Every company needs employees who are enthusiastic and who bring the very best of themselves to work. The secret to unlocking this unlimited source of energy is to build and strengthen the bonds between your employees and between management and employees. Having the right internal communication tools can help boost collaboration between different offices or streamline processes and improve productivity. In this post, I’ll explain how you can connect your people & which tools you can use to do so.
Connect with your employees
In this section, we discuss how to foster the relationship between the employees and management. How do you connect your employees even when they work from somewhere else?
How to develop a real connection with your employees
Your workforce is dispersed. Some of your people are working from home, some at the office, and some from another location. It’s becoming a priority to reach everyone, break silos, avoid one-way communication, and opt for 100% transparency.
Here are some of the best ways to forge and develop a real connection with your employees so that they feel truly committed to your business:
- Transparency
- Make sure your employees feel heard
- Keep everyone informed
- Be authentic
- Open up dialogue
- Make a recognition a way of life
- Culture
- Define, share & live by your company mission, vision & values
1. Transparancy
Transparency with decisions, changes, and outcomes is key to maintaining trust and respect between you and your employees. Hierarchies tend more and more toward horizontal models. That’s why communication and information need to flow more readily inside the organisation.
A digital workplace gives all employees easy access to previously unavailable information and news.
2. Make sure your employees feel heard
Do you regularly conduct employee engagement surveys? Do you encourage regular check-ins and one-on-one meetings? Do you listen to, measure, and most importantly act on what your employees have to say?
The most powerful way to build any relationship and make someone feel valued is to listen. Opening your ears to employees to find out what’s going right and wrong is the right to do smart business. There’s real gold in well-intentioned criticism from a loyal employee. The only way you’ll get the gold is by actively listening.
3. Keep everyone Informed
Provide equal access to business knowledge and updates. When your employees know how the business is doing, they can measure and understand the impact of their efforts on the company’s success. It can be a huge motivational push for them.
Make the information accessible from work, home, and on the go.
With a modern intranet that’s accessible from every device, you will make that information available to everyone. LumApps for example is his modern intranet that connects people to the tools and information they need to do their best work. The employees have quick access to experts and knowledge within an organisation. Your employees go to the LumApps intranet for help and answers because it’s there were important documents and data live. And most importantly where people connect with each other.
4. Be Authentic
Authentic feedback and genuine, constructive criticism are valuable for every worker to move ahead in their role and feel connected to the business.
5. Open up dialogue
Ultimately, employees want to connect with upper management on a personal level. Implement a real two-way conversation with employees by asking open questions.
Check-ins
Organise check-ins with your employees as much as you do client meetings.
Employee feedback
To retrieve employee feedback, leverage a platform to introduce survey tools, a virtual idea box, or third-party integrations.
6. Make recognition a way of life
Employee recognition is a necessity if you want to keep your employees engaged. Hence, it’s vital to implement tools and processes to recognise and reward the efforts of the employees. Use some relevant tools to promote a culture of recognition across all levels.
7. Culture
Integrity, transparency, inclusion, and a clear vision are fundamentals to create a company culture that employees crave these days.
8. Define, share & live by your company mission, vision, and values
Promote the company’s vision across the organisation. An effective way to do so is to share the vision, mission and values in an accessible platform.
Share your objectives so that they can align their individual objectives to them.
Why is it important to connect your employees?
In this section, we discuss the importance of connecting your employees.
Happy employees, who feel connected with their peers, will be more engaged and more motivated. Not only will they want to stay in the company, but they will also more readily share their knowledge with others.
The role of the HR department
Next to the administrative tasks, the missions of HR professionals include:
- Organising company events
- Organising teambuilding activities.
- Paying attention to individuals’ needs and professional evolution
- Onboarding new employees
- Organising activities that foster camaraderie
To facilitate the job of the HR department an internal communication platform could act as an easy tool to facilitate the HR team’s job in general. It acts as a repository for all processes and resources.
With the platform, they can also easily manage HR communities or specific HR pages.
A Digital Workplace to Connect Everyone
A successful organisation is one where everyone is connected, from all parts of the world, thanks to their internal communication platform .In this section, we discuss how you make the workplace more connected.
Let’s take a look at the different steps you can take right now to get your workforce connected with an internal communication platform.
Share your data, documents, and knowledge efficiently
An intranet fully integrated with collaborative suites like G Suite and Office 365 allows you to find all information in one place. Employees can safely share their expertise with everyone in the organisation or select groups of users.
Create communities
Online communities are a great way to bring people closer. Your digital workplace tools should include a good internal communication platform that allows a company to create social communities. In a community, every person can ask and answer questions, and more generally encourage participation.
What about Remote workers?
People working from home or nomadic employees such as sales, need to be connected even when they’re not at the office.
52% of employees around the world work from home at least once per week. (Source: OWLlabs Global State of Remote Work, 2019)
Here are 3 ways to make your culture more vibrant and to keep employees closely connected to each other:
- Use an internal communication platform to keep all the employees informed. This way they will all have access to useful information
- Allow employees to reach information and resources from everywhere and from any device by using the cloud.
- Leverage your intranet as a knowledge base, so your employees have everything they need at their fingertips
Step up your Crisis Communication
A modern intranet, like the LumApps Intranet, includes all the tools you need for publishing quickly top-down content such as crisis news in an attractive and engaging way. You can quickly publish news item and ensure the message is spread efficiently across the organisation.
Connect people with the right experts
In a large global organisation, you often have to go through many people and managers to find the right person you are looking for.
A digital workplace should considerably reduce the time it takes to find a relevant expert. Through a powerful employee directory, everyone can specify their expertise and other skills in their profile.
A collaborative, social intranet that is accessible anywhere at any time
Connect, collaborate, and engage your employees with the modern LumApps Collaborative Intranet.
LumApps
LumApps is a social and collaborative intranet platform. It’s designed to connect, inform and, engage your employees. This innovative digital workplace equips organisations to streamline internal communication and to give their employees a voice.
For who?
LumApps works with organisations of all sizes. The LumApps intranet supports companies in their digital transformation.
In this way, LumApps empowers both companies and employees to connect.
True Connections Don’t Require Rocket Science
Do engaged employees make a significant difference to your business success? The answer to that question is obviously yes! When you have a true and personal connection with your employees, they’re far more likely to feel invested in the business.
Conclusion
Your company began with a vision that brought together a group of people to create something of value for your customers. Cherish that vision and continue to communicate it to your team.
Showing a purpose, integrity, and transparency is the easiest way to develop connected employees.
Take it a step further with a digital workplace platform
An intuitive digital workplace makes it easier to connect people in your organisation. And you might find it paves the way to a new, productive, and more collaborative way of working.
Connecting with your employees is the easiest way for everybody to work in a collaborative and productive environment. To meet this essential need, invest in an intranet.
Today, an effective intranet like LumApps is one of the best tools to create connections between your employees.
Are you interested in learning more about internal communications and how to better connect with your employees? Read our full white paper on how to connect people in your organisation.
Do you want to discuss your own internal communications project with us?
Get in touch with
Inês Valadas
Supporting companies with their employee experience journey ? | engagement & retention strategy ?
