A recent Forbes ‘State of the Workplace’ study revealed a very interesting observation about the impact of poor internal communications in the workplace.
The study found that half of employees don’t just feel that poor communication hinders productivity – they also feel that it breeds mistrust.
If you are an internal communications professional, the twofold impact of poor communications reveals the unique task you have on your hands.
The collaboration tools, channels, and resources you provide are responsible for helping employees to be more productive. However, your work directly impacts certain ‘intangible’ metrics: feelings like trust, and a sense of belonging.
You don’t need us to tell you that. While these can’t always be reliably measured as KPIs, the knock-on effects of these – such as retention and productivity – certainly can be.
That’s why, when it comes to your internal communications strategy, you need a communications hub that lets you not only connect employees digitally, but deliver an experience that satisfies your employee’s expectations around these ‘intangibles’.
An employee intranet platform is the solution. If you read on, we will explain exactly how transformative the right one can be.
1. Resolving ‘communications overload’
For knowledge workers, information is power.
However, when organizations are generating a greater volume of communications than ever (to bridge the gap between global, distributed teams), there is a human impact to not doing so with the right communications channels in place.
1 in 4 employees feel overwhelmed by the amount of communications they receive.
This is critically important, because, as well as creating issues that are well within your power to control (above all, those related to compliance, where policies and procedures go unread), communication overload also impacts an individual’s wellbeing, a key driver of retention.
(As you will see, this is far from the only case where a strategic internal communication priority has the power to impact those ‘intangibles’ we mentioned…)
Solution: This is where engagement analytics have the power to help you tweak and perfect your internal comms strategy, while also improving the employee’s user experience. By understanding who is responding to your communications – or which communications frequently go unread – it prevents you from wasting time and resources in ineffective messaging. Equally, it also reduces the volume of messages employees receive to purely the essential ones – making their workload more-manageable.
Top tip: Whether you have analytics dashboards built into your existing communication tools, or are looking for a solution that helps you measure the impact of your communications, LiveTiles Intranet provides the ‘all-in-one’ platform where you can measure the impact of your communications, tweak your strategy, and execute it.
2. Making (every) internal communication relevant
In a time of information overload, it’s an achievement to ensure that essential internal communications aren’t ignored.
However, it’s another thing entirely to make even “non-essential” communications – those not related to compliance or work tasks – highly relevant for employees.
While driving internal culture may seem to be more in the realm of HR, your internal comms strategy has the power to effect enormous change on yet another ‘intangible’.
For a large (and growing) proportion of employees for whom company culture is non-negotiable, personalization of the workplace (down to the company information they receive, and their experience of the digital workplace) is increasingly a must-have in a modern intranet.
Employee-first personalization of the messaging and functionality their intranet platform provides not only improves adoption and engagement, but it also encourages innovation when communication and collaboration at a grass-roots level is supported.
Solution: This is why your intranet platform needs to not only connect people to tools and knowledge, but also have the versatility of a company ‘social media’ platform. This unlocks the opportunity for employees to connect to one-another socially, which is essential for building culture, and for starting off-the-cuff conversations that are the wellspring of innovation.
3. Minimizing app-switching and winning back time
We have talked at-length about how information overload impacts communication – but this isn’t the only thing that it impacts.
Information overload is insidious because of how deeply it impacts your employee’s everyday experience of their digital workplace.
It’s a simple fact that sorting and sifting through data (and the applications employees need to do work) takes up valuable time – but you may be surprised at how much time it costs you.
For knowledge workers, on-average:
- 8% of working time in a day is taken up simply by switching apps
- 20% of working time – one entire working day per week – is spent trying to find all the resources we need to complete tasks
When knowledge workers have an average of 11 applications to use in order to complete their everyday tasks (Gartner Inc.), it’s little wonder that many feel overwhelmed, unproductive, and inefficient.
It’s because they are.
That’s why a single hub that provides access to knowledge and tools is essential to help streamline your employee’s digital experience and restore their feelings of control.
Solution: Modern intranet software provides employees with easy access to the apps and people they need to work efficiently – all in one place that minimizes app-switching. However, it’s by implementing effective search functionality (backed by a robust metadata architecture) that you ensure that the foundation for your intranet remains accessible, scalable, and futureproof.
Top Tip: ‘Out-of-the-box’ SharePoint Intranet provides perhaps the most versatile base for an ‘all-in-one’ employee intranet. Among other reasons, this is because it allows you to integrate Microsoft’s own creation tools, like Power Platform and Viva Connections cards, alongside vital third-party productivity apps, like Workday and Salesforce, into one single platform.
4. Bridging your internal communication gaps
Lastly, we need to talk about communication gaps.
Communication gaps don’t simply exist between business units. They arise where teams speak multiple languages, are distributed between different regions and time zones, and work between the office, home, and on the frontline.
You already know of the difficulties that siloes like these present to effective work – not least in ‘blocking off’ information and expertise.
However, it also presents another ‘intangible’ issue – one of belonging.
In many organizations, it’s not uncommon to have a situation where:
- Desk-based employees enjoy a rich intranet experience, but frontline employees receive only the rare update email or newsletter – if anything
- Remote employees are unincluded in events open to office-based teams
- One language for communication is prized above all others, even if the majority in a given region don’t speak it
These scenarios create a ‘two-speed’ employee experience, in which some employees receive (or feel they receive) less support than others.
Fortunately, while ‘belonging’ seems like a very difficult ‘intangible’ to control, the right internal communications platform can play a pivotal role.
Solution: You know that an intranet can knit the fabric of distributed teams, but for it to be truly inclusive, you can implement automatic translation, mobile access for frontline workers, and provide access to the platform in the way that suits the employee, be it through desktop, or mobile.
Top Tip: Mobile functionality is a given in a modern intranet. However, only a few intranet solutions can be accessed entirely within Microsoft Teams. With LiveTiles, it’s possible to provide a rich intranet experience natively within one of your employees’ must-use platforms – reducing the number of apps to switch even further, and optimizing the way they find people, resources, and information.
Is Microsoft part of your organization’s internal communications toolkit?
If so, you already have the foundation required to transform your internal communications strategy – and deliver both tangible strategic benefits, as well as satisfy the ‘intangibles’ that are no less important for an exceptional employee experience.
By harnessing the power of Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and Office 365, you can simply add LiveTiles’ intranet solutions for a low-risk, easy-to-adopt way to transform your team’s most-essential applications into a rich, highly personalized digital employee experience.
LiveTiles is a turnkey SharePoint intranet that unlocks the full potential of your internal communications strategy. But for your employees, it’s simply the essential tool that they will open at the start of every day.
It helps you achieve more than you thought possible with your existing Microsoft 365 investment. So, why not book a demo to see how LiveTiles can transform internal communications at your organization?
