Taking Internal Communications Offline to Online
For many companies, external communications efforts tend to supersede their
internal counterpart. After all, employees are not the target audience when it
comes to selling your products or services. But the way you communicate within
your own walls shapes how you are perceived by your customers. Because your
internal communications strategy helps to create company culture, it’s the
driving force behind all external messaging. It’s the engine driving your
brand’s train.
But the question isn’t really “Why?” We all know that it’s important to deliver
a strong, coordinated message to your employees. The more important question is
“How?”
The Big Picture
Consider the current trends in daily publications: according to a recent New
York Times article, all but one of the 25 top newspapers in the United States
have posted declines in print circulation since last fall. And the inverse:
newspaper Web site audiences increased 10.5 percent during the first quarter of
2009.
Simply put, the Internet has changed the way we consume information. The Web is
available anytime, anywhere, so we tend to seek out information when we have
time – and in small snippets (i.e., getting e-mail updates about our favorite
topics or receiving tweets from news outlets). When it comes to communicating,
we give priority to speed, convenience and fun.
Apply this theory to your company’s needs, and you may realize it’s time for a
communications makeover. Taking your internal communications online is a fresh
approach that can help maximize your investment. And a well-executed,
interactive online magazine can be the vehicle that gets you there.
“We need to talk”
When it comes to your company’s internal communications, “We – meaning you and
your employees – need to talk.” And often.
Online employee magazines can facilitate this important exchange of
information. With multimedia and interactive features, an online publication
encourages the sharing of ideas and opinions among all levels of employees and
across multiple locations.
When FedEx Ground wanted to make a big change to their printed employee
magazine, GroundSource, they came to Brady Communications for help designing
and executing the new online version. With more than 40,000 employees in 5,000
locations, FedEx Ground certainly had the need for more efficient and
accessible internal communications.
What most sets the online version of
GroundSource apart from its former self are its interactive features.
When FedEx Ground employees log on, they can do more than read about company
news. They can share information with fellow team members and provide feedback
for managers and executives.
Equipped with reader polls, a question-and-answer section and an article-rating
system, the GroundSource site allows readers to express their opinions and find
out what others think about the latest in FedEx Ground developments. As a
result, site administrators can easily see what is most relevant and
interesting to the readers and use this information to create future editions.
Even more importantly, the user feedback provides management with the data
necessary to make sound decisions about future site content. It also provides
management with invaluable feedback on strategic decisions that affect
employees.
A Cultural Experience
Fostering a positive company culture is incredibly important to a company’s
long-term success. Employees need to be experts not only in their own specific
roles, but they also need to understand and embrace the company’s shared
values. This is where internal communications – whether it’s through your
intranet, internal newsletter or another method – plays a very important role,
providing an opportunity to reach out to all employees and arm them with the
information necessary to help build a positive corporate culture.
With an online magazine, this task becomes much easier. In the case of
GroundSource, one of the magazine’s greatest strengths is promoting the FedEx
Ground culture. GroundSource offers photo galleries, user-submitted photos,
video messages from executives and more. These tools help create a culture of
transparency and openness, showing that team members are serious about having
fun while getting their hard work done.
Fresh and Functional
With the seemingly endless opportunities for innovation in Web design and
development, an online magazine can be much more than an information source.
Whether it’s social networking capabilities, video galleries or animation, each
issue can bring something new and fresh to your readers. Through feature-rich
content, an online magazine can go beyond the practical applications of a
printed magazine or newsletter. It can build your brand culture, open up the
lines of communication throughout your organization, and make your business run
more efficiently by arming employees with the information they need to get the
job done.