White Papers

With the ongoing increase in healthcare costs and the growing challenges in maintaining a healthy work-life balance work life, employers are placing greater emphasis on the wellbeing of their workforce. Investing in workplace health programs improves productivity, reduces absenteeism, attracts talent and nurtures a healthy company culture. Nevertheless, crafting effective programs that harmonize high-quality solutions with cost management presents a challenge.

Executives increasingly recognize the profound effects internal communications (IC) has on many key parts of business, such as enhancing employee engagement and sentiment, fostering alignment toward common objectives, fostering a sense of connectedness and belonging, and boosting talent retention. And direct executive involvement is one of the most effective strategies for IC success.

A great intranet is like a tree: planting the seed is just the first step. To truly flourish, it needs constant nurturing and care. For a tree, that’s water and fertilizer, but for an intranet, that’s content, creativity and new features.

Internal communicators play a vital role in informing and engaging employees on topics of vital business importance. But the communications function is often overlooked by leadership who might not realize just how critical these tasks are to sustain a healthy, thriving organization.

This ongoing strain on the eyes can cause problems for the workforce in nearly every industry, from headaches to blurred vision and beyond.

Many communicators turn to surveys to get a pulse on employee sentiment and engagement. Other organizations prioritize one metric like Employee Net Promoter Score. While these can be valuable tools, they have their limitations.

Managing or writing for an organization’s intranet can sometimes leave communications professionals with little idea about what “good” looks like. Without a strategy or an understanding of how employees interact with the platform, comms teams might find themselves making little progress. To help navigate these challenges, SWOOP Analytics has analyzed the real-life data from over 36,000 SharePoint intranet pages accessed by almost 100,000 employees to produce the first-ever SharePoint intranet benchmarking report that shows how people use and access company intranets.

Sometimes organizations can struggle to retain their most skilled employees. Many factors can prompt a staffer to seek other employment, including limited learning and development opportunities, lack of engagement and ineffective communication. Business leaders understand that retaining talented and dedicated workers and fostering their career development is key to sustaining growth and finding success. And an organization’s intranet can play a pivotal role in this challenge.  

Over the past year, internal communicators have refocused their efforts on the best methods to reach their employees utilizing the most effective channels. One of the best ways to improve an organization’s communication strategy is by recognizing the strengths and challenges of your comms channels and eliminating redundant or ineffective ones. 

The keys to unlocking internal newsletter engagement include specificity—developing niche mailings that resonate with teams, locations and job functions—as well as easy digestibility and alignment with other communications.

Company newsletters can lack aesthetic appeal and personalization, leaving employees uninspired to read them and unengaged with the message. Internal communications teams who want to maximize reach and engagement with meaningful messages and content are recognizing the need for applications that integrate with existing content, offer dynamic personalization and targeting capabilities, and can be measured in seconds to inform changes.