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How to Keep Your Employee Portal Well Fed—Without Starving Your Time

March 10, 2017Lori Rohrbach

Does your employee portal sometimes seem like a bottomless pit? If you’re responsible for a portal or employee intranet, continuously feeding it with fresh and engaging content can feel like a Sisyphean task, akin to keeping a ravenous teenager or a growing puppy fed. It can also feel like a full-time job, but in all likelihood, you’ve got one of those—and managing the portal is just part of it. At the same time, you’re probably well aware that dynamic content—particularly in your news feed—is a key factor in keeping your employees engaged in your portal and coming back for more.

If feeding your portal news feed is gobbling up too many hours in your work week, it’s time to rethink how you generate (and re-purpose) content that adds value for employees without leaving you starved for time. Here are four strategies you should consider incorporating into your portal content plan:

  • Re-purpose content. Writing original articles is part and parcel of maintaining a portal—but it’s not realistic for you or your team to write every story from scratch. It’s okay to supplement with re-purposed content. Come across a relevant story from another business unit? Today’s portal technology allows you to tag content for your organization, or add an intro with a “spin” that’s germane for your audience, and hit “publish.” Voila—fresh content!

You can also get into the habit of “mining” content from other internal or external communications materials. For example, look at leadership presentations or messages and industry news articles for portal-worthy content you could republish as a news story.

  • Think “series.” The quick-read nature of the portal lends itself to a series of shorter stories rather than one long, detailed article. Take advantage of this fact by identifying content that can be split into a one-time series, or recurring content that follows a consistent format and theme—like a series of interviews with the leadership team or stories that showcase employee efforts that bring the company mission to life. A recurring series makes it easy to plug fresh content into an existing format with a common intro and conclusion, for instance, furthering your communications goals while reducing your workload.
  • Share authorship. Before you or your team spend hours upon hours generating more and more portal content, consider that there might be others within the organization who would welcome the chance to author a portal story. Seek those colleagues out and offer them the opportunity, and you might find this is a win-win: Your “beat reporters” get the visibility of sharing a perspective from their location or function. (You could even offer them a byline.) You retain editing rights, and get interesting story ideas and content without having to write more stories.

 Go beyond the written word. Videos, podcasts and other multimedia communications make for engaging portal content. Especially if you or someone else in your organization is producing multimedia for another purpose—say, a training class or sales conference—giving it a new life as portal content makes the most of your company’s production investment, while reducing the need to generate more portal content from scratch.

If your plate is too full to devote more time to your employee portal, it’s time to get smarter about how you manage content for this vital employee engagement tool.

Author: Kate Tomasco

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Eight Work-From-Home Etiquette Tips

Eight Work-From-Home Etiquette Tips

 

Whether telecommuting is old hat or something you’ve been forced into as part of the COVID-19 shutdown, here are a few tips to make the experience run smoothly for both employers and employees.

 

Managing expectations

Successful work-from-home strategies always begin with clearly communicated expectations. Make sure your employees have any necessary equipment, tools and resources.  Will they need to track their time? Participate in regularly scheduled meetings? Be available at certain times of day? For employees, know what you’re accountable for and clearly communicate any challenges you’re having.

 

Constant communication

Keep the lines of communication open and be accessible. Check in with employees regularly through apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts and Skype, or even an old-fashioned email or phone call. Be genuinely interested in how they’re doing but don’t overdo it. Foster a feeling of trust by not micromanaging.

 

Nine to five…ish

While having a daily schedule is ideal, it may not always be practical right now. Make sure your people know when you need them to be available and try to offer flexibility at other times. They may be juggling school schedules as well as work schedules and working at “off-shift” times may be necessary. Be mindful of employees in different time zones as well.

 

For employees, try to work when you’re at your best, and not when you’re exhausted by kindergarten playtime and fourth grade math. Make sure people know if you will be unavailable at certain times.

 

Taking a break

Getting up and moving clears the head and helps with creativity and problem-solving. Whether it’s a walk around the block or a break for lunch, make time to get away from your desk throughout the day.

 

Signing off

Working from home does not mean being available 24/7. Set an actual end to the workday if possible. Don’t send and respond to messages at all hours. Sign out of messaging apps and close work programs. Understand and respect these boundaries.

 

Location, location, location

When setting up a home office, think about where you will have the fewest distractions – for yourself and for those who may be seeing you and your background on a video conferencing platform. Try to avoid busy spots that may include semi-clad people walking behind you, barking dogs and kids vying for your attention.

 

Conferencing and calls

Be clear about whether you expect people to turn on their cameras during meetings. If so, be clear about how they should be dressed. During calls, mute your phone when you’re not talking to avoid background noise. Headphones can also help with call quality. When speaking, pause frequently so others can participate in the conversation.

 

Social engagement

It’s ok for managers and employees to have some down time together, which may help ward off feelings of isolation. Keep up your normal level of interaction, perhaps with a virtual coffee break or happy hour. Managers should set the tone for how casual to be. Let employees choose what they would like to share, and never pry into areas that were off-limits before.

 

 

Author: Erin Alderfer

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