Effective Employee Communication Software

Advantages of Business Internal Communication Software

Importance of Internal Communication

What would give your company the ‘power’ to generate more leads, deliver a better product, or provide services superior to those of your competitors? It's not a bigger budget or more resources; it's better, faster and quality communication that can be achieved with the use of internal business system development services. If we ask any organization how the communication among their employees happens, they will likely tell you “through email and weekly meetings.” It’s true. Most companies live and breathe by email and probably would admit they spend too much time in the conference rooms. They’ll probably also tell you their system works just fine and there is no reason to add complicated employee communications software to the existing mix. Before jumping to conclusions, let’s dig into what employee communications is and why it is crucial for the success of the company. One of the most popular definitions of employee communications is “communications and interactions among employees or members of an organization.” The larger the organization becomes, the more challenging these “interactions” can become. Growing companies often struggle to find the right digital communication solution for them to fit their organization. Below you can find the video explaining the strategic importance of internal communication and employee engagement:

  Employees expect some level of communication from their managers and they are more likely to succeed when they have convenient channels to communicate with each other. Their productivity level increases, feel more connected, and stay motivated when they know what is expected of them. Essentially, good corporate communication helps build a strong workforce community. It’s clear that we are more engaged than ever before with our technology, platforms and each other. And this has presented HR and internal communication professionals with the best opportunity to use these innovative digital tools to increase employee engagement. Savvy professionals are now using internal communication software to build the brand of their organization and improve recruitment, engagement and retention.

How communication can be measured

Forbes has suggested one of the ways companies can use to measure their internal communication:

1. The less is usually the more

Sending too many emails means employees will ignore most of your messages. If you’re continually emailing FYIs, most messages turn into a steady stream of static. Panzano and her team at Bayer Corporation use an unusually interesting metric for gauging success: the number of emails they don’t send to employees. She cuts out the messages that don’t align with strategic priorities to ensure employees hear what matters most. At the end of a quarter when she views the emails that weren't sent, she sees it as a win that’s helped with message penetration. Also, eXo suggests:

2. Employee performance and productivity

Happy and engaged employees work better. However, the productivity of an employee is influenced by such a variety of factors that quantifying this impact appears tough. An easy approach lies in the knowledge management. Indeed, knowledge workers spend a significant portion of their work time searching for required information. If your initiatives allow for a better flow of information, you can estimate how much time and money are saved. Let’s say that you have just changed the way customer success stories are stored and displayed on your intranet. Estimate the time it takes a salesperson to find a relevant case study before and after the change and translate that into time and money gains and savings.

 

Advantages of Internal Communication Software

Below we have provided the list of the key benefits of incorporating communication software for your employees and organization as a whole, presented by Axero:

1. Increased productivity, improved efficiency, and delivered exceptional service to clients, as your business is equipped with communication digital tools of the future.

2. Prevention of interrupted work flows, misinterpreted messages, and lost memos when you unite corporate communication in one easily-accessible virtual system space.

3. Uniting individuals, teams, and departments regardless of physical location with virtual work spaces. From working on a marketing initiative to creating quarterly reports, customizable work stations create the perfect place for team members to stay organized.

4. Distribution of informative, entertaining, and helpful content within your company

5. Equip every department, from human resources to IT, with efficient, customizable work flow tools. Using the Case & Issue Tracker, departmental teams can adjust controls to fit specific needs, such as customer complaint resolution, technical error reporting, or project management.

6. When collaboration is instant and project management is streamlined, your team is prepared to achieve business goals while encouraging company-wide harmony

Success Story

Below we introduce a case study of SnapComms, presenting a company enjoying the benefits of using the business system development services.

Towers Watson

Towers Watson is a leading global professional services company that helps organizations improve performance in the areas of benefits, talent management, rewards, and risk and capital management. The firm employs over 15,000 associates worldwide.


  Eli Fernández is the IT Service Management Lead for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region, which has more than 5,000 employees spread across 16 countries. His team manages the resolution and internal communication of all service-impacting incidents and delivers IT service management for the areas of operational support and business systems architecture as well as outsourcing first-line service desk, on-site support and network services.

Towers Watson has been using SnapComms Desktop Alerts since August 2012, as a mechanism for updating staff about high-priority (priority 1) IT outages and notifications. Fernández explains that his team has a duty of care and a requirement to inform associates about service interruptions and he says that they “needed something that was flexible, easy to use, that could target the whole organization, parts of it or individuals.”

The severity of an IT outage at Towers Watson is classified into four levels of escalating priority, determined by the number of applications and sites affected as well as the potential impacts on revenue and reputation. The priority level attributed to an issue drives the process around resolving and communicating that situation.

The IT team has developed a set of branded IT outage notification templates for their desktop alerts, based on a simple traffic light system. Three of the templates are used for incident management — a new notification has a red theme, an update is gold and the closure of that issue is green. The fourth template is plum and is used to communicate upcoming work which might result in service interruption.

While Fernández says that “what we do is common sense,” there is a culture within the team of setting high standards. They ensure there are no spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in their messages and use simple, jargon-free communications in English rather than trying to translate more technical information into local languages. This focus on simplicity, quality and consistency has made these visual tools highly effective in conveying the status of system outages to Towers Watson staff and third-party IT service providers in multiple locations and different time zones.

Conclusion

Good communication is paramount for any business to succeed. Whether it’s to communicate good news or bad, employees need to know what’s going on as quickly as possible. Employees who feel their companies are being honest with them, care about them, provide resources for them, and want to listen to them are going to be more engaged, motivated, and loyal. It’s to the organization’s benefit to have a communications strategy in place that really connects employees to each other and to the corporation as a whole. The first step in improving employee communications is to use communication channels that actually reach employees where they are, wherever they are. Meetings, email, intranets, and phone calls may reach some, but as we all know, there are many more communication channels we now use. Including texts, app push notifications, and social media into a communications strategy are some of the best ways you can connect with all of your employees. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with Business System Development? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing (SMM) are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!  

With creativity in heart, with an idea in mind!
 

Business System Digitalization

A New Perspective On Business

Over years, a wide range of management studies have come to a conclusion that any business organization has to be viewed from a new perspective, a systems perspective. Yet, decades of management training and practices in the workplace have not followed from this perspective. Only recently, with significant changes facing companies and how they operate, have managers and team members come to face this new way of looking at things. This interpretation has brought about a tremendous change in the way management studies and approaches organizations. The whole system is a systems thinking view of the complete organization in relation to its environment. It provides a means of understanding, analyzing and talking about the design and construction of the organization as an integrated, complex composition of many interconnected systems that need to work together for the whole to function successfully. An organization as an entity can suffer systemic failure. This happens in the whole system or high-level system where there is a failure between and within the system elements that need to work together for overall success. Factors in systemic failure may include confused goals, weak system-wide understanding, individual incentives that encourage loyalty to sub-ordinate (rather than super-ordinate) goals, inadequate feedback, poor cooperation, lack of accountability, etc. Thus, the business world is experiencing a rising demand for software infrastructure, designed specifically to ensure a smooth and cooperative work process within the organization. A complete system includes hardware and software infrastructure, data collection, procedures and employees with specific roles in collecting or using data. Advances in computer and web application development technology have contributed to a number of common web based systems being developed in businesses.

Examples Of System Development

Below we will have a look at few different types of system development within the organization, by analyzing their benefits for a business and discussing examples of famous brands using a particular system software.

Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a marketing-based system of collecting and analyzing customer data, interpreting it to develop targeted marketing programs and implementation of those programs. CRM can be defined as an organizational approach that seeks to understand and influence customer behavior through meaningful communications in order to improve customer acquisition, retention, loyalty and profitability. Computer hardware and database software programs provide the tech infrastructure used to collect data, including customer names, addresses, phone numbers and transaction histories. Procedures involving searching through data to formulate market segments, target specific customers with promotional campaigns and service customer accounts. In a CRM system, all company employees take on a customer-centric role, though marketing and IT are especially involved in pulling data for marketing use. CRM web application development software is a useful tool for your marketing team, transforming your employees into wizards being able to read the mind of your customers and predict their further actions, needs and preferences.  
  Zara, one of the leading clothing brands, recognize the crucial role of CRM software in their company to help them understand the needs of their customers, what they like and don’t like. They use this information to better relate to them as well as find ways of boosting their profile and profits. Zara has developed effective relationships with its customers, and thanks to the benefits of CRM, its customers are loyal and make continued visits throughout the year, with the average customer visiting 17 times compares to other stores’ average of four. What’s impressive about Zara is that it is able to have such a dedicated and loyal customer base despite the lack of advertising. Using CRM software, Zara is able to collect information about sales and work out which products are popular, and with this data easily to hand, designers are able to produce new items quickly based on the latest trends and in styles and colors preferred by their shoppers. Using CRM software, Zara has streamlined its customer data collection and found ways to improve its products and services as well as connect with customers at a more informed level.

Supply Chain Management

Supply chain management, or SCM, is the collaborative process of manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers working together to give the consumer the best value. In today’s global, interconnected supply chain, the technology and software solutions a manufacturer deploys are just as important as a company’s supply logistics and management strategies. SCM is driven by supply chain software programs and integrated computer networks that allow suppliers and buyers to share inventory data. The goals of supply chain management are to have just-in-time inventory and optimized inventory control costs. Transportation and logistics procedures are integral in SCM, and logistics managers oversee a particular company's role in coordinating supply chain relationships and activities. What does this mean for the future of technology in the supply chain? No longer will it be viable to simply deploy the technology flavor of the week. Rather, manufacturing companies must strive for greater insight into their overall supply situation and how to successfully position the right products in front of the right customer at the right time.  
  Home Depot is one of the biggest retailers selling home improvement and construction products and services. With more than 355,000 employees and 2,000 superstores across the US, Canada, Mexico and China, the company is doing pretty well with its efficient supply chain and logistics strategies. The company is also investing heavily in its e-commerce (online shopping) strategies to increase its customer base and become accessible to more customers regardless of their physical location and accessibility to physical stores. Forbes has shared some insights about the company’s e-commerce strategies, which also aligned perfectly with its logistics strategies: One solid example is the way Home Depot operates its inventory and replenishment (I&R) activities for its stores. The company used to have separate logistics management departments in every single physical store to utilize replenishment and store management-related activities. With the help of technology and right software solutions, Home Depot’s new centralized I&R department created a significant benefit for the company. The overall performance of the department improved the demand forecast accuracy and decreased the cost of operations for the replenishment orders. As a single/centralized department manages the inventory for all stores, the new method increased the bargaining power for the company against the suppliers. As a company, Home Depot was also able to benefit from this change, as it is now able to process online orders more efficiently.

 Enterprise Resource Planning

Enterprise resource planning, or ERP, is a computer-driven approach to optimizing resource efficiency within a business. Conceptually, ERP is different from traditional budgeting methods because company leaders across the organization collaborate to order, store and use supplies and inventory. The goal is to avoid carrying excess inventory and wasted resources within the business. ERP works to integrate disjointed processes into one data system that the entire organization can view and act upon. All users - from executives to CIOs to customer service reps - can have access to the same real-time, up-to-date, and complete user-appropriate data and information. ERP software tools allow department managers to share a viewpoint of the current availability of various resources and to schedule department use within the company-wide system.  
  When the global giant - LG Electronics (LG) - having 114 subsidiaries, more than 82,000 employees across 40 countries - tried to harmonize its human resources functions, the challenges were of a similarly giant scale. High maintenance costs, local controls lacking transparency, inefficient decision making, under-utilization of resources, manual processes, etc. made it difficult for LG to operate as a global company, which then decided to take the ERP route. The challenges for LG were: Location specific processes lacking transparency and automation needs for a global reporting; De-motivated employees, limited outlook, no room for information or best practices sharing; Limited localized resources for employee learning & training; Challenges with decision making, with significant business impact. LG’s familiarity with Oracle technology due to earlier Oracle usage made it easier to finalize a solution. It offered large data hosting, seamless migration of old data, easy scalability, multiple modules addition as needed and centralized access and control. LG hired Oracle Consulting to build a single centralized system which integrates available Oracle HR modules for uniform use at global level, thereby replacing location specific system dependency. The ERP solution, which included a data mart, performance management system, staff portal, and e-learning application, enabled the following benefits for LG: Centrally managed a single system with minimal maintenance costs; Transparency in the recruitment and employee appraisal processes; Real time reporting for higher management and tracking of set goals and objectives; Informed decision making due to readily available real time reports; Cost savings due to not having to maintain multiple systems; Easy sharing of best practices across the various centers; Increased employee morale, productivity and engagement.

Financial Management

Financial management is more of a general term used to describe an array of finance-based systems developed in many organizations. Companies rely on integrated financial software tools to join activities in purchasing, accounting and finance departments. In essence, the computer tools allow each purchase and revenue transaction to get recorded once, yet appear in the records and reports used in each of these finance-related departments. The goal is to optimize record-keeping efficiency and to avoid redundant transaction entries. Often, accounting software provides the foundation for data entered and used across the company.  
  Denver Zoo, one of the largest and most popular zoos in the United States, had an IT infrastructure made up of disparate financial systems. This made it difficult for employees to access the financial data they needed to operate effectively. Therefore, the company has decided to integrate financial management software, which as a result, provided Denver Zoo employees with faster and easier access to real-time financial data. With all financial information fully integrated, employees can gain a complete picture of operations. They can begin to introduce new areas of analysis, such as cross-referencing budgets against activities and between departments. For example, each department has its own set of expenses. Now the system is completely integrated, users can cross-check budgets and more effectively allocate spend against the right budget holder.

Conclusion

To keep your business growing at the dramatic rates you plan for, it is essential to have business software applications integrated around a single codebase, database and business process. The advantages of designing your systems in this manner yield tremendous cost savings and improved business productivity. Would you want Blueninja.io help you with new web app system development? Give us a call anytime! The highly-qualified team of Blueninja.io provides an unforgettable experience for businesses and their clients through innovative digital solutions. Website design & Mobile Development, Web Application Development services, E-commerce web systems, SEO, Google Adwords and Social Media Marketing  are just a small part of a wide service portfolio, opening doors to enormous opportunities for your business success. Stay connected with Blueninja.io and be the first who will read our next article!