How to Personalize Internal Communications Content for Employees

Personalizing internal communications content has always been crucial in maintaining employee engagement and maximizing productivity. In a world inundated with notifications and information, it’s dangerously easy for employees to become overwhelmed and saturated with alerts, and miss important updates that are relevant to them. Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the normalization of totally remote work, this has become an even greater challenge. Not only has online communication drastically increased, but it has become more important than ever to pay careful attention to updates, news, and current events both in and out of the workplace.

Personalized employee content–whether it’s in email, blog, or chat form–is essential. So how can you make sure your internal communications department is releasing the right materials to the right teams?

1. Understand your audience.

   What are the teams within your departments, and who are their members? Even outside the workplace, a significant portion of today’s digital experiences are personalized and targeted. Just as external communications content has to be tailored for a specific set of personas, so do internal communications–and that means knowing your intended audience inside and out. You can do this not only by directly surveying teams of employees about their needs and challenges, but also by using the behavioral data collected from your collaboration tools.

   Understanding your employees also includes understanding their journey. When targeting individuals, consider the phase of their life cycle at your organization. Are they going through the onboarding process, or are they coming up on retirement? Are they close to a promotion, or have they just changed teams internally? Make sure that you not only know what your employees currently do, but also understand what their goals and future objectives within your enterprise are.

2. Create a library of responses for your various audiences.

   This may seem like common sense, but creating a library of responses for your different audiences that are customized by occasion and reader is crucial for engaging relevant employees.

   Also make sure your content authors know your audience as well as you do–this may mean synthesizing relevant information about your employees and creating training materials and sessions to guarantee that your copywriters are familiar with the goals of your organization and its individuals.

3. Use a digital workplace that personalizes content for your employees automatically.

   While you can manually manage the personalization process through various marketing automation platforms and tools, it’s much more efficient for your enterprise’s internal communications team to use a digital workplace that automatically sorts through your response and content library and sends it out to relevant audiences.

   When selecting this workplace, make sure the platform integrates with whatever tools you’re currently using. To learn more, check out our piece on selecting digital workplace platforms.

   Keep your workforce engaged, regardless of where they are or what roles they have - make sure the content you send out is personalized and relevant to its recipients. Your employees will thank you–and it’ll show in their work.