After closing out a challenging 2020, 2021 holds so much promise. As a leader in your organization, now is the perfect time for you to empower that promise through effective communication strategies. When you combine effective communication with efficient communication, you have a winning combination that will help you motivate your employees to work towards your most important company goals all throughout the year.
To make 2021 your most effective year yet, start with a few simple steps that are the pillars of effective communication strategies.
Evaluate Your Current Process
In 2020, companies across the world faced unprecedented communication challenges. While you may not have done everything perfectly, your approach to internal communication throughout the year likely stretched your team to the limit. You had to pivot almost daily and make tough decisions about the what, when, and how to communicate changes across the workplace.
After having faced such a difficult situation head-on, you are in the perfect position to evaluate your current processes. Looking back on your communication in 2020, ask yourself the following questions:
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What areas of our communication strategy exceeded expectations in the face of challenges?
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What areas of our communication strategy fell short?
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Which stakeholders provided the most support when handling difficult communication situations?
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Was our communication effective for all employees (working in-house or remotely)?
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Did we provide a variety of materials and information to keep our employees engaged and informed?
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Which members of our team were most consistent with content delivery? What can we learn from them?
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Are there specific challenges we faced as a company where improved communication could have made it easier to weather the storm?
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Based on past experiences, how will our current communication strategy help us grow to achieve our goals in 2021?
Discuss the answers to these questions with your team and use them to help you identify the most pressing changes to your strategy moving forward. These answers can also help you identify the most valuable aspects of your strategy to leverage in 2021.
Realign Your Communication Goals
Once you’ve evaluated your current strategy and identified what needs to change, take the time to realign your communication goals in a way that reinforces your intended changes. Your goals should target specific aspects of your revised communication strategy – your content types, content owners, content platforms, or content designs.
Take your goals and tie each one to a change you’d like to see in your communication strategy for 2021. If your evaluation showed a delay in getting content from your department managers, you may decide to set a goal to:
● Create a content schedule with longer lead times and additional reminders to better support your content managers.
● Research and choose a service that provides professionally-designed templates to make sharing important messages easier.
● Identify new or additional stakeholders that can more easily take ownership of developing content for their departments.
Each of these goals would make it easier to have timely, relevant content across all departments within your company, and you may choose one core goal or combine multiple goals targeted to an intended change for an even larger impact.
Find Opportunities for Efficiencies
If you already feel burdened by your current responsibilities, the idea of adding more tasks to your plate in 2021 may seem overwhelming. Look within your current strategy for tasks that can be automated and greatly enhanced through today’s available resources such as digital signage.
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Leverage existing communication channels like Slack or Teams to display targeted messaging.
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Share real-time performance values through digital dashboards.
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Digital signs can display a variety of content formats, including spreadsheets or custom applications. By integrating important KPIs into your digital signs, employees on the production floor can have real-time performance information to make necessary labor adjustments and other decisions.
Invest in Resources
After evaluating your current strategies, and defining your goals, you are ready to develop your 2021 communication plan. You’ll need resources to carry out your plan – from human capital to digital solutions – and investing in these resources wisely can help ensure the success of your plan.
Incorporating innovative digital signage software into your toolkit provides your team with a way to easily integrate various communication tools in one place. By expanding the value of your communication platform, you will encourage repeat employee engagement and turn your communication strategy into a helpful business tool.
If you are looking to develop your ideal digital communication strategy for 2021 and beyond, working with one of our expert team members can help you find the right solution to communication take your employee communication to the next level.
