The Challenge:

In the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, The County wanted to assess the state of their internal communications and the struggles to engage a workforce that was working at home, working in a hybrid environment and, out of necessity, required to be onsite, on the job.

The Work:

We set out to do a comprehensive audit: six focus groups (63 people), with remote, hybrid and on-site employees; four leadership interviews; an online survey of all 9,000 employees (23% response rate); and a comprehensive review of county communications channels, including newsletters, email, the intranet and manager communications. Our findings:

  • A little more than half of employees (58%) rated communications “good” or “very good.”
  • By a wide margin, people working onsite were the least happy with communications, with many feeling left behind by those who got to work in a hybrid or remote environment.

Managers need help communicating with the workforce and struggle with how, why and when to communicate with their direct reports. On-site managers have particular struggles.

The Recommendations:

  • Streamlined editorial process focused on daily news: What You Need to Know. Single source of truth.
  • More human touchpoints to connect with remote and hybrid workers (managers and leaders).
  • Better manager and leader touchpoints to inform and engage on-site workers.
  • Culture shift: How to make nice-to-know stories available to everyone; better engagement from soup to nuts: onboarding, “re-boarding” and thought leadership.
  • Streamlined editorial process focused on ”local v national” news.