Content ideas to increase employee readership and engagement

You already know that your content needs to be interesting, targeted, visual engaging, and concise. You want to create content that is both useful and relevant to your employees and encourages them to share their thoughts. We believe that this should be done in an omnichannel fashion, across all your primary platforms from intranet to Teams to mobile as one unified conversation, but that is a different discussion (see our recent article on link to omnichannel article and one conversation articles). 

However, that is just the bare minimum of what is needed for getting people engaged. We reviewed analytics across our Sparrow’s clients and found that organizations with higher engagement are using a few key ideas and techniques. We have broken down the top ones here: 

Ask for feedback 

A dialog needs to have at least two willing participants, you (as the post author) and the organization. You should solicit your workforce’s views, and not be afraid of both positive and negative comments. Suggestions are even more important, gather their ideas, turn those ideas into new content sources. Of course, once you gather ideas and suggestions, you need to act on them. Do not get discouraged by the naysayers; they can alert you to valuable and necessary changes in your platform and your organization. 

We recommend you create a continuous listening strategy – see this post for more information.

Foster a recognition culture 

Sparrow has kudos functionality, allowing any employee to send another employee Kudos for a work well done. Other platforms will likely offer a similar feature.  Create a space across all your channels, where employees can show their gratitude for a colleague. Leverage the information collected to highlight the best performing employees, the true champions in your organization. You can easily do this via a monthly interview that gets shared with the entire organization. Over time, you will build a beautiful gallery of praise and recognition that through your interviews highlight your employees. 

Update your content often 

You need to release content on a regular schedule, and it cannot all be done by internal communications. You need to foster a network of contributors and build a content calendar.  

Here is some of the most popular content based on conversations with our clients: 

• If you have an in-building cafeteria and your office is open, why not share the daily menu. 
• Updates from the heads of your departments. You can choose to post them individually or roll them up in a newsletter. 
• Metrics. A portion of your workforce is analytics driven, regardless, most employees care to know how the organization is doing. Share statistics on your organization’s health, for example, HSE metrics, customer satisfaction, and financial performance. 
• Work with your CEO and the senior leadership team to produce a quick three-to-five-minute video. They can talk about the organization, a bit about themselves or any topic that is highly relevant for that week, month, or quarter. 
• Interview new employees and publish their stories. Focus also on birthdays, work anniversaries, and promotions.
   

External news sources including industry Insights and trends 

Make it easy for your employees to be informed of important news and trends in your industry. You should consider adding quality external sources to your communication, Sparrow makes this easy by allowing any external RSS feeds to be part of your communication platform.  

Drive engagement by curating quality content created by experts, disseminate that content across all your communication channels. You can have industry specific publications or even general sites with trends and information for example Gartner and Harvard Business Review. 

Remember that communication is two-ways otherwise is just a dissertation 

Allow your employees to voice their opinions and ideas for improvement. Remember that feedback is a gift, yes, even negative feedback.  Sparrow supports anonymous comments and feedback; research shows that 75% of people are more likely to speak up when their anonymity is assured. Make sure employees’ feedback is heard, otherwise, they will stop bothering to give it. You should always close the loop on feedback by providing messaging around it, for example ‘You told us X and we implemented Y’ or ‘You told us X and here is why we cannot do anything about it’.  

Crowdsourcing of Ideas 

Internal crowdsourcing combines the collective experience and knowledge of your organization to improve. Enterprise crowdsourcing is not about changing a specific industry, but rather improving the very nature of how your business operate.  Your employees are a great source of ideas. Platforms like Sparrow provide you with the means to source, up vote, classify, and put the ideas into action. Some of our clients have competitions for the best ideas. The winners are announced at the company Christmas party by the CEO and shared in a newsletter (see our newsletter article).   

In Summary 

In this post, we have shared several ideas to increase engagement with your content. They were sourced from our Sparrow client community. At the end of the day, increasing readership and engagement starts with producing the right content to meet the needs of your organization, as well as making sure you have the right communication platform to disseminate it. Asking users for their views in a post, providing great images or video, drawing from different sources, all of it helps make people feel that the content they are receiving is interesting enough, and inviting enough, to warrant their time and effort. 

If you’re looking for a platform to help make your life easier and connecting you with all of your workforce, give Sparrow a look. We’ve lived the pain, we understand the hopes, and we built a platform for communication professionals that delivers. From Intranets, to Microsoft Teams, to newsletters, and mobile, we know how important corporate communications is. Sparrow – Built for Communicators. Book a conversation with us today.