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. 

The post How to Differentiate Messaging Between Internal and External Communication appeared first on ICPlan.

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.

The post Virtual Meetings: A Guide to Better Engagement & Participation appeared first on ICPlan.

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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For enterprise users of the Office stack, it’s the innovative new features that Microsoft are rolling out that will make a noticeable difference for end users within organisations.

What’s in a name?

The move towards ‘Microsoft 365’ is partly a move towards what is essentially a cloud-based subscription model. Though the ‘perpetual license’ versions of a majority of Office suite products like Home and Student 2019 will continue to be sold, subscription seems to be the destination Microsoft is trying to reach. Fortunately for end users, this brings with it a slew of features and upgrades with little change to the actual pricing as it stands.

These include the requisite Office apps. So, expect to still be able to enjoy Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Note, and Outlook—which are the most used. You also enjoy Microsoft’s intranet and collaborative platform SharePoint, enterprise social network Yammer, and the increasingly popular communication suite Teams. The announcement from Redwood also highlighted the 1TB of OneDrive storage included as standard, strong security features, continuous tech support and an hour’s worth of Skype calling time.

Microsoft 365 for everybody

While much of this recent announcement is focussing on non-enterprise offerings, the new features will overlap into versions of Microsoft products being used by large enterprise. Microsoft 365 is paving the way for a revitalisation across the board. Emerging technologies like AI and even online monetary transactions are taking centre stage and incorporated in the applications where these technologies are most beneficial. Here are the biggest improvements that you can expect.

Microsoft Word editor improvements

Proofing within Microsoft Word has always been somewhat hit and miss. Without customisations to its dictionary, it’s very easy for the program to overlook simple errors in spelling and grammar. Microsoft 365 seeks to keep people from having to rely on external, third-party software like Grammarly for their document editing needs. To this end, they’ve added far more advanced artificial intelligence capabilities.

Apart from advanced editing features that emphasise better grammar as well as style. It will also include rewrite suggestions to improve the final output as well as anti-plagiarism measures—including a quick-click citation addition tool. Like a lot of AI additions to Microsoft 365, much of this will stem from Azure AI services. While Word is the initial focus of this move, the same features will be rolled out to Outlook and even Microsoft’s proprietary Edge browser (via an extension) as well as other browsers like Google Chrome.

Microsoft PowerPoint Presenter Coach

If you’ve ever found your presentations either too long or too short, Microsoft 365 has you covered. It is rolling out an updated version of Presenter Coach for PowerPoint. The name says is all. Utilising advanced AI analytics, the latest version will actually monitor your speech, tone, and the words you choose as you dry run your presentation. It then gives a post-presentation report that tells you exactly how you have performed.

What’s great about this report is that it’s very comprehensive. You not only get the total time you have covered as well as a slide count, it provides powerful suggestions regarding your pace and cadence. More importantly, it also aids in improving the quality of your overall presentation by noting if you’re simply reading off slides without adding anything substantial. It also tags filler words you might be regularly using without realising or any convoluted phrases that might have slipped in. 

Better connectivity and communications in Microsoft 365

The feature updates for Microsoft 365 when it comes to Teams are subtle but just as relevant—particularly when it comes to collaboration. That’s seen in shared to-do lists within a team, the ability to organise shared calendars that sync in real-time, and even share team passwords. These are timely updates given that the recent and ongoing COVID-19 crisis has driven more companies moving towards a remote work model.

Mobile improvements in Microsoft 365

Whereas Microsoft’s Office suite used to exist as separate applications on mobile platforms. While those separate iterations still exist and function well, for Microsoft 365 they’ve created a single application that brings the functionality of all three together. This lets you interact with different file types without needing to open up a separate app. It certainly speeds up the workflow in instances where you’re working on a document, spreadsheets, and presentations all at once.

More than that, however, this new mobile platform also allows the transformation of images into Word and Excel files with relatively good accuracy—subject, of course, to image quality. There are also built-in actions that cover a wide spectrum of enterprise needs like PDF creation and electronic signing for contracts, Sticky Notes for quick drafting of ideas and facilitated file transfer. Overall it’s a streamlined experience that will make working on the go significantly easier.

More is coming in Microsoft 365

The transition to Microsoft 365 is going to take many more months of implementation and staggered releases. It’s clear, however, that this isn’t just a matter of a mere name change. Microsoft is looking to the future here and is working to ensure that its full range of products are future ready and adapting to evolving trends in both the tech and enterprise world.

The post Microsoft 365: An Overview of what’s to Come appeared first on ICPlan.

Microsoft Yammer: Guiding Principles

Before we delve deeper into what else Microsoft Yammer has to offer, it’s important that we understand the main principles that guide the move towards a newer version—as well as the key areas of focus and emphasis. There are three concepts that guide the recreation of Yammer: communities, knowledge, and engagement. A lot of the changes are guided in the quest to strengthen these three principles.

It’s no surprise, of course, that these three are currently dominant in the enterprise. What Microsoft Yammer aims to empower is the development of communities within companies that drive culture and proactive action among colleagues. Within these communities, the platform aims to promote easy knowledge sharing internally. Ultimately, all of these elements create a deeper sense of employee engagement and a richer employee experience.

On a more practical level, these principles are also reflected in the cross-platform compatibility that Microsoft Yammer now strives for—not just with different Office 365 programs and applications, but also access points . As of this writing, much of the changes can be seen in the web versions of applications—such as with Outlook—but the design team has already said that a roll-out towards mobile and desktop applications is currently in the works.

They have also recently released a standalone Teams integration called Communities, which lets users have a fully interactive Yammer experience natively interact with Yammer directly from the popular collaboration platform.

Social Media With a Twist of Enterprise

Its own designers have billed it as an “enterprise social tool for community sharing” which is essentially social media for businesses. The closest comparison to an already familiar platform would be Workplace from Facebook. With the overhaul of the platform first being announced towards the end of last year, the similarities to Workplace from Facebook are striking. Just as a key component of Workplace from Facebook’s success is its familiarity, Yammer is treading the same path to good effect with a fresh focus on user experience.

For one thing, interacting with posts and announcements throws up options for rich text formatting. This allows users to put emphasis on responses however they see fit with options for bold, italic, and underlines. GIFs are easy to share with an embedded carousel to choose from. Perhaps the strongest feature is a dropdown highlighting your recent work on Word, Excel and even PowerPoint which you can readily share to any relevant thread or post.

All of these are presented in what Microsoft Yammer calls “social cards”. It’s a subtle but integral design choice that ties directly to the aim of cross-platform compatibility.  Each post is an entity unto itself. When shared via Teams and even Outlook, they look and act exactly as they would were they viewed in Yammer. It’s a critical feature that enables users who are more deeply embedded and involved with other Office 365 programs to enjoy full functionality as though they were viewing it directly on Yammer.

Enhanced Features for an Enhanced Experience

The features mentioned above are found within competitor software, but there is also a whole stack of new features unique to this new version of Microsoft Yammer itself. First among these is the Office 365 People Card. These are the equivalent of profiles in other social media and are tied directly to users added into your organisation Active Directory. These are useful for situating a person as they show where they sit in the hierarchy, who they collaborate with, events that you share with that person, and even messages and files shared between the two of you.

Another great innovation resulted from listening to their customer’s requests. The new Yammer now features AI curation when it comes to content in the feed. What it does is to filter and prioritise the content you see based on what is relevant to your job role, your position, and your interests so that they’re top of the screen. This adds a layer of relevance to what you get before you each time you check Yammer. This also applies to what is delivered to your Outlook inbox should you enable such notifications.

Other improvements sourced from users include improvements to the community section. For one, there’s the ability to post a cover photo to a community page. This can be used to better brand and can even be used to keep key announcements front and centre. Conversations too can be pinned within communities for above the fold attention — especially useful with key discussions. Within these conversations, users have the same rich options to customize responses as they do with social cards.

Microsoft Yammer in a Crisis

In times of crisis communications take centre stage in maintaining order amid the fear and uncertainty that can easily spread. Microsoft Yammer has acknowledged the critical role it plays and has incorporated crisis thinking into its reinvigoration of the platform. Empowerment is the name of the game and the platform allows for key information sharing at scale.

The ‘communities’ within Microsoft Yammer form an effective and safe gathering place for the fielding and answering of key questions and answers before, during, and after a crisis — regardless of where your employees and your HR/Comms personnel are located. The relative ease-of-use and simplicity of the platform make it easy to monitor, and the built-in AI makes focusing on common, critical issues so much easier—including mobile accessibility.

When Hurricane Irma ravaged the United States in 2017, Johnson & Johnson utilized Microsoft Yammer among other platforms. In particular, Yammer was used to create a community to facilitate communications with affected employees — even those employees that opened their homes to displaced members of the public. Key documents and files were also easily shared to employees and stakeholders. Yammer was also used by their senior leadership to talk directly to their employees and take charge of the situation.

Johnson & Johnson’s Employee Home Share initiative was a success – in part – because of Microsoft Yammer, and the team was quick to point out the simplicity of utilizing the system as a cornerstone of success. It allowed the creation of a centralized, global, and wholly online safe haven for their people. The company came out of the crisis relatively unscathed and much stronger for it. A culture of caring and mutual support emerged from the crisis revolving around the platform.

Outlook Integration Explored

Based on their own internal research, Microsoft has found that Outlook is still its most widely used service. After all, email remains relevant to employees and employers the world over. At present, in its web version, Microsoft has empowered Outlook users with a Microsoft Yammer integration that can be best described as near-native. Posts and announcements, as we already mentioned, appear exactly as they would if they were viewed in Yammer.

How you interact with the post is completely the same as what you get in the Yammer application also. For example, viewing images on a post throws up a pop-out gallery that you can scroll through. When checking on who liked or interacted with an announcement, a slider pops up from the right listing the information. You can like, respond, and even mark ‘best’ answers for reference. Polls created in Microsoft Yammer and shared to Outlook can be acted upon and monitored in real-time.

On top of that, you can easily shift to the classic, standard email view should you want to share an announcement or poll to anyone else in the ecosystem. One great feature that works in the background is that analytics work regardless of whether engagement was through Microsoft Yammer or Outlook. This makes it easy and accurate to track key data points that guide communications planning. Again, it’s on the web version for now, but they’re looking to roll it out to the mobile and desktop versions of Outlook come April to June of this year.

Microsoft Yammer Leverages the Power of Video

A study by the Academy to Innovate HR (AIHR) has found that employees are more likely to recall and retain over 95% of any particular message when it comes at them in video format. That same study has found that a whopping 93% of internal communication experts consider video to be a key tool in their arsenal. On the other side of the coin, 59% of those in senior leadership prefer watching video content over reading it in text format.

A Study in Effectiveness

It’s really a clear trend, especially on social media, with many companies and even news outlets pushing out video content for their key releases over any other — both internally and externally. One great example of this is the Alzheimer’s Society. They pushed out a new five-year plan via the launch of their own internal TV channel. This channel featured a film that expertly explained the key policy changes on top of explaining why the changes mattered. It was very successful among their 2,500 employees as well as their 9,000 volunteers.

The Video Advantage Applied

For Microsoft Yammer and its design team, their goals in improving video capabilities within the platform include building trust and authenticity in their leaders, meaningful information dissemination, and full employee engagement towards the company vision. Towards those ends, they focused their work on optimizing their work-flow through every event cycle’s natural touchpoints. All this through a platform that supports everything from professional on-site productions, semi-professional broadcasts from anywhere, and even ad-hoc mobile videos as would be the case with some executive blogs.

Professional videos are those that result in high-quality output as is the case with explainer videos, roundtable discussions, town halls and the like. Semi-professional options include coverage in the field — as would be the case in product launches or new office openings. Finally, ad-hoc can be as simple as the CEO sharing his thoughts and opinions casually and on-the-go. While each has value on its own—they can come together in a natural flow to push a full-fledged campaign.

An Example in Action

Say you wanted to run an outreach program where employees reach out to local kids to help teach them how to read. A professional video can be created to get the whole company aligned with the ideals of the program. You could even go for a live event set up for launch. At the organizational level—with the use of semi-professional setups like webinars or even local live videos—you can then reinforce the message or go deeper with tutorials on the most effective techniques for teaching reading.

Ad hoc videos can then be those on the ground—employee-made videos showing them and their experiences with the kids that they teach. Or even videos where they share their experiences and emotions as they undergo a program. There really is no need to have each tier mutually exclusive. They, in fact, work best in support of one another. That’s just one example. The central idea behind videos on Microsoft Yammer is to create meaningful connections that facilitate shared knowledge.

Towards that end, Yammer can be used to host webinars that are crafted and launched in Microsoft Teams. It’s currently set for internal users only, which makes it a powerful tool for internal comms efforts. A great thing about webinars set up through Teams and funnelled through Microsoft Yammer is that it enables for deeper engagement via company-wide chat and comments. All of the video content is stored in Microsoft Stream for easy access. Note the mobile videos are still stored in SharePoint for the moment — something that their team is looking to fix in the future.

Microsoft Yammer Compliance and Security

A final point worth looking at with the rollout of the new Microsoft Yammer are its compliance and security measures. A lot of these new integrations are to run parallel to Office 365’s existing Security and Compliance Centres. These improvements centre around Native Mode. This includes the assignment to one Tenant to one Yammer set up. It also implies that users are mapped in Azure’s Active Directory, that all groups created are connected to a single Office 365 Group, and that — eventually — all Yammer files will be stored in SharePoint.

Another important aspect worth touching on is smarter eDiscovery. Integration with Microsoft Yammer means that you can not only search by user and view their full Office 365 profile, but all their messages through Yammer are now visible alongside any others that they have sent via other platforms. These messages can be filtered based on key parameters like author, recipient, and even community. This makes it far easier to search for content as needed.

Lastly, minimum and maximum data retention parameters will also feature in the newest iteration of Microsoft Yammer. Users will have two options when getting rid of content. Archive mode will put things away into long-term storage. Delete mode will completely erase content after 30 days’ time. Also, it is important to note that deleting any groups will then result in the deletion of messages therein. All this allows finer control over the lifecycle of your content.

A New Microsoft Yammer for the Future

All of these changes represent not just the future of Microsoft Yammer, but also Microsoft’s commitment to integrating features that its user base has long clamoured for. It’s a promising move for a platform that seeks to fulfil a popular comms niche in today’s world from within Office 365’s already impressive Enterprise Suite.

The post Microsoft Yammer: Revitalized, Reinvigorated appeared first on ICPlan.

Microsoft Stream and the Rise of Video

As of 2020, over 2 billion people log into YouTube on a monthly basis—that’s a lot of people consuming content ranging from the professional productions to amateur projects covering a range of topics. Even that number pales in comparison to the 4 billions video views that Facebook sees on a daily basis. The reason why video is so popular a medium is because moving images catch the eye, and actively engage other senses, like sound through compelling audio, adding to its power.

For internal communications, these advantages are magnified when you realize that the often busy nature of work and deluge of other mediums makes video truly standout. In fact, a study by Ragan has found that 75% of all employees are more likely to watch a video over any other medium. Somewhat ironically, while many companies are quick to have a YouTube presence for external comms, they tend to lock it down internally for fear of lost productivity. That’s where Microsoft Stream comes in.

What is Microsoft Stream?

Microsoft bills Stream as a secure video service. Through it, enterprise users can safely upload their own video content which can then be shared within their company. What sets Microsoft Stream apart is the ability to manage restrictions on access via identity management system Azure Active Directory. This allows you to utilize your platform for even the most secure and private of content reserved for those higher up in your organization’s hierarchy.

It’s a highly adaptive platform—allowing you to use it for general internal communications as well as live online training sessions for up to 10,000 attendees. Best of all, it’s integrated into a host of other Microsoft 365 enterprise products to make it easy to share content or invite colleagues to participate across a bevvy of different channel options. Again, all of this within a system that is safe and secure. If you’re familiar with how YouTube works, you already have the basics down to pat, but there’s so much more to discover.

Creating Channels and Workgroups

An essential feature to Microsoft Stream is the ability to create channels—a basic to all video streaming sites nowadays. Within Stream, you have two options when it comes to channels. The first is companywide which is perfect if you want to organize things by topic. These channels are those that can be seen by the whole company. In fact, only videos with the widest spanning accessibility features can be added to them. Further control lies in the fact that only channel creators and the overall Stream admin can edit the channel.

Group channels are where Microsoft Stream diverts from other video streaming and sharing platforms. These can be customized with tighter permissions and limited to a set cluster of employees as needed. For example, you could have a channel focus entirely on your Sales team and limited to employees within that team. Their content can be more highly focused and attuned to their needs. For either channel, there are customization options that allow for internal branding.

Interestingly enough, it’s with organization focused features like these that you get your first taste of the Microsoft 365 integration. When you create Microsoft 365 Groups, they automatically create workspaces within streams for any videos that are created. Best of all, the membership settings of the Microsoft 365 Group automatically applies to the workspace created. This organization within Microsoft Stream makes it all that easier to share content seamlessly.

Microsoft Stream Cross-Platform Integration

Speaking of sharing, the true breadth of the sharing capabilities of Microsoft Stream can best be experienced in other applications in the Microsoft 365 Suite. SharePoint, with its ability to create team microsites for customized news and updates, is one of the best examples of strong Streams integration. Embedding a video already uploaded on Microsoft Stream is a simple matter of looking for the ‘web part’ in the list of components you can add to your SharePoint site.

Another very practical integration is within Teams. If you utilize that platform for keeping constant lines of communication open with your employees, you can easily push video content from Microsoft Stream into Teams. The simplest is to cut and paste the video’s particular URL into any conversation. If you wanted to put in a whole channel, just add it as a tab—Microsoft Stream appears among the options that you can select. From there, you just put in the URL for the channel or specific video you wish to share.

Still in Teams, it bears mentioning that you can also use Microsoft Stream to aggregate, collect, and organize recordings that you make of your video conferences in the platform. This is perfect for gathering minutes of your meetings which you can share later on with whoever needs it. As soon as these recordings are uploaded to Stream, they behave like any video uploaded on the platform. This means you can share it again as needed.

Interactive Videos with Microsoft Stream

Microsoft Stream really shines with the way content can be interacted with. For example, speech from an uploaded video can be transcribed side-by-side with the content as it is playing. This transcription can then be searched for key ideas and words for easy reference. Facial detection software identifies people within the video. Their particular portions within the video can then be jumped to via a visual timeline beneath your video itself.

These features make Microsoft Stream perfect for running training or informational campaigns. Whether in-person, over Teams, or through self-discovery, these features allow your employees to research specific concepts that they might want to focus on or revisit easily. No longer will they have to haphazardly click on a video timeline. They can also easily jump to key speakers as they might be directed to or go back to key points for reference with ease.

A great application would be ‘welcome videos’ for new employees. With Microsoft Stream, not only will they be able to take this welcome video with them wherever they go, but they can also easily search for key explanations on policies that they might find unclear or want to go back to. Your welcome video’s section on benefits or diversity and inclusion could be searched by term. Or they can even jump to sections featuring your HR manager if they wanted to review everything in one go.

Live events are also a possibility with Microsoft Stream. You can start them up from within the platform or have those started in Yammer and Teams saved onto Stream. All those intelligent interactive features don’t apply to the event itself, but they are applied afterwards once the final video is uploaded post-event. A final thing worth mentioning is that the technology is accurate but not completely perfect. Much depends on the quality of the video and audio uploaded to get things right.

Microsoft Stream Supports Forms

A final useful interactive feature in Microsoft Stream is the ability to embed all manner of forms alongside your video as it runs. Based on the useful Microsoft Forms platform, these can be anything from feedback forms all the way to interactive quizzes about the video. You can even run surveys to quickly gauge opinion on your video content—the results of which will arrive far more quickly than having it be a separate activity.

Setting it up is very intuitive. When you click on the ‘Add Form’ button as you prepare the video for upload, you get boxes for the Microsoft Forms URL as well as for the name of your form. You can then select the specific point on the timeline to embed the form into. When your employee reaches that point in your video, the form will unobtrusively pop up beside—and not over—the video for your employees to answer.

Inject Vibrance Into Your Communications Through Video

With Microsoft Stream, you have a secure, smart, and simple platform with which to upload and stream videos to your employees. It features a great many customization and organization options to ensure that everything is easily accessible by those who need specific content. The addition of intelligent interactivity features expands the platform’s utility into that of an effective training, educational, and reference tool for your employees.

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A World of Evolving Options

The older thinking behind workplace settings birthed internal communication channels that we now call traditional. There’s the aforementioned town hall gatherings in the offices, distributed memos and flyers, and even email–which is older than you think. As the workplace itself started to evolve to include teams over vast distances—often in different countries or work-from-home setups—so did the means to communicate also evolve. Nowadays, we have more technological solutions like curated social media workspaces, a bevy of chat applications, and even internally built microsites and intranets.

All of these evolved because of two key factors. The first is that many companies simply started growing—expanding ever outward to encompass sites across the globe. The second is the realization that the tech landscape is itself changing—shifting ever away from email as the primary electronic medium. As effective as email was in the early days, it simply isn’t “fast” enough a method of communicating today. In fact, email inboxes tend to get filled and go wholly ignored. Meanwhile, a lot of other internal communication channels are instant in their means of delivery.

A World of Challenges

Now the biggest challenge of having so many options available to an internal communication team is choosing the right one to use at any given moment. Many are the companies that have leveraged too many options that their employees were simply drowned in too much information. More than that, juggling too many channels presents the very real possibility that some employees somewhere simply don’t get the message. When that happens, many problems can arise that affect the overall quality of work.

Part of the problem lies in the “excitedness” people experience over the addition of new internal communication channels. Each of these market themselves as the best with ever increasing feature sets like screen sharing, the ability to send files expediently, and even video conferencing. Each of these promises to be the “fastest” and “most effective”, so you find companies that jump from one to another without considering the actual effectiveness to their organizations.

Ultimately, the wide range of choices is a good thing for a business. Having many internal communication channels to choose from means that there’s that one channel out there that’s a “fit for you.” That’s precisely the advantage that we seek to explore and fully flesh out.

The Keys to Finding the Right Internal Communication Channels

Finding the right internal communication channels that are suited to you and your needs specifically isn’t easy, but you don’t need to feel overwhelmed. That’s because exploration and thoughtful research are always great starting points and rather necessary ones to succeed.

Try Out Popular Channels

The only way to know which channels are most effective is to try them out. But you can’t do so just haphazardly. You need to be aided first by research into which methods are popular with your employee demographics at the moment. There was a time when IRC chat was all the rage and all anyone would go for. Nowadays, you have social media and their various internal messaging features being far more popular. A good place to begin is what’s actually “in.”

Experiment Thoughtfully and Carefully

In order to make your trial periods more effective, it is necessary that you approach it scientifically. Prior to rolling out one of the new internal communication channels, make sure that you have everyone brought up to speed on its feature set, its usage, and the purpose you set out for it. You then need to create a set of metrics that will give you useful data like reach, open rates, engagement rates, and reactions. Set a long enough period of time—a month or three works—for you to run the test.

Evaluate Your Options Based on Their Effectiveness

Make sure you conduct your evaluations in an organized manner. It’s critical that your internal communications team gathers relevant data in order to help guide your research. Many of these metrics are pretty simple. For example, reach and open rates are easy enough to evaluate as they’re simply measures of how many people received the message, and how many people have actually opened the message sent to them.

When talking about engagement rates on the other hand, you have to evaluate two things. The first is the number of responses and comments. The second is the resulting employee behavior. This latter bit is a tad more challenging to measure as it is very intangible. That is why you’ll need to conduct surveys and interviews to gauge how effective your messaging has been with each of the internal communication channels that you’re trying out. Focus the surveys on these key areas:

Connection to Company Goals

This has to do with whether or not the channel used to deliver a particular message drives actions or reactions that you desire through your message. For example, did a drive towards cleanliness in the workplace in fact produce a visible cleaning up of work spaces? Did an impassioned call for increased productivity indeed result in productivity? Go beyond the quantifiable and also talk about the emotional and psychological reaction to the message.

Peer to Peer Commitment:

This measures whether or not the channel you’ve chosen has pushed for more effective collaboration. Did your employees find it easier to get their jobs done? Did they find it more efficient to work with other teams critical to their jobs? Delve into specifics when asking these questions. Again, it’s necessary to also include what changes in terms of how your employees felt or what shift in disposition might have occurred.

Developing the Right Capabilities:

Finally, you want to also gauge whether or not you made your employees feel that they’re in an environment where they can not only grow, but also thrive in their careers. If your messaging is effective, they’ll reflect that in their responses to you. It’s often as simple as feeling that they’re “in the loop” and knowing exactly what’s going on in your company. A channel that’s effective will generate these feelings.

Match Means to Message

Another tricky thing about internal communication channels is that they’re very rarely one size fits all. Chat applications might be an excellent way to convey instructions or talk directly to a team, but it isn’t as effective as sending key documents in an organized and meaningful way. Email would still be a great channel for that. Social media might be more effective for sharing media content for your organization, but it wouldn’t be as effective if your CEO wants to deliver a key message. Even as you try out different channels, you should have an awareness of what each channel is capable of handling.

In-Person

The oldest of all channels is actually one of the best options to go for. You not only reduce the possibility of miscommunication, but you also get a more honest and visible response far more quickly. Utilize this channel when conveying information that is absolutely critical to an individual employee or group. Employee evaluations fall neatly within this category, as do announcements that affect the company as a whole. This is a lot more difficult a means of communication to use if your company is spread across cities and even countries, however, so leverage it where you can, when you can, and adapt other channels like video conferencing applications to provide as close to in-person as you can when it simply isn’t viable.

Social Media & Chat

These internal communication channels are easily compartmentalized so teams can communicate amongst themselves as well as with other teams in an organization. Keeping tabs on a team hour to hour is something that these channels allowUrgent messages that need to be sent across quickly are best served by these channels in the always online world we live in. Just make sure you clearly define how it is to be used. Also, don’t use more than one platform as this can get very confusing and counterintuitive as nobody wants to have to use more than one at a given time.

Emails and Intranets

When you need to get longer messages across or need to share documents and information, these are the channels you go for. Reserve these for the sharing of business critical policy changes or announcements. In order to avoid emails going unnoticed, it’s best to only send a few at a time. As you do, you should complement the use of these with reminders and prompts sent through quicker channels like social media and chat. A quick “check your email for the latest policies to be implemented” goes a long way towards getting that email open and read. 

Print

Finally, don’t do away with printed memos altogether. Just don’t use them in isolation. Instead, use them to reinforce messages already sent through other channels. After all, it’s just as easy for information to be “lost” in other channels. So, for particularly key bits of information, it’s still helpful to have these around the office partly out of due diligence, and partly as constant reminders easily glanced at.

Getting Down to the Nitty Gritty

Having many options is always a good thing no matter how you cut it. Instead of being overwhelmed by the bevy of choices, it serves you and your company to have a thoughtful approach to discovering the best internal communication channels that fit your company and your people. If you make sure that your exploration of these channels is data-driven and considerate of who your employees are, it’s guaranteed that you’ll find the perfect mix to use.

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