Does this sound like your staff? Let's face it: a lot of staff think emails from Internal Comms interrupt their work. Even when they've bothered to read them, they still have the problem of what to do with all those ‘internal emails' clogging up their Inboxes.
Employees surveyed at the start of the decade spent an average of 49 minutes a day managing email and claimed that 34% of the internal email they received was unnecessary. Nowadays, workers spend over quarter of their day managing email. Email overload and email bankruptcy are par for the course. ( Gartner 2001 / Radicati 2007 )
But your internal emails are important ! The content and information they contain provide the knowledge and tools that staff need to function effectively in the company environment.
So don't resign yourself to low readership rates and don't add to the email overload problem either. Try these tips instead!
• Your Message in the Subject line. Read more
• Critical, Important, or FYI? Read more
• Consolidate Updates. Read more
• Make and Manage Group Email Lists. Read more
• Target Content to your Audience. Read more
• Short, Simple, Interesting (see Part 2)
• Manage Inboxes and Archives (see Part 2)
• Right Channel for the Right Message (see Part 2)
• No Email Day (see Part 2)
• Think Outside the Square (see Part 2)
Get the heart of your message in the subject line. Your reader doesn't even have to spend time opening the email. They can read and delete. They get the message and they save time.
Use headings in the body of your email, too. Think about reading a newspaper. How often do you just scan the headlines? The same applies to your email. Structure your email logically, and provide a heading for each paragraph. Your reader will be able to find key information quickly by either scanning or searching.
Can you get your message across in a single headline? Then think about using Snap Ticker. Snap Ticker delivers information as an on-screen scrolling alert to targeted employee groups. There's absolutely no need to set up RSS or understand XML. Simply write your own headline, include a quick summary and add click through links if required. Then specify the target audience. Snap Ticker feeds headlines and information updates directly to your target employee group. If employees see a headline of interest, they can click through to read it there and then, or make a mental note to review their news feed history at a later time (e.g. a bit of down time with a cup of coffee).
Snap Ticker:
• Doesn't interrupt work flow
• Only appears when staff are at their desk
• Shows only the relevant information updates targeted to the specific employee
• Aggregates important information into a searchable history
• Helps staff find key information quickly e.g. new and relevant information on the intranet
• Reduces pressure on email inbox
• A means to send status reports, and other updates during email outages
• Pre-specified feed publish times can be setup to coincide with external media releases and/or financial market updates, ensuring that staff are immediately informed of important news before they hear it from anywhere else
Is your message critical, urgent, or just nice-to-know? Assist staff by flagging emails. Don't forget that your reader may have a very different idea of what is urgent. Mentally put yourself in their shoes. Decide how important the email is to them. You can then indicate the level of urgency in the subject line or by using standard email symbols.
Don't forget that email is not always the best channel for communication. Sure it is quick and convenient, but it is also more impersonal. You cannot check your reader's mood or check how busy they are. So if you are dealing with a sensitive issue, don't click ‘Send' before you have thought about other methods of communication.
To ensure that staff have received important messages and then track who has read them, you could use Snap Desktop Alert. This delivers important messages, via an on-screen message alert window, to targeted employee groups, with full reporting facilities on who has read the message and/or followed links to further information.
Snap Desktop Alert allows the administrator(s) to send an alert window that:
• Has 'read now', 'read later' options. If the user clicks 'read later' the window will fade away to reappear later
• Is persistent. The Administrator can specify specific desktop alert behaviours such as ‘recurrence'
• Fully displays the desktop alert message direct on-screen as specified by the administrator
• Can be preset (size, position and prominence) for each message
• Can generate reports on viewership and click throughs to track activity
Snap Screensavers allows the administrator(s) to turn employee screensavers into a series of dynamic sequencing billboards. This format is ideal for messages that may not be urgent but are important from an employee ‘awareness' perspective. For example:
• Brand messages
• Event updates
• Product launches
• Sustainability messages
• Reinforcing key elements of staff training
If appropriate, specific screensavers can be targeted to specific employee groups. Also, employees can click links on the screensavers to be taken to further information as appropriate.
Employees who are suffering from email overload are unlikely to notice these types of messages when they are sent as emails. Screensavers however, can act as a subtle but very powerful way to raise awareness and communicate key themes.
How many times each day do you go to your inbox for a specific reason, only to surface 40 minutes later not having accomplished what you'd intended? Each new message pulls your thinking in a different direction, and it takes precious time to get back to your priority work.
Many organizations have taken the smart step of consolidating news, updates, department announcements, etc., into a daily or twice-weekly bulletin, delivered by email or other desktop channels. Employees still get all the news they need to know, but in a concise, scannable form that takes a lot less time to read and is less interruptive.
Angela Sinickas, noted communications measurement expert, recently mentioned that a corporate survey her company conducted showed 85% of staff prefer a single newsletter summarizing information, versus individual subject emails from each department.
If you want to start small, consider simply establishing certain times of day for internal broadcast emails to be sent, and get buy-in from the rest of the business. Ten emails sent at 10:15 AM -- which can be scanned or read all in one go by staff-- will be appreciated and more manageable for the reader.
Snap's Snap Mag tool enables company newsletter distribution via a unique e-magazine format that is pushed onto the desktop instead of being delivered by email. The Snap Mag tool makes producing an e-mag efficient and cost effective. Any member of staff can click to submit e-mag content into pre-specified formats. The Administrator sets up the layout of each e-magazine and then the editor simply reviews and approves appropriate articles prior to publication.
This is an exciting option which significantly reduces information overload. For example, rather than IT sending an email update about an outage, or marketing sending product information updates and HR sending their staffing updates out via email, with the social club organisers utilising the same medium, all of these messages can be consolidated into the same magazine by each department as quickly and easily as them sending a group email. Snap Mag is a definite asset to employee communications.
Snap Mag has other benefits as well. A Snap e-mag:
• Has full reporting on which articles are being read and by whom
• Means any employee can easily submit articles, meaning they can have their say and horizontal communications can be improved
• Can be displayed as users logon, meaning staff have something to read as they wait for their computer to start up
• Can promote new editions as scrolling news feeds
• Allows employees to customise their view by clicking to remove articles already read, meaning that information never becomes stale
• Allows staff to search a database and revisit past articles
How often do you or your staff open an email and then spend several minutes reading it to figure out what it has to do with you – discovering that it doesn't? Someone just spammed the entire group email list. What a waste of the reader's time!
Try appointing an email gatekeeper: someone who knows each email group, what information is relevant to them, and what each group needs to know. The gatekeeper ensures each group receives only relevant emails. It's also best practice to develop and communicate clear email policies and procedures, so staff know which emails to delete, which to keep on file.
One added bonus to consolidated newsletters and magazines is that you can choose a format that expires desktop messages and articles. Did you know that when messages are delivered via email, they sometimes sit in email folders forever sucking up storage capacity? Why not chose a format that expires messages and auto-deletes them from the desktop. Messages can be auto-deleted from the desktop and redirected to a central searchable repository that users can visit as required.
One company decided to eliminate all ‘news and admin' emails, by putting the messages into an easy to read format called Snap Mag that took 80% less time for employees to review. Email inboxes were freed up and employees were able to focus more effectively on their specific roles.
In addition, Snap Mag has the ability to:
• Automatically expire out-of date articles and messages
• Re-direct expired articles and messages to a central searchable repository
• Ensure that staff can easily able to find and revisit past articles and back copies of Snap Mag
For those important messages, that can easily get lost in someone's Inbox, don't forget Snap's Desktop Alert.
Have you ever opened an internal announcement, read it, and then thought, so what ? Many readers receive the email on financial performance but have no idea what it means to them in their role. And what percentage of staff would deem the “2008 strategy statement” to be a lot of meaningless fluff? The cause may be quite simply that the writer did not think about you as the intended audience.
Key elements to ensure full understanding:
• Why are you writing
• What they need to know
• How does it relate to them specifically/why is it important
• What they need to do (call to action)
Whether you are sending informative emails or publishing an internal comms electronic magazine, you need to know your audience.
One of the key benefits of all of the Snap Internal Communications tools is that every communication can be easily targeted to specific employee groups. You can target employee groups via existing network structures set up by IT (e.g. Marketing, Finance etc.) and/or you can set up you own communications targeting groups (geographic sites, executive assistants, mobile workers, etc.).
The built-in reporting options can help you to see exactly which groups are reading your messages and who are not, for whatever reason.
Why don't you try a short opinion poll, using the Snap Poll tool, and confirm what's working and what isn't?
The Snap Poll tool can be used for staff feedback, employee satisfaction surveys, staff opinion polls, etc. Full reporting options means that Snap Poll can also serve as a benchmarking tool and provide the means to easily measure the effectiveness of many operational areas .
The Snap Poll tool means that interactive employee polls and surveys can easily be pushed to the desktop, so they do not add to email overload. Employee-specific desktop reminders (to only those who have not responded) can also be set up to overcome typical participation issues.
Finally, where appropriate, a confidentiality option can be enabled, meaning that staff can be candid (for example, in times of change), without fear of repercussion.
Cut Through Communications is the US distributor for the Snap messaging tools. For further information, to request a demonstration, or to try out some of our tools yourself at no charge, please contact us .
Paula Cassin
Director and Founder
Cut Through Communications, LLC
desktop pop-up alerts ensure your message cuts through the clutter
screensavers that act as dynamic billboards to keep employees connected and reinforce messages
a scrolling ticker bar that captures attention and broadcasts critical updates fast
a customizable, auto-publishing electronic update or magazine with powerful targeting capability, which can reduce internal group emails down to zero
direct, on-screen interactive quizzes with automated scoring
direct, on-screen interactive surveys which significantly improve response rate
CUT THROUGH COMMUNICATIONS | SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA USA
TEL 1-805-758-3392 | EMAIL info@cutthroughcommunications.com