Best Practices: Executive Engagement

The success of your intranet is heavily dependent on whether or not your executive team is truly engaged. While many executive leaders support an improvement in internal communications and employee retention, getting those same leaders involved in the intranet can be a challenge. In this best practice, we will explore some fundamental methods on how you can get your executives engaged with your intranet. 

  • Get your hands dirty: Figuratively speaking of course, the executive team should lead by example, by actively engaging with employees and authoring content on the intranet. 
  • Live it, breathe it: The intranet is a reflection of your company culture. What do you want it to say to employees? The executive team needs to be involved in driving the company forward with a focused vision that can be expressed on the intranet. 
  • Dedication, consistency, and frequency: The intranet is a mechanism to deliver timely, relevant updates to employees. Determine who on the executive team can dedicate an hour out of their month or quarter to actively participate in delivering updates to employees, consistently. 

Get your hands dirty 

Simpplr research has found that one of the top three reasons intranets fail is due to a lack of executive involvement. Intranets typically get leadership’s blessing, but they rarely have true engagement. Some of our most successful customers train executives on how they can utilize their voice to influence and motivate their employees directly on the intranet. You can assist an executive in publishing their first page, responding to a feed post, or creating their own feed post. These are a few tangible, effective ways an executive can get involved with the intranet. We encourage executives to publish their own pages or blogs after receiving training, and guidance. Guide your executives on the following three basic actions: 

  • Publish a page in the Executive Corner    
  • Respond to a feed post once per month 
  • Create a new feed post once per month 

Here is a sample of publishing pages in the Executive Corner: 

mceclip0.png

Here is a sample of an executive posting in the feed. In this sample, Leo Chen is the CIO commenting on a post from the CEO, Ryan Taylor:  

mceclip1.png

 

Live it, breathe it 

Less than 35% of executives communicate vision and strategy more than once a quarter. At Simpplr, we want to see a culture shift in the way executives communicate to employees. We have empowered executives with a simple channel to get their vision and strategy out to employees quickly: the intranet. In order to get true buy in around your company vision and strategy, you need to take a bottom up approach, while fostering executive support.

The intranet reaches and connects all employees. Communication is key in driving your company culture; the intranet will help you communicate to all employees about alignment, transparency and togetherness. Some ways you can drive your company culture on the intranet include:   

  • Create a video message once per quarter  
  • Recognize an employee for their contributions 
  • Share a customer story
  • Quarterly vision & strategy updates 

Dedication, consistency, frequency 

Find executives who are dedicated to the success of the intranet. In essence, there should be a few key people who can commit to an hour per quarter in communicating out to employees. This communication needs to be consistent, transpiring once per month or once per quarter.

Updates can be delivered to employees in the form of a page, a blog, or a newsletter. Whomever is selected as the executive team to deliver updates will need to be consistent in delivering content at around the same time. This will help build trust among employees.

We often see executives leveraging a ghostwriter to help build out content so that the executive can stay focused on signing off on the instead of creating the content. Here are a few mechanisms you can leverage to drive home consistency and frequency: 

  • Monthly/Quarterly Executive Newsletter 
  • Monthly Leadership Blog Series 
  • Monthly/Quarterly Thought Leadership publication 
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