As you may have noticed across our social channels, we recently released two new toolkits focusing on internal communications – an exciting project for the team at Hey Me. The first focuses on settling in new employees, and the second explores how organisations can engage their employees and refresh their internal communications by taking a combined holistic approach between communications and human resources, with a focus on wellbeing.

To describe the thinking behind the toolkits, we have taken the time to speak to the brains behind the toolkits, Amy (Hey Me), Stephanie (Clinical Psychologist) and Marie (Doodle HR), to find out why they believe this holistic approach is crucial to the future of business:

Stephanie (Clinical Psychologist):

“In any workplace, there has to be a focus on wellbeing and on ensuring that the employee is happy. Looking after employees benefits both them and the organisations they work for in the long term. When working with people, the work and the person can’t be separated, and therefore the wellbeing of the person is crucial to an organisation’s success.

“In most modernised workplaces, health and safety is viewed as paramount, whether it be the type of chair that the employee sits on, the angle of their computer monitor, or ensuring regular safety checks for electronic equipment. But how about we think about it like ‘health as safety?’ Health issues can become safety issues, for example fatigue causing safety issues when operating heavy machinery. Therefore, when we look at it like this, organisations need to prioritise wellbeing not just to ensure that employees can be productive and comfortable, but also to form safe practice. By combining with the Communication and HR disciplines, any measures that are implemented ensure employees’ safety can be communicated effectively.”

 

Marie (Doodle HR):

“Managing people’s expectations in the workplace is vitally important, especially as we live in a society where information is at our fingertips. Providing understanding and knowledge of what is going on in a business supports an environment where the employer and employees are on the same journey. This will hopefully enable businesses to grow and bring their people with them.

“Effective HR is about working together with other key elements within an organisation to provide a holistic approach to people management. Combining HR and Communications allows for clear and concise messaging and by adding Health & Wellbeing to the agenda, provides an effective approach that cares for the employee whilst ensuring the employer is linking its people focused disciplines together.”

 

Amy (Hey Me Communications):

“When we work in a company, we often find that information is distributed to employees by individual teams as required and this distribution doesn’t seem to comply to any kind of plan. Each department will send out what they need to tell employees; from HR, accounts, the management team and communications or marketing teams, which sometimes results in several messages being circulated at once which can cause confusion.

“Many businesses focus on the distribution of information using a singular approach which doesn’t require engagement from the team. The perception of many employees in a wide range of businesses is that their internal communications are below par or even non-existent. This then makes employees feel disengaged and unsure of how they fit in with the organisation.

“Good communications are paramount when trying to create a positive working atmosphere with engaged employees and most now recognise that higher levels of engagement lead to increased productivity and performance. Keeping employees engaged is even more important when you work remotely and can’t see them day to day. Employers and employees need to trust in each other to succeed. We recognise that to achieve good communications we need to look after the whole person and take the information and requirements of each department and the needs of the individuals into account.

“Our new partnership focuses on the people within businesses and what they need to both survive and thrive. We’ve developed these holistic toolkits to get businesses started and will be releasing more over the coming months as we develop the approach further. This new approach to communicating internally is extremely exciting as we can see how HR and health and wellbeing work together with communications to make things better for employees and employers.”

To learn more about our holistic toolkits, visit our ‘Toolkits & Tutorials’ page.

To find out more about the organisations involved in the toolkits, visit these links:

• Doodle HR – http://www.doodlehr.co.uk/
• Stephanie Fitzgerald on instagram – @workplace_wellbeing