The HR department serves as a bridge between management and the staff, which makes communication one of the team's primary responsibilities. Memos and emails are likely the most common mediums for intra-company messages, but another channel has been gaining prominence in recent years.
Social media has become an increasingly popular tool for connecting employees, HR representatives and management. Facebook pages may be the easiest for HR departments to use as they can require workers to like the profile to see corporate updates. Alternatively, Twitter may be the best option for disseminating brief messages to the entire staff.
According to the 2013 Towers Watson Change and Communication ROI Survey, 56 percent of employers now use social networking resources for internal communication. The goal is to establish a community within a business so that employees feel that they are on the same team as upper-level executives.
However, respondents were split on whether social media is actually a useful communications channel. Instant messaging and streaming audio/video were considered effective by 48 percent of employers, the highest ratings in the survey. Those findings haven't stopped Kathryn Yates, global leader of communication consulting at Towers Watson, from believe that social media represents the wave of the future in corporate communications.
"As the need for global collaboration increases, we expect more companies will join those already leveraging social media to creatively communicate those messages," Yates said in a statement.
Social media's potential effectiveness as a communications platform is based on its ever-evolving functionality. As new features are integrated into websites, HR departments will have new resources for workforce management and disseminating information to the entire company.
Further, the channel eliminates silos by connecting everyone within a company. An employee can send a message or chat directly with an HR coordinator or upper-level executive to open new dialogues.
Connecting with the remote workforce
One of the benefits of social media is that it allows the HR department to easily communicate with remote employees. Workers who travel frequently or are based out of distant locations are somewhat difficult to manage, but online tools provide instant connections.
Unfortunately, it seems like many HR departments aren't capitalizing on this benefit. The survey shows that only 23 percent of employers are using social media to build communities for their remote employees.