Effective HR Communication summary

You might think that effective communication with employees is easier said than done, so let’s take a closer look at the ways you can get your employees engaged.

What effective HR communication does is take the company’s messages and share its meaning with the employees, such that they truly understand and embrace the messages that the company wants and needs to promote.

When describing how he would use one hour to solve a problem, Albert Einstein said that he would first spend 55 minutes precisely clarifying the question. Once the problem was crystal clear, he would only need five minutes to come up with an answer.

Businesses should use a similar approach: first collecting valuable information about their employees to help them communicate more effectively.

When you’re preparing a new HR communication campaign, constantly ask yourself “why?” when you’re making decisions – this way you can set a clear goal and make sure you stay on target.

Every campaign should have a clear goal, so the first “why?” should be: “Why are we launching this new campaign?”

As Walt Disney once said, “You can design, create and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.” The same is true for your HR communication, because if you don’t select the right communication vehicles, or media, you’ll never be able to entice your employees to focus on your message, let alone do anything with it.

The good news is that nowadays there are many media to choose from. Gone are the days when the most exciting thing you could do was design a fancy poster or send out an email. Now you have options like the company intranet, social media, webinars and text messages. The bad news, and the flip side, is that with all this choice, how do you decide which one is right?

Even if you think your communication is so great that it couldn’t possibly fail, it very well might if you don’t put a proper plan together. A good plan will make sure you don’t miss those small but important details.

During one communication campaign, the author and her team spent days working on a video explaining the different benefit plans that the company was offering. But after they sent them out to all the different locations, they discovered that the company computers didn’t have the right software to play them. So when the employees tried to watch the videos, they could only see the images without any audio.

One of the most celebrated teams in sports history is the 1980 United States Olympic hockey team, a team of amateur players that managed to defeat the four-time gold medal-winning Russian team.

The secret of the US team’s success was that they had a diverse lineup of players who added their own different and unique skills. And this is exactly what you should look for when you put together a team of allies for your next communications project.

To reach your employees and truly connect with them, you should invest a lot of time and effort into the content you create for your HR projects, ensuring that it’s valuable, relevant and “sticky.”

A good mindset is to think of employees as the customers you’re trying to win over with your HR “products” and to see yourself as the marketing expert who’s pitching the product.

People today are constantly bombarded with information from a variety of sources, so don’t assume your audience will take the time to read more than the first few sentences of the message you’re hoping to deliver.

With this in mind, it’s always important to prioritize and highlight the essential parts of your message. This can be tricky since the subjects that HR deals with are often full of complex details, but it’s your job to be highly strategic and identify captivating details that will best highlight the value of what you’re promoting.

When it comes to HR communication campaigns, there’s no autopilot that would allow you to sit back after launch. Instead, you have to remain on top of things to adjust as needed.

A good method for this is to conduct regular tests along the way that are designed to show how you’re meeting your goals.

As we wrap up this book-in-blinks, let’s review all the tools we’ve covered that will allow you to communicate more effectively with employees.

To help you remember each tool, just think of the acronym IMPACT: Investigation, Medium, Planning, Allies, Content and Testing.