How to choose the preferred channel: Optimizing employee communications for your people
An important company update might need to engage an employee who works remotely from a co-working space in NYC, a field technician on-site in Chicago, and a senior executive at your Bay Area headquarters.
One person prefers these updates via email, another via text notification, and the other relies on face-to-face meetings. This range of preferences demonstrates a critical challenge for internal comms teams: there is no one-size-fits-all approach to employee communications.
How can you better understand these employee communication preferences? What communication channels and tools do you have available? How can you optimize your internal communications? Here’s how to tailor your messaging and tune your channels to increase employee readership and engagement.
What are communication preferences?
Communication preferences describe how individuals best receive, process, and respond to information. These preferences can include message timing, channel selection (email, meetings, chat, or internet posts), medium (text, video, voice), and sender. Employee roles, work environments, tools, generations, and workstyles shape their communication preferences. Ultimately, communication preferences describe how someone wants to receive information.
How different generations communicate at work
Let’s look at one factor that might influence how you craft and send messages: communication preferences by generation. Although this list is based on broad generalizations, these tendencies can help illustrate the range of employee preferences.
Baby Boomers (1946-1964): Tend to prefer formal, structured communication like emails and scheduled meetings. Videos can add a personal touch since face-to-face interaction isn’t always possible. For example, you could use video messages to communicate company announcements to help baby boomers feel more connected and informed.
Gen Xers (1965-1980): This generation tends to value a mix of email and direct messaging. They like efficient, no-nonsense communication. While they’re tech-savvy, they still appreciate professional etiquette. Therefore, Gen X employees might prefer a concise email that outlines key takeaways rather than a lengthy report.
Millennials (1981-1996): Millennials tend to favor digital-first communication, mobile-friendly platforms, and collaboration tools. If you want to communicate with millennials, make it a two-way street and solicit feedback. And one last note: millennials are a TLDR generation (i.e., too long; didn’t read it), so keep things short and skimmable.
Gen Z (1997-2012): Gen Z often prefers short-form videos, interactive content, and casual, authentic communication. Unlike older generations, they tend to reject traditional workplace jargon and are less willing to code-switch. For example, you could use memes or casual language in internal Slack channels to make internal comms more relatable for Gen Z.
Why communication preferences matter
Accounting for communication preferences goes beyond keeping employees informed–it impacts the employee experience. A study of 3,457 employees showed that internal communication satisfaction positively influenced employee engagement. Similarly, this study found that effective internal comms strategies can increase job satisfaction and organizational engagement.
Optimize employee communication preferences
As an internal communicator, how can you better understand your internal audiences, their preferred communication channels, and what motivates them to engage?
1. Gather employee feedback.
Start by connecting with your people. How do they want to receive information? Consider conducting surveys or focus groups and having one-on-one discussions. What are employees excited to see in your newsletters? Do they receive the right amount of internal messages? Do they understand how their role fits into the bigger picture?
2. Study aggregate industry workplace data.
Consultancies like Gallup, Deloitte, and Gartner, and communications technology vendors like PoliteMail, routinely publish aggregate workplace data about employee behavior. These reports can give you a starting point and a benchmark to compare your own measures against.
3. Analyze your communication metrics.
What are your open rates, page views, response times, and engagement levels? Have you performed A/B testing for different formats and channels to refine your strategies based on real-world results? As you learn more about employee communications preferences and tailor your content, do you see a positive trend in your communication metrics?
Key communication channels and tools
Next, you’ll want to optimize your communication channels to reach your people more effectively. Let’s examine some of the common corporate communication channel types.
Email: Most appropriate when a message requires undivided attention, asks for action, follows up on an emotionally challenging topic, or covers complex information. Email also wins for assignments, appointment or deadline reminders, announcements, and video content.
Meetings, both face-to-face and online: Research shows that in-person and online video conferencing meetings build trust, positively impact team empowerment and persuasion, help reduce misunderstandings, and improve conflict resolution.
Town halls are helpful for significant updates, leadership visibility, and interactive discussions.
One-on-one and small group conversations are ideal for managing groups and teams, training employees, providing feedback, and sharing emotionally complex or nuanced information.
Messaging apps (Teams, Slack, Viva Engage, etc.): These tools are good for building communities, informal collaboration, collecting feedback, answering quick questions, real-time group discussions, and connecting employees, especially remote workers.
Intranets: Great centralized hubs for company news, HR resources, and self-service tools. They can give employees easy access to benefits info and answer common questions like “How much PTO do I have?”
Each channel has an optimal message format, style, and length; sticking to these helps ensure clear, engaging, and effective communication. In other words, simply posting identical content in multiple channels is far from the ideal multichannel strategy.
Streamlining channels and tools
You likely have more channels than those listed above, whether digital signage, apps, screen scrollers, or more. Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better. Technology adoption is a real issue.
Channel consolidation is beneficial for content creators and the audience, as is streamlining content and targeting relevant audiences to ensure messages reach employees effectively without redundancy or overload. You can achieve this by creating a clear strategy that assigns specific purposes to each channel based on the above recommendations–and letting employees know where to expect what.
Routine measurement and regular comparative analysis of channels will inform you of what is effective and enable you to adjust your approach accordingly. Therefore, a well-structured communication and channel strategy keeps employees engaged without overwhelming them.
Making preferences a priority
Learning about your employees’ communication preferences and adapting your messaging to meet their needs is key to engaging them. Writing messages people want to read and delivering them via preferred channels will create a more informed and connected workforce. Start by asking which channels employees prefer for what content, then consider how your current communication strategies align with these employee preferences.
