If you’re producing newsletters, digital signage, videos or holding town halls for employees, you may find that there’s a steep learning curve for building engagement with your content. Check out these tips to spread key messages and build culture within your employee base.
1. Less than 100% readership is not failure.
When it comes to the communications you send employees that are designed to build culture, it’s not realistic to expect every single person to read every word. Newsletters, digital signage, infographics and other recurring comms are great ways to sow the seeds of the culture you’re building, and to highlight the people who are exemplifying that culture.
The average click rate for internal emails is 5.9%, so if you’re reaching 20-30%, you’re doing pretty well (but if you want higher viewership, check out these tips). People will bring up key ideas in meetings or model their team’s strategy after someone who was highlighted in a recent article. The recurring employee comms can have a domino effect as people start embodying the values and aligning toward the vision, then influencing others (who haven’t engaged with your comms) to do the same.
2. Employees aren’t as tired of the key language as you are.
When you’re developing messaging, you’re probably tying things back to the mission, vision and values so employees see the bigger picture. As someone regularly working with these key ideas to produce your content, you’re seeing them more often than employees on the ground.
One of the best ways to do this is to spotlight employees as positive examples of the language you’re using, but it’s still important to clearly reiterate the words themselves. Don’t hold back on spelling out the mission, vision, values or other key ideas just because you feel like you’re repeating yourself. Remember: it’d be a good thing if your employees could quote the MVV word for word.
3. Top leaders draw eyeballs.
When the CEO speaks, people listen, and the same goes for other top leaders in your organization. If you have a new key message or idea that will be relevant for employees for years to come, have the CEO go through the details in an article or podcast that employees can keep coming back to reference.
That being said, don’t ghostwrite for your leader or rely on them so much that employees tune it out. Instead, check out these alternatives that let people connect with your top leader without taking too much of their time away from other important issues.
4. The platform matters.
This one is especially true for newsletters and other comms that are more time consuming for employees engaging with them. You can have great content, but if employees can’t get to it or it doesn’t load quickly, nobody is going to see it.
Investing in a platform that’s well designed and that people will also use to do their jobs will intertwine work and culture. When employees can click right from a frontline employee spotlight article to a tool they need to complete a task, they’re more likely to show up consistently and engage with your cultural messaging. Learn more about effective intranet strategies here.
Want to engage your people with recurring employee comms? Tribe can help.
