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Communication professionals are faced with the daunting task of successfully aligning workforces with the strategic mission and objectives of their organization. Suffice to say while managing costs. These priorities are often competing, yet they don't have to be.

While the end of the Covid-19 may not be in sight and the full extent of its impact remains unclear, leaders must embrace this time as one that will help them be better prepared for future hardships.

Are people really your "most important asset"?

Then would it be fair to say that you should focus on the physical safety of your people first, the mental health of your people second and then worry about collateral damage and the P&L next.

If I were to head a large company, I would pay my Head of Internal Communications more than my Head of External Communications.

Why?

Because I know that if this company is really to change, and to persuade the outside world it has changed, it has to change on the inside first.

Internal Communication is here to enable change and execution of the strategy.

We all know the basic ingredients for high employee engagement:

A meaningful purpose, recognition, open communication, involvement, personal growth and some autonomy in performing our work.

But all of these don’t work if the basic ingredient is missing:

What do today’s two billion mobile workers have in common?

While the use cases may vary, the needs of the global distributed workforce remain universal. Whether in hospitality, manufacturing, retail, construction, or healthcare, to name a few, frontline workers need access to mobile communication to:

In Singapore staff attrition rates are rather high and employee engagement is rather low when compared to our neighboring countries.

According to the Ministry of Manpower attrition rates are the highest (> 40%) in sectors that are also characterized by a high share of Non-Desk Employees like F&B and Hospitality.

These Non-Desk Employees, also referred to as frontline employees, significantly impact a company's success. Especially since they are the people that interact with your customers and guests most frequently.

Creating an internal communications culture across multiple properties can be hard. The same is true for managing hotel operations across a diversified portfolio. It can be tough to know how to blend these various cultures and brand identities on the local level while ensuring organization-wide alignment.

How can hospitality property managers bridge the multi-location cultural divide, and ensure smooth hotel operations?

Miscommunication is expensive. Due to high levels of linguistic and cultural diversity within the non-desk workforce, it is crucial that the digital platform you adopt can effectively accommodate many different types of communicators.

Organizations have to cultivate an environment for inclusivity, engagement, and diversity if they want to increase productivity as well as retain more talents.

As mobile workforce demographics reflect more diversity, companies need to implement internal communication strategies that include every single worker. 

In business, change is inevitable. Companies evolve in any number of ways: new leadership, rapid growth, digital transformation, a merger, or an acquisition.

The traditional approach to change management usually implies detailed central planning and top-down hypotheses. The result? Around 70% of change projects fail.

The new collaborative way of managing change focuses on the process of collective, joint-exploration of change.  Because people are not against change per se – they are against being changed. To make the people part of the change they first need to believe in change.

Change begins with Communication.