4 ways to boost employee connection with communication

At its core, employee communication is about connection – to the company, to leadership, to values and to one another. Keeping communication at the centre of everything you do helps employees feel a deeper connection to your purpose, mission, and values.

This could mean understanding where the company is headed in the future or knowing why a new CFO was brought in to lead the way. Open and honest communication builds trust and transparency across your workforce. It helps streamline processes, strengthens relationships and even improves the customer experience.

And with the right employee experience platform, you can create consistent and engaging communication that reaches every employee, no matter where they are or how they work. Here are four real-life examples of how communication can empower deeper connection throughout your organisation.

Want to boost employee engagement at your business? Download our latest eBook: 6 Employee Communication Strategies to Drive Engagement and Connection.

4 ways to drive connection through communication

Connecting employees to the leadership team through transparency and trust

Is your organisation’s leadership team visible via employee communications? Our Head of IT Systems created a series of blogs to walk our team through our transition from one core IT system to another. This transition was one that created a lot of questions and worry for our teams, and this blog series was essential for making sure everyone was getting the same messages – and that they could go back and reference them as the transition progressed.

The communication throughout the series was open and honest about what to expect in the coming months, and readers followed along each week to learn more from an expert they may not have ever met before, but whose decisions impacted their day-to-day productivity.

It was important for our IT group that employees got accurate information, and it was essential to employees that they were aware of the advantages and potential challenges of this transition. Our IT Group made sure their blog series followed three steps to truly engage the audience. Take a look below:

A three-step process for making team achievements more visible

All-in-all, employees were able to feel more connected to a leader on our Technology team due to this increased visibility and open and honest communications. As the blogs were shared, and key team members were highlighted, employees around the globe could click on their profiles to learn more about them and even place individual recognition right from the post.

Connecting employees to each other in a high-growth environment

In a fast-growing company, it’s crucial to make sure all employees are on the same page, feel connected to the company and also feel connected to each other. In order to improve company culture in a high-growth environment – especially in a global company – effective employee communications can be the force that pulls your people closer to the company mission.

It’s important for employees to understand the organisational structure, as high-growth environments tend to change often. And employees need to pair faces with names to feel connected to the other people who might even be on their team, but whom they've never met in person.

Here at Reward Gateway | Edenred, we created employee profiles on our employee engagement platform, called boom!, which can be updated on the fly and is another way we help keep our employees in the loop. Employees can easily find information about what team their colleague works on, who they report to and who they manage, along with some fun facts, their birthday, email address, and phone number (depending on the employee’s preferences). Ultimately, these profiles allow our global workforce to feel more connected to one another and improve our company culture.

Using communications for updates on People News

Another way we keep our global workforce in the loop is through our weekly People News updates. Each week, RGERs can learn about new hires, leavers, anniversaries, and who’s in the spotlight for that week (which includes a fun fact or two). This update comes right to their inboxes as part of a newsfeed and employees can always find it on our engagement platform each week. In high-growth companies, integrating People News into a weekly feed can help employees feel closer to one another, even if they’re not in the same office, and feel more comfortable with all the new faces.

Connecting high-stress teams to individual and company purpose

Next up, let's take a look at another common situation, where we see teams with high stress — maybe the group is understaffed or work with short timelines, but this can wear employees down and make disengaging or cutting corners feel tempting.

By concentrating on the value provided by employees who push to go above and beyond, you can remind people of the mission they support and encourage the behaviour you want to see. In this case, the team’s manager can link up communications and recognition to shine a big spotlight on what the team is doing, why it matters, and how they can do more of it in a blog. 

First, communicate and educate:

• Link to a value
• Explain why that value matters to the business
• Explain what "great" looks like

Next, share moments in the spotlight

Once that message is out there, that’s just one step. Follow up communications by asking team members to share stories of when they or others performed the actions mentioned in the blog, or if they can think of other examples where they lived the value.

Managers can ask for a story from the team each morning at shift huddle or at the end of a busy day before close. Patience is important here. If associates aren’t used to noticing great work, it may take time to build up this habit. Managers should be prepared to share something they noticed (checking with the team first that it’s alright to share!) One strategy is to start with small, minor actions to define the range of this exercise – an action doesn’t need to be groundbreaking to be worth mentioning!

With enough of a spotlight, your people will see how others on their team have made an effort to put best practice in action, and deliver a consistently great experience. Managers can take it a step further by nominating some of these team members for a special Employee of the Month award, connected to that particular value. Employees are happy, customers are happy and the business benefits. What could be better?

Depending on the challenges your organisation may be going through, a valuable first step can be to take a hard look at how you're communicating with your people. These are just some of the ways that a powerful communications platform can help improve engagement and deepen connections amongst your teams.

Connecting a dispersed workforce through the right tools and touch points

Today's workforce is more geographically dispersed than ever in history, with more jobs workable from outside the office. While flexible working is a huge benefit for a lot of employees, it does take a toll on workforce connectedness.

This might mean an investment in teleconferencing technology or collaboration software. It could also mean setting up blog segmentation to ensure that the right messages reach the right people – without disrupting anybody they don’t apply to.

But it also means ensuring that employees have a means to communicate with each other, both personally and professionally. Chat apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams help fill this gap, along with various social groups – such as diversity networks or special interest groups – give employees ways to build relationships in the workplace.

A unified employee communications platform centralises all organisational messaging in one easy-to-find place. This also allows employees to share important updates and stay in-the-know about their colleagues' activity.

If you're ready to boost employee connection through effective communication, chat to our consultants today. Not ready to chat yet? Download our eBook: 6 Employee Communication Strategies to Drive Engagement and Connection.

Learn more about how Reward Gateway | Edenred can help you centralise and fine tune your internal communications strategy and better reach your people – wherever they are – and make your corner of the world a better place to work.