Lawrence Ragan

Communications, Inc.

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10 ways to reach non-desk employees

Nurses, bartenders, cashiers, factory workers and others have jobs that make them hard for communicators to reach. So how do you inform and engage employees who aren’t sitting at a computer?

10 ways to reach non-desk employees

Shel Holtz was consulting for a company that owned a Southern California potato chip packaging plant when he interviewed workers about their intranet.

What did they think about the new responsive-design version that could recognize whether readers were accessing it from PCs, smartphones or tablets? The design was nice, they shrugged, but the news was still the same old corporate copy about the headquarters in New York.

Would it help, he asked, if they could get text notifications—whether SMS or through an app— informing them about updates concerning their facility or the products they made?

“They said, ‘We would sign up for that in a heartbeat,’” says Holtz, who is principal of Holtz Communications + Technology.

Reaching dispersed employees is essential in far-flung organizations. The secret, though, isn’t just using technological tricks such as responsive design for mobile, but giving workers the information they need however they want to receive it.

Before the channel for communication can be selected, communicators must first understand the objective, the audience’s behavior and what that audience cares about, says Amee Kent, director of marketing for Red e App, a mobile internal comms platform. “Having a solid understanding of one’s audience and content are a good intro to then discussing how to select a channel and measure the effectiveness,” she says.

Most organizations rely on multiple channels, not a single silver bullet. Here are some tips to smarten up your communications with dispersed employees:

1. Make it mobile.

Nearly everyone keeps a mobile device within reach all the time. Your internal communications should easily run on any device on multiple platforms for employees on the go.

Employees expect mobility. If they can connect with their old college roommate, cousin in Milwau-kee or favorite dim sum joint, why not their employer? This starts with responsive design, but it goes deeper than getting the intranet to fit on your screen—as the chip company example shows. Mobil-ity includes pushing notifications for alerts, allowing off-site access to important documents and enabling two-way messaging with a manager and peers.

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10 ways to reach non-desk employees

“A lot of our workers do not have access to work computers or a work email address, so we have to get creative,” says Amy Waymeyer, culture and communications coordinator at JustFab.com, a cloth-ing company with a fulfillment center in Louisville, Kentucky.

2. Use apps.

Even computing companies have employees who aren’t writing code or processing timesheets. At SAS, everyone from cooks to the company shepherd can reach the intranet through apps, says Becky Graebe of the North Carolina business software firm SAS. (There really is a shepherd on staff; sheep graze the greens on the corporate campus.)

People are accustomed to using social media tools through their phones. They expect to be able to interact online with fellow employees and subscribe to information feeds that are applicable and of interest to them.

A colleague might say: “Hey, this guy I work with shared this article. He says it’s really going to help me understand this new project. I think I’ll read it,” Holtz says.

3. Provide documents digitally.

Give staffers access to documents when they’re offsite. Survey them to find out which documents are essential and what news they want to hear. New products? Contests? Cafeteria menus? Job postings? Give it to them.

Also, use your analytics to determine the most-read content. Analytics can also guide the best time of the day to send messages or emails according to location, job title or other factors.

JustFab uses Red e App to provide access to documents, including benefits information, and to send company announcements such as messages. A notification shows in their smartphones letting them know about the message, Waymeyer says. Recently, JustFab provided information about a job open-ing via the app “so current employees could apply before external candidates.”

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10 ways to reach non-desk employees

4. Use video.

When Chuck Gose, co-founder of ICology, was working for Rolls-Royce a few years ago, the company reached a milestone. Rolls-Royce had built the engine for Bell Boeing’s V-22 Osprey, and one of the hybrid helicopter-planes buzzed around the automaker’s factory and landed in the parking lot.

Rolls-Royce recorded the event on video, adding interviews with the pilots, and played it on digital signs for workers who couldn’t go out to see the bird land. The pilots encouraged employees to make quality a goal, reminding them that military personnel’s lives depend on it.

“I saw the power of video,” Gose said, “that it wasn’t just ‘a nice-to-have,’ it wasn’t just a ‘That’s cool that we were able to do that.’ It really brought that event home.”

Short “video vignettes” are an especially engaging tactic for digital signs,” says Eric Haman, corpo-rate communications manager with Clemens Food Group, which also uses Red e App for employee communications. In addition to companywide content, “area owners” at each facility can incorporate targeted communications for that site.

5. Use scheduling and messaging apps.

Employees are figuring out how to use outside tools to adjust their schedules and swap shifts. Orga-nizations should help them do this, says Holtz. For instance, a foreman can let the entire crew know that a third shift will be added—and that everyone should be at work at 6 a.m. instead of 8.

This also means empowering floor-level supervisors to message staffers. The direct manager is the most trusted source of information for the employee.

6. Work your theme.

It’s hard to find a more dispersed group of employees than those who work for an airline. The Cana-dian airline WestJet has to communicate with 11,000 staffers who are made up of distinct subcultures (pilots versus flight attendants, for one).

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10 ways to reach non-desk employees

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“With flight attendants, we’ve used a boarding-pass style announcement to give them a reference for a large change,” says Robin Farr, director of internal communications and culture. “It made it relevant to them and more visually appealing.”

Also, if employees must access certain digital systems to do their jobs, make use of them, she says. For example, you can put information, links and reminders in their scheduling tools; they’re more likely to see those elements there than they might elsewhere.

7. Livestream town halls.

You think you’ve got a dispersed workforce? Try dealing with employees scattered across the most remote wildernesses in the United States.

That’s what Suki Baz faced in launching the first-ever internal communications team at the National Park Service, many of whose 24,000 employees work in places without cellphone service.

One of her tips: Host big-event virtual town halls. Livestreaming enables employees to connect with leaders directly—and ask them questions face to face (as it were).

“That can be a pretty powerful tool,” Baz says.

8. Empower individuals to share images and video.

Many organizations have policies against employees’ taking pictures, perhaps unaware that the Na-tional Labor Relations Board ruled that employees should be allowed to do this, Holtz says. Letting them snap a picture or shoot a bit of video can cut costs and boost efficiency.

At Pepsi, if employees saw steam coming out of a valve that wasn’t supposed to be leaking, they could take a picture and send it to maintenance, Holtz says. Maintenance workers could evaluate the picture and show up with the needed part, so the production line was down only 20 minutes instead of three hours previously.

In one plant, truck drivers were taking pictures of loads that were shifted when the drivers started out. That way they could later say, “Look, I got it this way,” rather than get in trouble later with no way to prove they weren’t at fault, Holtz says.

10 ways to reach non-desk employees

9. Use print.

It might be a throwback, but print works. For deskbound workers, Duke Energy emails a newsletter titled “This Week at Duke Energy” to drive employees to its intranet page, says Greg Efthimiou, com-munications director at the Charlotte, North Carolina-based power company.

Many of its employees spend their days in power plants, hanging power lines or restoring service after a storm, so last year Duke Energy began printing out “This Week in Brief” and sending it to 120 plant managers and administrative assistants to post for non-wired workers.

Says Efthimiou: “We simply felt it was necessary to go back to the past to make sure that all employ-ees were getting access to the same important information.”

To help with consistent messaging, Clemens Food Group mails supervisors at all locations “coach-ing cards” with talking points on them, Haman says. That way, all supervisors’ facilities get the same messaging to employees, no matter how dispersed they may be. “These coaching cards may be around safety, benefits, wellness, upcoming events or any topic,” Haman says.

10. Tell them face-to-face.

JustFab holds team meetings before each shift, allowing supervisors to say, “Guys, this is what we need to do today. Let’s get motivated and be engaged, and make sure you keep this safety tip in mind,” Waymeyer says.

She adds, “People want to hear from their managers. They want to hear from their team leads. They want to know they’re doing a good job.”.

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