We text with everyone today including friends, family, or coworkers. Many organizations are now relying on SMS texting in order to communicate with their employees. Fortunately texting is being baked into make recruiting platforms making life easier for both HR professional and employees. Staying “in the loop” has never been easier with tools like Emissary.
We’ve written extensively about the use of texting in recruiting. But texting has a place in the human resources function as well. After all everyone receives texts. Over 90% of them are opened in the first 5 minutes. Americans spend nearly 6 hours per week texting. And its cost effective, costing just pennies per text sent.
Employee Communications Text Use Cases
Here’s how today’s employers are using text messages to communicate with employees.
- Weather Alerts: Keep your staff members in the know through texts that alert them about about closings and cancellations.
- Meeting Reminders: By sending meeting reminders via text you’ll enhance productivity, and eliminate scheduling conflicts.
- HR Policy Updates: Employees don’t read everything they should. Use texts to gently remind them of important policy news and changes. Texting ensures that your employees are held accountable and are constantly getting updates via texts with trackable links.
- Employee Feedback: Send surveys and questionnaires to help you gather feedback and learn about your workforce. Texting makes it easy!
- Employee Training: If you do any kind of training or onboarding, texting can aid in the learning process. Help prepare workers so they don’t feel overwhelmed, which could lead to an unhealthy work environment. Send resources and training material via text message.
- Open Enrollment: Every year HR emails out the new health plan information. Back up those emails with text reminders. Give employees plenty of lead time to evaluate their current plans and ask questions before the open enrollment deadline. Send texts with links to your open enrollment plan signup forms.
- Welcome New Hires: Onboarding new employees is a critical step in their future success in their role. Leverage text messages to excite them about their start date, new manager and team. For example as soon as they accept the job offer have their new boss reach out with a welcoming text message.
- Departmental Group Chats: In some cases it may even make sense to have group text chats for certain departments that need to stay in constant touch with team members.
Texting Employees Just Makes Sense
The bottom line: employee communication via text is the right thing for any deskless workers, especially those who don’t have easy access to email. In addition, tasks that take a lot of time, such as scheduling interviews, providing paperwork links, and sending notifications of deadlines can all be streamlined through text.
