Many organizations rely on email as their primary communication channel, but there’s a vast difference between sending regular emails through Outlook or Gmail and utilizing a dedicated email newsletter solution. This distinction becomes especially important for internal communications professionals tasked with keeping employees informed, engaged, and connected.

In recent years, employees have expressed a growing appreciation for internal newsletters, with a Ragan survey finding that 73% believe they are an important source of company news and information. While there are many strategic benefits to using email newsletter tools, those email clients such as Outlook and Gmail can come with limitations and unexpected costs. Let’s take a closer look at the differences and how they impact both the internal comms strategy and the wider employee experience.

The hidden costs of “free” email clients

While using existing email clients such as Outlook or Gmail might seem cost-effective – after all, your organization is already paying for them – this approach comes with significant hidden costs that affect both communicators and recipients.

1. Limited design and formatting capabilities

Standard email clients offer basic formatting options, but they lack the sophisticated design capabilities that professional communications require. The result? Communications that look outdated, inconsistent, or unprofessional, which could undermine your message and your brand.

A dedicated email newsletter tool provides professional, customizable templates that maintain brand consistency across all communications. You gain access to dynamic content blocks that engage readers, responsive designs that work seamlessly across all devices, and rich media integration without the technical complications that plague standard email clients.

2. No meaningful analytics or insights

Perhaps the most significant limitation of standard email clients is their inability to provide actionable data about your communications’ effectiveness. Did employees open your message? Which links did they click? What content generated the most engagement? How do different employee segments interact with your communications?

Without this data, you’re essentially communicating in the dark – unable to measure impact, optimize your approach, or demonstrate value to leadership. Every message becomes a leap of faith rather than a strategic decision based on evidence.

3. Time-consuming manual processes

Creating and distributing communications through standard email clients involves numerous manual, time-consuming steps. Communications professionals spend hours building distribution lists by hand (or waiting on IT teams), manually updating these lists as people join or leave the organization, creating formatting workarounds for visual elements, sending emails in batches to avoid system limitations, and manually collecting any feedback or responses.

These inefficiencies consume valuable time that communications professionals could better spend on strategy and content creation. In many organizations and depending on how many emails are sent in a given time, the hidden cost of these manual processes amounts to several days of lost productivity each month.

4. Delivery and reliability issues

Standard email clients were built for person-to-person communication, not strategic mass distribution. When communications professionals attempt to send important announcements to hundreds or thousands of employees through these platforms, they encounter serious limitations. The system may flag these messages as potential spam, preventing delivery entirely. Content-rich communications often exceed size restrictions, forcing communicators to strip away engaging elements like images and videos.

Without robust delivery reporting, you’re left wondering whether your message reached its destination or disappeared into digital oblivion. The inability to schedule sends for optimal engagement times or automatically follow up with employees who missed your initial message further undermines your communication effectiveness. And if you are asked to ghostwrite and send an email to your CEO, the security hoops you may find yourself jumping through are disheartening.

These limitations compromise the reliability of your most important communications. In the worst cases, critical messages never reach their intended recipients – not because they were ignored, but because they were never delivered properly in the first place.

The strategic advantage of dedicated email newsletter tools

A purpose-built email newsletter solution transforms internal communications from a tactical activity into a strategic advantage for your organization.

1. Targeted communications that reach the right people

Unlike the “all or nothing” approach of Outlook distribution lists, dedicated newsletter tools enable precise targeting. You can segment by department, location, role, or any custom attribute that matters to your organization. Modern systems create dynamic groups that update automatically as your organization changes, allowing you to personalize content based on recipient characteristics.

This targeting capability ensures employees receive relevant information without overwhelming them with messages that don’t apply to them. The result is more engaged employees who trust that communications from your organization will be relevant to them personally.

2. Actionable analytics that drive continuous improvement

Data is the foundation of communication effectiveness. Dedicated newsletter tools provide comprehensive analytics that show exactly who’s engaging with your messages and what content resonates most strongly. You can track engagement patterns across different employee segments, monitor performance trends over time, and compare your results against internal benchmarks.

These insights enable data-driven decisions that continuously improve your communication strategy. Rather than guessing what works, you’ll know precisely which approaches drive the highest engagement and can adjust your strategy accordingly.

3. Workflow efficiencies that save valuable time

Professional newsletter tools fundamentally transform how communications teams work by removing the technical barriers that consume so much valuable time. Instead of fighting with formatting codes or building emails from scratch, communicators can shape their message using intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that make design accessible to everyone.

The days of recreating templates for each message disappear as teams build a library of pre-approved designs that maintain brand consistency while adapting to different communication needs. As employees join, move within, or leave the organization, distribution groups update automatically, eliminating the constant maintenance that plagues manual lists.

Perhaps most valuable is the ability to plan ahead – communications professionals can craft messages when inspiration strikes, schedule them for strategic moments, and trust the system to deliver perfectly timed communications without requiring them to hit “send” at precisely the right moment.

These efficiencies translate into significant time savings for communication teams, allowing them to focus on strategy and content quality rather than technical details and manual processes. Many organizations report saving 5-10 hours per week after implementing dedicated newsletter tools – time that can be reinvested in creating more compelling content.

4. Integration with your digital workplace

Unlike standalone email clients, modern newsletter tools integrate with your broader digital workplace. They connect with your intranet for content consistency, leverage existing employee data for targeting, coordinate messaging across multiple channels, and generate unified analytics that provide a complete picture of your communication effectiveness.

This integration eliminates silos between your communication channels, creating a more cohesive strategy that reaches employees through their preferred channels. Information flows naturally between systems, eliminating the duplicate work and inconsistent messaging that plague many organizations and communications teams.

Real-world impact: the measurable difference

Organizations that implement dedicated email newsletter tools witness a transformation in their internal communications landscape. The most immediate change appears in engagement metrics, with open rates typically climbing 30-50% beyond what standard Outlook emails achieve. This dramatic increase stems from better targeting, improved design, and delivery optimization that places messages in front of employees when they’re most receptive. Behind the scenes, the reclaimed hours from automated processes that replace manual tasks allow comms teams to focus on their trained skills and strategic thinking rather than the administrative burden.

The impact of better communications extends beyond mere efficiency, however, as employees begin to better retain important information and complete requested actions at higher rates. This improved effectiveness naturally leads to greater employee satisfaction with how the organization communicates, creating a virtuous cycle where employees pay more attention to messages because they’ve learned that communications are relevant and valuable to them. Perhaps most importantly, leadership starts to see communication as a strategic function rather than a tactical necessity, creating a stronger alignment between communication efforts and broader organizational objectives.

These improvements translate directly into better-informed employees, stronger organizational culture, and more effective change management. During critical periods like organizational changes, product launches, or crisis situations, these benefits become even more pronounced.

Making the business case: when “free” costs more

When evaluating the true cost of using standard email clients versus dedicated newsletter tools, consider several factors beyond the initial price tag. Calculate the hours your communications team spends on manual tasks that could be automated. Measure how much time employees waste sifting through irrelevant communications. Assess the impact of important messages being missed or ignored and evaluate how improved targeting and analytics would support your business objectives.

For most organizations, the business case becomes clear: dedicated email newsletter tools deliver significant ROI through improved efficiency, effectiveness, and employee engagement. The question isn’t whether your organization can afford a dedicated tool – it’s whether you can afford to continue without one.

How to choose the right email newsletter solution

Not all email newsletter tools are created equal. When evaluating options, look for integration with your existing digital workplace, intuitive interfaces that don’t require technical expertise, comprehensive analytics that provide actionable insights, and sophisticated targeting capabilities. The solution should offer mobile-friendly design and delivery, strong security and compliance features, and scalability to grow with your organization.

The most valuable solutions will integrate seamlessly with your existing employee experience platform, creating a unified ecosystem rather than adding another disconnected tool. This integration is key to maximizing both adoption and impact.

Email newsletters: from communication to connection

In today’s fragmented workplace, effective communication is more than distributing information – it’s about creating connection. Standard email clients like Outlook simply weren’t designed for strategic internal communications. They lack the targeting capabilities, design flexibility, analytics, and integration features that modern workplaces require.

A dedicated email newsletter solution transforms how organizations communicate internally, turning one-way broadcasts into meaningful conversations that engage employees, reinforce culture, and drive strategic objectives.

The post Why your organization needs a dedicated email newsletter tool (not just Outlook) appeared first on Interact software.

The 2024 Paris Olympics are upon us and they present a fantastic opportunity to engage employees through participation and celebration in your organization.

Transforming your organization into a mini Olympic village with themed activities can significantly boost morale and motivation, inspiring employees to bring their best to work, fostering camaraderie, and creating shared memories. This not only enhances interpersonal relationships but also cultivates a vibrant and positive environment that people are happy to be a part of.

Your modern intranet should provide a wealth of features to help you do just that. Here are five high-impact ideas to activate your workforce, turn your intranet into an workplace Olympics engagement hub, and make your organization a frontrunner in the competition for company culture excellence:

5 employee engagement ideas for your very own workplace Olympics

1. Recipe share: A healthy Olympian challenge

Athletes are known for their dedication to healthy living, so why not inspire your employees to embrace a healthy lifestyle with a “Healthy Olympian” recipe challenge. You can start by creating a dedicated community on your intranet for sharing recipes inspired by Olympic athletes’ diets or healthy dishes perfect for watching the games.

If your intranet doesn’t include a communities feature, you could create an intranet blog or homepage post that employees can participate with by adding comments, or create a forum post.

Social intranet features can be useful for boosting interaction, inspiring creativity, and encouraging healthy competition. Using Interact’s social timeline feed, employees can share photos of their culinary creations and include any relevant #hashtags that you designate to the challenge.

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2. Going for gold: Trivia!

Fuel some friendly competition and test your employees’ Olympic knowledge with a regularly occurring trivia challenge, or ask them to predict the outcome of specific games within the Olympics.

To do this, you could use your intranet’s social feed to pose Olympic-themed questions or call for predictions.

If your intranet doesn’t offer social features, regular pages or forum Posts will do. You can encourage participation by awarding your employees points for correct answers through your intranet’s rewards and recognition program.

3. Olympic athlete challenge

Encourage employees to get into the games just like Olympic athletes by tracking their daily or weekly activity levels. Employees can utilize wearable devices or smartphone apps to track steps, distance, and other fitness metrics.

Why not create a community and use it to set up virtual challenges inspired by different Olympic sports, such as a marathon challenge, swimming relay, or cycling race? You can create teams or have individual participants compete to reach specific goals, offer rewards and recognition for top performers, and encourage employees to share their progress and achievements on the company intranet.

This initiative promotes a healthy lifestyle, team spirit, and a sense of accomplishment, and those who take part can encourage others to push harder and applaud them for the work they are doing.

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4. Olympic charity challenge

Unleash your team’s competitive spirit while making a difference with the Olympic Charity Challenge. This involves dividing employees into teams and encouraging them to accumulate points through physical activities like walking, running, or cycling – or you can use a mix of ideas found inside this article.

The team that racks up the most points during your workplace Olympics wins a prize, but the ultimate goal is to raise funds for a chosen charity. This initiative fosters teamwork, promotes a healthy lifestyle, and creates a sense of purpose as employees unite to support a worthy cause. Combining friendly competition with charitable giving can ignite employee enthusiasm and make a lasting impact.

This idea is a great overlay to everything you do in your workplace during the Olympics. It can be the ultimate layer for which everyone competes.

5. Spirit days: dress for the games

Inject a dose of fun into your work week with themed spirit days! Announce the days and themes (think sports disciplines, participating countries, or iconic Olympic colors) by building specific pages on each one and promoting them to your internal audience, ensuring everyone is ready for the challenge.

Encourage employees to showcase their workplace Olympics spirit by sharing photos of themselves sporting their themed attire on your intranet social feed, and if your intranet allows filtering by topic, you can apply one to their posts, creating a vibrant visual representation of your company’s Olympic enthusiasm. Alternatively, a page with comments enabled or a forum thread will do just fine if your intranet lacks social media features.

You could take this a step further and provide rewards for categories such as Most Creativity Outfit, Best Group Costume, Most Liked, and Best Overall Spirit, and present these awards at the end in the spirit of the Olympics.

Bonus idea: pass the torch

An Olympics-inspired digital torch relay is a great way to ignite a wave of excitement and connection. Kickstart this interactive campaign by having your CEO virtually pass the torch to another employee via a comment on a designated intranet post. Each employee who receives the torch then passes it on by mentioning another colleague in their comment. Track the torch’s journey across the organization, creating a sense of community and anticipation as employees eagerly await their turn to carry the flame.

To add an extra layer of fun, consider incorporating challenges or questions for each torchbearer to complete before passing it on. This will encourage creativity and engagement while extending the lifespan of the campaign.

Let the workplace Olympics games begin!

These workplace Olympics initiatives can transform your intranet into a vibrant hub of employee engagement and excitement. Remember, the key to success lies in choosing activities that resonate with your employees’ interests and passions.

Whether you opt for friendly competition, knowledge-building, or charitable giving, celebrating the 2024 Paris Olympics within your organization presents a unique opportunity to foster a stronger sense of community and shared purpose. So, get ready to ignite the Olympic spirit and create unforgettable memories for your employees!

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Main image by Freepik.

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According to Meta, the platform will remain fully functional until August 31, 2025. Users will then be able to view existing content in a read-only mode until May 2026 before Workplace shuts down completely on June 1, 2026. 

Meta has not disclosed a specific reason for the closure, but some experts believe the company is shifting its focus toward developing its Metaverse and AI projects. 

This news will require businesses currently using Workplace to find an alternative employee experience solution for enterprise social networking, internal communications, knowledge management, and collaboration.  

The good news for current Workplace users is the platform is not unique in its functionality, and the required change provides organizations with an opportunity to review what additional features exist in the marketplace that could augment an internal comms strategy.  

“While a shift to a new employee communications app can feel disruptive, companies like Interact have been providing employee experience tools for 20 years and are well equipped to make the migration as smooth as possible,” said Simon Dance, CEO of Interact. “Further, blending employee communications tools into a modern intranet solution provides an elevated employee experience.”  

While Meta has left Workplace customers with time to seek a replacement platform, considering alternative options early will ensure organizations have the best chance of identifying a solution that meets their unique requirements.   

If your business is affected by the closure of Workplace, we’re here to support you with finding a new intranet solution. Whether you have questions about our extensive set of features, what a transition to Interact entails, or you’re interested in a product demo, get in touch and we’ll be happy to help.  

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Whether you’re looking for actionable tips or detailed analysis, The Roundup is your weekly window into the world of employee communication, engagement, and workplace culture.

Check your inbox every Friday for a pun-derful look at all the news that’s fit to print. Don’t miss out on our comprehensive internal comms roundup!

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Due to the changes in how enterprises operate – i.e., towards a mix of remote, hybrid, and on-location work – the world has caught up with something that internal communicators already knew. Namely, employees work in lots of different places and receive communications via a dizzying mix of channels and technologies.

Getting through to everyone requires planning and perseverance.

A typical digital workplace may use email for all-company comms, intranet software for daily posts and long-term content, and Slack or Teams for instant messaging. Then there’s also SMS, digital signage, and unofficial shadow IT tech such as WhatsApp. The intranet employee app – a company-branded enterprise app that replicates the intranet in a mobile app format – is an additional channel through which employee communications can be delivered and workers can access important information.

To capitalize on this suite of multichannel options, you need to use all these platforms effectively. This means being able to create, schedule, send, and track messages so they are seen and understood by their intended audiences. You may be able to send internal comms via the channels above, but if your team doesn’t use or engage with them, it’s going to be a wasted effort.

This introduces a dilemma some communicators and organizations find when they try to use an employee app for internal communication.

Some employees don’t like using them, some won’t download them to their personal devices, and many don’t understand their value. This article offers some tips on how you can communicate the benefits of an employee communication app in a way that encourages adoption. By gaining more active employee app users, you can boost engagement with your intranet and develop a crucial mobile comms channel to connect your workplace.

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What is an employee app?

Even before the pandemic and the jump to remote work, mobile phones were an important part of our working lives. Pre-pandemic research suggested that 71% of US employees spent more than two hours a week accessing company information through mobile devices, and 66% of organizations planned to invest in an enterprise employee app in the coming three years.

What were these companies keen to invest in? What is an employee app? 

Vendors and industries define employee apps differently. An HR definition of the employee app may be that it is a mobile-first, single-purpose software application that enables staff to book holidays or check payslips. A project management employee app, on the other hand, may support task management. 

As an intranet software company, we define an employee app as an application that enables all workers, especially deskless and frontline personnel, to receive internal communications and instantly access tools and information available in their digital workplace. A typical workflow might see a remote worker logging into the intranet employee app to read new company communications and then searching for a co-worker or resolving a query for themselves about an IT or HR policy. Crucially, they can do this without having to access a desktop.

As such, employee apps are extensions of the intranet and a valuable communication channel. An intranet employee app can help: 

• Senior leaders and IC teams to distribute business news, events, and policy updates 
• Foster social interaction and cohesion through blogging, liking, sharing, and commenting 
• Create a knowledge base that mobile employees can use in their daily work and in interactions with sales prospects and customers
• Dispersed employees to find and connect with co-workers through a search function and comprehensive people directory

Why are some workers resistant to downloading an enterprise app? 

Employee mobile apps are not universally loved, which is something organizations must overcome if they want to take advantage of the opportunities created by the technology. 

Skepticism about mobile enterprise apps is both reputational and functional. At one level, there is confusion over what an employee app is there to do (make lives easier) and what people perceive it might do (invade privacy and limit freedoms). 

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This has been increased by news stories such as the one from 2022 about the Amazon mobile app allegedly blocking workers from using the words “union” and “pay raise” when chatting with one another or communicating with the company. 

Whether or not these stories are accurate, they add to a sense of unease some people have about downloading a company application onto a private mobile device. 

From a functional perspective too, the employee app has sometimes suffered from being rushed and underdeveloped. By releasing self-created enterprise apps with limited design and poor UX, some organizations have given employees a buggy, half-baked experience that erodes confidence. 

In its survey of over 4,000 US office workers, ArcTouch found that just 12% (one in eight) of office workers used mobile apps to perform their work, with only 13% stating that they found the apps to be “elegant”. 

How can you get staff to download and use an employee app? 

There is no single magic trick to drive the adoption of a particular technology. Individuals have preferences and dislikes that can be hard to change. However, some resistance may be overcome through communication and education about the features and benefits of an employee app.  

If you’re creating an internal communications campaign to increase employee app adoption, consider including these tips in the story you tell about why they should hit the download button.

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#1 They can expect UX

Inelegant design and poor UX was a problem in older enterprise apps, but it has been overcome through the development of native apps. A native employee app is created specifically for a mobile operating system (iOS or Android), resulting in a superior user experience that meets user expectations. 

Let’s take the example of intranet homepage design. When they log in through a desktop or laptop, users of Interact encounter a homepage designed to celebrate company culture and make life easier for them. Users become accustomed to this well-designed, easy-to-navigate format, so it is important that when they come to utilize the employee app too, the experience will be just as smooth.  

Because the Interact employee app is built natively, users receive the same homepage experience as they would with the online platform. The app version of Interact can showcase custom designs, allows users to personalize their content feeds, shows calendars, and much more. 

By delivering a seamless experience that transfers from web to app, every organization can communicate to remote, in-office, and on-location staff alike that their app will be both elegant and functional. 

To make the experience of downloading and using the app even easier, your comms campaign may also give details on how to download and access the app. Interact’s employee app is accessible alongside consumer apps in the Google Play and Apple App Stores. Again, this increases usability and can inspire trust—both of which are essential in driving adoption. 

#2 Be honest about permissions

Security is an important concern in the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) digital workplace. BYOD has evolved because rather than issuing company mobile phones to everyone, it is more cost-effective for companies to allow workers to operate via their private devices. However, this raises the issue of whether company data is still secure. What if a worker loses their phone with company data on it and doesn’t have a security pin set up? 

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One way to achieve a high level of security in this environment is through the Mobile Application Management (MAM) protocol. MAM software allows an organization’s IT team to publish data, push notifications, or configure and secure information on the app. This is a necessary and standard feature within apps but can cause reluctance among workers who are anxious about the reach of enterprises into their private lives. They rightly want to know how far the management of the application may stretch into their permissions or private data. 

The truth is that the 60 to 90 apps we all have on our phones probably ask for more excessive permissions than an enterprise employee app will (consumer apps routinely ask for access to microphones, cameras, and location settings). If you’re going to overcome reluctance though, you may want to be transparent about how an employee app will interact with the employee’s mobile device. 

So, when putting together employee comms, don’t just document the “what’s in it for me?” factor but work with your IT team or software vendor to communicate exactly what MAM will mean for everyone. Collaborating with your tech partners to produce explainers or even live webinars can dispel misconceptions about data usage and security.

#3 Be clear on your comms plan

You’ve got an employee app, now how are you going to use it? 

It can be tempting to spam people with every piece of company news, but a personal mobile device is a private affair that often feels separate from work. Many people do not want to receive late-night push notifications about things they don’t consider urgent. 

With pull communications such as emails (assuming mobile notifications are turned off) or the intranet, we can choose not to check in. With push notifications though (although employee app messages can easily be turned off—tell your co-workers how!), anything that is pushed at us can feel like an intrusion, so communicators need to be reserved in how they use the tool. 

When creating a multichannel comms plan think carefully about the type of messages you will use an employee app for. Will you communicate routine updates or just urgent broadcasts? Who will you target with these messages, will it be all users or just frontline staff without easy access to computers? When will you send these notifications if you have workers in different countries or on shift patterns? Your comms plan should take account of these factors so that you achieve a balanced approach.

With this in place, share elements with your co-workers as part of the employee app campaign. People may be more inclined to download and use the app in ways that benefit them if they know they aren’t going to receive constant notifications when they’re trying to enjoy some downtime.

#4 Make an employee app personal

Offering a cookie-cutter experience that doesn’t take account of personal needs or preferences will either get your app ignored or downloaded, glanced at, and then deleted. 

Some elements of an intranet employee app that should come as standard include: 

• Personalized homepages based on roles or locations 
• The ability for users to manage the topics and content they follow so they see more of it 
• Content in the native languages of employees 
• The ability to search for and then connect with colleagues. This is especially true in large, dispersed organizations where thousands of staff – many of them in hard-to-reach manufacturing or transport locations – may be spread across a wide variety of locations or countries 

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If it’s set up correctly, your employee app should deliver all of this. Having these tools enabled will allow you to make an even stronger case that everyone should use them to improve their employee experience.

#5 Make your employee app a place of creation as well as consumption

Receiving company communications and accessing key tools (e.g., SAP Concur or Salesforce) are two reasons staff will log in to an employee app, but giving them the facility to create their own content may keep them there once they’ve arrived. 

Not everyone in your organization will be a keen blogger, but there will be those in manufacturing or retail who do want to share their experiences. 

With an employee app that has employee blogging activated, even workers who don’t have a corporate email or spend hours at their desks can use the app to create and publish blogs for the whole company. 

Not only does this give individuals a voice, but it allows everyone in your workforce to understand what is going on in other locations. This can be instrumental in building a stronger, more diverse culture.

While mobile blogging won’t be a deal clincher for everyone, it’s another element to include in your persuasive and motivational internal communications campaign. Enabling content creation can be a good way of showing everyone that their voices are valued too. 

Finally: Publicize to persuade 

Internal communicators are a company’s great persuaders. In addition to all of our other tasks, it frequently falls to comms teams to influence staff to adopt a new technology or initiative. 

Hopefully, some of the above points will help you to develop a persuasive campaign but don’t forget there are many more. You can get leaders to publicly support a new channel, run competitions specific to your employee app, or use nudge theory prompts to better promote usage. Whichever way you communicate the value to your workforce, don’t forget that it’s never going to be a “one and done”. Plan to communicate, re-communicate, and then come back to it again. Repetition with variation can help to encourage people to feel comfortable with new ways of doing things. 

As remote and hybrid work becomes more common, enterprise apps are growing in importance and will arguably become a key communications channel in the coming years. Thinking ahead and motivating people to use them now could be important in developing a future of internal communications that is better connected.

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The post Give staff an employee app they actually want to download appeared first on Interact software.

We know that boosting employee interaction with company communications and content areas can help them to stay informed and feel connected, but it’s also a challenge. Employees have priorities aside from reading through the CEO’s recent blogs after all. In big organizations especially, people may be reluctant to interact with individuals and teams they don’t know. 

Then there’s also what psychologists call the bystander effect. Counterintuitively, when lots of people are present in a crisis it becomes less likely that a single individual will act. Everyone assumes someone else will do something, so everyone does nothing. Comms can be a little like that too. 

“Everyone else in the company has already liked or shared this, so I don’t need to.” 

The question is, how can you counteract that feeling and encourage people to act in a way that increases intranet engagement? One possible way is by using insights from employee advocacy programs. 

This article explores what employee advocacy is and suggests how you can turn employee advocacy tactics into better intranet engagement too.

• What is employee advocacy? 
• How is employee advocacy different from employee engagement? 
• What are the benefits of employee advocacy? 
• How to build an employee advocacy program and improve intranet engagement 
• Apply employee advocacy to your intranet engagement 

What is employee advocacy?

Outside of its programmatic meaning, employee advocacy simply means having workers who are so engaged with an organization that they represent it positively and voluntarily within their own networks. 

They post about it on social media, actively engage with its media content (blogs, social posts, reports, etc.), recommend people they know to work there, and wear its swag when they’re out and about.

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In the context of employee advocacy as an intentional act though (what you might call Employee Advocacy), EA is a set of strategic and tactical actions that give employees everything they need to advocate for your company. This may include setting them up as ambassadors, incentivizing them, giving them a timeline of appropriate content, and offering social media training on how they can use it in an authentic way. EA means treating this kind of earned media mention as a serious marketing avenue. And lots of companies now do it.

How is employee advocacy different from employee engagement? 

In many cases, this comes down to who owns the process and where it takes place. 

Employee engagement and experience are usually the responsibility of HR and comms professionals. They are tasked with creating intranet content ideas and internal communications that engage and connect their people internally. 

Using multichannel communication tools such as intranet software, the end goal is to create better informed and happier workplaces. 

As social media has grown, however, employee engagement has also taken on an external element. Shrewd marketers understand that brand authenticity depends on people who intimately know the product and the company (and who better than its employees?) making public recommendations for it. With this in mind, employee advocacy programs seek to find, equip, and reward those employees who are most likely to publicly celebrate being part of the enterprise. 

So, while employee engagement (through intranet engagement as a single metric) remains an internal drive, boosting employee advocacy through organized programs is often co-owned between marketing and other people-focused teams in a business. 

Crucially, employee advocacy programs now act for marketing teams as another pillar of social media and marketing strategies. The conventional wisdom is that if employees voluntarily broadcast to their networks via social media and other channels, you’re more likely to build a positive brand presence, attract new hires, and gain sales opportunities. Employee advocacy in this sense is another form of marketing.

Some of the obvious differences between employee engagement and employee advocacy are summarized in these diagrams.

What are the benefits of employee advocacy? 

If it’s done right, a good employee advocacy program should have positive benefits for both the company and the individuals promoting it. 

By providing employees with the resources and tools to create interesting external content for their own audiences, everyone wins. 

Some of the combined benefits include: 

• Building a shared sense of purpose internally and externally 
• Promoting a company as an employer and business partner 

• Improving customer perception 
• Driving employee creativity and connection 
• Establishing the employee as a thought leader and the brand as a destination employer 

These points are good in theory, but does the evidence support them? Research suggests it does. 

One study of North American executives found that “On average, employees have 10 times more contacts than the official branded channels. Company branded messages reach 561% further when shared by employees versus branded channels.” 

Given the way that social media platform algorithms often seem to limit the visibility of unpaid corporate posts (why would they give them away free when they can charge to advertise?), encouraging employees to share company content is an effective way to engage a wider network. 

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The real benefit though comes from the trust that these advocates build. Research from Nielsen suggests that when it comes to getting information on brands and services, a staggering 88% of people trust earned media – including recommendations from family and friends – over any other source. 

As the digital landscape has grown more crowded and complex, personal networks have become more important, with personal trust growing to fill the gap.

How to build an employee advocacy program and improve intranet engagement

Employee advocacy programs are designed to give individuals the tools and incentives to voluntarily engage with organizational content and communications. To work properly they must create a community of people within a business who are willing to advocate, and then give them ways to engage via social media on a regular basis. 

If enterprises can do this for external interaction, we should be able to transfer the same principles to intranet engagement. 

So, how do enterprises drive greater employee advocacy? The following points show how EA programs are created and how you can adapt them for better employee engagement.

#1 Begin with a POC 

You may want to leap straight into providing thousands of employees with content and swag they can boast about, but it’s advisable to start small and ensure you can scale. 

Creating a proof of concept (POC) is essential for bigger organizations especially because it allows them to test and learn with a cohort of employees before it gets rolled out further. 

Some tips for designing an employee advocacy POC include: 

• Identify and select a proportion of employees (2-5% may be a good start) you wish to include. Inevitably, not all employees will join the EA program, so the POC is about working with a smaller group of the group who will eventually participate. If your future plan is to have 100 employee advocates out of 1,000 total workers, start your POC group with between 20 and 50. Identifying these people will depend on your workplace, but the key thing is to ensure diversity. To avoid creating a bubble effect, seek out voices from right across the organization, in every team. Don’t forget to include those who don’t typically post or advocate. The goal of the POC is to see whether the program will succeed when people have the right tools and incentives, so there is no point in only utilizing those people who are already active.
  
• Define your goals. The POC gives you a chance to look at a small group of people and decide what success looks like and how achievable it is. If you provide 20 people with social media training and three months’ worth of content, how many times will they advocate during that time? Knowing what success is in a small group means you can scale upwards and create an adoption and communication plan.
  
• Provide training and guidelines. Having a small group of participants should make it easy to offer training and guidance on how you’d like marketing and advocacy to work together.
  
• Plan to scale your efforts. EA requires a continual effort because you need to provide fresh content, stimulate a community of advocates, offer new training, and keep people engaged. As your program grows from 20 to 100 or more, who will do what as it grows? How and when will you roll out the plan to more people? Will the marketing department provide everything or will a point of contact in each team provide more specific material that’s relevant for their people? It’s important to plan the structure of your EA community in advance.

Intranet engagement pro tip: 

Designing a scalable intranet engagement plan works along the same lines as a POC. It’s likely that you will have certain teams, locations, or even countries where your internal communications just don’t seem to stimulate any engagement. 

Rather than tackling everything in one go why not start small in these areas and try to isolate those individuals who may be important internal influencers. Once you have a list of possible people, work with them to develop content and processes that suit what they find engaging. It may be that your company’s global content is just not interesting for them but by starting at a local level you can grow engagement from grassroots. 

In time, you’ll be able to see if those people can keep up the momentum of making regular interactions with you, hopefully building to even more from their colleagues.

#2 Create a community 

With your POC behind you, it’s time to identify and build an even bigger group of brand ambassadors. There are many potential strands here, but one crucial one is whether you choose to create an internal sub-brand that marks these ambassadors out as special. 

Having a designated group with its own name and branding (which can then live on a Slack or Teams channel and on your intranet) can create a sense of solidarity. It can also be a place where everyone can connect, suggest ideas for posts, and communicate about how they are networking. Having everyone together in one place is also ideal for internal communicators and marketers as they can update the entire group without having to use multiple avenues of communication. 

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Intranet engagement pro tip: 

Your intranet is the perfect platform for building solid communities. Customize the branding of a page, give it a name, and send your members unique comms along the channels they are responsive to. By having a smaller group you’ll be better able to see who responds to what (mobile, employee email newsletter templates, app, etc) and which just don’t work. 

Creating a team of influencers may help to build a better culture of communication throughout the organization.

#3 Reward and recognize 

Employee advocacy should be a two-way street, with employers benefiting from publicity and employees being recognized for going the extra mile. Being seen as a thought leader and a positive force within their own network may be one externally motivating factor, but companies can also provide internal benefits such as employee recognition points (at Interact we give each other digital ‘donuts’) and company-wide acknowledgment. 

Highlighting the efforts of your advocates during your all-hands meetings can help to foster recognition and increased buy-in too. 

Many companies also now have employee referral bonuses for those who recommend successful new hires. Although this monetary compensation is not necessary for all advocacy tactics, it can support the company to recruit from a pool of trusted contacts.

Intranet engagement pro tip: 

Good feelings are viral, and it doesn’t take much to make people feel so good that they want to share that. It doesn’t have to be a gift box (like lucky Beth above), it can be a mention on your company’s intranet feed or a celebration on your social media feed. If people are going the extra mile for you internally then show you care and encourage senior leaders to make their mark on that too.

#4 Training and guidelines can make a difference 

Having diverse voices advocating for you is important. It will also mean that you have some ambassadors who are less social-media savvy than their colleagues. To ensure that everyone can participate in an authentic way, most employee advocacy programs include elements of social media training and help participants connect with company guidelines. 

Whether you choose to conduct this training in-house or via an external partner, there are several key things to remember. 

• There are lots of platforms and you want employees to use those most aligned with their interests. If they don’t use LinkedIn then only giving them training and content for that channel will be largely pointless. Meet them where they live and provide actionable tips on how to create good company-referencing content. How would you like them to use company hashtags or logos? Is there a specific URL they need to use if they’re sharing blogs or guides? Treating EA as an extension of marketing strategy means that you want their actions to be trackable in the same way as conventional marketing.
  
• Platforms change and develop, which means training needs to change too. Assuming that you can write your training guide and rely on it indefinitely is a sure-fire way to create content that looks out-of-date or inauthentic when the platform changes.
  
• Social media guidelines should be just that, not hard and fast rules. Employee advocacy is about empowering people to be creative and to interpret some of the company content you provide. It can be good to suggest that you like to use a certain tone or specific words, but limiting people to ultra-specific rules will mean they never voluntarily get involved.
  
• The time your co-workers spend learning and then communicating on behalf of the company is still a form of work and should be understood as such. To guarantee full engagement you may need to liaise with managers and work out how much time EA activities will take. Your ambassadors can then be supported to post creatively in a way that benefits everyone. If EA posts are seen as an add-on that people should perform in their own time then this may alienate people and make them reluctant to act.

Intranet engagement pro tip: 

Intranet content creation has become simpler with the advent of more advanced CMS intranet features. If you haven’t heard about Interact’s new content editor (which allows everyone to make awesome intranet pages!) then please take a look at this short video. 

With a drag and drop page editor, it’s possible to give non-technical authors the power to make interesting pages that will cement their internal influencer status.

#5 Provide relevant, shareable content

Perhaps the most important part of an effective EA program (and an intranet engagement push) is the creation of a steady stream of engaging content. 

If you can provide blogs, guides, images, and videos that all reflect people’s interests, they will be more inclined to share them with their networks. 

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Some considerations for good content scheduling: 

• As with other marketing content, you need a timeline. Combine your editorial and social media calendars with an internal communications calendar to ensure that you are creating integrated content that reflects the business as a whole. If you are already producing external communications around Pride Month, for example, then it’s important to let your employee ambassadors know that in advance and to give them ideas and resources to create their own social posts too.
  
• Discover what your people are most interested in. Pulse surveys can be a quick way to ask about topics people like or dislike, and your intranet communities (or Slack/Teams channels) can be an ideal discussion forum. Use forms to gauge the popularity of certain topics and then work to provide greater resources around them. Experience suggests that people are interested in other people. Consider communicating well on internal promotions, community action, recent hires, product launches that relied on teamwork, get-togethers and socials, team events, DE&I, or other topics that connect people with your organization’s purpose. 
  
• Global content is interesting but local content is even better. What’s going on in individual offices and at different locations? Tap into the knowledge of your dispersed teams and ensure that everyone is represented. If your local admin contacts can add some color to your global content plans then you should be equipped to provide more highly targeted communication. 
  
• Give people lots of choices and cater to all platforms. Not everyone is interested in making high-level business commentary on company strategy, so having a wider variety of material can serve more people. Infographics, images of colleagues, and logo-stamped videos can all be highly interesting and highly shareable for people across your organization. If they can use these elements to create new social posts then even better. 

An EA tool such as Sprout Social shows how some companies choose to create a topic timeline that employee advocates can use to keep in touch with what’s coming up. Having greater awareness means being able to pick and choose what they want to share.

Intranet engagement pro tip:

Much like marketers, organized internal comms pros have their own calendars and timelines. You may be sharing employee stories during Pride or highlighting your latest interns, all balanced against what different stakeholders in the business want and need. By making time to share a version of your timeline with your ambassadors (and to give them some possible ways to interact with everything based on their locations and networks) you may be able to push that content further and generate a good feeling right across your workforce.

Apply employee advocacy to your intranet engagement 

Employee advocacy on social media (and beyond) is so powerful that an entire industry of software tools and consultants has sprung up to support companies get more of it.  

Ultimately, the goal of all these people is to give employees the tools and time they need to engage with company content and communications externally. If you consider that a modern intranet is also now used as an enterprise social network (with many of the same features and practices) then it’s not hard to cross apply some of these tactics to encourage intranet engagement internally. 

As has been outlined above, if you start small but plan to scale big, you can create a group of intranet activists who can drive even greater engagement with your intranet. Offer them: 

• Relevant, authentic content 
• Social media guidelines and training 
• Time and recognition 
• Connection with the business 
• A chance to use their voices 

You just might see the engagement you hope for.

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The post How to increase intranet engagement right now appeared first on Interact software.

What do Star Wars, The Matrix, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have in common? In addition to being among the most successful examples of communication ever (the dollars do the talking here), they all rely on transmedia storytelling to generate excitement and engagement in their audiences. These juggernaut franchises create multichannel communications campaigns capable of reaching people on a wide range of technologies and content touchpoints.

However, the multichannel communication strategies used by these entertainment behemoths is even more specific than their availability on different formats (for example, in videogames, TV shows, movies, social media, mobile apps, and merchandise). They all also utilize transmedia storytelling to connect with audiences. 

Transmedia storytelling doesn’t mean simply showing the same content on different devices – by remaking a movie as a videogame, for example. It is a way of breaking up a narrative into pieces and then making those pieces of information available across different media. 

The scholar Henry Jenkins describes how disaggregated transmedia storytelling techniques work: 

Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. So, for example, in The Matrix franchise, key bits of information are conveyed through three live action films, a series of animated shorts, two collections of comic book stories, and several video games. There is no one single source or ur-text where one can turn to gain all of the information needed to comprehend the Matrix universe.

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This kind of communication inspires what has been called “additive comprehension”. Put simply, the more media you consume from all sources, the more information you gain about the characters and storylines.

Transmedia storytelling examples

One of the most lauded examples of a transmedia universe is Star Wars. It’s easy to pick out the thousands of different media that contribute to the Star Wars story – the games and toys that give a separate life to minor characters, for example – but perhaps the most notable example is The Mandalorian. 

No spoilers if you haven’t seen Disney+’s hit show, but The Mandalorian tells the story of a lone bounty hunter plying his trade after the fall of the Empire. In terms of the timeline of the Star Wars narrative, The Mandalorian takes place after the fall of the Empire in Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983), but 25 years before the emergence of the First Order in Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015).

It’s this dating of the show which is crucial. For an audience who wish to discover more about the world beyond the films (such as how the First Empire rose in the first place), they can’t rely on going to movie theaters to learn this backstory. Instead, they have to go to novelizations, games, comic books, animated series, and The Mandalorian. By telling a complete story across all these different media, the franchise owners build a tale that wouldn’t fit into a two-hour movie, but also that lives a life of its own – with its own unique characters, artwork, and feel.

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Transmedia storytelling and internal communications

Yes, I know what you’re thinking, internal communications is a completely different field with different goals and channels. But who says that we can’t learn something useful from communications that consistently generate devotion in an audience? 

The goal of internal comms professionals in recent years has been to balance ‘push’ messages that inform and engage colleagues with the creation of environments where employees can also participate through social intranet tools and features that allow users to ‘pull’ information towards them. 

In a modern digital workplace, not every communication is a comprehensive email, so communicators also now use mobile employee communication app alerts, digital signage, intranet banners, and more, to generate this balance of push and pull. In effect, many organizations are already running transmedia (or multichannel) strategies. If you aren’t already doing this though, please read on for some techniques. 

This internal communications strategy is different in every industry and every organization. A good comms plan – and thus its ability to generate employee engagement and improve the employee experience – will depend on the split between desk-based and frontline workers, compliance and regulatory issues, shift patterns, tasks, global dispersal, and much more. Perhaps the biggest difference though is managing to connect with frontline workers just as well as if they were at a desk eight hours a day. 

How to communicate with frontline workers

Communicating with frontline workers in the same way as desk-based employees has been a challenge for decades. 

Typically, non-desk staff have: 

• Dispersed locations away from HQ or on the road 
• Infrequent visits to a regional or head office 
• Limited or no access to a computer 
• No corporate accounts for email or cloud-based storage 
• No access to vital documents or information on-the-go 
• Difficulties connecting or communicating with peers from other locations or departments 
• Lack of visibility of company news and updates in real-time. The cascade of information through traditional channels such as newsletters, manager cascades, and noticeboards is infrequent and unengaging 

These problems have been magnified by the pandemic, which has piled pressure on frontline workers at the same time as it has increased their need to receive clear, consistent communications. 

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It’s partially the gap caused by employee pressure (resulting in stress and burnout) and the feeling of disengagement from an organization that has generated The Great Resignation and its accompanying talent shortages. Recent data suggests that in the UK, 41% of employees are considering quitting their jobs, with the greatest intention to leave being felt in industries such as hospitality, social care, retail, and healthcare, all of which rely on deskless, frontline workers. 

So, how do you reach the hard-to-reach and empower frontline workers who may be feeling more disenfranchised? It’s possible to develop a multichannel communications strategy that, much like transmedia storytelling, relies on a mix of push, pull, and personalization, to reach workers in ways more likely to engage them. 

Below, I set out one scenario for how multichannel communications can work: crisis response. The goal is to create a universe of comms that frontline workers can rely on for everything they need. By using all these methods, you can create a mode of additive comprehension without simply piling all information into one or two dense emails.  

Using transmedia storytelling for internal communications

#1: Use online repositories to store emergency protocols, procedures, and policies 

Whether it’s your company intranet or a designated SharePoint site (no, they’re not the same), a centralized data source has a key role to play. If you want to empower frontline workers in times of crisis, you need to give them an instant, easily searchable platform that contains everything they need. In terms of transmedia communications, think of this as your company’s wiki or subreddit, the place where all fans know they can go to get updated. 

Your intranet can also take crisis comms further because you can use tags and keywords to ensure the right information is found efficiently. In some situations, the use of Mandatory Read functionality to confirm receipt of critical information supports compliancy and ensures frontline employees are reading what you need them to. 

#2: Embed employee knowledge early 

 
It’s tempting to think of crisis policies only in the moment, but by building a process whereby employees learn what to do in an emergency before anything bad happens, you can reach staff and build resiliency. 

Many organizations integrate policy overviews into onboarding; but ask those new hires six months down the line, and the chances are, they’ve already forgotten the details. Integrating regular check-ins and testing staff knowledge can help keep those details front-of-mind and embedded. Use quizzes to check knowledge retention against policies, and pulse polls or on-the-spot questions on your intranet to keep the information fresh.  

#3: Multichannel alert system – Interact Broadcasts 

Unique to Interact, Broadcasts enable a centralized team to compose messages within the intranet and broadcast to staff via SMS, email, a blocking notification within the intranet, and/or a display banner. 

By creating a single message that can be distributed simultaneously across multiple channels to hundreds or even thousands of users, you can communicate with frontline workers and ensure speed and consistency of message, a risk often seen with manager cascades. 

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The ability to send a text message to personal devices or email can be crucial. 90% of SMS messages are read within three minutes, which closes the potential communication gaps created by unread emails. 

Critically, the message doesn’t need to contain every piece of information as it may just be a QR code or weblink that asks users to pull information from the intranet or website.  

#4: Provide frequent updates using timelines, @mentioning, and digital signage 

Depending on the nature of the crisis, we often don’t have all the necessary information upfront: situations develop and evolve rapidly. 

If you want to ensure that staff get real-time information and alerts – with quick links or QR codes to further information if required – you can use @mentioning of individuals, teams, or locations to alert staff to relevant policies, pages, or areas on your intranet. 

If staff are on-location and don’t have constant access to mobile devices either then digital signage can be a great multichannel way to issue timely comms. 

Empowering frontline workers needs a multichannel approach

Communicating with employees is central not just to business success, but also to employee experience and engagement. Whether you’re issuing crisis comms to healthcare professionals or celebrating success with warehouse workers, you want everyone aligned and connected. Different employees have different responsibilities and access though, so it can be a challenge to know which channels to use and when. 

Assessing what works best for your employees will only come with time and experience, but if you want to communicate in an authentic way, avoiding a “one channel fits all” approach is key. 

Maybe you won’t have the global reach of Star Wars, but with a multichannel approach, you can at least show all of your workforce that they’re equally important when it comes to communication.

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