Connecting Employees Through Internal Communications

Connecting Employees Using Digital Communication

Question: What happens when employees stop reading company emails?

Answer: They feel “disconnected” from what is happening around the Firm.

The marketing team was tasked with developing a comprehensive internal communications program to engage employees around the country. Understanding the critical importance of this task, we immediately set up a task force to uncover the underlying issues with employee disengagement and to find areas for improvement. Once we received the task force’s results, I quickly outlined a three-step communication plan to implement over a 12-month time-period.

Step One: Reviving and revamping the monthly electronic internal newsletter, The Insider, making it more interactive with local content relevant to each of the offices. We also began to leave printed copies around the gathering spots and in the break rooms for those who still prefer to read hard copies.

We use a variety of communication tools to distribute the video: an email goes out to all employees driving them to the website; it is featured in the break room TVs, the internal newsletter The Insider, and on the company intranet, InSite.

This storytelling method demonstrates to the staff that there is not one clear path to leadership, but many diverse paths, and they have great role models at the firm to seek advice.

Step Two: Installing television sets into each break room in every office around the country, where weekly slides rotate through important information and announcements. This reinforces the messages that management is pushing out, as well as celebrates employee achievements, collaborations and wins.

Step Three: Creating a company intranet site that not only distributes information, but also engages employee discussion and collaboration. Starting the intranet from scratch, we held a naming competition along with soliciting suggestions from employees on what information they wanted and found critical, helpful and accessible. With the launch of InSite, the newly named portal, we were able to have 73% of all employees online and participating within the first two weeks. Now, with over 95% of employees participating, we continue to make changes to the site based on employee suggestions and see weekly increases in engagement.