Diving into Internal Communications and Employee Engagement
Our most recent webinar, Improve Employee Engagement with Effective Communications, brought together employee engagement experts and professionals like you to uncover the intricacies of internal communications and employee engagement. The event aimed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the communication strategies, best practices, insights, and impactful data available within the internal communications landscape.
We heard from experts Maddy Rieman, Head of Customer Success at Cerkl, and Karen Scattergood, Senior Account Executive at Spitfire Communications. They led a meaningful discussion about common challenges companies face and how they approach these challenges from their respective companies. Beyond that, the audience participated in polls and surveys, making their unique challenges a part of the conversation as well. In this post, we’ll review some of the key topics covered and highlight the main takeaways from the webinar.
Key Topics of Discussion
The webinar kicked off with a focus on the impacts of effective benefits communications on employee satisfaction and employee loyalty. Our experts showed that research demonstrates with effective communication, employee satisfaction increases from 6% to 75%, and employee loyalty increases from 34% to 74%. This is not only important for productivity in the workplace, but replacing employees can cost 2.5 times the employee’s salary. Maddy also mentions that the hard-earned “tribal knowledge” lost when replacing an employee can be invaluable.
Additionally, our speakers discussed some of the most common challenges we face with internal communication and how you can solve these challenges at your organization. They shared ideas for how to cut through the noise, address generational and environmental differences, effectively personalize communications, and strategically target content. Finally, the webinar offered some tactical takeaways that you can use to improve communications and engagement at your organization starting today.
Thoughtful Audience Questions
Throughout the entire webinar, attendees had the opportunity to submit questions and be a part of the conversation. We’ve picked out a few our favorite thought provoking questions to share here:
Our first question relates to personalization, asking “as an internal communication team, how much personalization is too much?”
Karen fielded this question first, explaining how important it is to understand your audience and the culture at your organization. She said that some cultures “really welcome that and want that work done for them. And then there are people who think you know too much. So really take a look at your culture to determine that.”
Maddy built on the answer with her perspective that it’s more of an art than a science, saying you can tell when “they’re really trying here to touch on every key aspect of me.” Adding that you should use those personalization fields only “where it matters most.”
Here are some more:
Q&A
Q: “Do you see a difference in strategies for communication about health plans vs financial wellness (401k)?”
A: Karen emphasized the importance of strategizing your communications based on the topic you are communicating. The strategy for one topic may look completely different from another topic. You should look at what “health plan [communication] challenges you are facing versus the financial challenges… if you… communicate both those things at once… it’s going to be too hard for people to… understand what they are supposed to pay attention to.” She adds that “it’s really important to make sure that when you strategize, you’re fine tuning your communication to be really cultivated toward one topic.”
Q: “What is a good frequency for touch points with employees on retirement benefits?”
A: Maddy jumps in mentioning the importance of “knowing who has completed that form” so that they aren’t being bombarded with information regarding something they have already completed. She empathizes that “there’s nothing worse than that… I’ve already done this, why am I seeing it again” feeling. She ties it back into Cerkl Broadcast’s ability to automatically retarget emails to the members of your audience that haven’t engaged sufficiently, without repeating communications to those that have.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Our speakers shared some great tips and tricks to take away from this webinar even if you missed the presentation:
- Keep it simple – Use language that is concise and easy to understand. Don’t make your audience have to work to figure out what the message is about or what they need to do.
- Use visuals – Visuals are a great way to quickly and efficiently communicate important information. Research shows that people engage more with visuals than text.
- Clear call-to-action (CTA) – If your employees are confused and have to guess what action they need to take, you’ve already lost. Make your CTA short, clear, and to the point. Employees should be able to get to where they need to go without confusion.
- Limit typefaces – Too many typefaces distract the audience from the actual message. This ties back into the keep it simple message. At the end of the day, it’s more about the message than the aesthetic.
- Use colors wisely – Don’t overwhelm your audience with an abundance of color. Stick to your brand colors so it’s recognizable and does not distract your audience.
- Don’t be afraid of white space – White space can be a double edged sword, but there’s no reason to fear it. Without white space, it’s easy for content to be overwhelming. Use white space to guide your audience to where they need to focus. Don’t pull their attention away from the message with a lack of white space.
We’d like to give a special thanks to our employee engagement experts, Maddy and Karen, and each of our attendees. Without your participation, none of this would be possible. We hope the webinar was pleasant and insightful, and you took home something you can use at your organization to improve your internal communications. If you found this recap insightful and would like to watch the whole webinar, check out the recording below.
