New approaches to familiar comms pathways: Innovation with internal channels

Innovating with internal comms doesn’t always require reinventing the wheel — sometimes it just takes a fresh perspective on your channels and distribution methods.

At Ragan’s Internal Communications Conference at Microsoft HQ earlier this year, Taylor Prewitt, director of employee communications at T-Mobile, Cheryl Lachance, manager of employee and executive communications at Emera, and Stephanie Guzman-Barrera, deputy public affairs manager, director’s office at the Department of Natural Resources and Parks, King County, Washington, shared how they’re breaking the mold with internal comms platforms and channels to keep their messaging sharp and targeted.

Lachance said that when she started at Emera, the company didn’t have an employee newsletter, but workers were seeking cross-company connection.

“We built the newsletter as a way to show faces, tell stories and connect people across the organization,” she said, adding that image and people-focused content in the newsletter performs best.

To measure their newsletter’s success, Lachance and her team leaned into tech tools that gave instant feedback. These tools helped adjust how comms team approached their newsletter content.

“You can be sitting in a meeting and see a heat map of clicks, how many people engaged with each item and how an issue is performing in real time,” Lachance said. “That completely changed how we understand employee behavior, and it let us refine our content quickly.”

Guzman-Barrera said in her organization, many employees are deskless and intranets and newsletters won’t work as well for employee outreach. In these situations, experimenting with visuals can come in handy.

“Essentially, we take what would be newsletter material — updates, employee stories, recognition and leadership messages — and convert it into micro-content that can play on screens throughout the day,” Guzman-Barrera said. “If we produce a five-minute video for our remote workforce, we break it down into a 60-to-90-second version for those screens.

Frontline employees see those messages every time they walk through the lobby or common areas. And if they want more information, we include QR codes they can scan later.”

Those QR codes also help with measurement.

“It gives us a sense of how many people saw something and wanted more information,” Guzman-Barrera said. “It’s not the clean data you get from a digital newsletter, but it gives us valuable feedback about whether our content is landing.”

To watch this panel in its entirety, visit Ragan Training.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.