Zoomed out employees will be Zombies without these Internal Communications Tools.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners and those people that would like to get more value out of their businesses by enhanced communications. My name is Jim James and I've been building my own businesses for over 25 years, but also running ESOS Public Relations, an international PR group with offices in China, Singapore, and the UK. So on this show, I'd like to share some tools and some tips that I know will work to help you and your company perform better. Today, I'd like to share with you some thoughts about internal communications. Now, I actually think that internal communications is going to be to some degree the next battleground for companies. I say this because people are getting fatigued. They're getting fatigued from doing so many virtual meetings, but also from separation from their classmates, their colleagues, their teammates, their factory mates. But also from their customers or from their students or from their partners. So I think internal communications is going to be an issue that business leaders now have to tackle full-on because maintaining morale is going to be as big a part of the communications team's work as external communications. I think we're going to see the transition from it being considered to be HR, the preserve of HR, to being really the area where the communications specialists will come into play. And I say that because internal communications is not a policy issue necessarily, nor a compliance issue, but a corporate culture issue. And that's going to be a function of the story of the company being told, the narrative being led by the founders and the management team and the collective consciousness. And that is going to be shared now online. It's no longer going to be the case where the building, the facilities, the factory, and so on give the entire story and the support to the brand. We're going to need to find other ways to engage our team members So that when they're not with their colleagues, they're still understanding and believing and wanting to deliver their very best for the company. Now, the old water cooler and games rooms, you know, didn't really have policies that they were— they were not platforms either. They were rooms with facilities that were really only relevant to those who were present, and these rooms were dark and dead unless there were people in them. But social media platforms mean that people can participate anytime and anyplace. Now, what's exciting about the way technology is moving— and we've heard about some 8,000 different martech platforms that are available— there are now dedicated internal communications platforms using some of the same technologies, of course, of mobile and Wi-Fi. That enable companies to have their own dedicated internal conversations. We've been working in China with clients because on WeChat, there are actually 3 different types of account one can have. One of them is for external, for enterprises, but there is an account actually for internal where both members and the holder of the account have to receive invitations and be accepted into the community. Now, in the West, we have a large number of tools and platforms that we can use, some of which are adaptations to the main platforms. For example, like the Facebook corporate, where we can have a Facebook group with a closed discussion. We can use newsletters of platforms like Mailchimp or SurveyMonkey. We can use videos like VideoAsk, for example, or Boomerang, but we can also use the conferencing systems like Microsoft Teams. But there are also some dedicated platforms for internal communications which have, by their very structure, recognized that there's a different relationship between the organization and the people that are being invited to participate with the app. These are essentially collaboration and employee engagement tools, and they're really powerful. And I think that they are going to really move in because as we're trying to move from the sort of general meeting platforms of Zoom and Microsoft Teams or Google Hangouts, or the productivity platforms of, for example, Slack and Asana, will realize that they're not dealing with some of the fundamental points which take place in effectively HR and employee engagement, which are to do with recognition and rewards and, and policy, and also with restricted access. So I thought I'd just have a look at a couple, one of which I've got personal knowledge of, which I'll share, which is a British company called Mo.work. But before I talk about Mo.work, just talk a little bit about a company called Connecteam, which is just with the one T, founded in 2014 by Amir Nehemia, who is from Tel Aviv in Israel. It's listed on the website as coming, being based in New York, but Nehemia says, we're on a mission to provide managers of all business types and sizes with the tools they need to communicate on operate, engage, and run their deskless workforce. Now, what he's recognizing is that the lines really are officially blurred. It's not really internal or external in terms of location anymore. It's all frictionless communication with people who come together and work, in this case, with, you know, deskless workforces. Now, they've actually just launched an app which enables organizations to create their own branded organizational smartphone app, which employees download, and with that they can do scheduling and so on. So they've got a case study, or quite a few, on their website, and they talk about, for example, St. John's, the medical assistance nonprofit, which frankly I didn't realize, but they have operations in 40 countries. Now this Connect Team is being used by St. John's to track members because it has GPS tracking. Volunteer networks are working with paid teams, so it's this blended organization which needs special demarcation between different groups, but also it's got the ability to create different groups, for example, for adults and children separately, which is useful in this case for St. John's because they, they're communicating with volunteers and employees using the same branded platform, but with different sections of the content gated. It's all mobile, and it's also able to log on with geofencing. It's called logging on in local time zones. But also, I thought what was interesting is that they're using the platform to onboard new volunteers. So it's also becoming a crossover from the website where people sign up to being the onboarding platform for the St. John's volunteers. So of course, the brand experience and the public relations that someone might have seen and read about wanting to take part with St. John's needs to be seamless, because otherwise they have one experience from the external public relations and another experience from the internal communications platform. But using a platform like Connecteam, they are able to have an integrated and seamless flow. They offer a free time tracking, employee engagement, chat, and employee directory enterprise app. And for $29, you can just have 200 users with time tracking and employee engagement, scheduling, workflow, rich chat updates. Now this is where it gets interesting— suggestion boxes, events, surveys, and quizzes. And listening to the manager at the railway company the other day talking about how one of their challenges right now when they have a team meeting on Microsoft Teams is that people are fielding questions at the wrong time, at the wrong event. Because if there isn't a forum for employees to file their issues that they're facing, they will understandably raise them at the next available opportunity, which might be a strategy meeting. So Connecteam enables companies to start to collate information in the way that they might have done around the factory. Certainly when I worked for Philips, a big part of the Philips town hall monthly meetings with the CEOs and the HR directors was to look at what suggestions have been put into the canteens, for example, in Malaysia and Indonesia, and try and create a channel for correspondence from the shop floor all the way to the boardroom. Now, Connecteam offers Advanced for $59 a month for organizations, and then has things like live polls, anonymous surveys, triple time clocks, which enables people to be logging on for different time zones and therefore, you know, tracking their time, but also being able to track where people are and to communicate with them. Especially, I can think of the benefits this, for example, for crisis management, where if there is an issue in a different time zone, that information needs to be released at the right time for the people that are living in that time zone. So one of the issues then is going to be that there are tools like Connecteam which are enabling us to manage the ongoing content and discussion There was a company that I looked at for a client from America that was having some issues recruiting staff in India, and this company is called mo.work. This is the one that I was looking at, making a recommendation to this client, because my view was for this client, their, their challenge was not so much getting people to come and work for them, although that was the challenge, but it was really because Internally, they didn't have any company evangelists. When people start to believe in the brand, or do believe in the brand and believe in the story, they become the best recruiters possible. And many companies will even offer a reward to internal staff who will invite potential new hires. I was interested in Modotwork because they've understood put into place that recognition is one of the main drivers, along with interesting work. According to my surveys, recognition is one of the most important drivers for people to feel a sense of belonging and support. So with mo.work, they have a platform which embeds peer recognition, and I think that's very forward-thinking because businesses are understanding that when people are of sight, they might really be out of mind. So the old well done when you see someone do something may now become completely invisible, especially for those members of a team that either may be not so vociferous, may not be so outspoken, or may not have a high-profile job. So at mo.work, they are creating moments which bring people closer together at work by using a platform which mirrors some of the social interactions that take place at work. There's a study by Gallup that suggests that 85% of the world's global population is not engaged at work, and that can only be getting worse when people are getting, uh, Zoomed out, and they may well zone out as a result. So what the people at mowork.do do is they allow employees to give each other recognition, but also to create things like contests inside the organization. They use the term moments. So what they like to do is to find ways to create quality and frequent moments of interaction between members of the workforce so that they're better able to understand one another and truly connect. So a little bit similar to, for example, an end-of-month meeting or a Christmas party or some kind of a review or these informal conversations which take place on a daily basis, especially through, for example, a line manager and a member of staff. Mo.work has put this in as a structure and as a system, and you can, you can seed the conversation, but you can also have staff gift, for example, vouchers to one another. You can allocate budgets for people to give free coffees, for example, or coupons for, uh, food, flowers, and other benefits, movies and so on. And they have this platform worldwide, so I really personally like this a great deal for my potential client in India. So through this combination of recognition and rewards, they then create the Mover View, which basically enables you to track the values of the company through the behavior of the people inside the company. And I thought this is very, very smart. Now needless to say that this is automated. It is an enabler with some measure of AI, but it's very much focused on the human interaction, and it enables organizations to really start to understand the the culture within their own organization, but also to monitor it over time. And the reason that this is important is, of course, because anyone that's in charge of internal communications is going to need to know what kind of sentiment is within the organization when a new message is going to be delivered. So sentiment analysis that we do, for example, on external communications to see what people are saying about a product or a service or a country, The engagement and the pass-along is just as valid, if not more so, on the internal audience. In our Speak PR program, we talk about the 3 different audience groups: the internal, the partners, and the external. A lot of attention is paid to the external because that's where people believe sales come from. But as we know, if you have an organization which is not energized and well organized and engaged, then you could be bringing potential partners or customers to the organization but losing the sale anyway. Now, Mo.work works with clients including the NHS and William Hill and AEG. So although it's a young company, Their philosophy and their tool sets have already found some some great homes. So I'm raising this because I think that as I listen to people on Zoom and listening to one person today who had eight Zoom calls back to back and had a a twelve minute break at eleven o'clock to get himself a coffee, I can just see how eventually people are going to get tired. And they're going to need to be able to find ways to say that without it seeming as though they're complaining. And it's only by engaging with our teams, especially if they are now deskless and remote, and they may be comprised of some permanent and some impermanent, but also some paid and some voluntary organization members, the tools like Connecteam and Mo.work represent dedicated platforms for internal communications. And so for all of us that are business owners, I think it's worth us thinking about creating special tools for the special people who help us to run our businesses. And so with that note, I wish you the best of health and a profitable business. And that you keep on communicating, not just externally but also internally, and maybe using one or two of these tools. If you like this podcast, please do subscribe, share it with someone else that you know that might enjoy it, rate it if you have the chance. You just do that at the bottom on iTunes of the show episodes that you've downloaded. Also, I'm available for consultation or for discussion on any of these topics around how to get your company noticed. You can reach me at jim@eastwestpr.com or come over to the eastwestpr.com website. There we've got our Speak PR methodology. We've also got our podcasts and our weekly subscription newsletter. I wish you well. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR.