Employee Communications: How to Address Employees at the Global and Local Level

Employee communications is necessary no matter how small or how large the company. Keeping employees informed and engaged is just as important at a local business as it is an international corporation.

Strong communications are simply a good practice for all businesses to get behind. But in the case of global companies, having strong internal communications across countries and regions can be especially hard. Here, we’ll tackle the main problems that crop up, and how best to solve them.

The Problem? Global and local content streams are all mixed up.

For international companies, information can have relevance at a global and a local level. But many companies can’t separate these streams. The messages become jumbled and confused. Employees receive huge amounts of global information, but this news isn’t always useful at the local level. And companies don’t know if content should be sent in English or in regional languages. Either employees don’t feel part of the group, or huge efforts go into translation.

Neither is good for employee engagement, and both make employees less connected. On top of that, local communications from regions that have nothing to do with their business still pour in. The messages pile up over time, and important information becomes lost in the shuffle. This can be especially true during large global deployments.

Events when clear channels need to be managed and maintained. Imagine a large corporation rolls out an international campaign. One that’s important for employees across the board. They all need to know about it in order to do their jobs. But their inboxes are filled with sales data and competitive reports from a foreign office. Irrelevant local news drowns out the campaign news for the majority of employees. And engagement suffers. Employees cannot connect with the news they need. Important updates fall through the cracks and the company can’t function as it should.

The Solution? Content curation at both a global and a local level.

For international corporations with global and local communication streams, it is important to manage and filter the information flow. It doesn’t matter where the employee is based.

Relevance and clarity should be maintained. Therefore, an effective employee communications platform needs to be dynamic. It should allow different levels of administration. For large global deployments, this could mean having an administrator who manages global content. But it means also having regional and local administrators who choose which content should flow to their offices. And language is a consideration, too.

The right platform should smoothly transition between global content in English and local content in other languages. For example, news of a company-wide policy change would be something for the global administrator to pass on. A report written in French about changes at the Paris office might require the approval of the Paris office’s local administrator. Information is not all the same.

How Sociabble can help you with global and local communication

At Sociabble, we offer an employee communications platform that can do all this and more. Content curation at the global and local level is possible. Multi-level administration capabilities make the difference. It allows a single platform everyone can connect to, with segmented users and channels..

The platform is categorized into different channels based on job role, location, interest, etc. The Administrators have full channel organization control, to ensure that the employees are not being overwhelmed with irrelevant news, and to decide which channels are available & visible for the employees to subscribe to; they can also make the subscription compulsory for certain channels, to ensure the right mix of pull & push communications.

Sociabble’s audience builder facilitates easy segmentation of employees into relevant groups for targeted communication. The right news, to the right people, at the right time.

However, employees can also belong to multiple sub-platforms and switch easily between them. Either way, relevant content is shared across the platforms with ease. And Sociabble empowers administrators to manage multi-language content and newsletters. This means employees can read thelatest updates in their own language. As for data, local admins can have access to local statistics, while global administrators can access consolidated data, all in a single dashboard.

Sociabble is the perfect tool for managing employee communications on the global level. This is especially true for international deployments and mergers. Our work with BNP Paribas over the last two years is an example of how Sociabble has helped a global company to keep its employees connected around the world. An internal communications platform with multiple administrators and multi-channel curation is key. It will keep employees engaged and informed regardless of their location.

It will permit information to flow freely and openly as needed. If you’d like to see an example of what we mean, you can download a Sociabble demo here.