Reposted from cycl.ch.
An employee engagement app can help minimize disruption to operations by keeping your employees connected in unexpected situations, regardless of where they’re working.
It doesn’t necessarily take a global crisis such as the Coronavirus to urge organizations to introduce home office work at large scale to keep their operations going – local weather events or similar disasters, such as the bushfires that hit Australia in early 2020 are sufficient to disrupt work routines, processes, and teams.
- Proven tips for communication with an employee engagement during crises
- The emergency-proof communication infrastructure
- Support of LiveTiles during the Corona (COVID-19) crisis
For LiveTiles and many other companies, this has led to redefining how we communicate in times of crisis. In the workplace, technology can help minimize disruption to operations by keeping employees – especially those who work remotely or at home – connected, regardless of where they are. In times of uncertainty, communication is key to help businesses safeguard their employees and navigate the unpredictable.
Configuration tips and best practices to keep employees connected during a crisis with our LiveTiles Employee Engagement App
In times of emergency, an employee engagement app gives companies the ability to send updates and alerts to employees instantly. However, it’s equally important to have two-way communication to receive feedback from your staff, especially with a globally and physically distributed workforce. We have compiled a list of key LiveTiles Employee Engagement App features and best practices to leverage during a crisis.
- Create an open and default channel in your employee engagement app to provide a single source of truth for daily updates and safety recommendations and then ensure these high-signal updates reach everyone effectively by sending them as alerts or by using an illustrative header picture. If you already have a set of established channels, share updates and guidance regularly in channels that employees will be familiar with and check.
- Reduce bureaucracy: high-profile issues typically attract review by senior management, legal, risk management and a host of other functions, leading to slow, cumbersome communication. Assemble a trusted team of communicators and enable them to publish directly by giving them Editor rights in the corresponding groups.
- Don’t assume that information creates informedness: Your employees might have direct access to many sources of information and you might reasonably conclude that there is so much information available externally that you don’t need to do anything additional. But this is not true: creating and widely sharing a regularly updated summary of facts and implications for you as an organization is invaluable. Activate push notifications and read-receipts to ensure important alerts and updates are seen or rules of conduct are acknowledged.
- Increase your communication cadence to share news and update daily or even more frequently. Tune your publishing process to be able to communicate in high frequency, respond to critical situations in minutes and leverage our features to automate, schedule and targeted comms in advance. This allows you to constantly reframe your understanding of what’s happening. Don’t wait until you completely sure and know everything out of a fear of looking misinformed or indecisive. In a rapidly changing situation, a living document, with a time-stamped «best current view» is essential to learn and adapt.
- Living digital content can enhance speed by avoiding the issuing and approving of multiple documents, and also reduces risk, since it can easily be updated or withdrawn if necessary. Our employee engagement app provides a publishing process to update existing alerts and content and republish updates in the same article to always provide a complete and timely picture in one place and avoid confusion.
- Establish a social channel for user-generated posts to receive feedback from the field and in case of emergencies. Quickly respond to questions and comments from your staff and set up an FAQ group.
- Integrate videos to make information and recommendations more engaging. Simply establish a private channel on YouTube or Vimeo and publish your own videos for internal use only, or link official recommendation videos from your local government or other trustworthy sources. In our employee engagement app, you can embed video URLs in your posts to provide a seamless experience or even use a video directly in your news header.
- Support your teams at home and minimize stress by sharing encouraging and empathetic posts and making your leaders visible in your employee engagement app.
- Set up pages to provide structured information, such as policies, work instructions, process documentation, online training, and learning videos, forms, templates, and documents as well as links to access other tools to help your employees doing as much of their work remotely and without the need to travel.
- Support your teams at home and minimize stress by sharing encouraging and empathetic posts and making your leaders visible in your employee engagement app.
- Set up pages to provide structured information, such as policies, work instructions, process documentation, online training, and learning videos, forms, templates, and documents as well as links to access other tools to help your employees doing as much of their work remotely and without the need to travel.
