digital communication Archives - Axiom Communications Ltd

How an agile employee engagement app can help you connect with your people

September 18, 2017

What’s on the minds of colleagues right now? Are they fired up and engaged? Disinterested? Fearful? Now there’s a way to know for sure

Staying in touch with the ‘word on the street’ is critical in connecting with an audience. Getting it wrong can have serious consequences – just ask Theresa May, David Cameron, and countless other political leaders. In business too, not being tuned into what your colleagues think and feel can mean being disconnected from reality.

A couple of years ago, I was working with a senior leader about to invest in bringing together 500 managers from across his retail business for a conference. My job was to help him shape his keynote. To start with, I asked him what his top five messages were and he quickly trotted out a list of strategic goals. “And what do you think your audience is actually talking about right now?” I asked. Cue a long pause until he very honestly volunteered: “I’ve no idea… but I guess you’re going to tell me we should find out.”

A quickly organised piece of research revealed absolutely zero correlation between what he planned to say and what his people wanted to know. Armed with this insight, we were able to position his key strategic messages in a context that would meet the needs of his audience – and to great effect, according to their feedback.

Of course, keeping in touch with your people’s needs and views shouldn’t just be an ad hoc or even annual exercise. Far better to have a reliable, accurate and easy way of keeping in constant touch with the word on the street. We’ve worked with our partner IT Hummingbird to develop an agile employee engagement app to do just that.

Engage with an agile employee engagement app

Engage is a mobile app that quickly and easily allows you to dial in to the hot topics in your business. This next-generation employee engagement app collects real-time views, ideas and feedback from across the workforce. The data can be dissected at the click of a button by role, function, site and so on. User-friendly infographics and advanced word clouds show where communications are cutting through and where they are not.

If I’d had an agile employee engagement app in my locker back when I was working with that retail client, it would have made life much easier… We’d use it to discover the views and concerns of conference participants and also of the teams they lead. We’d dive deeper into the data to identify trends in particular areas. We’d then present the insights to leaders and use them to shape the whole conference.

Then, of course, we’d deploy the app afterwards to check how well the conference messages were getting through and being understood. And we’d use it on an on-going basis to monitor the mood around planned strategic changes and other specific topics. All of which would inform the evolving communication plan.

Engage to stay connected

Find out how you could use Engage in your business to help you stay connected by booking a demo today.

The alternative might be that, like some politicians, you become disconnected, lose your mandate to lead and then your best people; and maybe even your customers vote with their feet.

More about the Engage, the agile employee engagement app

Mind the g-app: Engage with our latest internal communications tool

June 22, 2016

An employee engagement app can either add to the noise or create crystal clarity – so choose wisely

Employee Engagement App

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the rise of the employee engagement app as an internal communication tool. Only the other day, I was catching up on my emails while travelling on the London Underground. As I stepped off the train, I heard the familiar announcement: “Mind the gap” – and came uncomfortably close to dropping my phone between the train and the platform edge. It was ironic that the mail I’d been reading was from a client complaining about no-one using their employee engagement app. Mind the g-app, indeed!

The client in question, a comms manager in a forward-thinking public sector organisation, was complaining that a recently installed Jive app, which had suddenly appeared on desktops and mobile devices, was not proving popular. A quick call to the in-house IT team shed no light. “Ah yes, that replaces Yammer,” the person in the contact centre responded, “No-one used that either.” First up, surely when we put these things in place, we have to give some practical guidance and training about how to use them to good effect before their only use becomes ‘liking’ the litter-in-the-car-park thread.

In this digital era, we have more and more ways to share information with the workforce, most recently through the rise of apps. But satisfaction with how most organisations communicate isn’t, in my experience, getting any better. In fact, people at all levels complain about it more than ever. If we are just sending more noise, from more sources, via more channels, we are simply adding to the confusion.

Beyond broadcast

I am, however, encouraged to see that some employee engagement apps are now focusing on more than just broadcast communication by, for example, measuring the reach of specific channels. Even so, knowing how many people opened an email or clicked on a newsletter still doesn’t tell us what they took away from that communication. Did they understand it? What did they make it mean? What are they going to do differently as a result?

My passion for 25 years has been making a difference to organisational performance through employee engagement – and then being able to prove it. I want to be able to demonstrate to CEOs that the messages from their leadership event actually left the conference room and were understood and acted on by staff at the coalface, who are now fully aligned. I want to pinpoint where change programmes are being implemented at speed and where they are bogged down. I want to show that top talent is motivated to stick around and to help drive new ways of working.

The ‘g-app’ I want to fill is the one between the aspirations leaders have for their organisations and the day-to-day reality of what really happens at the sharp end of the business – out in the field, in regional offices, on the shop floor.

An app to generate dialogue and killer data

Rather than just banging on about how important it is that companies do this, Axiom is trying to help – by harnessing the rise of mobile technology and social tools. Right now, we’re fine-tuning a new employee engagement app that will quickly and efficiently provide up-to-the-minute data on the word on the street, depict the mood of the business in innovative infographics and chart the extent to which staff understand key messages – by audience and over time.

So, do you agree that employee engagement apps should be creating crystal clarity about what really matters to organisational performance rather than just adding to the noise? If so, reach out and help us shape a cutting-edge app that meets the needs of your business.

Don’t miss the employee advocacy boat

October 21, 2015

Leading companies are realising wide-ranging benefits by encouraging and supporting employee advocacy through social media

It’s high time you joined them, argues Axiom’s digital guru Helen Reinson.

There’s a new trend in social media – one that all comms and HR professionals worth their salt need to understand and capitalise on. It has the potential to transform an organisation’s brand and external reputation as well as driving employee engagement. I’m talking about employee advocacy.

Defined as “the promotion of an organisation by its staff often by using social media”, employee advocacy has been driven by the phenomenal rise of mobile devices and social media. The line between personal and professional social media usage is blurring as employees increasingly use their personal social media presence to defend and promote the company they work for. According to a recent survey, 50% of employees are already posting about their company. What’s more, the number of companies blocking social media sites on their networks is falling by 10% per year.

Building the brand

Before we dive into what employee advocacy means for employee engagement, let’s take a quick look at some of the benefits to an organisation’s brand and reputation:

561% greater reach for brand messages when shared by employees vs. the same messages shared via official company social channels.
8x more engagement with content shared by employees than shared by company channels.
An employee advocate is 2x more trusted than a CEO.
10x more social connections on average for each employee compared with a company.
90% of customers trust product or service recommendations from people they know, with just 33% of buyers trusting the company.
24x more frequent brand message shares when distributed by employees vs. being distributed by the company.

The question is: What kind of messages are they posting – positive, negative, even outright damning? Relax… the evidence suggests that the postings are mostly positive and defensive of the company they work for. For instance, 39% of employees have shared praise or positive comments online about their employer whereas only 16% have shared criticism or negative comments.

And, oh, how much better would it be to have a whole army of employee advocates sharing content supportive of company products, services and overall approach to audiences you’d otherwise fail to reach or influence?

Encouraging engagement

The employee advocacy trend is also driving employee engagement. This is bringing four key benefits:

1. Inclusion

When you give employees an active role in talking about the company on social media, as well as the freedom to express their views (all within the corporate guidelines, of course), they instantly feel more included in the organisation and the journey it is on. Chances are they’ll also have a greater understanding of the integral part they play, however great or small.

2. Authentic understanding of messages

A key requirement of effective employee advocacy is that the organisation makes available a steady stream of high-quality digital content, aligned with its over-reaching strategies, for advocates to share. While posting and sharing, advocates will, by default, be consuming the content and absorbing key messages in a more natural and authentic way. At the same time, they will be influencing and educating their colleagues in the same manner.

3. Talent retention

Employees of a socially engaged company are 20% more likely to stay at their company and 27% more likely to feel optimistic about their companies’ future, according to recent research.

4. Smarter recruitment

Employee advocates can be especially helpful in recruitment when they share job posts with their network. Recruitment by referral has been shown by Jobvite to have many advantages:

Recruitment that is 67% quicker and 51% cheaper.
The highest applicant-to-hire ratio compared to other sources.
47% greater job satisfaction among those recruited through social media referral.

What’s more, recruitment by social media is more likely to yield socially savvy recruits who are, in turn, ready to become your next tranche of advocates.

Leading the way

LinkedIn has identified the world’s most socially engaged companies based on billions of signals and insights.

Isn’t it about time your organisation joined these leading lights in using social media-powered employee advocacy to build your brand and engage your people?

Get started

To get you started, here are some basic steps you can take right now:

Ensure all employees are aware which social platforms the company posts on and invite them to follow.
Identify initial employee advocates and bring them on board.
Regularly promote company posts internally and ask for employees to support by sharing and liking.

To learn more about implementing an employee advocacy strategy, drop us a line at hello@axiomcommunciations.com.

Read more about Axiom’s workshop Getting the Most from Social Media.