How to stop overreliance on emails for your internal comms strategy
Effective communication lies at the heart of every successful frontline team. However, for frontline teams tasked with delivering exceptional customer service and driving business growth, overreliance on emails from internal comms managers can pose significant challenges.
Because let’s face it, we don’t like being bombarded with emails from our favourite brands at the best of times, let alone a barrage of emails, while trying to get our day-to-day work done. But don’t worry, you’re not alone; it happens in more businesses than you think, and that’s why we’ve written this email to help you get out of the email trap so many companies fall into.
Researchers at the University of California found that too many emails can increase stress levels and make it challenging for employees to focus on what needs attention.
So before we dive into tips on how to stop overreliance on emails for your internal comms strategy, let's first look at why this is such a damaging and relevant issue for so many internal comms professionals in 2024.
Understanding the impact of email overload on frontline teams
Frontline teams serve as the lifeblood of any customer-facing business, delivering exceptional service and driving sales. Yet, even with the relentless influx of emails, frontline employees often feel overwhelmed and disconnected.
What was once a streamlined channel for urgent and critical business messages has transformed into a cluttered bulletin board, making it challenging for frontline staff to stay engaged.
Compounding this issue is that many of these emails lack relevance to frontline roles, leaving employees feeling inundated with information that doesn't directly impact their day-to-day responsibilities.
From the perspective of communication managers, this email overload presents a significant challenge, as traditional emails often fail to provide meaningful insights into engagement rates.
The result? A fragmented internal comms strategy characterised by top-down messaging with little understanding of how these messages resonate with the most crucial audience: frontline teams. A new approach is needed to bridge this gap and create a more responsive and impactful communication strategy tailored to the needs of frontline employees.
Step-by-step guide to diversifying your internal comms strategy
Step 1: Assess current email messages
Start by conducting a thorough assessment of your business's current communication practices.
Examine their frequency, relevance, and recipients.
Ask yourself: are all these emails genuinely essential? Are they reaching the right audience? How engaging are their contents? Do they often spiral into lengthy threads?
This exercise is a crucial first step in painting a comprehensive picture of your business's communication landscape. By scrutinising your email practices, you'll gain invaluable insights into which messages are indispensable for business operations and which could find better homes in alternative communication channels or not be sent at all.
Step 2: Define communication categories
Now that you have clearly understood which communications are best suited for email and which are not, it's time to establish categories for organising your content effectively. This step will help streamline communication processes and ensure messages reach the right audience through appropriate channels.
For instance, social posts are better suited for platforms like Workplace, where employees can discuss and share updates more informally. Similarly, monthly bulletins containing important updates or announcements could be reserved for distribution during scheduled huddles or town hall meetings, where they can discuss in-depth and address questions in real-time.
Here's a breakdown of the types of channels recommended by our interviewees in our latest report, "The State of Frontline Comms in 2024":
Formal emails - These are ideal for conveying important announcements, policy updates, or official communications that require a structured format and documentation for future reference. They help maintain organisational clarity and ensure that essential information is documented and easily accessible.
Town hall meetings - These gatherings are perfect for creating open dialogue, lively discussions, and engaging presentations. They provide a platform for leadership to communicate organisational goals, share updates, and gather feedback from frontline employees in a collaborative and interactive environment.
WhatsApp groups - These informal groups offer a relaxed and unofficial space for quick updates, instant responses, and team collaboration. They are handy for facilitating real-time communication, sharing urgent information, and building a social culture for frontline team members.
Ocasta Engage - Our customers have successfully used this app for strictly business communications. It offers features tailored to internal communication needs, such as hyper-targeted messaging so everything is always relevant to the reader, along with a knowledgebase of information needed “in the moment” and microlearning to embed training. By keeping business communications separate from social interactions, internal comms managers can ensure that important updates are not lost among unrelated discussions.
Yammer or Workplace - These platforms serve as hubs for more social communications, allowing employees to connect, collaborate, and share updates casually and interactively. By providing dedicated spaces for social interactions, you can encourage team bonding and create a sense of community.
By using different communication channels effectively, you can create a much more impactful communication strategy that meets the needs of frontline teams whilst avoiding email overload.
Step 3: Inform managers of the change
A significant contributor to the overreliance on email stems from a lack of awareness.
Many managers may not recognise the issue of excessive email usage and its impact.
Educating them about our new communication strategy is essential, defining what qualifies as an 'email-worthy' message and what doesn't.
Once you’ve established clear categories with specific criteria, distribute this information to all managers responsible for sending emails. Ensuring everyone understands the guidelines for email and knows when to send emails will help reduce usage.
Step 4: Leverage video and visual content
Video is one of the top medias in marketing for a reason. 161.4 million people watched live video content in 2023. Sometimes, managers in your business might just send emails because they can’t think of another way to deliver their messages.
Encourage using simple and easy-to-create video and visual content to convey messages more engagingly and memorably.
Provide training on how to create short video updates or infographics to capture the attention of frontline employees and communicate complex information more effectively than plain text alone.
Step 5: Implement regular Town Hall meetings
As mentioned above, Town Hall meetings or Huddles are a great alternative to emails. In the recent State of Frontline Comms report, Claire, the director of Internal Comms Manager at Enterprise Community Partners, mentioned that town hall meetings are a big part of their comms strategy. Many leaders worry that these meetings won’t engage frontline staff, so to counteract that problem and ensure maximum engagement, Claire said they prefer frontline staff to speak during these meetings as their words carry more weight than hearing solely from C-suite executives
We’d recommend hosting regular town hall meetings or virtual gatherings to provide leadership updates, share organisational goals, and collect feedback from frontline teams. These interactive sessions create opportunities for open dialogue, which is great for employee engagement.
Summary
We hope you see that there is a life without email overload, which you can achieve with a bit of forward planning.
Assess current practices, define categories, educate managers, use video, and explore alternative channels like town hall meetings or Ocasta Engage.
These steps make it simple for internal comms managers to improve frontline engagement and productivity quickly and easily.
Download the 2024 state of frontline internal comms report
With helpful insights from communication experts, offering a new perspective, interesting strategies, and best practices for improving frontline comms. Follow their actionable tips and transform your internal comms strategy.
