Employee communications strategy- ENGAGE

By Tarun Gill on March 17, 2013 • ( 0 )

ENGAGING EMPLOYEES

In my last post, I talked about the AIER communications approach to help all professionals draft their employee communications strategy. We covered the phase-wise methodology covering A (Attract) and I (Inform) of the AIER approach.

This post will talk about phase E (Engage) of the AIER.

ENGAGE

You have attracted the right talent pool using all effective communication enablers and creatively informing them about how great is to work with your organization with the help of professional interview process.

You have hired the applicants and now it is important that you live up to the expectations of what you promised them in the interview process. The promise you made, which is also your company differentiator, the value proposition and the employee engagement model, which makes all of them, want to work for the company.

What is the objective?

The objective is very simple. Engaged employee is a happy and productive employee. How to you keep you employees fully engaged at workplace?

Channels you can use

As communication professionals you can leverage use various channels to reach out to them effectively. Remember our effort should be to keep even a boring, mundane business update, engaging.

The new Induction experience

The induction program is one of the most important and yet sensitive engagement tools. Companies spend millions to drive important content via this channel and giving new hires a WOW induction experience.

How you can contribute

Make sure you don’t bore your employees with a week long induction program, rather have a one day seminar kind of a approach inviting company business leaders who are also great facilitators to conduct these seminars. Remember this experience employees will never forget at least till the time they are with the organization, make sure you give the best one.

The buddy program

The employees are new and we need to assign a buddy to them who can help them with the organization process and procedures. This approach also gives employees an opportunity to meet people in the company and strike a positive chord with them.

Merchandize and technology

Companies usually give away lot of paper handouts to new hires as part of their induction module. These handouts contain company information, policies, and brief history. This is quite a dated approach, use technology instead and host everything on the intranet where everything can be pulled out with a click of a button.

Create a new hire group

Companies hire employees in groups, which explain the extensive induction program. Though the sad part is whatever happens in the induction program is not often carried forward. Employees lose touch with each other since they get caught up with their work deliverables and have no time to socialize.

The solution to this could be creating a group on your social enterprise-networking tool, if you have an infrastructure.

This tool works exactly like Facebook, where you can create groups for people to come and interact, having a similar group for new inductees will help them stay connected.

Next post will get to the most interesting part, viz Retain.