Your Ultimate Ally for Internal Communication

Regardless of your industry or company size, keeping employees in the know is no small feat. In the wild world of distractions, it’s an all-out showdown for employees’ attention, like the reach is never far enough. Moreover, there’s a lot of time and effort poured into planning, writing, editing, designing and executing communication pieces, making efficiency and effective collaboration essential cornerstones.

It feels like technology changes more rapidly every year. These changes can feel overwhelming to try and keep up with all the new ways to communicate. It used to be that email was the go-to tool for internal communicators — and before that it was memos.

With focused inboxes and short attention spans, relying solely on email messages alone will miss (a lot of) employees. I mean think about it, how many times a day are you getting emails from other people and wishing you could reply with TLDR (too long didn't read)? Even with an important or active project, we must keep things short.

It begs the questions—is there a digital employee communication channel that reigns supreme? Will this internal communication hub lead in efficiency and be more likely to capture employees’ attention? 

The Slack Hack

Consider this—if your company uses an instant messaging app or platform like Slack, chances are your employees are already using it every day. It's a platform that's more than likely being used throughout their day for work collaboration. It’s a dynamic hub where they’re used to receiving and sharing information throughout the day.

According to Statista, Slack is predicted to have over 32 million daily active users this year and the number continues to grow. Why? Well, Slack offers a quick and easy way to reach people in a world where informal messaging is becoming increasingly prevalent. It's basically the only way people have immediate conversations today. Especially with people working all over the world in today's remote world.

So, if your employees are already in sync with Slack for navigating their day-to-day work, why not tap into this very same channel for the all-important company communication? Employees can even access Slack from a mobile device for an even more immediate response time. It's also estimated that the employees of companies who currently use Slack, people tend to spend around 90 minutes per day sending and receiving messages.

This Slack blog post puts it best: “Whether you need to send out an internal newsletter, organize an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with a key executive or host a companywide meeting with more than 1,000 attendees, Slack makes it easy to set up relevant channels. Bringing all these types of communication into a single platform with well-organized channels helps employees know where to go for the information they need and helps to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.”

Now for a few of Slack’s bonus features.

  1. It’s interactive — communication can happen all in one place.
  2. There’s a built-in poll function for instant, real-time feedback without the hassle. In other words, you can create a survey yourself in mere minutes without overhead.
  3. Messages are easily searchable thanks to filters and modifiers. You don’t need to remember when you think you saw something or who it may have come from.
  4. It’s less vulnerable to spam and phishing than email. 
  5. You can schedule messages to be sent at certain times to make things easier.
  6. It’s mobile-friendly so messages can be viewed and responded to on-the-go.

Oh, and you’re more likely to get the desired response because instant messages naturally raise one’s sense of urgency more than emails.

How To Make Slack Work for Your Company

Leveraging Slack doesn’t mean bidding farewell to your other communication channels. Rather, it’s like welcoming a trusty companion into your existing toolkit. Don't be afraid to adopt a new way of communicating with your employees. In today's world, everyone's interested in the newest form of social media anyway so you might as well give it a try to see how great it is. Slack is an acronym for “searchable log of all conversation and knowledge”.

Here’s a common example: You’re about to launch a two-week Benefits Annual Enrollment campaign to your employees. It’s an important time during the year when employees need to know what’s happening with their benefits. They need to know how important it is to take action because they’ll have to live with their choices for the next 12 months.

Chances are, you’ve already established a robust multi-channel strategy including website updates, emails, a home mailer, videos and more. All of those still matter! Slack can be used as a great internal and external collaboration tool.

Now, add a few quick and easy Slack messages into your content or editorial calendar. These instant messages will help to remind employees what’s happening and can send them to the other resources.

The Slack messages you send out can be as simple as a sentence or two with a link to your benefits website and maybe a few emojis sprinkled in, just for fun! Or you can spice it up a notch and attach or link to a well-designed newsletter. Maybe you could include a funny GIF or an attention-grabbing commercial (video clip). You could even host a quick Q&A session for anyone to attend. And you can customize the message and target certain groups via different channels. There's no need to craft the perfect subject line when you can just send an instant message in its place!

Next comes the fun part—the instant feedback. Who doesn't love seeing the responses and reactions from everyone in real time? Watch as your post comes alive with a flurry of “likes” and reactions; comments; shares. Say goodbye to the days of asking your coworkers if they received your important email for fear that it went into a whitelist traffic jam or worse yet, a junk folder.

This will also alleviate the worry of an important task looming in one's inbox just waiting to be submitted. And we all know, it's always a quick 2-minute task we put off as long as possible before we finally accomplish it. With Slack, these worries will vanish like magic. Soon they'll be replaced by the joyous certainty that your message was received loud and clear.

Embrace this exciting era of simple push communication where feedback flows freely. And know it will make an impact. It's never too late to make sure your employees feel connected and have an easy way to communicate with each other.

Need help writing or designing attention-grabbing Slack messages or posts? Ask us how we can help.