Internal comms: are office staff your new hard-to-reach audience?

With many companies encouraging people to work from home for at least the rest of this year, it’s important to reshape your internal comms to continue to engage remote workers post lockdown. 

Hard-to-reach audiences have always posed a challenge for internal communicators. Traditionally, these colleagues were field based, spending most of their time out on the road and rarely sitting behind a desk or connected to a computer. The COVID pandemic has introduced a new kind of remote worker, though – staff who had always been office based but are now spending their entire nine to five working from home. 

Facebook, Coca-Cola, Google, KPMG, Microsoft and RBS are reported to be among the companies not expecting their office-based employees to return to work before 2021. Many others, including Unilever, are predicting that they won’t go back to 100% office-based working arrangements.  

If home-based office staff are going to form a large proportion of the colleagues you need to engage with your internal comms for the coming months or even years, it’s important to consider how best to meet their needs.  

Good employers have always invested in internal communication tools and tactics that help remote workers feel valued and included. You’re likely to need to at least tweak your internal comms strategy, though, if you’re going to continue to engage these ‘new’ remote workers. You’re probably one of them yourself, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to put yourself in their shoes.   

The Headlines team has been working remotely throughout lockdown and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Here are a few things we’ve learned, either through our own ‘new normal’ or through talking to others in the internal comms community: 

Keep the team strong 

Whether it’s a regular morning Teams or Skype call or less formal check-ins, encouraging teams to have a daily catch-up online helps everyone feel connected and in touch with their colleagues. Explaining what you’re doing that day, sharing out work and discussing challenges and successes can help people switch on their brain when they’ve traded the morning commute to stumble downstairs at 08.59. 

Grow your communities 

Using internal communication social media tools like Yammer or Workplace can really help bring people together when they’re physically apart. They’re tailor-made for whole company chats and for creating sub-groups for different work areas or social interests. A rallying video message from the CEO, a shout-out for help, a new hack for getting stuff done… it’s a familiar format that keeps people talking. 

Print v digital? 

With many budgets squeezed and internal comms teams facing the need to do more with less, it could be a good time to review the format of any regular employee publications. If many more of your colleagues are now comfortable with online tools than they were pre-lockdown, you could look at moving some or all of your printed comms to digital channels. In a fast-changing world, digital comms tend to have shorter lead times so you can get the latest, up-to-date messages out faster and save on printing (and potentially re-printing) costs, too.  

How are you coping with post-lockdown internal comms? Need any help? Our team would love to hear from you.