Best Practices for Employee Communications

Your communications strategy will make or break your employee performance program success. In fact, the single, most important element in getting people to do something is to tell them what you want them to do. In fact, the two most common reasons these programs fall short of their objectives are:

1. The audience was unaware of the program;
2. The audience didn’t understand how to participate.

Here are the three communication best practices for a successful employee program.

Best practice 1: Make it relevant

Clearly identify ‘What’s in it for me?’ in your communication piece. This may be different by audience, such as for a manager versus an employee. Segmenting your audience and making sure the most relevant message is being conveyed to each program participant is the difference between a good campaign and a GREAT campaign. Relevance creates meaning and meaning drives behaviour.

Best practice 2: Build in frequency

The “Spotlight Effect” in behavioural economics demonstrates that we overestimate how much attention others are paying to us. For example, you might believe you have a captive employee audience, but your participants aren’t paying as much attention as you think.

Research shows that it takes 3-7 times for a new message to take hold in a person’s memory. For a truly effective program, you need to plan several messages in several different formats because people internalise information in a variety of ways. Make sure you use digital, written, visual and aural methods in your campaign.

Best practice 3: Keep it simple

People make about 48 decisions per minute. Crazy! When asking them to make decisions about participating in your program, make it as simple as possible. If participants don’t understand what you want them to do, they’ll most likely do nothing. Focus on one communication piece - one message. Keep the calls to action simple so that critical elements are easy to understand and act upon.