To help support employee engagement and improve employee experiences everywhere, we’re offering these HR Content and Communication Tips on an ongoing basis. Please subscribe here if you’d like to receive these directly in your inbox!
TIP #1: THINK LIKE A MARKETER (part 1)
Engaging employees is harder and harder in today’s digital world. Although you may not have the same budgets or resources as the Marketing team, you can still use some of their techniques to improve engagement:
- Personalize your communications with DATA – targeted, relevant communications get more engagement, so marketers use data to personalize their messages. HR has a lot of data that can be used to make your messages more relevant and get more employee engagement. That doesn’t mean individual communications to every employee, but targeting communications by segmenting your messages by employee location, role, age range, etc. will significantly increase engagement.
- Send important messages multiple times – Marketers know they need to send messages several times (4+) to get good engagement. So, if you really want to get through to employees, you need to hit them with information multiple times to increase the likelihood that they get the info when they want it!
TIP #2: THINK LIKE A MARKETER (part 2)
Remember, engaging employees can be extremely challenging in today’s digital world. Here are some proven marketing techniques to drive engagement:
- Use multiple formats and channels – Marketers know that they need to use different communication approaches to engage different employees. Use the same technique by leveraging different channels (e.g., email, text, Slack/Teams, posters, intranet, Facebook, Instagram, HR apps, newsletters) to increase overall engagement.
- Focus on the employee’s needs – create communications that the employees want and need – from THEIR perspective. Many traditional company communications are created only from the company’s needs – get better engagement by focusing on what your employees want.
TIP #3: SIMPLICITY = ENGAGING
Information overload can be a real challenge. Short and simple content has taken over the world – Twitter, TikTok, Instagram Stories, and more. But most HR content is long, oftentimes complex, and written with technical or legal jargon – the very opposite of the type of content that’s engaging. So when asking yourself “how long should my employee content be”?, keep in mind:
- Simple – make sure your content is easy to read and understand. Use imagery to break up dense copy and videos for optimal visual communication.
- Short – You may be concerned you can’t cover everything you want, but multiple snack-size pieces of content is more consumable by our brains than a single and heavy, longform piece of content.
- Sweet – Content is about engagement, and engagement benefits from empathy. Even with shorter content, you shouldn’t neglect the opportunity to connect with your audience on a meaningful, emotional level.
