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3 Solutions and Internal Communication Strategy for Growing Businesses | UX to EX Episode 2

August 24, 2023
10 min read
3 Solutions and Internal Communication Strategy for Growing Businesses | UX to EX Episode 2
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Read Summary

  • Departments have their own requirements that need to be catered to. How do you create culture and community across different departments? And last but not least, how do you make individuals feel seen and valued? Three solutions that can solve these three separate issues right now.
  • Today we're tackling how to get ahead of three internal communication challenges. The bigger your organization gets, the more solutions you will use. The power of notifications via Instant Message is key. Less email and more real time messaging leads to more employee engagement.
  • Microsoft's enterprise social solution Viva Engage can help your organization solve employee connectivity. Communities are the central locations to have internal conversations, share files, events, and updates. It's not intended to replace your intranet, but instead enhance it and make it more social.
  • Champion Management Program adds gamification to your organization. Digital badges can be added to your profile pictures. Tournament of Teams can be used to enhance your leaderboards.

Read Transcript

It comes to scaling your organization, more time is needed to focus on issues and align. Everyone. Departments have their own requirements that need to be catered to, and while it's important to provide the right tools for the job across the organization, it's also one of the main areas disconnect begins to occur.

So ask yourself, how do you make sure your messaging is seen across different channels and teams? How do you create culture and community across different departments? And last but not least, how do you make individuals feel seen and valued? Well, we're going to help you with three solutions that can solve these three separate issues right now.

Welcome to the second episode of UX to Ex, the ongoing series where we're going to be tackling how UX and Ex can amplify your organization. Today we're tackling how to get ahead of three internal communication challenges that come hand in hand with growing your business.

As we all know, communication is changing and today we're going to take a closer look at how UX can help with that consistent communication, employee connection, and employee spotlights. So Eddie, why don't you take us into the first hurdle we'll be tackling for Comms at scale? The bigger your organization gets, the more solutions you will use. And of course, communication is spread out across all of them.

As I briefly mentioned before, employees are going to consume your company news, details and internal communications on their terms. If you want them to see it and more importantly, engage with it, you're going to need to cater to them wherever they consume it. Today, we have multiple places to share our updates.

Apps like Teams, Outlook, and your Internet are perfect for this type of engagement. However, one application tops the charts when it comes to employee engagement. And of course, we're talking about Microsoft Teams.

That being said, even teams can be challenging when it comes to selecting the right channels and Microsoft 365 Groups to share your message with employees. So how do you make sure your messaging is seen? Great question. This is where the company Communicator solution comes in.

With the company Communicator app, you can post your messages across those multiple channels and groups you choose. We can reach employees where they are. It could be on their desktop, their laptop computer, or even on their mobile device.

The power of notifications via Instant Message is key. If you've read our Ex white paper, you will know less email and more real time messaging leads to more employee engagement. Speaking of the user experience, let's take a quick look.

With the company Communicator, you create a message and share it with your team. It's quick and easy to use if you know how to send out an Instant Message to your team. Creating an announcement is not much different in the company Communicator solution.

We can take advantage of these patterns and leverage tools inside teams to share these messages and create engagement you can cater to where your message will be shared. You choose who gets these messages and when they receive them. If it's an upcoming announcement, schedule it for a future date, or if it's an important message, you can publish it to your team instantly.

Messages can be shared with team channels or custom distribution groups that you already have set up in your organization. Finally, with the power of reporting and analytics, you can track and see how your messages are engaging with staff track each message and its engagement by their clicks or trends. Over time, this gives you an idea of what messages are engaging and hitting with your audience.

So whether you're using a solution like Company Communicator or not, the key is having employees engage with your content where they work. Don't forget that. And if you're using Microsoft teams in your organization, company.

Communicator is a great low cost solution that can help. But now, instead of a solution that helps you communicate to your employees, let's focus on something that allows them to create community themselves. So how do you create culture and community across different departments? Equally important to your messaging is making sure that people have an environment to connect on their terms.

And now with enterprise social solutions like Viva Engage, you can easily facilitate it. Why keep conversations siloed? They're happening anyways, right? Whether it was at the water cooler, whether it's in Viva Engage, they're going to happen. Might as well create a community around it.

You might initially think this would hurt productivity, but especially if you're remote where you don't have that water cooler option, it allows employees to connect in ways they would traditionally do in person anyways. So let's take a closer look at Microsoft's enterprise social solution Viva Engage, and how it can help your organization solve employee connectivity. Viva Engaged is designed to help organizations build community, spark engagement with leadership, harness a knowledge center, and build personal networks.

All of these are great things, and you want them in your business. The connection with culture happens not just at the top level in official communities, but throughout the business. Let's dive into communities inside Viva Engage, communities are the central locations to have internal conversations, share files, events, and updates.

Depending on how active your is, there could be many communities to connect with. Depending on which initiatives your company wants to provide your staff, you can create a community for almost anything. Pro tip be intentional.

When it comes to creating your communities, you have an opportunity here. You can define the community name, give it a custom description, and even set its avatar and community banner. You can design these custom banners for each community, and it really starts to promote your brand inside Viva Engage.

By doing these things, you will promote a strong brand across your. It will help other staff understand that this is an official community. Another tip is answers.

In Viva Engage, it's a wonderful feature to help tackle those FAQs inside your business. Staff can ask questions and get answers from their colleagues. Again, the user experience is very straightforward.

Remember, it's not intended to replace your intranet, but instead enhance it and make it more social. Don't forget that employee relationships are an extremely important way to improve retention and it doesn't end at Microsoft teams or the Internet. Build those relationships and if Vivaengage is going to help you do that, why not implement it? So while Viva Engage tackles employees building relationships, you should also build up each individual employee and create a way to shine a light on key figures, important contributors, new employees and so on.

Which leads us into our third question how do you make individuals feel seen and valued? This brings us to the Champion Management Program, which is a unique solution that adds gamification to your sounds like fun, right? Admins have control over all aspects of their Champion Management Program on their Management Platform dashboard. This is where they can organize a list of their Champions Manage badges, the Champion App logo and enable the ability to sign up new staff. Provide an approval system to onboard new members into the Champion Management Program.

It's a user friendly way to manage the entire Champion Management Program. Eddie, you highlighted this feature earlier. It's one of my favorite aspects the digital badges that can be added to your profile pictures.

This is done by adding a visual overlay to your profile, much like the ones you see on LinkedIn and Facebook. Showcasing this badge helps identify the champions in your these are the goto people for specific topics and provides recognition for their contributions. Another nice aspect is that these badges can be used across other Microsoft 365 apps.

The Champion management program also offers leaderboards. These are used to track campaigns across multiple Champion groups. You'll be able to define the types of activities and the point values for your leaderboards.

Customizing the types of events tracked. You can leverage the Champion Management platform to help you. Tournament of Teams is another feature that can be used to enhance your leaderboards.

These create milestones and goals for your staff to target and reach. Understand this though tournaments aren't for every leaderboards can get very competitive. Depending on your culture or team, results may vary.

Some teams thrive on this competition. This is great for departments like Sales that are always tracking various goals and initiatives. So those are three solutions to solve your ex problems that are built with great UX.

We hope you find value in them and that you're able to bring some of these into fruition in your organization. Also, if you're looking for a great resource with a lot of information on employee experience from the solutions that you can use to help to just straight up strategy, we would highly recommend humbly highly recommend our employee experience white Paper which has now been updated with Copilot so be sure to check that out. Thanks for watching.

Let us know what you think. If you have questions, comments, please leave them below as well. If one of these solutions looks enticing for your organization, please reach out to us at 2toLead.

We would be happy to work together with you. Until next time.

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