Overview
Internal comms tools help you to engage with your teams. For office workers, internal comms has typically meant phone, email and, more recently, intranet sites and desktop messaging apps. For field-based or branch-based staff, this provision has been much less comprehensive, with colleagues relying on official ‘head office’ emails or ad hoc conversations. This meant communication was often one-way, poorly-understood and inconsistent. Now, a combination of improving tech, widespread smartphone adoption, tough data protection rules and a challenging employment market have resulted in significant development of internal comms tools.
Done right, they can help even the largest companies communicate with their teams in a way that is secure, authentic and valued. Done badly, you create ‘yet another app’ that employees have to check and feel compelled to use, even when they’re not working. It therefore pays to conduct really thorough research, and ideally run a trial, before adopting a new internal comms tool.
Many hospitality businesses rely on consumer apps like Facebook, Messenger and WhatsApp to communicate with teams. While these are free of charge and have widespread adoption, they present two big problems. The first is that they make it hard for companies to ‘own’ the conversation. If disgruntled former employees or belligerent colleagues use the channel to spread rumours and gossip, or to post damaging, confidential or commercially sensitive information, businesses may find they have little ability to take down the posts and/or exclude the harmful actors. The second problem is that consumer apps typically aren’t GDPR-compliant when used for business purposes. This means colleagues could inadvertently breach data protection rules, resulting in fines of up to €20 million. Much like your in-store Wi-Fi, it’s just not sustainable to use consumer technology for business purposes.
Critical functions
This is a booming market with frequent product launches and feature upgrades happening all the time. The sorts of things hospitality operators will typically want from their internal comms tool are as follows:
Device- and platform-agnostic user interface (e.g. mobile apps for iOS and Android; mobile-optimised website for those who don’t want the app; desktop website for office-based staff).
1:1 and group messaging - enabling colleagues to chat in the same way as they would with WhatsApp or Messenger, with a similar user interface to ensure friction-free adoption.
Single sign-on - using existing login credentials (e.g. for Office 365, or Fourth Payroll) to access the service.
Staff directory - with contact details, roles and responsibilities, potentially an org chart function, and the ability to search by function and geography. For example, a manager at a London branch might want to advertise an available shift to every barista in the company based in London.
News feed - working exactly like the Facebook, Instagram or Twitter feed, this is an endlessly scrolling series of content; algorithms can be used to ensure more important content (e.g. posted by the company) is always visible, or shown first.
Share sheet - you know that box that pops up at the bottom of your phone screen when you want to share content by email, SMS, Facebook etc? That’s a share sheet. You might want your teams to be able to share content they find on the web or in other apps on the company news feed, in which case, it needs an icon in the share sheet to make it as seamless as possible.
Permissions and admin - depending on how your organisation is set up, you might want to create admin users (often in the People team) to ‘curate’ content, post on behalf of the company, post to all users, moderate offensive content and so on.
Notifications and do not disturb - to avoid your staff feeling they need to be ‘always on’, they need to be able to control how invasive the service is. A ‘do not disturb’ feature lets colleagues choose when to get notifications - and not when they’re sleeping, on a day off, or at peak periods, for example.
Surveys - quick pulse check surveys and polls can help to quickly gather opinions and engage users. Getting staff comfortable with giving feedback little-and-often can mean better engagement with more formal surveys.
GDPR compliance - although professional apps will go a long way to protect you from data protection breaches, you are still ultimately responsible if your staff cause a breach. You should therefore establish what level of protection any service affords you, and any specific measures you need to take in adopting, rolling out or managing the service to maintain those protections.
Important integrations
Internal comms tools are easiest to deploy when they integrate with existing services, particularly those managed by the HR team. Look out for integration with your payroll, labour scheduling, employee relations and learning & development applications to enable single sign-on (see above) and accurate staff directory information. One particularly important function is the ability to remove an employee’s access to the internal comms platform when they leave. Integration with one or more HR management systems can help to make this automatic and instant.
You may also want to explore the third-party services that internal comms platforms can integrate with. Many will use integrations to connect with office applications, video conferencing services, document management and so on.
Users
The principle users of your internal comms tool will of course be your employees. Before you start researching, you’ll need to know how many staff you have (or will have, if you’re growing fast); what their roles are; where they’re based (office / field / branch); whether they are salaried or hourly-paid. You’ll also almost certainly need an email address to get them started, which may be a company email address or their personal one. If the latter, and/or if you’re proposing they use their own device, you cannot force them to use the service! You may therefore need to consider a backup for those staff who cannot, or choose not to, engage with the tool.
You will also need to designate at least one admin user who can deal with billing and onboarding issues, as well as moderating and curating content. In larger organisations, these are likely to be separate roles.
