For those of us who are used to working in head offices and behind a computer, living through the COVID-19 pandemic taught us a thing or two about remote working. While our day-to-day processes might not have changed dramatically, there were many components of the business which had to make a quick pivot.
If you are an office worker, chances are that you felt the biggest shift in information flow.
The informal avenues where you picked up important business information (e.g. conversations with colleagues in the kitchen) disappeared and had to be replaced by conscious information sharing through digital channels as a way to keep workers up to speed. In most cases, highlighting both that businesses had been very reliant on those informal channels and those channels’ importance in setting the business up for success.
While this may have only been a challenge in the last year for those in the office, if your business has large workforces working at remote sites, chances are these workers have been feeling the effects of this geographic gap for quite some time.
And proactively bridging this gap can have significant benefits on your employees and overall business.
A recent study from MIT found that frequent, transparent and consistent communication plays a huge role in increasing employee satisfaction and motivation. It is easy for employees to feel disconnected with the latest company news or goings on in a sizeable work environment, let alone when they never set foot in head office – so these communication channels are often one of the leading ways which encourage employees to feel part of the bigger business.
This knowledge is also invaluable to equip your employees on the ground with the information to drive bigger company initiatives forward. For example, if your company has a strong, public commitment to ensuring that zero harm occurs across all your worksites. The most important people in your workforce who will make that happen are your remote on-the-ground employees. They are the people on the frontline who will identify hazards and potential issues. And you want them to be motivated to proactively report or address them by giving senior management teams the information that the on-the-ground workers know they are looking to capture.
For an organization with a lack of existing communications channels, getting to this point can be quite a challenge. But it doesn’t have to be.
Site noticeboards are communication channels of the past. They are slow to update and only provide one-way communication. If you haven’t already, it’s time to bring your communication channels into the 21st century by going digital.
Creating a company-wide intranet is a great way to start. One central place to house all essential procedural and process information, a company news feed and online document storage providing your employees with a single source of truth to find everything they need to both do their job and stay connected with the organisation.
Even better if it is then connected in with the rest of your HSEQ software modules, such as within a Lucidity software solution – because then your team will already be heading to the page to check on their latest actions and navigate to forms they need to complete.
It doesn’t need to be complex, but simply ensuring that you have communication channels in place with your employees can bring them in from the dark and empower them to make a world of difference to your organization.
