identify people who potentially had contact with anyone who has been diagnosed with SARS-COV-2 to stem the spread of the virus. This will provide employees with comfort and reassurance amidst the very real fear of not knowing who is infected.

Compassion Above All is Key to Coronavirus Internal Communications

In times of crisis, what employees look for is genuine care and concern for their safety. It’s something that you can’t really fake—and genuineness will go far. Cisco Systems struggled badly to reach out and care for its employees during the 2011 tsunami in Japan. There wasn’t a plan in place and so tracking their employees’ whereabouts was extremely difficult. They did care a lot for their people, however, and did much to incorporate this into their planning. So, their response to the Brussels bombings in 2016 was swift and compassionate— with their employees quickly accounted for.

As the global spread of SARS-CoV-2 spreads and brings out more and more instances of the disease (COVID-19), it becomes increasingly important for companies to place compassion at the centre of their thinking. People are afraid and the propagation of inflammatory headlines on social media and some media outlets isn’t helping. Because they play a prominent role in their employees’ daily lives, companies who make compassion central to their crisis response have a unique opportunity to make a positive impact in this challenging situation.

Listen

When people are stressed, they like to talk things out. In a crisis like the one being brought about by SARS-CoV-2, employees will have a lot to fear and be stressed out about. The most common people they’ll turn to at work are fellow colleagues, whether it’s at a one-to-one level or on employee collaboration tools. There they will likely share their worries, apprehensions, and fears. Many are likely to even open up about potential exposure. This kind of information is critical and will benefit a company and its efforts against the pandemic.

It’s important that you set up a dedicated feedback channel early on an establish it as something that is open. You’ll want to build up trust in this channel by actively listening and responding in a meaningful way. This will ensure that you’ll be the recipient of any key information that you will need to act decisively and respond quickly on during the course of the crisis. Active listening of this kind is ultimately beneficial to both employers and employees.

Respond

As far as coronavirus internal communications go, effective leadership communication is critical during a crisis. They can be a bastion of strength and certainty given the ever-shifting nature of the global situation. It’s important to take advantage of many different mediums and channels available. Video over your company’s social media can be a powerful tool—especially when you can complement this with online town halls via Microsoft Teams, Workplace from Facebook or any other video conferencing software used within your organisation.

While it is especially important for your leaders to be prompt in their response, there needs to be caution to avoid being inflammatory and contributing to the panic and chaos. Your leaders should, if possible, make a point of explaining any policy and practical changes that your company needs to undertake to manage through the crisis. This is especially true for more extreme shifts like remote working that can change the landscape of your company for the short, medium and even long term.

Prepare for the Future

If there’s one thing that’s certain when it comes to the coronavirus crisis, it’s that it’s going to be an unpredictable run. Now, rather than hope that things are going to blow over soon, it’s better to be prepared for any potential long-term situations. Google exemplifies this perfectly. What they’ve done is to use the coronavirus situation to test the company’s ability to have staff work remotely in the long term—in preparation, of course, for potential escalation of the virus.

You don’t necessarily have to mirror this move yourself if your particular line of business can’t really thrive by completely doing remote work. It’s food for thought, however, and is an opportunity to explore your options down the line. Perhaps you could try out a semi-remote work model with some days in-office. Or maybe you can even re-evaluate distribution of tasks. It really all specifically depends on your unique needs as a company.

Whatever you decide, however, you need to take to heart the key communication measures discussed here. As with all changes that can occur in a company, the key to successful implementation really lies in properly planned and timely coronavirus internal communications with your employees. Remember that in times of crisis like these, it falls upon communications teams to be the voice of truth, clarity, certainty, and even compassion.

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The Biggest Challenges of Virtual Meetings

In order to be able to ensure your virtual meetings flow smoothly, it’s important to be aware of the most common challenges that are specific to the platform. We’ve touched on a few of those in our introduction, but it’s worth diving deeper into them to understand how they can affect engagement and participation. Here are the most common and biggest challenges that you face when it comes to virtual meetings.

Too much freedom

When communication is done online—as is the case of virtual meetings—people are generally more relaxed as they’re insulated by the distance from the people they’re meeting with. This often makes it very easy for people to start talking over and even through each other. This problem increases proportionally in direct relation to the number of participants that you have in the meeting. The difficulty here is that it’s easy for confusion to reign and difficult to regain control.

Poor information retention

Modern human attention spans are already ridiculously short as they are—the average attention span of an internet user is 8 seconds! Virtual meetings can often run long, especially if everyone participating is comfortable where they are. This often makes it very difficult to keep people focused on the matters at hand, and just as difficult to have anyone pick up on the most critical information that your virtual meetings are trying to push.

Lack of social cues

One particular big challenge when it comes to virtual meetings is the general lack of social cues. These are the subtle non-verbal actions that we subconsciously or consciously look out for to gauge the reactions of people. Perfect examples include facial expressions and body language. A quick narrowing of the eyelids can signal doubt and disbelief while a crossing of the arms can be a sign of defensiveness. They make up 60% to 90% of our conversations with anyone and they’re very difficult to see in virtual meetings.

Misunderstandings

Because of the lack of social cues, it becomes surprisingly easy for misunderstandings to develop. A touch of sarcasm or even a well-meaning jab takes on a whole new dimension of meaning when you take the social cues out. All this can lead to arguments over what is essentially nothing. Even silence can be taken the wrong way with much difficulty for others in discerning what it means. After all, silence in virtual meetings can be caused by anything from focused attention, to tuning out, and even problems with the technology.

Trust is more difficult to build

There’s a power to face-to-face meetings that is lost in virtual meetings. Apart from the social cues that we just talked about, personal encounters help quickly identify common ground and parallel mindsets. These, in turn, become points around which your employees might find kindred spirits to get closer to and develop trust with. The distance inherent to virtual meetings takes away many of these things, making the team feel more disconnected.

Virtual Meetings Done Right

Virtual meetings, in a lot of ways, might seem like at a major disadvantage to face-to-face meetings, but they’re not without their advantages. For one thing, you can connect people across vast distances who might otherwise be unable to meet. Another reason is that it’s a key cornerstone of implementing a remote work setup that studies have shown increases overall productivity, satisfaction, retention, and profitability. The trick is to be smarter in your approach.

Take charge and set proper guidelines

The first thing you need to do to get your virtual meetings flowing smoothly is to take charge from the start. In your very first virtual meeting, start by setting clear ground rules on how the meeting will proceed. Key rules include only one person speaking at a given time. Anyone with something to present should be able to do so without interruption. Others can raise their hands—or an alternative custom action—during or after to be heard. Once they’re done, it will help you a lot to call on each attendee to ask if they have anything else to add.

Of course, if you have a lot of participants, that isn’t feasible. Just be encouraging and still ask if anyone has further questions. To facilitate better communications, make sure to offer to have your own comms channels open for those who might not want to share their thoughts with everyone during a meeting. On top of setting rules, you need to enforce them. When people start to talk over each other, step in! Being firm in this way imposes much-needed order to virtual meetings.

Give people nowhere to hide

Research has consistently shown that participation decreases in direct proportion to the number of people involved. While you may not be able to get everyone talking and jumping in at a single virtual meeting, you can certainly increase this across several meetings. The reason behind this need to involve others is because some employees will be not as outgoing as others—while still wanting their voices to be heard.

Sure, some people might be taken aback by being asked to participate—and you should certainly not try to force people—they’ll come to appreciate being given opportunities to speak out. The keys there are to be supportive as opposed to forceful, understanding as opposed to being persistent, and consistent in your encouragement. If you keep doing this, people will eventually get used to the system and start opening up on their own.

Check the time

Apart from the people, another thing you need to carefully look out for is time. It’s very easy in virtual meetings for things to drag on longer than they should. This can be frustrating for many employees who’d feel that time is taken away from their workdays to sit in on an overly long meeting. Much of this is due to how information is presented. Prior to any virtual meetings, it’s important that you take stock of exactly what needs to be discussed.

You should review what you need to present in order to cut out what’s extraneous and unnecessary. Streamline any presentations you are to give to the absolute essentials. Not only will this cut down the time for a meeting, but it will also aid in clarity and comprehension. The best presentations for virtual meetings use bullet points to highlight the most important bits. While there’s no hard, fast rule for the number of slides, less is always better.

Follow up to ensure understanding

While it might be common for people to send out minutes of the meeting after virtual meetings, you need to be especially attentive to the content. For one, a summary of points discussed (or the full document if you did a summary) should be sent out. Another check is making sure you take note on the summary of key points raised, who raised them, and whatever response was given. This lowers the chances of any confusion and misunderstanding happening.

Should there be cases where you couldn’t address a particular point for lack of information, make sure you make note of the time frame that you gave for providing an answer—then follow through accordingly. This, in particular, helps to create an atmosphere of trust and reliability that will work wonders for any future virtual meetings. Seeing questions being answered and issues being dealt with in a timely manner also does much to encourage others to participate.

Be attentive to your specific needs

As a final point, it’s just as critical that you pay particular attention to the specific needs of your business. The tips and suggestions here are only as effective as they are applicable to your specific company needs. If you require longer meetings, that’s fine. Just make sure that you call on everyone to share their views and create an open and free atmosphere of sharing. If longer meetings have proven effective for you, go for it by all means. What matters is what works.

A rough guide for virtual meetings is the three P’s: people, presentation, practice. Understand who your participants are, get to know those who need to be given more voice, and adapt accordingly. Tailor your presentation of information to fit what has worked and what does work in your experience. Finally, keep evolving the setup and execution of your virtual meetings to match what works and get rid of what doesn’t. You’ll soon come up with a system that works best for you and your company.

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Just how loud is this clamour? Well, the Owl Labs State of Remote Work 2019 report found that 34% of employees were willing to take a 5% pay cut if they were only allowed to work remotely. 20% of those surveyed were even willing to accept a pay cut higher than 10%. So why is it a solution that companies are hesitant to adopt? One answer is sensible enough: some jobs simply can’t be done remotely and need to be done in person.

The Challenges of a remote work setup

Some of the other reasons cited by companies are that there is the fear that productivity will drop due to distractions and interruptions. Others cite the difficulty of setting up the technological infrastructure to ensure work flows smoothly. Studies, fortunately, have found that working from home tends to boost productivity when you get rid of the office watercooler chat and additional breaks in work. On the tech side of things, faster and more accessible internet connectivity has done away with most of these concerns.

The biggest challenge that you need to deal with has to do with remote work communications. Because your employees are going to be scattered far afield, it’s more critical that your communication efforts be clear, comprehensive, and adaptive. For one thing, you need to ensure that colleagues know how to work remotely. Owl Labs has found that 38% of employees and 15% of managers don’t get adequate training in preparation for remote work. This can be everything from the systems required to log in, to ensuring work outside the office is done in a safe and secure way.

Remote work by the numbers

That being said, the numbers certainly back the idea that it’s a growing trend that can’t be ignored. For example, a study done by FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics has found that—between 2005 and 2017—the number of companies offering remote work has jumped by a staggering 159%. In the United States, 3.4% of the working population of around 165 million people are actively remotely working. Looking at the way the trend is going, those numbers are likely to increase exponentially over the next few years.

Digging deeper, the State of Remote Work 2019 pushed out by Buffer reveals the biggest benefits as seen from an employee’s perspective. 40% cite the flexibility in schedule, which affords them time to spend on activities that matter to them that would otherwise be set aside for the sake of commuting or a rigid work schedule. These include time with their family, catching up with friends and loved ones, and even walking the dog.

Now it isn’t just employees that are better off, studies have shown that employers benefit as well. For example, a 25% lower turnover rate was noted in companies that allowed remote work—supported by findings that 76% of employees are more likely to stay if their employer offered remote work options. The State of Telecommuting study found that employers save upwards of USD 44 billion with remote work setups. Part of that is due to a 24% boost in productivity and overall satisfaction in employees that remote work at least once a month.

To enjoy all those benefits, however, you really need to leverage effective remote work communications.

Effective Remote Work Communications: Five Crucial Elements

Get the Right Channel Mix

One key foundation of remote work communications is technology. The communication options we have available today to connect and collaborate are myriad, but there’s a need to choose the right mix. Now, the “right” channel mix depends entirely on the specific needs of your company. There are, however, several basic needs that need to be taken into consideration. Chat and collaborations apps like Microsoft Teams, Slack and even Workplace from Facebook are the most commonly used and are effective for quick communications among teams.

You also need to have a channel for video conferencing, global broadcasts and even virtual face-to-face conversations. Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Workplace from Facebook are most effective here and even allow screen sharing and virtual whiteboards should it be needed. Cloud sharing and collaboration platforms like Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive and Modern SharePoint are also essential for all your company’s documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other files. These allow for the organization and posting of content that is larger in size than email allows.

While not absolutely essential, it helps to have a company social network set up to allow for the posting of company updates, event promotions, media sharing, and other content that doesn’t fall under the remit of other channels. This is where intranets also come in. What these channels offer is a means to build up your company culture, boost morale, and engender a feeling of unity and belongingness across the vast distances.

Create a Clear Remote Work Communications Plan

If there’s one thing that the combination of the COVID-19 outbreak and the current uptick in remote work setups will teach us, it’s that planning is absolutely critical. Unlike in an office setting, you can’t just peek your head out of your office to announce something that’s really important. You’re talking about employees that are miles apart who might be on different time schedules. Others might be focused on their work and unable to review their company chats and social media.

If you want (and you should) angle your remote work communications towards educating them on key policies, driving attendance to online or offline events, or any other key activity, it’s important to plan things ahead of time. Having an effective cloud-based online planning tool like ICPlan allows you to not just create specific plans covering specific functions and audiences, it allows you to lay it out on a calendar to ensure that communications are effectively spread out and not overwhelming to a particular audience.

The collaborative nature of tools like ICPlan also makes it easy to get your team involved in your planning efforts online. This is important if you want to adopt a remote work model that is more or less full-time. Effective planning will allow you to cover the most pertinent needs of your employees when it comes to remote work communications as evenly as possible. With built-in analytics tools, you can also monitor the effectiveness of your efforts.

Be Proactive in Your Remote Work Communications

One of the biggest challenges in remote work is the feeling of disconnectedness. Because employees will often focus on the work that needs to be done, and because they’re physically distant from their co-workers, it’s easy for them to feel isolated and emotionally distant from their workmates. That’s why remote work communications need to be more proactive and vibrant in nature. Given the limitations, it’s important for communicators to get creative.

Several key initiatives include checkups among teams at the start and end of the workweek. It’s an effective way to track the status of work, giving everyone the opportunity share their experiences. While these should ideally not run for too long, sufficient time should be given for employees to open up, have a laugh, and interact with their colleagues. This is the perfect venue for sharing company updates. An additional mid-week check also works well.

Other companies even incorporate online video chat activities just to break the seriousness of work. Game nights with online games are popular options, as are online “happy hours” where employees can let loose, bond, and enjoy themselves. These can serve as good forums to place a greater emphasis on CEO and leadership communications. Their visibility in these types of setup will enhance remote work communications significantly while helping reinforce company values and culture.

Open Lines of Communication and Get Feedback

Two-way communication is always valuable in any company, but it becomes even more critical when you’re talking about a work from home setup. If before it was relatively easy enough for an employee to approach managers and human resources with any grievances, problems, or even suggestions, for employees that work remotely, those avenues might seem distant or even closed off. When this happens, you can have your employees sharing amongst themselves—never “letting you in” when it comes to crucial temp checks for employees.

The first thing you need to do is set up avenues for feedback. While email might seem appealing, you’re better off with channels that allow you to respond just as quickly. Slack, Skype, Messenger, and any number of chat apps allow you to create dedicated, private channels that you can use for feedback. When your employees see that their feedback is being read and—more importantly—responded to, it starts to build a culture of feedback that will help you improve your remote work engagement.

That’s the second thing that you need to do, actually: create a culture where your employees will feel that their feedback is valuable. This is especially critical if you want to find out what’s working and what isn’t with your remote work setup. The way to get this done is to respond to their feedback in a real and tangible way. Veer away from the positively scripted corporate-speak and talk to them like people—be honest and realistic in your responses.

Track Engagement Religiously

Companies that don’t take heed of the engagement on their remote work communications efforts can be surprised down the line when things collapse around them. With everyone so distant, it’s harder to see the tangible effects any of your communications has on your employees and their work. It’s easier to become complacent when everyone is so far apart. The problem with this is that issues that might be otherwise easier to address have room to balloon out of control.

When it comes to remote work communications, engagement surveys take on a new level of usefulness. These should be specifically and purposefully tailored to track the effectiveness of a particular campaign in terms of the metrics that are considered most important: comprehension, productivity, satisfaction, and similar. In remote work setups where it’s easy for employees to delay all but their work for the sake of time, it’s a good idea to take time for these surveys to be answered and submitted as quickly and easily as possible for colleagues.

It’s a good idea to also schedule one-on-ones with your employees to get their thoughts and opinions straight from the source. One benefit of the remote work setup is that anonymity is all but assured—no one else is going to know you’re talking to your employees. Emphasize this, put them at ease, listen—this way you will encourage them to open up. This, in turn, will help you spot problems and identify their causes so you can act upon them.

Good Comms is Always a Good Idea

The simple fact is that remote work is fast becoming the new norm in the workplace landscape. That’s why businesses need to pay more attention to doing what is necessary to keep things flowing smoothly in the brave new world. With the right mindsets when it comes to crafting your remote work communication plans, you can be sure that you’re ready to effectively communicate and engage your employee’s no matter how far-flung they might be.

The post Remote Work Communications: An Essential Guide appeared first on ICPlan.

Microsoft Teams Versus Skype for Business

There’s some confusion for some as to what the differences are between the two products. After all, there is a lot of overlap in the two platforms when it comes to functionality—both allow for chat, calls and conferencing among individuals and teams. The deeper difference lies in the focus of Teams on all-round collaboration. Sure, you can use Skype for Business to host meetings and share files, but if you want full integration with the rest of your enterprise Office 365 programs, Teams is the way to go.

The clearest difference between the two however is that Skype for Business is coming to the end of its life. Support from Microsoft for Skype for Business Online is end in July 2021, with Skype for Business Server 2019 (the version the majority of medium to large enterprises use) receiving support through October 14, 2025, but with limited updates in comparison to Microsoft Teams.

Understanding the Core of Microsoft Teams

There are two very important core capabilities when it comes to Microsoft Teams. The first of these is the communications platform. This is the capability people who have used Skype for Business are familiar with, with it functioning in essentially the same way. People can send chat messages and initiate voice and video calls or conferences with colleagues and external users also using the software. Much like Skype, you can add emojis, images, videos, and even customised memes to your chat if you wish.

The second capability is the hub. This is a shared collaborative space that integrates all of Microsoft’s other Office 365 programs directly into Teams. This hub allows you and your employees to use everything from Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, SharePoint, Power BI and more, natively within Microsoft Teams. This does away with the hassle of having to switch from one application as you get your work done.

Microsoft Teams for the Modern Workplace

Microsoft Teams is highly adaptive in a world where the workforce is increasingly diverse and organizational structures flatter than ever before. It caters to the need for quick flowing communication and integrated workspaces. At the heart of Microsoft Teams are three S’s: security, sharing and segmentation. ‘Security’ refers to the fact that Teams complies with the strictest security and associated governance protocols. ‘Sharing’ refers to the easy way in which content can be found and shared with others. ‘Segmentation’ refers to the native organization of groups and colleagues within the software.

Versatility is a watchword when it comes to Microsoft Teams with conversations threaded and readily updated in real-time to match the flow of conversation within your company. Each of these conversations is also tagged for the key components to allow users to easily go back and draw out information that they need. For those who value security in higher-level discussions, there are of course options to ensure privacy for only those selected to be part of specific conversations.

Time Matters in Microsoft Teams

One key differentiator between Microsoft Teams and the similar Skype for Business, is the inclusion of much improved time management capabilities. First of these is the built-in calendar function. This allows you to schedule meetings with all the fine details built-in. For example, apart from selecting the time and date of the meeting, you can set the channel within which it will take place. The automatically sends invites from within Teams without having to go to Outlook.

If you’re one whose work calendar tends to fill up, Microsoft Teams has a Scheduling Assistant – similar to the one available in Outlook – that can find the best times available for everyone involved. This saves you time you would normally spend manually trawling through your own calendar and having to reach out to ask how everyone else’s calendars are looking like. The application itself sends out notifications prior to the start of the meeting depending on the time threshold you set yourself.

A second key function useful to companies with shift workers is the ability to create, communicate, and manage work shifts for employees. Everything is intuitive in this regard. Managers are able to create work schedules for their teams which are then added onto a calendar for easy reference. These schedules can be customized to reflect different time zones for remote teams should you have them. These set schedules and any further changes can readily be shared to the entire team or specifically impacted employees.

For the employee, they have control over when they clock in and clock out. More than that, the Shifts functionality allows them to easily submit leave requests which can be reviewed by managers who can then approve or deny as necessary. If allowed, employees can even submit shift swaps with their colleagues. It’s a feature that truly empowers a remote workforce looking to stay organized in spite of the distances involved—one that certainly contributes to a strong schedule and – ultimately – improved productivity.

Bringing Automation Into the Workplace

Automation is becoming very popular in terms of workflow processes because of the efficiency it brings to repetitive tasks. There are two ways in which automation is applied to Microsoft Teams. First is the easy way in which you can integrate bots into your set up. There are a lot of options available here covering a wide range of needs. The most commonly used are calendar bots that make scheduling even simpler, and secretary bots who help collect key information for you, take messages when you are away, and more.

One of the most effective of these bots from a communication standpoint are survey bots that can assist in gathering much-needed feedback on anything and everything with less input required from your end. Not only can these bots be trained to proactively share important surveys, but they also collect responses, send reminders to those who haven’t responded, and organise data as well. They’re great examples of accessible artificial intelligence and automation that fit seamlessly into a platform like Teams.

The second application is through Microsoft Flow. Workflow process automation is something that has long been popular for people in the smart home. Known as IFTTT (short for If This Then That) These are sets of executable commands working off different applications and programs designed to trigger when a specific action is taken which then flows to a desired automated output. This does away with repetitive tasks—freeing you up for the work that matters and requires your utmost attention.

For example, you can create a flow that takes attachments sent from a particular channel in Microsoft Teams and automatically places it in a curated folder in your company’s SharePoint. That same flow can then send a notification to your Outlook that it’s done—and later send follow-ups should you ignore the notifications. The configurations are limited only by the imagination and—like the bots—creating them up can be done entirely within Microsoft Teams.

A Complete Collaborative Work Hub

The true power of Microsoft Teams comes when you have a full enterprise Office 365 subscription because then you really get benefit from its full collaborative potential. Documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that form the foundation of many people’s daily work can be accessed, shared, and natively edited in real-time via Microsoft Teams. All of these can then be organised—still via Teams—into SharePoint or OneDrive for easier aggregation. The built-in search function within Teams makes retrieval at a later date easy.

It isn’t just these programs that are fully integrated either, you can enjoy the full functionality of Microsoft’s other enterprise Office 365 programs right from within Microsoft Teams. You can use Power BI, for instance, to better collate and present key company data in a meaningful and easy to digest format. You can also use Planner to better visualize your work allocation and schedules within your company to make it easier to coordinate specific plans and projects—again without needing to leave Microsoft Teams.

Even if a lot of your workplace ecosystem is outside of Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of products, you can utilize Connectors to incorporate popular third-party applications into Microsoft Teams. You can integrate Twitter and get updates to your company Twitter page in a channel in Teams. You can connect Github to allow your developers to track their projects. There are even many CRM-integration options so your marketing and sales teams can keep tabs on that while communicating with Microsoft Teams.

Even more potent than Connectors are Tabs. Where the former allows snapshots of activity, Tabs give you a full dashboard view of specified third-party services in a separate window within Microsoft Teams. While the process to create a tab is a little more difficult than using connectors, it’s worthwhile if the function is critical to business processes. For example sales teams can track key outstanding tickets for review within Teams if set up in that way.

Safety is a Priority in Microsoft Teams

With all the sensitive and proprietary information passing through Microsoft Teams, it’s great to know that security is a standout feature of the platform. Data is always encrypted whether it’s being passed back and forth or is just sitting in a channel. That’s because the platform meets crucial compliance standards like ISO 27001. There’s also Advance Threat Protection (ATP) that analyses content for potential malware to keep your company safe.

All in all, Microsoft Teams is one of the most convenient and feature-rich enterprise communication and collaboration tools out there. It might come with a somewhat steep learning curve given the complexity of its system, but it’s worth it considering what you can ultimately get out of the platform. It’s the perfect central hub for businesses that are already deeply embedded in the whole Office 365 ecosystem as its integrations and co-operability are unmatched in utility and functionality.

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