The new year is a good time to review your employee engagement success. Is it working? Are your teams engaged? Do they access the platforms you have in place such as Viva Engage, SharePoint sites, Newsletters or WhatsApp groups? Download our tips guide.
It’s important to first define what engagement means in terms of your communication goals. Is your goal to maximise attendance and participation of calls, meetings, employee recognition campaigns and learning? Or do you want to achieve more – have a community who shares information, help and insights freely and easily?
Having worked with global corporates for 22 years, and knowing the stats on the decline in at-work engagement, our Communications Strategy approach includes both. The importance of belonging at work is imperative. The correlation between having a greater sense of belonging translates into an increase in overall engagement.
Start by doing an audit of your Communications environment by reviewing your platform analytics. This will give you good insight into what works, and what doesn’t with your audience.
If a channel isn’t yielding the engagement levels, it doesn’t mean you need to remove the channel. First review the content, aesthetics and available functionality. Often they aren’t maximised in both functionality, content and aesthetics.
Key questions to ask during your review:
- Are your communications visually engaging with consistent branding making it easily recognizable and attention grabbing?
- Are you using Viva Engage storylines, running Q&As or allowing employees to post questions?
- Does your SharePoint site provide employees with the information and tools they need to do their job, expand their career and knowledge base with intuitive navigation, brand consistency which is also attention grabbing?
- Is your WhatsApp group creating conversation and reactions (likes, emojis)? Have you considered replacing your digital newsletter with short, sharp WhatsApp newsletters (this can be done using a normal WhatsApp group and doesn’t require an app)?
- Digital Newsletters:
- Is your Newsletter too frequent or infrequent?
- Are employees clicking on links to documents or a page with more information which is the goal ensuring they are absorbing the information you’re sharing?
- Review the content copy – is it engaging enough to encourage clicks to more information?
- If your newsletter is too long employees don’t scroll through all the content you’re sharing.
- Is your content of value to employees – does it help them to do their job better, expand their knowledge and encourage skills development?
- Lastly, are you over communicating across your channels? Each should serve a specific purpose.
If you’ve ticked all these boxes and still aren’t achieving your engagement goals, we recommend running a survey or poll to get insight into what your audience want to be communicated to them. If your audience are already disengaged this could yield few responses.
From the feedback, and the analytics reports, it’s now time to look at the communication channel options and the functionality available in your organisation. Bare in mind that what works for one team may not work for yours. Some teams we’ve worked with use Viva Engage effectively while others find higher engagement through a WhatsApp group or Newsletter. Often it’s trial and error with a new platform and will take time to re-engage your audience so allow some time before determining its effectiveness.
Employee engagement from design to digital platform creation, editing and maintenance is our speciality!
We help teams review their channels and provide a report with proposed ways forward.
We then work collaboratively to craft a new Communication engagement strategy where needed, make adjustments to existing platforms, and setting up new channels.
Get in touch: sandy@bluejuicedesign.com