Communication Made Easy With CMS Intranet

Emails are a pain. Printed media is old news. To engage and communicate with your team, it’s time to migrate company-wide communications to a CMS intranet.

It goes without saying that when you take the time to create content for your employees to read… You want them to read it! Regardless of your organization’s size, people respond to emotions. To get your message across, to even have your article clicked on, it’s absolutely crucial to keep your team’s emotional response in mind. After all, how many of you simply clicked on this blog because of the interesting picture?

Truly great communication comes when emotional triggers are combined with robust content. Write something worth reading, and your people will read it. Whether you’re trying to communicate a complex organizational change, or simply sharing a fun story, we’ve created a few pointers below to get you on the right path.

Make Your CMS Intranet The Happening Place

First things first: stop bugging your staff.

Constant email updates interrupt your team’s workflow and clog inboxes. Solve this, by turning your CMS intranet into the place where all news is shared. Celebrations, wins, warnings, learnings—these should all be regularly posted on your intranet, creating a hub of activity. Enable the option for staff to save content and refer back to it later, maximizing the chance your update will be read. It won’t be long before your intranet becomes the cultural Bible of your organization, capturing all of the story-telling and history that epitomizes your company ethos.

Creating such a hub for company news and culture is especially helpful for new employees. During their first few days, they’ll be able to immerse themselves in recent history, as well as tune in to upcoming events around the office. It works both ways as well—when an existing team member returns from time off, they can quickly get back up to speed with what happened while they were hiking around South America.

Make sure to stay organized. Updates should be easily searchable and well categorized. Although it’s fantastic having regular updates and engagement from staff, this can mean that those really important updates—you know, the ones from the CEO—can accidentally fall through the cracks. Choosing a CMS intranet that has the ability to publish different updates under different categories and pages is recommended, as long as there’s a straight forward navigation tool to keep these all visible. If you find your intranet is becoming swamped with content, it also might be worth restricting everyone’s ability to publish.

Add Value, And Have Fun At The Same Time!

Sometimes, we have to talk about boring things. Policy changes, employee inductions and tax updates aren’t exactly the most riveting of topics.

Thankfully, there are ways around this to get those important, boring updates read. Besides catchy headlines, try pulling on the competitive strings of your staff, and turn engagement into a competition. ‘First one to spot the mistake gets their boss’s car for the day!’ ‘Comment your thoughts below, and go into the draw to win a paid day off!’ The possibilities are endless.

Be sure to use an engaging image up-front. It’s surprising how far images can go to boost readership. Other forms of media can be fantastic as a break from the usual as well—video introductions, interactive explanations, infographics, visual aids. Remember: half of the battle is grabbing initial attention.

Capturing initial engagement is all well and good, but it’s important to treat your employees’ time with respect. The kindest thing you can do as a writer is make your writing skim-able. Create content that can be easily digested, free from jargon, clunky paragraphs and technical language. Surprisingly, only 21% of communication professionals are intentional about this practise in average-performing organizations, compared to 50% in high-performing organizations. Improvements in the clarity and simplicity of your writing are low-hanging fruit—avoid clichés, cut out the acronyms, use subheadings and bullet points, write concisely.

Make Sure To Measure

All of our tips above could be leading you astray.

There’s only one way to know—measure the success of your updates. Unfortunately 60% of organizations have no measures in place for the effectiveness of their internal communication. Management 101 mandates that in order to manage or influence any aspect of your business, there needs to be a measure. You’re reading this article now because you want to improve your internal communication, so get measuring!

There are a few easy ways to dive into measuring the habits of your readers. Measure participation by looking at unique user logins per day. Peak times of day when readership is at its highest will be revealed by tracking when posts are opened. This kind of insight will allow you to publish important updates at the best time possible, ensuring they receive the attention they deserve. To understand which content is engaging your team the most, you can measure how long readers stay on a certain page, or which articles are shared the most.

Here’s a quick look at the most common types of measurement:

• Engagement: Has your update created conversations? What level of activity is there in the comments section?
• Relevancy: What were you trying to achieve with your article? Were you trying to spread a message wide, or get answers to a specific question—and did this occur?
• Readership: How far did the article reach? What percentage of staff read it?
• Readability: Use readability tests to measure the ease with which your message is digested.

Let’s Get Social!

There’s no need for your company-wide updates to be purely one-sided. Crowd-source your news to your team as a whole, and allow any important updates to be communicated in real-time by any employee.

The days of static news are gone—today, social networks have empowered everyone to participate and interact with the news. Research has shown that as many as 63% of Facebook and Twitter users get their news from social networks. Over half of millennials view social networks as the most important source of news in their lives. Engage your employees by harnessing this trend.

Rather than news being a one-way transaction, create a dynamic conversation. The principles of social media still apply in a business context. Allow employees to create, comment, share and interact, and they will feel included and engaged, viewing your business as more transparent, and feeling a sense of ownership.

One way of catering for social media is to embed your company social feeds (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) as a single page on your intranet. This not only drives higher engagement in the respective social platforms, but also saves time for your users, as they have just the one place to go for company updates.

So What Does All Of This Mean?

We’d be remiss to assume employees read every single piece of company-wide communication.

The onus lies with us, the content creators, to truly engage our readers. Create concise, enjoyable, informative information, on a platform the is visible and easily accessible, then measure the success.

We think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the results.

Ready to create your own intranet news hub with intuitive navigation and embedded social media feeds? MyHub Intranet can help! We provide a cloud-based, CMS intranet platform that will help ensure your news is read. Contact us to for a free demonstration.