5 ways to improve employee communications through personalisation
What is personalisation?
Personalisation is taking a piece of communication, tailoring it and making it more useful and relevant for your audience. More targeted at their interests, needs, and preferences — giving them exactly what they’re looking for right when they’re looking for it. It’s been around for years and is a top performance and revenue driver in business sales and marketing. So why not use it for the same effect within our internal communications?
Employees are constantly being bombarded with messages from every angle. Colleagues, corporate comms, customers, suppliers, partners and external agencies. It’s easy to get lost in communications and ignore the hundreds of emails sitting in your inbox. How often do you take time to filter through your messages and hit delete all because the majority are just not relevant to you?
Why should you consider personalised communications?
Using personalised communication can capture employee’s attention by drawing on their particular preferences – whether that’s the way the message is delivered or the topic of conversation. And when those messages resonate with people, they’re more likely to be understood and remembered.
But no matter what information is being shared, people respond best to personalised content. It gives a feeling of relevance and reassurance, which in turn drives engagement and motivation.
According to a study from the University of Texas, people prefer personalised experiences due to desire for control and information overload. When you receive something personalised, you know you’re not getting the same as everyone else and it’s tailored to you, making you feel more in control and having a positive effect. And by receiving something tailored to you, you’re given the right information you need so don’t feel overloaded with information.
So, when employee communications are tailored to their likes and needs, they are more likely to engage and act on the content.
We experience personalisation daily – from Spotify and Netflix recommendations to Instagram’s algorithms – and are expecting it more and more. Simply adding an individual’s name at the top of an email isn’t going to cut it any longer. We need to up our game, so let’s look at how you can introduce personalisation in your employee comms.
If you want to know how to improve communication skills in the workplace, personalising your internal communications is a great place to start. We’ve put together our top 5 strategies for integrating personalisation into your employee comms.
1. Get to know your audience
Use your existing employee data to really understand the diversity across your organisation. Gather numbers and stats from HR relating to employee location, department, role, tenure, seniority and more.
Now you know the demographics of your audience but what about their behaviours and preferences? Use surveys, polls, comments and quizzes to gather as much feedback as possible. Ask your employees how they like to share and receive information, what topics are of most importance and interest to them and what communication style works best for them. Anything from their preferred frequency of eployee comms to the time of the day they like to receive it.
The more you know and understand about your team, the better you can tailor your communications to engage with them.
Once you’ve gathered all this information you can start to segment your audience into groups based on their characteristics. Set up ways to communicate directly with these different groups such as email distribution lists, MS Teams channels and Viva Engage groups.
2. Adapt your messaging
A key part of knowing how to improve communication skills in the workplace is learning how to communicate with your audience effectively. Rather than sending out a generic, one size-fits-all employee communication, you can now start to tailor your messages for individual audience groups.
Think about both the content and the tone. Use language and terminology that’s appropriate to their level of understanding on the subject. Include details of how your employee comms links back to their goals and targets. Where possible, share personal examples, anecdotes or testimonials that relate to their work and expertise.
When speaking to Millennials and Gen Z you might refer to examples or phrases from social media, entrepreneurship or pop culture and even throw in the odd emoji. An older generation may want a more traditional approach with evidence and data to back up your messages.
Make sure you provide regular updates on the topics your audience groups have said they are interested in and give relevant information just to the groups who need it.
And if one team is having a tough time or struggling with a specific challenge, be mindful of this in your message and even acknowledge it to show empathy, support and understanding.
3. Choose your channel
Effective employee communications are about balance. To avoid overwhelming your employees, be selective and choose the channels they prefer and engage with most often. The aim is to deliver the right message, through the right channel, at the right time, to the right people.
Taking a targeted approach will stop those overloaded inboxes and make sure people see the relevant and important information they need. There’s no point sending a technical IT update to employees who aren’t affected or don’t need to take action – in fact, it’s just annoying.
Consider the purpose and content of your communication when choosing your channel. If you need to deliver a sensitive message, this is best done either face to face or through a webinar. It provides the opportunity to ask direct questions and presenters can express their understanding and give a personal and human touch.
Don’t underestimate the power of mobile!
With people spending on average 4.8 hours a day on their mobile phones, we’re used to having access to information at our fingertips at any time of day. Posting employee comms messages on your company intranet and in newsletters means everyone can access the information when they want and go back and refer to it without needing to save their emails. And by having these platforms available on a mobile device, means your employees can access them anytime, anywhere – whether they’re commuting, in-between meetings or on their lunch break.
Whichever delivery channel you choose, remember, people consume information in different ways, it’s a smart idea to have your message available in different formats and media. One person might want to read through the detail in a booklet over lunch, while research shows that 48% of employees find video the most engaging form of communication.
4. Follow employee journeys
Companies use personalisation to tailor their external marketing based on customer journeys; first-time customers will see different messages and promotions to returning customers. So, why not do the same internally for employees?
New starters will need a lot more information about existing processes and systems than long-serving employees with years of experience. And the same can be said for those developing their skills or recently promoted managers.
Use the employee lifecycle to map out your journeys and the major engagement touchpoints at each stage.
Six stages of the employee lifecycle
Attraction > Recruitment > Onboarding > Retention > Development > Offboarding
By understanding where employees are in their lifecycle, you can tailor both the content and communication style to their needs, ensuring the right information reaches the right people at the right time.
5. Measurement and evaluation
It’s impossible to know how to improve communication skills in the workplace without an effective way to measure how employees respond to your communications. Personalising internal communications needs constant measurement and evaluation so you can be ready to adapt to technology and organisational changes and the needs and preferences of your employees.
Use measurement data and analytics but also measure behavioural changes. Try tracking technical metrics:
- Email open rates
- Click-through rates
- Likes, comments and reactions
- Video views or watch time
- Intranet page views
- Resource download or access
But never forget the real-world behavioural changes:
- Are employees completing the action?
- Has the behaviour really changed?
- Are employees using the new platform or service?
- Are they engaging with the initiative?
- Has a new dialogue opened?
- Do employees have confidence in the communications?
Keeping track of what’s working well and what isn’t, will help you plan your next engaging and effective comms campaign.
And don’t forgetthe power of asking for feedback. A sure way to know how to improve communication skills in the workplace is to actually ask the people who work there! Give them a channel to ask questions and join conversations and discussions. Make sure you actively listen to their opinions and respond to questions. Not only will this help you evaluate your employee comms but it also enhances personalisation while promoting a culture of inclusivity and employee voice.
55% of communication professionals think hyper-personalisation will be most impactful technology for internal communications in the next five years.
What does the future look like for personalisation?
There are already some platforms out there that offer a more tailored approach to employee intranets and apps, in the same way that the adverts consumers see on the internet is different, depending on their search history and the socioeconomic groups that they belong to. As technology evolves, we’ll see more of the emerging trend of hyper-personalised internal communication. It’s a more advanced way of tailoring messages to individual employees and their specific circumstances. Using data, analytics and automation to get the right message to the right person at the right time.
And with the help of AI, algorithms will be able to predict future behaviour and preferences based on past interactions, creating personalised and relevant homepages and newsfeeds just like Amazon and Facebook.
Many organisations have limited technology to implement advanced personalisation, so for now it’s ok to begin with the basics. The key is being flexible and open to change.
If you need any help working with your current data and resources to make your comms more personal, get in touch via talktous@handhcomms.co.uk.
For more ideas on how to improve your internal communications, check out our post on accessibility and engagement.
We can help
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If you’re struggling to make your employee communications even more personal, to land the most important messages, whether that’s across departments or the globe, we want to help. Just hit the button and let’s talk.
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