Internal Information Accessibility

From 4 Ways to Improve your Corporate Communication : First of the serie

by Leattytia Badibanga ⎸Blog serie

March 2nd, 2016

I want to invite you to take a look at the first blog 4 Ways to Improve your Corporate Communication. In this series of five articles, you will find the help and information you need to successfully improve your communication and inevitably your business! Here is how to ease your internal communication accessibility.

Information and knowledge are the core of your business.

We quickly realized that the ever-increasing volume of information flowing through companies is vital, and the amount of knowledge transfer is the key to its progress. Providing your workforce the information they need to do an effective job doesn’t have to be stated, the point is how effective the information is circulating on the inside that matter.

Wasting time = wasting money — elementary, right?

Let’s start with some practices that would help you ease the access of your corporate information. No need to mention that nowadays most people use smartphones in the workplace. The growing business trend that would be appropriate to merge with is the BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policy. It increases the worker satisfaction in the way they are using their own mobile devices that they are so familiar with and enjoy to use. Technology is always changing and smartphones can stay up-to-date with the most modern features, capabilities, and upgrades in a way that restricted intranet couldn’t without constant additional costs. Employees who seek to work flexibly and often on-the-go will be pleased and even more productive. To minimize security risks linked to this policy, you have to make sure you control the data, content and users, in addition to applying defense procedures against data leaks, violations and hacks. Users are certainly more apt to maintain their own devices and understand how they work, which can reduce support costs as stated before. Workers won’t need to travel with several devices to satisfy their personal and work needs because the one device will fulfil both. Of course, there can be some tiny technical issues with the management and updates by IT department regarding acceptable use policies since it can be quite tricky telling employees what is or is not an acceptable use of their own smartphone. Be assured you produce a clearly defined policy for BYOD that outlines the rules of engagement and states up front what the expectations are, and it will be successful!

In this perspective, a secure, instant and easy mobile access to corporate information surely optimizes your team, considering employees can work from anywhere. The overall productivity and satisfaction increase by accessing centralized data and even their own work materials out of the office and after business hours! If you are concerned about devices’ expenses, know that 50% of companies in the US with BYOD models are requiring employees to cover all costs and they are actually happy to do so since it is their own device, anyway. The more seamless the transition back and forth between a computer and a mobile device, the more satisfied workers are likely to be. Therefore, a majority of companies are taking the option of easy-to-use and affordable business apps as their main 24/7 communication tool.

A new trend in organization is about giving short format types of formation, called ’’Micro-learning.” Ease of access to corporate information includes not only the formal data content but knowledge transfer as well. The expertise of your team must stay on point at all times and remain aware of new practices and well-informed on current techniques. Learning new information for every level of a company is provided with digital material that employees can watch on their own time. It has been reported that only one percent of a work week is actually used for the development activities in corporate environments. The world is going top speed and you certainly want your employees to focus on innovation and stay ahead in their professional field. This is how you ensure your competitiveness on the market and also to keep teams stimulated and their performances high. Bite-sized training material provides the best ROI (return on investment) of the training dollar. Micro-learning clips are the perfect solution to companies who need to create effective learning materials quickly, in a cost-effective manner.

Ease of access to corporate information includes not only the formal data content but knowledge transfer as well.

Here is another relevant practice you might want to give a try to make your internal information accessibility easier; introduce an email-free day per week in your workplace and “taste the feeling.” As mentioned in Why Your Company Should Consider Banning Email, many CEOs have adopted this practice and were very happy with the results. Approximately 10% of your inbox is actually relevant. By communicating in person or on the phone, people can quickly share information and get things done faster. These being a proven success, new corporate apps are created everyday but somehow never really optimized. One of them, coming up soon, has been created in this spirit that would actually ease this convention (from formal to informal) without having to physically move around within the building or travel to other locations if your company has multiple branches: a video-based corporate app. Pretty clever! “This has boosted productivity and creativity in our company,” said Louisa Levit, cofounder of web developer Reliable PSD. “When your email is always open it is easy to get sucked into writing email after email in a never-ending whirlwind. But having breaks allows the mind to relax and refocus. It also allows our people to do a better job when answering email and interacting with customers.” They experienced a cultural shift with employees moving from an individual mindset to that of a community.

By communicating in person or on the phone, people can quickly share information and get things done faster.

Face-to-face is by far the best way to communicate; body language and facial expressions leave impressions and is relevant to communicate new ideas, pleasantly achievable via videos!

What communication tool is your company using?