Reliable communications are necessary to ensure your organization works like a well-oiled machine. But when everyone’s so busy all day, how do you draw their attention to your messages? We’ve got seven tips to grab your busy workforce’s attention. Keep reading to get (and keep!) the spotlight.

1. Tailor your tools to your audience

Today’s workforce is 25 percent baby boomers, 33 percent Gen X, 35 percent millennials, and 5 percent Gen Z. A lot of generations to inform and engage all at once! Drawing each generation’s attention may involve different channels, as people and generations may have different preferences. Some may still like paper posters, some will prefer email or the intranet, and others love a mobile-first approach.

A multichannel employee communication strategy caters to everyone’s needs and preferences, as it uses multiple channels such as digital signage, desktops and laptops, and smartphones and tablets. It can tie in other channels like intranet by integrating with existing tools such as SharePoint or can redirect employees to a lengthier message on an intranet by adding a hyperlink. It allows every generation to consume information from their preferred medium.

2. Tailor your content to your audience

If you have a multi-generational workforce, creating your message in a variety of formats may help you get the information to more people. Like they prefer certain communication channels, they may also prefer certain types of content. For example, baby boomers may prefer longer articles, millennials might rather read short, tweet-like messages, whereas Gen Z may favor the video content they see on their favorite social media channels such as TikTok and Instagram.

Our employee communications platform is an ideal vehicle for all sorts of content. You can publish videos and show them with or without sound on screensavers, digital signage, or on employees’ smartphones. Our platform was designed to force content creators to create short messages that can be read in about 20 seconds. Longer articles can be posted on our Desktop or Mobile App or, for example, on your intranet. A hyperlink or button will redirect staff to the full item. This way, you cater to everyone’s wishes.

3. Make your content visual

Visual communication is a super powerful way to inform your employees. The idea behind this is simple: humans are naturally visual creatures. We respond better to visual information and process it better than any other type of information. It draws attention and is, therefore, an important factor of our platform.

Our versatile communication tools are designed to include lots of space for visuals like images, diagrams, or GIFs.

The space available for accompanying text is limited: the text should be short and powerful. After all, your target group must be able to read and understand the information easily and swiftly. For example: when employees walk past a digital signage screen, they must be able to read the text as they go by. Digital signage is, as well as our Corporate Screensaver, a tool that brings out the power of visual communication to the fullest.

4. Reinforce without disrupting

Drawing attention doesn’t necessarily mean being intrusive or obtrusive. You can draw attention without interrupting your workforce from their important tasks: Netpresenter triggers your employees’ curiosity during their downtime. By, for example, displaying messages on a corporate screensaver, you immediately catch your workforce’s attention while they are sitting behind their desk, but not while using their computer.

The same goes for our digital signage: you inform your colleagues when they aren’t busy. They catch a glimpse of your digsig presentations while grabbing a cup of coffee, walking towards a meeting, or entering your building. In none of these examples, your staff is actively focusing on work at that moment, which means you inform them without being intrusive.

5. Keep it relevant

Do you pay attention when someone tells you a story that isn’t at all relevant to your situation? Probably not. The same thing happens when you send employees messages with information that doesn’t apply to them: they won’t pay attention. If you want to grab employees’ attention, make sure the information you send them is relevant and applicable to their situation.

You can avoid sending employees irrelevant information by defining audience groups inside of your organization. After you’ve defined these audience groups, you can send them relevant information by targeting your messages to the right people. An employee communication platform with a targeting feature will help you target the right audience by enabling you to send information to specific locations, departments, devices, or even individuals. This ensures that employees will pay attention to your communication channels, as the content shown on these channels is always relevant to them.

6. Make use of storytelling

Humans are emotional creatures. Storytelling is, therefore, a great way to draw attention! Stories that resonate with your colleagues will also be remembered better. The best way to pull your audience in is to make them care. Telling stories that are relatable to your colleagues and mirror their own experiences at work will give them a feeling of belonging. Our customers already love to use storytelling to inspire their colleagues and draw their attention.

We’ve got customers who share employees’ stories weekly to recognize their employees and allow others to celebrate their peers. A great way to draw attention to highlighted achievements and inspire and motivate your workforce to do their best work every day!

7. Capture instant attention

We live in an age of flooded inboxes. Every day, employees receive 122 emails on average. Many of us, though, may even receive more. No wonder emails are being missed or ignored. They are not effective for grabbing attention when it’s needed most.

For instant attention, activate channels like alerts or notifications that are unmissable. They bypass emails to reach your staff, will pop up on top of other applications, and will cut through the noise to increase visibility and attention. You can guarantee readership by using notification recurrence settings, like our attention boosters: they will keep retargeting your target audience until they’ve read the message or acknowledged reading it, so you’re absolutely sure they’ve read your message, and you got their attention.

Do you want to start grabbing your busy workforce’s attention? Read our guide to find the right communication tools for your workforce. Or get in touch with our consultants or schedule a free 30-minute demo to get advice on how to grab your staff’s attention.

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Internal newsletters might seem a great solution for keeping employees informed about company news. Every week or month you spend a ton of time filling your corporate newsletter with quality content. You even search the web for ideas to come up with fresh and compelling employee newsletter names. That will ensure your colleagues will read your newsletter, right?

Think again. Sure, we understand the appeal of newsletters. You can inform many people at the same time about what is happening in your organization. Advanced tools even assist you to create digestible and fun content. Internal newsletters have been around for a long time, but times are changing. Nowadays, there are numerous reasons why internal newsletters are long overdue for retirement.

1. You will not reach everyone

You might think simply e-mailing everyone in your organization is the easiest way to reach all employees. But how do you reach your colleagues who don’t have a corporate email address? 80 percent of the working population consists of non-desk employees, like cleaners, delivery drivers, factory workers and nurses. They won’t see your internal newsletter until they will use a workstation and probably won’t have much time when they finally do.

What to do instead:

By using an omnichannel communication platform, you can truly reach everyone. It no longer matters where they are, if they have the right access or permissions, or what devices they use for work. With a strong combination of multiple channels and devices, including digital signage, interactive screensavers and a corporate app, you’ll reach your entire workforce.

2. Information is rarely hot off the press

No matter what interval you use for your internal newsletter, you will always find something noteworthy happens right after you’ve sent your latest edition (unless you send it out daily – but who has time to write and read that?). By the time you publish your next edition, the news will be outdated, or will have lost its relevance entirely.

What to do instead:

With Netpresenter, your content is updated continuously. The moment you publish something, it will be visible for all employees on every channel you choose. You don’t have to wait days or even weeks until your next periodical newsletter, only to see your fresh content getting old. In case of real urgent news or even emergency situations, you can even use push notifications to make sure everyone is informed right away.

3. You’re only sending info instead of starting a dialog

You can let people contribute to the newsletter with interesting content, but that’s not the interaction we’re looking for. To what extend are people enabled to react to your newsletter? If you’re using email only to deliver information, it might feel impersonal to your audience. Enabling employees to react to the news in your newsletter and to respond to each other’s reactions, can help foster healthy and positive relationships between your coworkers. This leads to higher engagement. But when they only reply to the original sender, they will not see each other’s comments and reactions. Reply-to-all isn’t the solution either though, as that will bring us to the fourth reason why internal newsletters are obsolete.

What to do instead:

Employees can like messages and comment directly in the Mobile App. This way, your content can spark connections between coworkers who don’t see face to face on a daily basis – perfect for companies that embrace hybrid work as their new normal. It also enables the sender to respond to questions or clarify something in a central place, without having to respond to multiple independent e-mails or direct messages.

4. You contribute to the information overload

You work hard to fill your internal newsletter with compelling content. Chances are that your employees will view your newsletter as just another email that floods their inbox. The average office worker receives about 120 emails a day. No wonder two out of three employees ignore emails at work. It also means your newsletter (and any reply-to-all emails) will probably not receive the attention you desire, while it only contributes to the information overload.

What to do instead:

Instead of adding to the information overload, you can decrease it in a smart way. You don’t just spare people the monthly edition of your newsletter, as well as any reply-to-all’s or updates that you have to send out in between editions. Our channels are designed to be non-intrusive. Employees will see the latest news during a coffee break, a walk, or right at the start of their day when they boot up their device, so you’ll never have to distract them when they are focused at work.

Are you ready to say goodbye to your trusty internal newsletter? Let’s talk with our consultants and see what Netpresenter can do for your internal communication! Not convinced? Download our free infographic about wasting money and time because of distractions and ineffective communication.

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Most developments in communication and technology are thought of as having a positive influence on business. The internet allows us to communicate and collaborate easily with our colleagues, even when we cannot physically be present in the same room. And nowadays, information can be brought to employees through all kinds of digital channels. However, current research suggests that the growing volume of available information can affect decision making, innovation, and productivity. And it is also taking a financial toll: Information overload costs the U.S. economy 900 billion dollars a year. Ouch! So, how do you avoid information overload in the workplace?  

In short, these three measures will help you avoid information overload in the workplace:

• Align your channels
• Make content relevant
• Stop the multitasking

The most logical thing to do, and maybe the first thing that comes to mind would be reducing the information you share with your organization. However, you may not always have an impact on that side of things. Instead, you might want to rethink which channels you are using to get information to your employees. Email, for example, is not the most effective way to reach employees anymore: a full 60.8 percent of respondents in a survey about workplace communication preferences exposed they either occasionally, often, or always ignore emails at work. So, while you think you are reaching everyone through email, you may just be adding to the noise and flooding your employees’ inboxes with unnecessary emails.  

What causes information overload… 

Email is not the only source of information overload in your organization. Typically, the term ‘overload’ means ‘too much of something’. So, information overload at work usually refers to the overwhelming amount of information and data employees process daily in their jobs.  

 However, when you refer to information overload, you do not just address the volume of information shared in the workplace. Poor quality of information adds to the overload as well. And when we say poor quality, we mean information that is irrelevant to (some of) your employees. Information overload in the workplace is related to:  

• (As stated before,) too much information exchanged in the organization 
• A lack of coordination between various communication channels  
• Irrelevant information shared in the organization 
• A lack of time to process the information shared in the organization 

… And how you avoid information overload 

One of the central sources of information overload at work is the glut of information channels organizations are using to communicate with their employees. Take your own organization, for example. You may be using email, intranet, newsletters, digital signage, private messaging apps, screensavers, collaboration platforms, video conferencing software, a corporate app, document sharing platforms, et cetera.  

 With all these channels used simultaneously, it is easy for your employees to get drawn into digital distractions and lose grip on all the conversations going on within these channels.  

Align your channels 

But the real issue is not the number of channels; if all these discussions were appropriately aligned, the problem would be significantly reduced. It is the lack of coordination between these channels that cause confusion. Therefore, the solution to this problem is not necessarily to immediately eradicate some of these channels: one employee may choose to consume most information from a different channel then someone else. However, you could try to find a way to better coordinate all the channels you are using.  

 Construct (several) central places that allow your employees to easily find all the latest corporate news and the information they need to do their jobs (including your remote and non-desk employees). Our omnichannel communication platform enables you to publish the same message through various communication channels such as digital signage screens, a corporate app, your employees’ screensavers, or Microsoft Teams, helping you to coordinate your communication channels. Employees will not have to check every communication channel available anymore, since the messages transferred through these channels will be aligned. They can now choose to consume information through their preferred communication channel.   

Make content relevant  

Have you wondered yet what causes 60.8 percent of employees to ignore corporate emails? If employees feel a message is irrelevant to them, they will not read it. So, one of the best ways to reduce information overload in the workplace is to target your employees with content that is relevant to them. Create content based on your employees’ roles within the organization, their locations, the language they speak, and their department. You’re probably not that interested in a new colleague when they start at the Atlanta office while you’re located in Sacramento and will most likely never meet them, right?

After you segment your content, only send it to the workers that genuinely benefit from this information. This way, your messages will appeal to your colleagues. They will not feel like the information you send them is part of the overload; they will feel like they need your messages to do their job properly.   

Stop the multitasking 

The constant connectedness we discussed earlier causes (forces) us to become multitaskers; we have incredible demands on our time as we try to fit more and more into the same 24 hours. Having to get more work done, in most cases, means having to process more information. And it usually also means processing that information fast, in between tasks.  

 To give your employees a chance to cope with this information inundation, allow them to take time to explore this ocean of information in your organization at their own convenience. Make sure there are ways your employees can read any important messages when it suits them, not when it suits you (except for the information they must get immediately, such as safety warnings).  

Publish the information in your corporate app, for example, so they can scroll through the app at moments they would usually be on their phones anyway, scrolling through a news app or social media. This allows you to reach your employees in a non-intrusive way; information that is not forced upon them will feel less overwhelming. You can still disturb them with truly crucial information through text messaging or push notifications that will light up their phones and immediately draws attention. However, do not overuse these features: push systems are related to information overload.  

In the end, the solution to information overload is a proper communication strategy and the right tools. Keep communicating with your employees, but make sure you get the right message to the right employee. Could you use some help with this? Feel free to contact one of our consultants, or download our nine tips on reducing workplace distraction and start improving communication!

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