E-mail and Intranets Still Rule Employers’ Internal Communications

The vast majority of employers continue use the internal communication channels of email (83 percent) and intranet (75 percent) to engage their employees and foster productivity, find International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation and Buck Consultants (A Xerox Company). Their joint survey also reveals that nearly half of employers currently communicate through Facebook, instant messaging, and Twitter. However, most of the C-suite (60 percent) is not participating in internal (60 percent) or external (62 percent) social media, fewer than half the organizations surveyed have policies in place to address employee use of internal and external social media, and approximately half the organizations surveyed do not measure the effectiveness of internal and external social media.

The survey delves into the goals employers have for employees, as well as the tactics used to achieve these goals. For instance, increasing productivity (66 percent) and retaining top talent (65 percent) are the most important goals employers cite to keep employees engaged. Other important goals identified by survey respondents are increasing employee morale (59 percent) and creating a new culture or work environment (52 percent).

Publishing a formal list of values (74 percent) and using exit interviews with managers (73 percent) are the top practices of survey respondents to sustain an engaging work culture. Other practices include regularly surveying the workforce on engagement and work satisfaction (60 percent), including material on the organization’s culture in new hire orientation (56 percent), and involving senior leadership in orientation programs (54 percent).

Formal or informal employee feedback (77 percent) is the number one way that organizations measure the effectiveness of their employee engagement strategies. Other methods include meeting annual company performance goals (48 percent) and measuring employee retention rates (42 percent). Even so, 32 percent of survey respondents indicate that their organizations rarely or never conduct employee listening activities.

Posted by RecruitingTrends.com on August 4, 2010. Filed under Data Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry