Internal Communications Best Practices: Reaching Employees Who Do Not Have Email Access
Written by Elizabeth Castro
Throughout my career I’ve had the opportunity to implement internal communications programs for a variety of corporations that have large numbers of employees who do not have email access. While many of us in internal communications have moved towards relying on digital channels in order to reach more people, faster, for less cost and across geographies, there is still a need for corporations to connect with large groups of employees the old fashioned way— verbally through their supervisors and on paper. The biggest internal communications challenge for legacy companies or newly formed parent companies with satellite locations is to ensure corporate messages reach, and are meaningful to, employees who are in the field.
The Landscape
Even in 2011, the United States still has 12 million manufacturing jobs in industries like furniture, automotive, large-scale bakeries and utilities that rely on a workforce that is either mobile or located in a plant setting. Especially today, these employees face a unique environment, especially for those whose individual companies have become part of larger corporations, and sometimes even global companies.
These employees overwhelmingly feel left behind, especially in terms of how they believe they are viewed by the nameless and faceless parent company. They’ve seen their numbers shrink. They’ve seen their benefits change and likely cost more. They’ve seen whole processes go digital. Yet while many of their co-workers may be the same, just about everything else, including goals, values and principles, have been redefined for them. They believe the “family feel” is gone, they mourn for the old days and they resent their new parent company.
The Communications Gap
Companies that fit this profile struggle with how to remain connected with their offline remotely located employees. In fact, very often, internal communications pros back at headquarters lack two important things that hinder their abilities to effectively reach this employee segment with the corporate message:
- Some companies don’t have the proper communications infrastructure in place. I’m talking about processes that allow them to easily translate materials into simple flyers and talking points that could be used in the field. Another piece includes communications contacts within each facility whose job is to help distribute the materials (e.g. hang flyers, hand out one-pagers, etc.).
- Managers within these facilities have historically never been formally taught, or asked, to cascade information outside of the day-to-day work at that particular location. Nor do they know where to find the right central information that would be appropriate to communicate.
The irony is that the “old ways” of communicating, such as face-to-face, almost need to be re-learned. There are a couple of different reasons for this. First, internal communications as a distinct function is still somewhat new in the field of communications, which really evolved in an exclusively digital age. Second, internal communications today includes spreading a central corporate gospel across previously autonomous groups of employees who are located all around the world.
Our Findings
One of the most valuable experiences has been talking directly with plant and field employees about what’s important to them from a communications perspective. If you find the right employees who don’t mind speaking their minds, they’ll gladly tell you what they want to know and the best method for delivering it to them. I’ve heard similar suggestions across numerous industries:
- Facilities often have time set aside for in-person meetings. Managers will likely share information if they know what to say and are asked to say it. If managers give verbal direction to read something, employees likely will.
- Bulletin boards are in every facility, but some employees don’t have the time to read posted items especially if they’re too long. Posted information needs to be succinct and relevant and employees need to be told about it.
- If you give employees something to read such as a handout, that’s ideal. If handouts are available in places like lunch rooms where people congregate for breaks they’ll likely take them and read them later.
The Fix
As I already alluded to, internal communications efforts to employees who do not have email access requires you to create opportunities for in-person dialogue with managers and to distribute materials that are succinct and easy to read. Here are best practices for implementing each component within your organization:
Manager Cascading Program:
Helping managers share information down to employees, verbally and at regular team meetings is one of the most important communications channels you have available within your organization. Remember: plant and field employees like the personal touch. They want to directly connect with the number one person that matters to them– their supervisor.
By and large, managers have a lot on their plates and may view communications as another added pressure. But if you offer them the right information in the right form with instructions on how to share it, their communications efforts can literally add just a few minutes to their existing team meetings. Items like a script with bullets of information are a great and simple way to start the communications process.
Materials Development Process:
Back at HQ, internal communications professionals are very connected with the corporate messages and business strategy. They often have nice newsletters, blogs and the company intranet that allows them to share loads of information. Now imagine that all these items are not accessible to a segment of employees, not meaningful to them or too complicated. So how do you use them?
The solution does not require you to reinvent the wheel. You simply modify it. First, review your existing content and determine what’s appropriate for your satellite employees. Develop a one page template that acts like a script. There’s an introduction with a series of bullets of top line information. The scripts can be emailed to facilities with other handouts and flyers that contain more detailed information. Your facility communications contacts distribute the scripts to managers and print out the other handouts and flyers. This is of course a simplified and general approach, but you get the idea.
Getting Started
Before you implement a tactical approach and process to reach your offline employees, it’s important to identify the unique challenges and opportunities within your organization. The best way to accomplish this is by conducting an internal communications audit. The audit includes these three steps:
- Identify individuals within your organization to interview about your existing and potential communications processes. Ideally you should select employees from all functions and levels, then schedule a half hour of their time to talk.
- Develop a series of questions that allow you to get feedback on how information is shared, what they want to know and how they should receive it.
- Analyze your findings and develop a recommended approach. This will also allow you to identify what resources, staff support and processes are needed to effectively implement the recommendation.
Finally, I cannot stress the importance of creating opportunities for two-way dialogue with offline employees. For those of us who spend our work days in front of a computer or sitting next to our managers or executive leadership teams, we take our direct access to meaningful information for granted. Our job as internal communicators is to help all employees feel connected to their organization.
Elizabeth Castro is a vice president at O’Malley Hansen Communications (OHC) in Chicago (www.omalleyhansen.com) and the editor of TheCommunicationsBlog.com. You can follow her on Twitter at @Eliz_Castro and @thecommsblog.
Hi Elizabeth – Great reminder that there are so many employees without email still. Digital distribution is surely not the only means to reach our employees. I agree that a two-way dialogue is so important to employees. Hearing regular messages from their managers will only help engagement.
I have another another option to add to the mix. With the addition of touchscreen panels (LCDs), we can now share communications in another form. A bulletin board can now become digital and interactive. This can add a new layer of safety communications. I think in the near future, we might see mobile devices creeping into the Warehouse as well. Employees of course have some already. But maybe there is possibility of bringing some in for employee to use while in the plant. We are just scratching the surface with some new options.
The real point, we communicators cannot forget that our audiences are varied and have different needs.
Christopher – This is a great point. As technology makes its way into the manufacturing setting it surely could open opportunities to use these devices to communicate with employees. Thanks for reading this post and for responding. – E
Very informative article , Elizabeth .I would also extend my support for the 2-Way communication to evaluate the employ’s understanding towards the information transferred . But it depends on the priority of the information :
For High Priority Works ( eg : A project requirement ) — Here the manager conveys the message over a presentation (status meeting) highlighting the requirements or requesting for a prototype from one of his employs . By verifying the prototype , the manager can succeed in achieving his requirements .
For Low Priority Works ( eg : Requirement of 10 employees from Designing department with 10% extra payment for the night shift ) — This can be sent in the form of a circular or a form and the employees in the design department who are willing can sign up for the job.. This again becomes a 2-Way Communication .
Thanks for your comment Kumar. If you have any other good thoughts that would make for an article, feel free to submit one.
That’s really helpful, Elizabeth, many thanks.
When I was at Melcrum, we produced some interesting research on ‘hard-to-reach’ employees — ‘hard-to-reach’ either because (1) they have access to technology but work in different offices or (2) because of the nature of their job and/or they’re ‘unwired’ — eg factory/restaurant/shop floor, delivering on the road, working on a train/plane, etc.
A couple of things come to mind about this second group — hoping they reinforce/illustrate rather than just repeat your, Christopher’s and Siva’s points!
1. Face-to-face is the gold standard
Email often isn’t an effective channel anyway, particularly for key strategic/change messages. It’s cold and impersonal. Dense information. Too much information. No opportunities for feedback. And so on.
There is also an extra value from face-to-face — engagement through attention given. As an employee, if my manager or even someone from head office takes extensive time to explain the company’s strategy and how my work makes a difference, I would feel really valued and all the more engaged.
Rolls-Royce has a history of using storyboards to communicate business strategy to managers. It also has a senior employee representative group and when this group experienced a storyboard session explaining strategic issues, they suggested rolling it out right across the whole company. They did so — two-hour sessions of 10-12 people for 37,000 employees…!
Face-to-face requires dedication and buy-in from leadership/managers. And it costs a lot, particularly in terms of time and production down-time. But it’s unbeatable really and the Rolls-Royce example is a very extreme one.
2. Start with the question, “When and where do employees want to be communicated with?”
Comms departments need to start with their audiences and work backwards — I suppose the old cliché of ‘outside-in’ talked about in marketing. It’s not about, “What channel do we want to use?” but “What channel do the employees want us to use?”
Get into the mindset of the employees — think about how and where they work, the cycle of their day, etc. Perhaps they’re not getting time to read the bulletin boards. Perhaps the boards are in the wrong place relative to their primary work ‘station’. Perhaps they’re part-time workers who don’t ever go to the canteen or staff restroom. Perhaps they just want to get straight home after a day’s work, rather than lingering in the staff restroom. Etc.
So, why not try a short meeting or site visits at particular times when all employees are around?
Marks & Spencer, like many retailers, use 10-minute meetings at the start of each shift. KFC have short ‘huddles’ focused around particular actions that need to be completed. Meanwhile, Rentokil-Initial organised a ‘roadshow’ to ensure key managers were visiting employees on the ground at all its UK sites.
3. Also, “How do the employees like their communications?”
What content? What style/language?
So, they sit in the staff restroom every day but never read the bulletin boards – why not Perhaps the posters are just too densely laid out (without images that bring the text to life, for example). Perhaps the language is just inaccessible to them – packed with ‘management speak’ or far too long-winded given English is a second language to many of the employees. And so on.
Once again, it comes back to being all about the audience first and foremost. And don’t make assumptions. Just because they’re getting bored in the half-yearly PowerPoint presentation, don’t assume it’s the complexity of the strategic information you’re trying to communicate that’s bringing on the yawns — don’t be tempted to dumb it down.
Rolls-Royce subtracted very little from their original storyboards when they talked them through on the factory floor. They found that, with the opportunity to explore it with the facilitators, the employees grasped it all no problem, and really appreciated not being patronised. This content was important to them as they had great interest in the future of their company and the part they were going to play in it.
And the reverse at KFC. Don’t assume that employees need/want to know the ins and outs of large-scale strategic plans. The KFC comms department did some initial research and employees fed back things like, ‘I want to be told what to do’ and ‘I want to be told what you expect of me.’ They wanted action-oriented communication “without the flowery stuff”. The comms department produced action-oriented posters that could be displayed prominently in the employees’ work areas and also could be used by managers to support their communications in those huddle meetings.
4. Employees need opportunities to provide feedback
‘Cascade’ is a tricky word because it implies trickle down to employees, rather than (iterations of) ‘communicating with employees’.
Again, developing communications tactics (including language style, delivery, feedback mechanisms, measurement systems, etc) without the involvement of employees (surveys and employee representative groups at least, or action groups in more sophisticated processes) is like developing a product in a vacuum without reference to customers.
And the communications can’t just stop after the particular delivery — there are employee responses, reactions, next phases, etc. Communication departments need to engage employees and keep them engaged, and this can only be achieved in partnership with them.
5. Technology is cheaper than you think
IBM, Sun Microsystems, BT… they have phenomenal, integrated tech platforms, with all the bells and whistles, for vertical and horizontal communication. Okay, you’d kind of expect that from a tech company.
But you don’t have to be a tech pioneer to have broader e-platforms for communicating with your employees.
For example, like British Airways many companies have installed computer kiosks in crew rooms, so anyone can log on and access the company intranet.
Also, organizations have been using SMS for years to keep remote groups up to date with urgent announcements or important news. And now that employees have smart phones, they can access their companies’ employee sites and sign up for all sorts of pull comms.
That is, if they’re incentivised to do so – the content doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does have to be relevant, interesting and engaging (employee generated comments, CEO’s down-to-earth blog, competitions, etc)
Also, it’s worth bearing in mind that networks and social media aren’t as expensive as you might think. There are loads of IT developers and service providers out there and competition makes for quality tools at cheap prices.
Thanks for the excellent information Graeme.
Hi Elizabeth!
Thank you for this great post. I couldn’t agree more. There are so many ways in which employees can be reached. And for some reasons, internal communication seems to be overlooked in many organisations these days.
A year ago, I did a work placement in a tourism marketing agency in Paris. It was number one on the French market! You would think that the managers would actually care about their employees, knowing that happy staff is invaluable. But it is not what I experienced at all. Instead, an important event occured, that ultimately was going to affect the ways in which the employees were going to work, but they were kept in the dark until the very end. In a 20 employee organisation, I found it rather shocking that no manager went out of their way to explain to their employees what was actually going on. As you can imagine, it resulted in a nice crisis, that even drove employees to leave the organisation, which conforms with the saying that employees don’t leave an organisation, they leave their managers.
I have written a blog post about it and would like to have your opinion on it!
http://theartofconflict.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/i-want-to-know.html
Sarah – Thanks so much for reading and for sharing your experience, and your own blog post. I think you’ve learned a valuable and simple lesson: just tell people what’s going on!