Tips for steady employee comms amid change

Whether it’s a shaky economy or a fraught geopolitical environment, uncertainty can have a negative impact on employee experience. Employees look to their employers as a source of trust and stability — especially when the winds of change blow. Internal comms pros are uniquely positioned to leverage that trust into communications that can serve as a source of calm for employees even when uncertainty may loom.

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in August, Lauren Stephens, executive director of internal communications at MGM Resorts International, will share some of the tactics and tools internal communicators can use to help keep their employees in the loop to reinforce trust and keep company culture ever-present.

“Your job isn’t just to deliver a message,” Stephens said. “It’s to help employees understand what’s happening, how it affects them and what happens next. The way you do that — early, honestly and empathetically — can change everything.”

Tactics and strategies for calming employee comms

Any organization will undergo periods of change. But it’s key for comms pros to remember that how news of change is communicated is just as important as what’s being shared.

Stephens told Ragan her team provides employees with company updates on a regular weekly cadence through its employee app and intranet. Setting a regular schedule for comms updates provides a resource that employees reliably turn to and creates important touchpoints for trust.

“Silence creates anxiety,” she said. “Even if nothing has changed, we still communicate.”

She added that even when communicators might think there’s nothing to share, simply keeping the line of communication open is a must.

“There’s always something to say, even if it’s just reinforcement,” Stephens said. “You can remind people of what’s coming. You can tell them where to go with questions.”

Stephens shared several other examples of calming employee comms, including:

• A dedicated hub for change comms. Major organizational changes like mergers or acquisitions can raise big questions for employees. Stephens shared an anecdote about when MGM Resorts International acquired a hotel property and needed to onboard employees all at once. Her team created a hub on the organization’s intranet platform to ease the new employees into the company and provide them with a stable and welcoming introduction to MGM’s distinct culture. “We knew this could be disorienting for them, so we built a standalone transition page within our intranet where we could consolidate everything,” she said. “Welcome messages from leadership, FAQs, a clear timeline and even videos. And here’s the key — we gave them early access.” Stephens added that the resource became a living document and a helpful place to push updates for employees seeking information and managers looking to answer questions. “Every new update, every shift in timeline — we pushed it there,” she said. “So managers didn’t have to field one-off questions constantly. Everyone knew to go to the transition page.”
• Text alerts for employee updates. Seventy-five percent of employees at MGM Resorts International don’t check their email on a regular basis because they’re deskless workers. Stephens said that the company implemented company-wide SMS updates for regular communication to cast a wider net with their messaging and drive engagement. “As long as you’re in our HR system, you’re opted in automatically,” she said. “That includes hourly workers, part-timers — everybody. It’s been a game changer, especially for time-sensitive updates like acquisitions, leadership changes and operational impacts. When you get a ping on your phone from your employer, you pay attention.” She added that the text campaign has had the added bonus of driving employees from their phones to more interaction with internal comms platforms. “We found that even employees who weren’t actively using our app or intranet started clicking through more once we used SMS as the entry point,” she said. “It’s not just a channel. It’s a behavior trigger.”
• Comms coaching for leaders. Leaders play a big role in calming employee comms. Employees look to their leadership as sources of stability, and internal comms pros can help leaders approach times of uncertainty. Stephens said that her team goes through messaging rewrite sessions and one-on-one comms coaching to help leaders refine their employee comms skills. “I’ve seen firsthand how differently people respond when they hear a tough message from a real person versus reading it in a PDF,” she said. “Even when the news is bad, hearing it from someone who cares, who’s prepared and who answers questions makes a difference.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.