For communication and marketing professionals, this means client acquisition and retention have been clearly identified. These goals are often achieved through funnel marketing and to accompany clients throughout their lifecycle. But what about company employees to whom internal communications are addressed?
Internal communications are sometimes sidelined by external communications, as they don’t convert clients and appear on the balance sheet. However, they also have a significant impact on results in that they influence employee morale – and therefore their productivity. The employee experience should be studied and fine-tuned the same as the client experience, and internal communications should be considered the gateway to employee engagement with clients. Instead of funnel marketing, Maslow’s hierarchy can be used to orchestrate employee engagement.
The hierarchy developed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in the 1940s is frequently criticized today for its lack of flexibility. However, it is still taught in management schools as it provides a useful classification and hierarchy of fundamental needs:
The concept being that satisfying one of the needs causes the next level of needs to manifest. Thus, acquiring confidence and self-respect must come before self-actualization.
This is the final stage of internal communications, as engagement with employees pushes them to outdo themselves in their work and to communicate proactively about their company. The Gallup Institute has already used Maslow’s hierarchy to assess employee engagement. The steps of this pyramid are as follows:
Here again, what matters is fulfilling the basic needs before going any further. The results are concrete: according to Gallup, companies that prioritize employee engagement are 17% more productive and 21% more profitable than others. All good arguments to convince companies of the importance of internal communications.
In the same vein as Maslow’s hierarchy, we have developed our own version of the hierarchy of needs for internal communications: a hierarchy which highlights the importance of securing employees’ “primary” needs before seeking to generate engagement.
The first stage is generating dialogue between employees. Whether it takes place around a table or in a virtual session, conversation is not only a source of well-being, but a means of improving collaboration. Well-being because conversation is the foundation of social relationships, which are crucial for human beings, as we have seen this past year. Conversation is also a vehicle for collaboration because, whether professional or informal, it allows colleagues to get to know each other and thereby collaborate more efficiently.
How can we give conversation more prominence? By giving everyone a chance to speak in meetings (whenever possible), as well as promoting discussions within teams, e.g., through conversation groups. Since knowing one another is a prerequisite for conversation, it may also be useful to create an employee photo directory, or even an internal social network.
This is arguably the stage that imposes itself when we contemplate employee engagement mechanisms. While a company’s external communication creates ties with its clients and audiences, internal communication maintains them with employees. But internal communications use different channels, different "touchpoints," and the primary challenge is to maintain coherence despite this diversity. These touchpoints may be different from those used in classical communication campaigns, whose codes must be mastered.
Each point of contact comes with advantages and disadvantages. One-to-one email is excellent for forming direct relationships, whereas meetings offer optimal interactivity but can generate stress for employees due to their synchronous nature. It’s also important to identify the right “content mix”, the right ratio of content dedicated to the company vs. the news, of formal vs. lighter-weight formats.
In this context, email signatures are a valuable tool, both omnipresent in internal emails and discreet. A centralized email signature management tool offers the ability to automatically create internal communication campaigns and reach a maximum number of employees. As such, this solution is a natural fit in the digital workplace, a unified digital work environment that highlights the employee experience.
Progress, advancement, and development prospects are all criteria in employees' assessment of their work. Continuing education contributes to this progress, giving employees the possibility to acquire skills and climb the ranks. It also allows them to cover new subjects, master new tools, and break out of their routines.
This positive dynamic is vital because it provides the employee the opportunity to move forward and plan for the future. They can develop progress goals and the motivation to achieve them. As such, training benefits employees’ well-being and must be an integral part of internal comms.
This is the final stage: engagement. The goal here is not simply to make employees happy, but also proud to be company ambassadors. It's not an easy goal to achieve. To reach it, the previous steps must be implemented: conversing, communicating, and continuously educating them.
Employee engagement offers many advantages. By ensuring employees’ well-being, it improves the company’s productivity. That said, this is not an easy objective to achieve: it is an ideal towards which the company must strive.
The company must therefore be able to measure progress achieved in order to ensure continuous improvement, thereby tracing a path towards real and sustainable engagement with employees.
Sources:
http://alain.battandier.free.fr/spip.php?article6
https://www.juliedesk.com/fr/blog/engagement-collaborateurs-entreprise/
https://www.hbrfrance.fr/chroniques-experts/2019/12/28885-lengagement-des-collaborateurs-le-nouveau-levier-de-pouvoir-des-rh/
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
