Reaching your offline workforce - an Internal Communication challenge

In our Internal Communication: Emerging Trends and the use of Technology Survey 2014 we asked over 500 communicators to what extent they agreed with the following statement: "We are able to communicate effectively with our offline workforce (e.g. employees without access to work smartphones, work email or the intranet)

How is Internal Communication reaching an offline workforce?

Less than 30% of these Internal Communication professionals agreed with the statement. In a recent webinar, I highlighted three customers who are making clever use of their email employee newsletters to help them reach their offline workforce:

Sending to personal email address

One Internal Communication team ran a campaign to ask employees who do not have a company email, if they could send the email employee newsletter to their personal email address. It was NOT mandatory. They got a 60% buy-in on this request.

easyJet create downloadable PDF

easyJet has many employees (pilots and cabin crew) who have sporadic online access. easyJet creates an issue of the email employee newsletter and automatically generates a PDF version. The IC team then embeds a link to the PDF in the newsletter - inviting employees to download to their device to read offline at their convenience. An elegant solution that removes barriers to getting opened and read, plus easyJet gain metrics and insight from the PDF clicks.

Balfour Beatty send PDFs for factory floor noticeboards

Balfour Beatty has personnel on the factory floor and need to reach them with essential Health & Safety information. Rather than just mailing out printed posters, they embed a link to the PDF of the poster in the newsletter. Employees who have been designated as the noticeboard co-ordinators at each facility are responsible for printing out the posters to display on the factory floor. The Internal Communication team use metrics available from the campaigns to ensure all designated noticeboard co-ordinators have received, clicked and downloaded the poster.

If you're interested in finding out more on how you can Drive employee engagement through communications, check out our 50-minute watch on-demand webinar.

In this webinar you will learn:

• The consistent drivers of employee engagement
• 3 types of engagement and how Internal Communication plays a crucial role in them
• Leading strategic case studies from Sears, Avery Dennison, Volvo and Aviva
• Why creating accountability is essential to proving IC effectiveness