Here’s a question for internal comms professionals at companies with multiple locations – perhaps globally – and different staff profiles: do all your colleagues have access to a PC?
For example, if your company has large numbers of delivery staff who spend their days driving, or engineers who work in the field, they’re not likely to be logging on every morning for a day’s work in front of a screen. In fact, some companies will have unskilled workforces who may never use a PC.
Which raises another question – does your mix of internal comms channels take into account the colleagues who won’t be accessing your intranet or receiving your all-staff emails? I recently worked on a campaign that required staff to sign up for an activity, and after much breast-beating about the low response, it turned out that the worst sign-up levels were among – surprise surprise – field workers who aren’t in the office much at all and don’t have a need to be online during the typical working day. And yet the campaign had been planned almost exclusively around electronic communications.
It’s not just that your messages aren’t reaching these staff, or that your event isn’t as well-attended as you hoped. It means you’re disenfranchising a significant portion of your audience – and it’s one that’s already not around for water-cooler chatter or corporate videos in the canteen. When every company worth its salt is telling the world that it champions inclusion, failing to address the communications requirements of whole constituencies in your audience is significantly failing to honour this commitment.
We’ve all enthusiastically embraced electronic comms channels for the great advantages they offer: they’re efficient, they cross borders, they provide great analytics, they can be interactive and engaging. But like every technological advancement, they tend to leave a ‘tail’ of old tech which we can’t quite stop using yet. Everyone in the 90s who decided to migrate their music collections to CDs still has a few cassettes in a drawer somewhere containing music they never found in the new format; our external comms strategies may be becoming more and more digital, but we still find ourselves drafting press releases. And there will still be uses for the old channels in reaching out to those colleagues whose roles haven’t involved adopting a networked PC.
So here are some things to bear in mind when planning an internal communications campaign for a large, diverse, scattered workforce:
This needs to be part of your strategy from the start – plan flexible, multi-channel campaigns. You may need to use traditional hard copy channels: posters, leaflets, standees. Word-of-mouth ‘cascades’ to line managers are still effective: hone your messages for communicating verbally in meetings and remind managers that spreading the word is a leadership activity.
In turn, this means your messaging needs to be capable of being reproduced in verbal as well as printed formats.
Allow more time: if you’re going to be relying on old-fashioned media, not only will you need time to design, output and distribute collaterals, but you’ll also need more time for colleagues to respond to your calls to action.
Manage expectations: as ever, your stakeholders need to understand that they’re not reaching out to people with access to technology and their targets need to reflect this. They may have to expect a lower response rate.
The one tech solution that can overcome this challenge if you can pull it off is by harnessing mobile channels. Pretty much everyone has a phone: if we can motivate our colleagues to download an app to their personal phone, we can push messages to them – and provide the means for them to respond, wherever they are. Putting yourself on your workforce’s phones is probably the best way you’re going to find to be in touch with them in a way that suits them. If you're going to develop an app, allow a lot of time to work with your IT and legal departments.
Which brings up the final point – the fundamental principle of pretty much all corporate communications: know your audience. Not only do you need to understand their work patterns and preferences, but insight into the challenges they face is key. You will know how to reach them and how to motivate them. This principle should drive your strategy, your channel choices, your messaging and your expectations regarding a response.
