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Employee Communication: 5 Tips To Engage Employees
Guest articles >
Employee Communication: 5 Tips To Engage Employees
by: Marcia Xenitelis
When we think of employee communication most organizations focus on
information tools. These include intranet sites, staff magazines, CEO blog, Town
Hall meetings and so on. Whilst all these employee communication methods are to
be applauded, they inform employees about what is going on. To truly engage
employees in the process of change, for instance, a merger or acquisition, a
re-organization, financial results or corporate social responsibility, employee
communication methods need to be designed to actively engage employees.
Employee engagement should always result in some positive change of behaviour
which will then lead to the achievement of organizational goals. Just
distributing information by any of the above methods will not achieve the change
in employee behaviour and organizational outcomes you are looking for.
Here are 5 tips that will ensure that your employee communication methods do
achieve those outcomes.
- The first tip is to establish whether the tools and methods you are
currently using to communicate with employees are engagement strategies or
information tools. So gather all the tools used and identify all the methods
used, their frequency, intended audience, whether they are one way or two way
communication vehicles and review the key messages.
- The second tip is important because your ultimate aim in employee
communication has to be to create the “Aha Moment”. The “Aha Moment” is based
on information that challenges the employee’s belief about an aspect of the
business. The information that suddenly helps employees say, “Now it makes
sense”, “Now I understand”, “Now I can do something about it”. Once you know
what the “Aha Moment” is this will form your key message and the basis of your
design of your employee communication strategy.
- This third tip explains the best type of research to find out what the
“Aha Moment” is, and the best type for this purpose is focus group research.
Focus group research allows you to ask employees about your business and their
thoughts on competitors, to identify the largest gap between what customers
think and what staff think customers think, and to identify what would create
a paradigm shift in employee’s thinking. It also helps you identify how you
will measure the impact of the change in employees thinking and to determine
how significant it is to achieving the business objectives.
Focus groups are a good format as they allow you to explore issues further and
sometimes you will discover issues or ideas you hadn’t considered prior to the
session. Focus groups generally are held for one and a half hours duration and
in groups of 8 – 10 participants. As the facilitator, your role is to lead the
discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, bringing them
back to the main issue if they have gone off on a tangent or to ensure that
all the topics that you wanted to cover within the allocated timeframe are
covered. A well facilitated focus group will identify the key messages for
your employee communication strategies as they relate to a particular business
issue.
- The fourth tip is that once you have your focus group outcomes, you can
then begin designing employee communication strategies that engage employees.
You should have a clear understanding about what employees know and what the
facts are, and the gap between the business facts and staff perceptions. This
forms your key message to create the “Aha Moment”.
- The fifth tip is that you take the key information from the focus groups,
identify a business issue that you feel sure your employee communication
strategies can impact on. By using that information and work together with
that area of the business you then implement an employee communication
strategy that can be measured by business outcomes.
Once you have gathered all this information you then need to design employee
communication strategies that engage employees around the one central message.
Many of these employee communication strategies will actively involve employees
in some aspect of change by designing communication methods that will require
employees to participate. These engagement strategies are then supplemented by
employee communication information tools.
About the author: Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject
on employee communication and has spoken at conferences around the world. For
more information on the types of employee communication strategies you can
implement to engage employees visit her website
www.employeecommunicationtips.com for a wealth of informative articles and
resources.
Contributor: Marcia Xenitelis
Published here on:
Classification: Communications
Website:
www.employeecommunicationtips.com
MSWord: EmployeeComm5T.doc
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