We’re pleased to announce that three recent creative projects have received awards from the 2024 International Hermes Creative Awards Competition.
Shady Grove Medical Center has recently introduced the construction of a new tower building, with a focus on providing patient-centric care and innovation. The advertising campaign by CMBell showcases the hospital's cutting-edge technologies and medical advancements through captivating visuals and compelling narratives, representing the hospital's transformative journey.
How do you know if you’re getting the best possible results from your social media?
You should be getting leads (or sales, if your product can be purchased online), and your audience and engagement should be growing.
If you’re ready to level up your video content game, the next step is figuring out what kinds of videos will fit your goals.
Here are just a few of the video options to consider:
Looking to hire a new communication team leader?
Hiring for a communication position—and wishing you could dig a bit deeper than the standard interview questions? You know, the ones that ask about strengths and weakness, career plans, and why they are interested in this particular position.
Words and images are powerful tools for building a company’s culture. And yet they are too often underused in business.
While mission and values are at the center of an organization’s culture-building language, a mantra can flesh those out. If, for example, excellence is one of your values, a mantra can focus attention on how excellence occurs.
Are you in the midst of layoffs? Budget-cuts? A merger or acquisition?
If you are downsizing, then you know the anxiety it produces among employees and the way it impacts morale, productivity, and customers. Communication during these times is a powerful tool that can help keep your employees engaged during difficult times. Here are 14 internal communication tips we’ve seen work during difficult times:
The days of a one-size-fits-all channel are gone. As many as five generations with diverse communication appetites make up today’s workforce—making the job of the communicator increasingly complex. Some workers are at desks and access email, while others rarely do. Reaching them all requires using a wide range of channels and multiple deliveries of the same message. Here are the most popular channels being used for internal communication.
Creative work by CMBell and our clients has garnered five awards from the 34th Annual Healthcare Advertising Awards competition.
In this year’s competition, nearly 4,000 entries were judged by a national panel who reviewed creativity, quality, message effectiveness, consumer appeal, graphic design, and overall impact.
Hats off to our creative team and to our clients for earning this recognition!
When it comes to millennials, one of the most important actions employers can take to improve their engagement is to offer routine feedback. According to a recent Gallup report, only 19% of young workers state that they regularly receive feedback, and just 17% acknowledge that the feedback they get is meaningful.
This type of internal communication could involve technologies like Slack or others that connect managers and their teams with real-time feedback.
You can read more about the Gallup survey and how to engage your workforce here. The bottom line: millennials have grown up in a world of continuous feedback, which has deeply shaped their employment expectations. Employers who understand and respond to this will see higher employee engagement among this demographic.
It’s no secret that employees who buy into your company’s mission and vision will make you more successful.
In fact, Gallup says that the most engaged teams will have four times the odds of success compared with teams with low engagement.
So it’s surprising to learn that seven out of 10 employees are not engaged at work. And the cost is real:
Lower productivity
Poorer quality
More safety incidents
Higher absenteeism and turnover
Poorer customer satisfaction
Higher employee health care costs
While several factors impact engagement, communication’s central role can’t be overlooked.
It’s not that employees lack communication—more information than ever is clamoring for their attention. It’s that they are often starved for the right kind of communication at work.
They hear a lot about problems to solve, regulations to meet, targets to reach, and customer concerns. But they hear too little about things that ignite their passion and help them connect their work to their purpose.
Think of communication as nourishment for the soul. Employees need a balanced diet that includes messages that inspire. They need to understand the “Why?” behind what they are asked to do. This includes:
Vision: What the destination is, and how you’ll get there
Mission: Why their work matters
Values: The principles that drive behavior
Strategy: How their work connects to a broader vision
Stories: How their work impacts customers and co-workers
Their role: What’s expected of them
Strategic, intentional communication with your inner circle can change the future of your company. It can help build employee support for your most pressing business goals, revitalize your culture, and spread to your customers in the form of better service and products.
It’s nearly impossible to win customers if you have not first won the hearts and minds of your own employees.
This is why internal communication is gaining more and more attention and resources. It can:
Connect employees to their purpose
Inspire them with a mission that brings meaning to their work
Give them a better understanding of how their work fits into the company’s strategy
Help them understand and support decisions that are made
Help them deal with change
Build a robust and healthy culture
So how do leaders get their teams to embrace their vision? To share the same dreams? To move in sync with each other toward a common goal?
Make a strategic communication plan that identifies your key messages, how often and when they’ll be delivered, and the target audience for each. It doesn’t have to be complicated—just clear and executable.
Create a compelling picture of the destination before outlining how you’ll get there. Weave a story around the vision that invites others to step into it, inspires the mind, and ignites curiosity. Once employees know the destination, you can show them the plan to get there.
Make it personal. How will the vision impact employees? What exactly should they do differently? What is their role in success? Why is it important? Use specific examples and stories that draw them in.
Use language employees understand. Corporate-speak weighs down a message, so if you struggle with this, have an outsider review what you plan to say before you deliver it.
Use the media they’re using. While email is still the most used channel for internal communication, video is gaining ground as appetites for this medium soar. A mix of media is best, so don’t rule out in-person forums, print pieces, apps, and intranets. And, of course, all of your digital communication needs to be mobile-friendly.
Engage the senses. Visually rich messages inundate today’s employee—so a slow-moving, text-heavy presentation won’t be the most compelling way to deliver your important messages. Great visuals are now essential to get and keep your listeners’ attention. And, of course, the motion, music, and sound that video offers makes your message even more engaging.
Understand their world. Cognitive overload is real. Employees get too much information—but not enough inspiration. Connecting your ideas to their sense of purpose is the best way to inspire them.
Keep it short. Employees like their information in short, snackable, yet content-rich formats that they can ingest quickly.
Repeat your essential messages. Yes, over and over and over. By the time you’re weary of saying it, it will just be gaining traction.
Listen. Communication is a two-way street. Give employees more than one way to submit questions and ideas, then use that to drive content.
While 70% of senior leaders value internal communication, only 49% of companies have a written internal communication plan, according to Gatehouse’s State of the Sector 2016 survey on internal communication and employee engagement, which surveyed more than 300 organizations in 70 countries.
Even fewer—27% of those surveyed—have a dedicated budget. This will likely change with the growing concern leaders have about low employee engagement.
The unprecedented rate of change and uncertainty in health care leaves employees looking for clarity about what’s most important. Yet even in times of change, engagement is possible.
“Nearly eight in 10 employees are engaged when workers strongly agree there is open communication, opportunities to provide input, a clear connection between current changes and the company’s future, and management support for changes that affect their work group. When employees disagree, a mere 1% are engaged,” according to Gallup.
Gallup says that clear communication and a well-articulated mission and purpose that’s consistent with the culture are two of the strategies top-performing health care organizations handle better than their peers.
Wondering how to put together an internal communication plan, develop your essential message points, or craft a creative narrative that speaks to employees?
Email is still a common way to communicate with employees internally—but it can be challenging to reach those whose inboxes are full or who don't have desk jobs.
That's why it's important to use every available tool to get your strategic internal emails read. Here are 14 tips for creating an email that gets opened and read:
Engaging physicians is vital—and an area of internal communication that is too often neglected. While health care professionals have a strong impulse to help others, daily work can sometimes make it easy to forget this. That's when engagement slumps, burnout happens and the drive for excellent quality and service wanes.
The antidote? Stories. Not just any stories, but stories that show how a peer is keeping the impulse to serve awake. Stories that remind people of their purpose at work.
Watch and see for yourself. Were you different at the end of this remarkable story?
Most leaders can see a vision for their company that will help it thrive. But the next step is the hard one—how to get these critical ideas adopted—and executed?
Here are some tips:
These tried-and-true strategies will absolutely help your ideas spread. What other tools are helping you get your ideas heard?
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