At our recent customer meet-up event, 'Inside Oak', we invited customers from across the UK to meet in person to chat about all things internal comms. We ran a series of roundtables where attendees voted on the biggest challenges they face in their line of work. We selected the most common challenges and asked each table to work through a challenge and provide actionable tips for how to overcome them. The roundtable topics involved cutting through the noise and managing information overload, enhancing two-way comms and creating engaging content that resonates.
Topic 1: Cutting through the noise: Reaching your audience effectively
- Clarity on what really is important: Start pages that enable a takeover to reach every colleague can be very impactful but the key is to use them sparingly. It can be easy to overwhelm employees with too many disruptive elements. These features should capture attention without becoming too much.
- Newsletters: To avoid missed messages, make more use of automated feeds and take this a step further by creating automated newsletters that pull in recently published content, giving employees a second chance to see content they may have missed.
- Building personas and enabling preferences: Tailoring delivery based on personal preferences ensures content is relevant to each user. Analytics can help build employee personas and reveal how much content they are engaging with, which can feed back into helping you understand which content works best for each area of your workforce.
- Setting realistic expectations: Engaging every single employee is not a realistic goal. Instead, focus on delivering content that people want to see. By setting realistic goals, you ensure your communication strategy is effective without the pressure of universal engagement.
Topic 2: Enhancing two-way communication
- Using functionality like hubs, timelines and the recognition applet can foster two-way dialogue, but you should ensure there is a defined purpose for each feature, such as the timeline. This will help colleagues to know what they should use it for and how to use it, which can in turn also support respectful use of these features.
- The challenge of misinformation: By opening up two-way comms, anyone can comment or reply to others, so how do you ensure the correct information is being shared? By providing a Q&A option on the timeline, for example, you can ensure there is a correct source of truth by assigning a designated person from the relevant department to respond to questions or concerns that are specific to their business area.
- Encouraging feedback: To encourage engagement and continuous improvement, always enable star ratings and comments on pages. This gives employees a voice and feedback can be used to improve future communications.
- Community standards in hubs: To prevent abuse or misuse of hubs, you can establish a brief user agreement that sets clear standards of conduct, so there is universal clarity on what is and is not acceptable.
Topic 3: Managing information overload
- A quick poll within the group showed that information overload is a significant issue, with organisations rating themselves at an 8 out of 10 in terms of the volume of information being shared. The key takeaway is that overloading employees with content can backfire.
- Content timing: Overload is often not the fault of the comms teams. When content needs to be approved, often the leadership team won’t get to it until Friday afternoon and then an influx of information that needed to go out this week has to be published at once. Consider sending newsletters on a Monday morning to round-up all of the information from the previous week, when everyone has a fresh head and is more likely to engage.
- Use notifications sparingly: Overuse of notifications can lead to “notification fatigue,” where employees ignore them altogether. For example, some areas may have a constant stream of notifications which can lead to user zone-out. It would be great to allow users to customise their preferences to limit unnecessary interruptions.
Topic 4: Creating engaging content that truly resonates
- Test new features first: Before launching new content or applets on a large scale, test it with a smaller group. This allows you to gauge its effectiveness and make adjustments based on feedback.
- Using timelines for live updates: One great example shared was using Oak’s timeline feature to provide live updates during company events, such as annual conferences when some cannot attend. This keeps employees engaged and informed in real-time.
- Remember the colleague: The human element should always be at the core of your communications. Content should be concise and impactful, allowing them to quickly absorb it and move on. Remember to survey your colleagues to find out what they want and don’t want, which will refocus your comms efforts.
- Content expiration: Don’t forget to check expiration and review dates for content and campaigns. Keeping content up-to-date ensures that employees aren’t exposed to outdated information, allowing them to adhere to the right procedures, policies and ways of working.
How can Oak help overcome your comms challenges?
Our roundtables highlighted the importance of balancing the volume of information with quality and relevance. Whether it’s through better targeting, fostering two-way communication, managing notifications, or crafting engaging content, the goal is to keep employees informed without overwhelming them.
We hope these insights help you refine your internal communications strategy, cut through the noise and engage employees in a more meaningful way.
If you’d like further guidance on how Oak can support in levelling up your employee engagement strategy and to understand the varied applications of our platform’s features, we’d be more than happy to show you what we can do.
