The focus on building an employee-led organisation has escalated with the evolution of the hybrid way of working and the need to ensure effective communications are at the heart of all organisations.
We partnered with Firstup, the World’s first intelligent communication platform, for an exclusive VIP roundtable discussion with senior People leaders around the topic of ‘Building Intelligent Communication is at the Heart of Employee Experience’.
Create a culture of cultures, not a business of businesses
Curating the right communications for your business can only be achieved by understanding your business and the people that work within it. Many businesses are going through big transformations and as they evolve are struggling to bring their employees on the journey and ensure their comms activities do not become ’noise’.
Communicating the values that your business is built on should be at the base of all effective communication strategies and the role of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) is one that has been increasingly central as organisations look to build connections with different cultures and generations.
Connecting people together across organisations to entice them to achieve a goal is one of the most challenging objectives for internal comms teams due to the nature of the personalisation of messaging. In order to create common personas, we must first gather the persona data of our employees, which is where a lot of organisations fail. The transferable skills that individuals have are hugely valuable pieces of information as this can help facilitate movement internally but employees are sometimes reluctant to hand over the data.
Connecting your organisational communications with the wider organisation’s goals can help with challenges such as hiring, whereby connecting career progression through the role of internal mobility can open up an abundance of workplace opportunities. The group around the table discussed how internal mobility can be notoriously harder than hiring itself due to the difficulty of getting employees to keep their skills up to date and then for managers actually wanting to utilise the internal database for hiring. The need for internal communications to be clear, cohesive and positive has never been needed more to succeed here.
Nothing is ever just ‘internal’
Communication means different things for different companies. The role of communications is regularly overlooked as a means to achieve, rather than a function in itself that can have a positive impact on each aspect of the business. During times of uncertainty, communication can sometimes be viewed as not the most important and its budget being one of the first to be cut. Internal communications may not be seen as a priority, despite the fact that employees themselves are the best brand ambassadors for an organisation.
Nothing about internal communication is ever just internal, it always has implications externally. The employee journey is directly impacted by the role of employee experience (EX), which has evolved from the employee engagement of old. EX is thought of as a luxury in today’s market with it being the first to go. All leaders think about it and discuss it but do not necessarily know what to do. The value in itself needs to be justified but is notoriously difficult to measure even though the knock-on implications on the EVP can be quite visible when it comes to Glassdoor reviews, for example.
Find your ‘moments that matter’
Understanding the key moments of impact during the employee lifecycle and mapping out the employee journey provides all employees with an enhanced employee experience throughout their careers.
Time, effort and most importantly, money, go into finding and hiring someone, who then gets put through a poor process of onboarding and ultimately once they’re in the role, no effort is made to keep them in the company. There needs to be more thought put into the onboarding for the employee themselves. The question was asked “why can’t technology that is used elsewhere in the business be used during onboarding’ to help improve the overall experience. The conversation looked at how organisations use technologies and processes across the business, which could also be used within the role of the employee experience. For example, NPS scoring is very common on the customer side but why does this not also get utilised on the employee side to help understand when and where things are going right/wrong throughout the employee journey.
Many of the group spoke about the challenges of larger organisations, which may have many different subsidiaries within the umbrella brand. In these circumstances, many people in individual businesses won’t care about the wider umbrella business. The role of communications during change, especially within larger organisations, has faced huge challenges over recent years, especially with the ongoing uncertainty. The conversation looked at where the role of comms starts/finishes and where change management has an influence. During these times of change, it must be audience led and not leader led. Change management must work with comms and separately, work with management to deliver impactful change, which lands successfully.
People-first companies around the world are successful when their communication pipeline is mapped to their engagement, skills and capabilities. The better experience that our employees have, the better results our organisations will have. Every employee’s journey is as important as each others, so we must ensure we are aware of the key moments that matter for each individual employee, personalisation is vital and ensuring we are tracking our success and failures is the only way we can improve our engagement, productivity and retention.
About Firstup
Firstup is the world’s first intelligent communication platform. More than 40 percent of Fortune 100 companies use our platform to connect with their people, design and deliver personalized communications, and gain engagement insights throughout the employee journey. With Firstup, employers can view engagement data in real time, by organization, department, or employee. That helps leaders better understand their workforce, make informed decisions, and provide better experiences from hire to retire. Companies like Amazon, Tesco, Ford, and Hilton use Firstup every day to improve outcomes for their employees. Learn more at firstup.io
