Overview

Chat may be the modern way of communicating, but it’s far from perfect. Catering to your employee preferences around workstyle and working to keep your company data unified by centralizing everything in your digital workplace will set up your workforce for productivity and success. But how can businesses successfully allow their chat, email, and intranet to co-exist? Good intentions aren’t enough. Change won’t happen unless you develop a plan for employees to easily communicate while still prioritizing business data. With that in mind, consider the following steps to improve your workplace communication processes.

Recommendations

1. Integrate your key personal productivity and core systems into your digital workplace platform. By creating a destination for all of your chat, document sharing, projects, and social interactions, you eliminate the data silos that are inherent when employees use multiple tools to get their work done. 

2. Make a plan to enforce digital workplace communications. Decide what your internal communication culture will look like and document it clearly. Small, one-off changes are less likely to stick than a more systematic strategy overhaul.

3. Articulate how internal communication works in your company. If it’s ever to be adopted, the communications model you decide on needs to be conveyed to your workforce. Cover these processes during your onboarding so that new hires know what’s standard.

4. Consider hiring a digital workplace manager (a growing trend). This full-time position takes on a consulting and training role around office technology: what’s being used, how it’s being used and ways to make it better.

5. Decide how strict you want to be. Nobody wants to be the bad guy, but there have to be consequences to change behavior. This could include adding compliance as a key behavior that is assessed during performance reviews. For certain regulated industries, such as finance and law, you’ll likely need workplace policies that are acknowledged annually and include disciplinary actions for any violations.