In a typical year, an employee would generally spend around two-thirds of their time at work – but not in 2020.
The year when everything changed. Never before have entire businesses been apart for such a prolonged period and never before have leaders spent so little face-to-face time with their teams. Throughout the pandemic, CEOs have recognised the importance of connecting their teams and building a strong culture of community.
The key to building a strong community with any team is internal communications.
The function and purpose of internal communications – along with employee engagement and experience – has changed and evolved. At first it was about sharing information from the top – very one way and transactional. The boss at the top of the business was telling their employees what they thought they needed to know.
Then it became a two-way conversation. Leaders started to ask their teams for feedback and how they feel at work. This open two-way dialogue between leaders and employees helped businesses to perform better and drove higher engagement (advocacy, motivation and commitment).
However, for most businesses, internal communications remain traditional, usually taking the form of a digital newsletter – boring, static, monolingual and non-inclusion, and reserved only for those with access to a company email.
This isn’t necessarily a problem if your entire team is office based, but what about if you work in retail or hospitality? 80% of the world’s workforce are desk less (they don’t sit at a desk all day) – working on the frontline, whether that be on the shop floor on the road, in a restaurant, a hotel or a hospital.
They work face-to-face with the customer every day, gathering vital feedback about the services or products they sell. By not connecting their entire workforce, businesses are losing out on a massive, untapped pool of talent – not only for product feedback and idea generation but for talent pipeline development and retention.
Internal communications in 2021 and beyond isn’t just about sharing information or communicating messages; it’s about bringing teams together to connect, share, collaborate and innovate. By connecting entire teams through one platform – giving everyone an equal voice and the same opportunity to participate -businesses can drive a high-performance culture and truly build a connected community. Even if an entire organisation is connected via emails, emails are very transactional and don’t create the same environment for collaboration.
A connected community moves away from the traditional top-down and bottom-up communication. It promotes collaboration and problem-solving between peers and teams, giving employees the ability to innovate quicker and more freely.
To connect their workforce – whether dispersed or not – businesses should embrace a new type of technology, one which is digital-first employee engagement-focused, open to all and democratic. At Ennismore, we have connected our entire team – from Gleneagles in Scotland to The Hoxton in Amsterdam, Chicago, London and New York – through one single platform, Workplace from Facebook (other platforms also available).
Since we launched Workplace in 2018, we’ve seen how our teams at both a global and local level have flourished into supportive communities, reaffirming our culture and introducing positive new behaviours, including volunteering, supporting homelessness and giving back to our local communities.
As well as bringing our entire team together through one platform, it is also a place to get work done, including daily reports, operational updates and a messaging function which eliminates the use of personal apps, such as WhatsApp (music to our legal teams’ ears from a GDPR perspective). This new way of communicating engages everyone – from the greenkeeper at Gleneagles to the barista in Downtown LA – and encourages two-way dialogue.
Our internal communication has become more transparent and engaging – from live videos of our CEO to endless gifs of Moira Rose from Schitt’s Creek (yes, mostly from me).
And finally Workplace has helped us to automate some of what we do – making tedious tasks fun! We create bots using The Bot Platform, which requires no coding experience. These tasks including voting for employee of the month (driving peer-to-peer recognition), booking a room for work travel (reducing paperwork and time), checking out our learning and development events (encouraging learning) and anonymously submitting questions to our CEO. Tasks which used to be much more laborious.
And this is just the beginning for us.
Bringing our team together, keeping them connected and creating opportunities for innovation has helped us build a culture of community.
Want to join The Collective, and contribute to the debate?
Email us at: The.Collective@lewissilkin.com