Private Messages and Interactive Content Are Key to Better Employee Experiences, Report Finds

By HRTech News Desk On Feb 27, 2019

Speakap Q4 2018 State of Frontline Employee Communications Report Finds Private Messages, Comments & Photos/Videos Made Up the Lion’s Share of Content on Enterprise Social Network

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, a company’s success is directly linked to the quality of the employee experience. Delivering an exceptional employee experience is no easy feat – and is often confounded by outdated, inefficient communications tools and processes, device/digital overload and email clutter. But when frontline employees share more personalized, interactive content, it can lead to more information sharing, increased product/promotion knowledge and a better employee experience. This is supported by the Q4 2018 State of Frontline Employee Communications report released by Speakap, which found that private messages, comments and photos/videos are among the types of HR content that resonate best with frontline workers.

When a company has already chosen to implement an employee communications tool, the available features can have a tremendous impact on the quality of the employee experience. Private messaging, for example, is a critical feature of enterprise social networks because there are many things employees are more comfortable sharing in private than they would in public. It also allows for more focused and relevant discussions between teams, colleagues and managers about important projects. The platform usage data from Speakap supports this, with Private Messages (63 percent) ranking as the most common type of content shared in the fourth quarter of 2018.

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Key highlights from the Q4 2018 trend report include:

News, Updates and Events are most popular on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays. Mondays had the highest rate of News being posted (24 percent), followed closely by Thursdays (18 percent) and Fridays (18 percent). Mondays, in particular, ranked highest when it came to the frequency of certain types of enterprise social posts, such as Private Messages (19 percent) and Updates (18 percent).
Late evenings are the least effective times for posting Events and News. Events (8 percent) and News (7 percent) were posted least often during the late evening hours of 6 pm to 12 am.
With over 100 News items posted daily, News gets employees’ attention. On average, 127 News items were posted daily (combined across all users) during the fourth quarter of 2018. Additionally, 43 percent of the News items posted daily were read between 12 pm and 6 pm, while 39 percent were read between 6 am and 12 pm.
The addiction to enterprise social ‘likes’ is more real than ever. In Q4 2018, Updates garnered 77 percent of the total likes on the enterprise social network, while Comments only accounted for 14 percent of the total likes on the platform.

According to Patrick Van Der Mijl, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer, “If messages are too vague or are not filtered to target and reach the most relevant users, it can lead to clutter, confusion, less productivity and even poor results/performance. This is where having the ability to group messages according to the organizational structure/matrix of your organization is tremendously valuable. By doing so, you can ensure there is far less spamming of irrelevant messages (i.e. “Who left their keys in the staff kitchen?” or “Whose car is blocking me in the parking lot?”) to all employees. Instead, the most relevant messages are delivered to the right employees at the right times and in the right places.”

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Patrick Van Der Mijl concluded, “Most C-level executives, HR departments and internal communications/employee engagement teams care about addressing certain challenges, such as reducing email clutter, granting access to management and listening to the needs (and feedback) of employees. By understanding their employees’ communications behaviors, organizations can effectively build and adjust their employee engagement and experience programs to better serve the needs of their workforce.”

The State of Frontline Employee Communications report is an in-depth quarterly review of frontline employee communications and engagement trends, including: types of updates shared, ‘like’ patterns and popular days and times for differing types of employee communications. The information contained in this report is based on internal data collected from hundreds of thousands of users who used the Speakap desktop platform and mobile apps (iOS and Android) for internal communications worldwide in Q4 2018.

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