Calls, Texts, Yaps, Teams/Yammer, Email - how many channels is too many?
how to organise multiple communication channels within a company
We did an end-user survey within a customer organisation recently where some users gave feedback that they felt overwhelmed by the volume of content coming from their employer. We were initially concerned that maybe we hadn’t made Yapster’s intelligent muting functionality easy enough to discover and use, but then we saw the problem. Duplicative communications were being sent to colleagues across multiple channels outside of Yapster.
So, if you have multiple communication channels and a large amount of potential information to share, how do you avoid the risk of spamming your workforce?
Quality leadership content buys you goodwill for administrative notices
Whilst we recognise that over-communication can be just as bad as under-communication, worst of all is when the excessive content is low-quality information and there’s little high value information being offered on top (if the CEO never does video updates, for example).
Your first line of defence against criticism for company communications is to ensure you are regularly creating unique and compelling content. This means challenging yourself to come up with insights that would be impossible to get other than from you.
Our favourite example is a regular (perhaps after each quarterly board meeting) ‘all hands’ video update from the company leadership team. This can be a simple ‘selfie’ piece to camera by the CEO or a more polished production involving multiple executive contributors. The key is to ensure the content contains useful nuggets of information, which the employees recognise as true and that you wouldn’t present in the same way to the external world. Admissions of minor managerial missteps and turnaround plans tend to intrigue and galvanise frontline teams the most!
If you have enough high quality content going out, people generally don’t mind administrative updates. Think of the former as your ‘movie’ and the latter as commercials or trailers (and how upset you would be if a cinema sold you a ticket and then all they screened was adverts).
Do not turn off comments or overly restrict end user permissions
Interacting with content is generally more interesting than passive consumption. This is why your Yapster usage dashboards allow you to see both ‘active’ and ‘interactive’ user rates.
Where possible, we recommend resisting the temptation to turn off replies to Yaps or comments to news posts so that colleagues can interact more meaningfully with your content. This isn’t just for the benefit of those who directly wish to ask a question or give feedback, it’s also to signal that the content you’re creating is useful to other colleagues (evidenced by the questions and feedback visible on your post). If you’re routinely sending out information and no one can see any engagement with it, do not be surprised if some colleagues conclude that content was unnecessary.
Ensure people know how to mute and archive conversations
It is a fact of modern life that similar people can have very different mobile communication preferences, both in content and volume. Rather than over-thinking things on the sender side of the equation, our preference at Yapster is to empower recipients to control the information flow to their tastes. Unlike WhatsApp, which will show climbing unread badges in chats even when they’re muted, Yapster’s muting functionality is designed to completely silence the platform whenever the user wishes to disconnect.
As our intelligent muting features more powerful than is generally available within consumer apps, it’s worth actively pointing them out by linking through to our Guide Dog resource centre.
Create and enforce a communications matrix
Whilst we work hard to empower end users with advanced controls on their handsets, it is still worth giving some thought to the ‘sender’ side of the corporate comms equation. An easy first step is to create a content calendar so that company communicators know who’s planning what and when between them. The next level up from this, particularly if you have a range of systems and lots of contributors sending out ad hoc content, is to invest in drawing up a communications matrix that sets up high level rules for your content types and channels.
Perhaps the best example of this within our customer community is Bartlett Mitchell, where they successfully maintain a mix of technologies that have some potentially overlapping characteristics and very different audiences.
Bartlett Mitchell’s Communication Matrix
If you think such a matrix could help your organisation, it may be worth watching this webinar with Bartlett Mitchell exec Chair, Wendy Bartlett.
Summary
The job of a leader within any organisation is to align and inspire the workforce. Assuming you have hired the right people and have the right strategy in place, the leader’s mission is almost entirely one of communication, so it’s worth investing time in getting your content and channels right.
If you would like some help in this area, please do get in touch with one of our experts.
