HRTech Interview with Neil Morrison, Chief Human Resources Officer at Staffbase

How do you define good communications?

Great communications are literally the path forward for organizations to ensure their workforces are connected, engaged and aligned to the mission, strategy and change journey they are embarking on. I would always describe great communications as ‘relevant’ ‘easy’ and ‘distinctive’. (FYI, I borrowed this from the book RED Marketing by Greg Creed and Ken Meunch). Relevant information is vital to ensure that you reach the right people with the right information at the right time. From an employee perspective, relevance fosters connection and engagement while preventing communication overwhelm. In a world where we constantly consume and absorb content, both consciously and unconsciously, tailoring communications to what truly matters helps employees stay connected without feeling overloaded. It’s particularly important for large, complex and distributed workforces, in that sense communication without relevance is wasted effort and input that will not create the desired outcomes.

Making communications easy to understand and engage with is essential for effective messaging. In a fast-paced world where people expect instant access to what they need, it’s crucial to meet employees where they are to ensure your message resonates and reaches them effectively. Leveraging technology and diverse mediums, while structuring content to be easy to absorb and delivered in accessible language, are key strategies for ensuring maximum impact and engagement.

Distinctive communication sets itself apart by resonating with the audience, evoking emotions such as a stronger sense of belonging, greater engagement, or inspiration to take action. While repetition helps reinforce a message, making the content unique and memorable is equally important for it to truly land and make an impact.

What are the implications of ineffective employee communications?

Ineffective employee communications often fail to consider the best way to reach the audience and clarify the desired outcome. This leads to poor engagement, information overload, and confusion about priorities. The consequences include decreased belonging, frustration from lack of clarity, and a misaligned workforce, which hinders the company’s mission and strategy. Ultimately, this environment results in higher attrition and weaker perceptions of the employer brand and EVP, both internally and externally.

How important is frequency of communication to employee satisfaction? How can technology be used to streamline communications?

Balancing the frequency of relevant messaging with avoiding communications overwhelm is a delicate act, but one that will ensure the right people hear the right information at the right time. Research shows that we have to hear a message seven times before we take action: moving beyond noticing it, remembering it and then trusting it. Ultimately, as communicators we want people to trust what they are absorbing and be moved to act.

Technology is both an obvious and important answer to support this endeavor. Ensuring that your workforce has access to an easy and engaging platform will enable you to push relevant communications content in different mediums to them, in a way that will drive reach, connection, engagement and action. And ultimately, measure impact each step of the way.

Just as employees face communication overwhelm, they also experience technological overwhelm. So, making sure that the platform you leverage fits efficiently into your tech stack and doesn’t end up being ‘another app’ or ‘another login’ becomes very important. The best communications platforms streamline and integrate seamlessly while becoming the primary interface employees rely on. By serving as the central hub for information and community, these platforms naturally drive engagement and make it easier for employees to access other essential tools. Creating a virtual workplace within a communications tool becomes a strategic way to guide employees toward the resources they need for their roles.

How can digital platforms provide avenues for employee feedback that drive growth and improve company culture?

Company culture and change are most successful when implemented collaboratively with employees, rather than imposed upon them. Digital communication platforms empower this approach, fostering environments where two-way communication thrives. Effective communication hinges on active listening as much as it does on clear expression. So, having a platform that enables communications to reach employees across varying channels and in a variety of formats, opens up the possibility for employees to engage with content in very meaningful ways. Some ways include showing support, seeking clarity, providing perspective or challenging direction, all of which can show you how engaged and active your workforce is. Moreover, the ability to measure the impact of communications in the moment is critical for organizations navigating change and transformation as they grow. Embedding analytics for communicators and leadership to see how their workforce is feeling in regards to key messaging, strategic plans and transformation efforts, becomes highly valuable and action focussed. This further enables organizations to drive engagement and cultural shifts in support of their ambitions.

How do digital platforms ensure continuous improvement of employee engagement levels?

Employee engagement is a crucial factor to understand, yet it is often tracked infrequently or with limited depth, making it difficult to gain a truly agile and dynamic understanding. However, embedding measurement to the way you track and monitor engagement, sentiment and propensity is the more agile way to drive alignment of your workforce to the mission and goals of your organization. In addition, it builds a sense of continuous improvement to your corporate culture and employee engagement. Understanding who is and isn’t aligned with strategic initiatives based on factors like role, location, or tenure, provides actionable insights. These insights enable communicators, people teams, and leadership to deepen understanding, make adjustments, and drive improvement.

Can you share examples where digital platforms have successfully identified and addressed employee disengagement?

When assessing the impact of communications, you realize that two attributes become important, especially in larger, more complex and dispersed organizations. The first is the ability to create trust through the communications and information shared. The second is just how important the manager role is for any given employee. What we observe with the many companies we work closely with, is that those who seek to build trust and know the importance of locally or relevant manager expressed communications, see higher levels of engagement and activation from their employees. Part of that is to understand how different parts of your audience are feeling about their experience, their sentiment based on the communications they are receiving and how they ultimately feel connected to (or disconnected from) the company’s mission and goals. Helping customers see that geographical or cultural differences in levels of engagement and sentiment exist, is often the fastest route for them seeking to learn the ‘why’ and in turn, being able to act positively to improve levels of disengagement and low sentiment.

How can organizations balance personalization and scalability in their employee communications strategies, particularly in large, dispersed teams?

Ensuring that the technology behind your communications allows you to reach the right stakeholder groups with the right content at the right time, is the key foundation to achieving personalization at scale. I.e., creating a direct path to front-line workers to ensure that they receive content that is relevant and engaging to their actual roles. However, beyond the technology, communicators and leadership need to adopt methodologies and approaches that drive relevance for all through personalization. The most effective examples I’ve seen involve local leadership creating local content. This means, empowering an organization’s management tier to communicate both company-wide messages and their own content in authentic ways. By doing so, they reach employees with highly personalized and relevant messaging, which significantly boosts engagement. Personalized communication delivered this way is far more likely to inspire employees to take action and feel part of something larger. This is why scaling personalized communication across large, complex workforces is crucial for driving meaningful change and fostering action.

What role does leadership play in fostering a culture of open communication, and how can digital platforms support this effort?

Now more than ever, employees are seeking workplaces that prioritize transparency and authenticity. The 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer reinforces this trend, showing that people increasingly turn to businesses as one of the most trusted sources of reliable information, surpassing other institutions. Leadership’s role in this is vital, in both the good and the challenging times. Setting your communication philosophy at the heart of your corporate culture is a key foundation that in turn enables Leadership to communicate authentically and clearly to demonstrate transparency and establish trust with stakeholders. Ensuring that leadership has the ability to reach all the workforce is an important aspect to check off, but demonstrating that communication is cascaded in ways that demonstrate a commitment to listening and responding effectively to internal sentiment, is a sure way to foster a safe environment where employees benefit from a culture of open communication. Only then, when they can truly engage with information they can trust, will Leadership be able to create alignment with their workforce and inspire them to act.

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