Winter or summer, vacation season can bring a dip in employee communication.
Make the most of the lull (unless you’re on vacation too!) by getting to those “one day” tasks and projects that never seem to leave your To Do List.
Here are 5 suggestions that will make good use of your time, improve the one-to-many employee communication in your organization, and re-energize you by doing something different than the usual day-to-day activities.
Pro Tip: Keep your enthusiasm in check. Choose one initiative (from this list or not) and get that done before tackling another!
1) Audit bulletin boards – physical and virtual
Do you ever post notices, invitations and reminders on bulletin boards or other central places such as lunch and locker rooms, intranets or hallways?
If so, chances are that some of the content has gone stale. Maybe the deadline for action has passed, the branding or style is out of date, or it’s been in the same spot for so long that no one notices it any longer.
Tour all the places (again, physical and virtual) where notices for courses, programs, safety awareness, charity events, etc. are posted.
- Remove any that are out of date.
- Assess the value of those that remain.
- Make note of those that could be spruced up and determine if the content is worth the effort.
- If you can, reposition those that need to stay.
- Look for gaps in content. (Should there be something about how to stay safe in summer/winter weather?)
- Make a simple plan for creating any new content.
If you have multiple locations, ask someone in each location to take pictures and be your hands to make changes.
Bonus activity: Make a list of all the locations (physical and virtual) where general information is posted. Use it as a reminder and checklist to audit the content every quarter.
2) Make coffee dates with business unit leaders
If you’re responsible for creating or managing employee communication on behalf of other functional areas such as HR, IT, Operations, Security and Facility Management, it’s in everyone’s best interest for you to know more about their short-term plans, current issues, recent successes and chronic concerns.
Coffee chats are a great way to gain this insight (that will help you make good decisions when creating employee communication on their behalf) and build positive, productive relationships.
You can also use the time to help that stakeholder understand your bigger picture. That kind of knowledge can make requests for support more reasonable and timely. It can also making finding mutually beneficial solutions easier if conflicts arise.
When requesting a stakeholder’s time, make it clear that it’s an informal, info-gathering meeting that will be a good use of their time. (Give at least one example of how the meeting will benefit them.) Keep it to 30 minutes and meet in a neutral place like a lunch room or nearby coffee shop, if possible.
Pro tip: Go prepared with 1 burning question (What info/insight would make working with that business unit easier?); 1 piece of info/insight you want to share (What might they not know about your process/priorities/constraints/objectives?); and 1 open question related to employee communication related to their area (Examples: What’s the biggest obstacle? Are you getting the results you need — and why do you say that?)
3) Gain 1 new skill
Sometimes we get so wrapped up in doing, we don’t take the time to learn new ways of doing or discovering tools and techniques that can make day-to-day work easier — and sometimes better.
More skills to create and distribute employee communication leads to more versatile and higher quality products (e.g. videos, emails, posters, articles, presentations). Plus, your job gets easier and your contributions are more valuable.
Some of the most valuable skills for internal communicators:
- Image creation and manipulation
- Writing in a familiar or collegial tone
- Understanding colour and design theory
- Video production
- Writing for different media (e.g. paper, web, oral)
- Strategic use of social media (as it relates to internal audiences)
- Basic coding (to better understand what is and isn’t possible given your org’s particular constraints)
- Mapping data and other analytics to communication outcomes
4) Review general intranet and internet content
Every organization has information about its mission, vision, history, team, products, goals, culture, accomplishments, accolades posted on internal and external websites.
It’s common for the info to go up then be forgotten. Until something major changes or a mistake is noticed.
The summer vacation lull is a great time to review all that content to make sure it:
- Is accurate
- Is necessary
- Reinforces the organization’s desired style and tone
- Is told in a compelling way
- Uses words and images
Always, the goal is to have content that will help employees be accurate, feel connected and make good use of their time.
5) Start or add to your lingo dictionary
Another thing every organization shares: a unique set of acronyms, short-hands and pet phrases.
While you are undoubtedly doing all you can to minimize the use of these in the employee communication you create or at least offer adjacent definitions, they will never entirely disappear.
So, the next best thing you can do is create (and maintain) a dictionary that everyone in the company can access.
Make sure it offers basic context as well as definition. In other words, if the acronym RST stands for Really Simple Tool, also say “One of our products” or “the internal accounting system” or “the industry term for X”. That’s the information an employee needs to not make mistakes or feel confused or foolish.
Pro tip: Call up, email, chat with staff at all levels to ask them what they think is the most confusing/misunderstood acronym or term? Resist the urge to set up a survey unless you have a lot of time available to promote the survey. Better to keep it simple and get something in place than make a big deal of it and it doesn’t get off the ground.
Another pro tip: Give new employees access to the dictionary as part of the onboarding process.
The Best Vacation Season Project
What’s the best choice when deciding which vacation season project to tackle? The one that will give you the biggest return on effort.
It may sound selfish but it isn’t.
If you become better or faster at your work, reinvigorated, or more knowledgeable about your stakeholders or organization, it can’t help but improve the effectiveness of the employee communication you create.
