Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There’s a great quote from Confucius:

“Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand."

People will more readily help bring to life the changes that they are involved with.

How are you involving your people in the changes that need to be implemented?...

The infographic that we put together has some pretty shocking statistics in it, but there are a few common themes. Employees feel overworked, overwhelmed, and they don’t like what they do. Companies are noticing it, with 75% of them saying they can’t attract the right talent, and 83% of them feeling that their employer brand isn’t compelling. Companies that want to fix this need to be smart, and patient.

This doesn’t happen overnight, but like I mentioned, it’s easy to do. Being patient might be the hardest thing for companies, and I understand how frustrating it can be not to see results right away, but it’s important that you invest in this, because the ROI of employee engagement is huge.

Here are 4 simple (and free) things you can do to get that passion back into employees. These are all based on research from Deloitte....

Prescient Digital Media's 2013 study found the implementation of social intranet tools on the rise at most businesses, but satisfaction is quite low. Why aren't employees and executives happier?

The firm's 2013 Social Intranet Study found that 76 percent of the companies surveyed use instant messaging, at least in some limited way. About 75 percent use blogs. Around two-thirds have wikis, discussion forums, and user comments. It's fair to say social tools are being used widely.

However, only 19 percent of organizations rated their social intranet tools as good or very good. Even fewer executives, 17 percent, like them.

Toby Ward, president of Prescient Digital Media, says the tools are easy to come by, but demonstrating their value is considerably tougher....

Concerning internal communication elements critical for employee engagement, we found that satisfaction with feedback, informal communication and communication during meetings are the most relevant ICS dimensions for employee engagement. Our results confirm previous findings that feedback (e.g. Bakker & Demerouti, 2008), open channels of communication (e.g. Caesens, Stinglhamber & Luypaert, 2014), communication between supervisors and employees (e.g. Agarwal, Datta, Blake-Beard & Bhargava, 2012), and sharing information with employees (e.g. Durkin, 2007) are vital enablers of engagement.

However, even though our results imply a causal relationship between ICS and employee engagement (and even though engagement is mostly conceptualized as an outcome of internal communication, e.g. Ruck & Welch, 2012), what matters most is that internal communication and employee engagement “feed” each other in a continuous virtual circle.

Our results show that internal communication should be recognized as an underlying influence of employee engagement (Karanges et al., 2015). This implies that internal communication strategies, when effectively applied, help organizations to create and sustain high levels of employee engagement, which leads to higher levels of performance....