Boosting Engagement by Streamlining Communications

We began by polling employees and interviewing managers about their communications styles, knowledge and use of tools.

Results from those efforts were clear: Employees were receiving information that wasn’t relevant to their work, didn’t connect with the system’s mission and came from a variety of sources. Managers, meanwhile, varied markedly in their comfort and ability to communicate.

To address this, we built a plan to flip the organization’s top-down communications into a two-way relationship between employer and employees.

Elements included:

• A new protocol that drastically reduced “All-Staff” emails, ensured that content was relevant to specific employee populations and was properly curated with the most vital information at the top
• Creation of a new intranet portal to serve as a single, easily accessible, updated source of truth
• Development of a training program for managers to help them communicate clearly to their teams

Measured by surveys, the strategy yielded dramatic results. One year later, 77 percent of employees responded they received the appropriate amount of information from the system, versus 54 percent the previous year. Another 58 percent said they received information pertinent to their day-to-day work, versus 45 percent the previous year. Finally, half of the respondents said they felt engaged, up from one-third of employees before we began our work.