Six questions to ask before you create your employee communication strategy

3 min read

Here’s what you want to do: Create an effective communication strategy that will resonate with your people and call them to the action you want. Sounds good, right? But with so many avenues to communicate with your people, where should you start?

Let’s break it down...

Get it right at the beginning

You probably won't be surprised to learn that planning and getting the right pieces in place at the beginning will be key to your success. To do this, we recommend asking yourself the following questions:

• Who are your employees?
• What channels do they react to best?
• Where do they like to digest communications?
• What is the campaign focused on (a benefits launch, a new recruitment strategy, etc.)
• When will you launch the campaign?
• How long will it last for?

The answer to a few of the above can be multi-layered so don’t feel like you have to only cater to one segment of your audience.

Use budget-friendly channels to boost your platform

Emails, posters, postcards, and text messages are easy wins when thinking of how to communicate your new platform – and they cost very little. Our client Oliver Bonas are a retail company with 550 employees across 55 locations in the UK. To really grab their attention, a pre-launch, launch, and post-launch plan was devised to get the word out about the exciting new platform.

The launch day itself involved store employees opening a special box of goodies, and office-based staff were treated to a jam-packed launch event, managed by Reward Gateway. Following the launch, Oliver Bonas rolled out a series of post-launch activities from emails and multi-dimensional business cards to roadshows at each of the stores and a competition which saw Oliver Bonas and another Reward Gateway client swapping their products to set as prizes.

Make your campaign long-lasting

This will largely fall from what you have chosen as your focus but don’t try to dwell on one-off events – look for a durable theme. Try to stay away from one-off events such as Valentine’s Day and instead think about the bigger picture on what value your employees are taking from your benefits platform.

Remember: Benefits should be beneficial, right? So why are these benefits or platform exciting to your workforce? For instance, communicating how a discounts platform can help ease the cost of family or life events that have an actual impact on them as people will ring much truer than simply stating the benefit without any context.

Use tools that are already available

An engagement platform which can instantly adapt to the changing shape of your campaign is a big wow for employees. Imagine if you could create multiple versions of your communications and schedule them to go live on a particular date and time. What can be better than setting out the vision for your next promotion and have it unveil with minimal administration on your part?