4 Tactics to Engage your Employees with your New Intranet

Here at EasyWeb, we understand that humans are creatures of habit. That’s why we know that trying to get your employees engaged with anything new, from a new tool to a new procedure, can feel like an impossible and daunting task.

If you’ve already read our recent blog - ‘5 Ways Workplace by Facebook Improved our Internal Communication’ - you’ll know that we have just introduced a new internal communications platform. You can learn about some of the simple yet effective features of Workplace by Facebook and why we chose to start using this platform in the blog above.

As promised in my previous Workplace blog, I’ll be filling you in on 4 tactics we used to ensure a successful roll out of Workplace, which will guarantee your staff are engaged with the product from day one. Although our tactics are specific to Workplace, we think they’re pretty relatable to anyone who is introducing a new internal communications tool to their employees.

Before I go on, should you decide to begin using Workplace, I strongly recommend following their own 4 Week roll-out timeline, which they give you when you register. The structure and advice they offer on how to set up Workplace before introducing it to the whole company was beyond useful. Anyway, let’s get started on that tactic talk…

Tactic #1 – Get your department managers on board!

Before Workplace is released company-wide, make sure all of your managers know exactly what it is, how you intend to use it and try to make them feel positive about the tool.

We approached this by doing a short 30-minute-demo, where we showed all managers the features of Workplace, gave them examples on how they could use these with their team and gave them the opportunity to ask us any questions concerning the platform.

Our theory was that if the managers are comfortable with using the tool’s features and are proactive about what it has to offer, this will rub off on their team members.

Tactic #2 – Tasks for each employee when they first log in

It’s important to encourage employees to use the tool from the second they can access it. That’s why when we sent out the log-in details, we gave everyone a list of 4 tasks which they had to complete within a week.

We put emphasis on making sure everyone uploaded a profile picture because we felt that this would add a personal touch, whilst, making them accept the invitation to a company-wide event helped everyone to understand the kind of things that you can use Workplace for.

Nothing too time consuming but enough to get them

exploring and seeing different features of Workplace. We

created these tasks on a post, using the poll feature as a

checklist. When employees had completed each task, they

ticked the box on the left, to let us know they had done it.

This kept them engaged right from the start.

Tactic #3 – Stop the use of other communication platforms within the company

If your company is using different communication platforms that Workplace could replace, simply remove them. By removing other platforms, you are forcing employees to break their old habits and bring all of their internal communication into one place, simplifying the way you communicate as a company.

We were aware that suddenly removing Skype and WhatsApp may throw some of our employee’s off, so we gave everyone a week’s notice and an explanation of why we no longer need to use them, to prevent any potential uproar.

As well as removing Skype and WhatsApp, we put a lot of emphasis on using Workplace to decrease the amount of company-wide emails we send out. Below are some examples of things we used to email out but now we just post onto Workplace:

Tactic #4 – Weekly Activity Reports

Each week, Workplace sends a brief overview of your employee activity - great for figuring out which areas you need to encourage employees to participate in more.

Whilst it’s useful to look at these statistics, you don’t necessarily need everyone to be using everything. For example, we can see that not many employees are using the mobile apps, however this isn’t a big issue for us, as it’s not essential for everyone in the company to have mobile access.

We are only into our second week without Skype, so hopefully we’ll see our number of ‘Message

Senders’ increase by next week’s report.

When setting up an internal communications tool at your company, whether it be Workplace by

Facebook or something else, the best advice we can give you is to simply give it time. Figure out what

parts of the tool your employees take to and which parts they don’t. From that, you can decide what

gradual changes you need to make, to encourage employees to use all elements of the new platform.

If you are interested in improving your Employee Engagement you might be interested in the free

Employee Engagement Survey tool we have launched, see www.easywebengagement.com

EasyWeb Recruitment offer a range of other services:

•Free Online Recruitment Training: www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/easyweb-recruitment-320818116

•An Applicant Tracking System: www.easywebats.co.uk

•Online Managed Recruitment Campaigns: www.easywebrecruitment.com

• Recruitment for Not-for-Profit Organisations: www.easywebnfp.com

• An Agency Service: www.easywebagency.com

Written by: Olivia Scott, Marketing & Events Administrator / Workplace by Facebook Ninja