What Is Multichannel Communication and How to Get It Right

An appropriate multichannel communication strategy is critical for keeping employees informed, engaged, connected, and enabled to do their best work. 

Unfortunately, one study showed that 60% of employees feel less-than-enthusiastic about internal communications in their organizations. 44% say that their business’ internal communications are stagnant, with nothing having changed in the past five years.

So if you are looking for ways to make your company’s workplace comms more efficient, engaging, and streamlined, keep reading this blog!

What Is Multichannel Communication

Multichannel communication is a term used to describe a workplace communication strategy in which multiple channels are used to deliver important company news and updates. 

With the rise of the importance of internal communications in organizations, multichannel communication was introduced as a concept to help IC professionals do their jobs more efficiently. 

The biggest challenge every communicator faces today is the inability to always reach the right audience with the right message at the right time. So multichannel communication significantly increases the likelihood of better reach and employee engagement. 

Why Multichannel Comms Is a Must for Every Organization

In the same way we use multiple communications in our private lives, so we do in our professional lives. In fact, when multiple channels are used right, internal communications become much more efficient. 

Most employees today depend on technology to do their jobs and collaborate with teammates on a daily basis. This is especially true for remote and hybrid organizations and for those that employ many frontline workers. 

These employees still regularly miss important company updates. In fact, according to Gallup, 74% of employees feel that they’re missing out on company information and news. However, when employees deal with information overload every day, it can be very hard to catch their attention. 

Furthermore, it can be hard to understand which communication channel should be used for which department, topic, or project. Studies show that 68% of employees toggle between 10 apps in a single hour, with some even juggling up to 15. 

Information is coming from everywhere, and while employees are left scrambling to figure out which app has the information they want, internal comms professionals need help understanding how to best reach their audience. Some employees use email, some use Slack, and some use Microsoft Teams as their primary means of workplace communication. So how can we always ensure we send information via the right channels?

Multichannel communications aim to enable workplace communicators to use internal channels strategically – not to overwhelm employees but keep them informed with relevant information. 

Furthermore, a good multichannel communications strategy can go a long way in driving higher employee engagement and shaping positive employee experience in the workplace.
Last but not least, proper use of internal communications channels is critical for achieving better organizational alignment and trust in the workplace. Unfortunately, research shows that 72% of employees don’t fully understand the company’s strategy and poor internal comm is usually the main culprit.

Top 6 Communication Channels Organizations Use

So what are the channels you should include in your multichannel communications strategy?

Social intranet

Social employee intranet serves as a digital home for every employee. They are the ultimate aggregator of all the important information, documents, and other company resources. 

Historically, intranets were considered unintuitive workplace communications solutions. However, modern social intranets are a must-have employee experience platform for every organization that wants to keep employees informed and engaged. 

Email

Even though the popularity of emails for internal communications has decreased with the emergence of instant messaging platforms, they are still an important communication channel. 

The fact that emails are interoperable with other email providers makes it an important channel for inter-company communications. 

Instant messaging platforms

Instant messaging platforms such as Slack and Microsoft Teams are the most popular real-time and asynchronous workplace communications solutions. According to research, Slack has over 20 million active users as of 2023, while MS Teams has over 270 million users as of 2022. 

Hence, including these channels in your multichannel communications strategy is critical. 

SMS

Even though not heavily used by office employees, some organizations use SMS to keep their frontline employees informed and engaged. Moreover, 70% of employees think texting should be used for interoffice communications. With open rates of 98% compared to just 20%, texting is a simple way to enhance your internal communication strategy

Mobile-heavy workforce that depends on smartphones to communicate with colleagues and employers, so integrating SMS in your workplace communications is an absolute must. 

Digital signage

Another channel organizations use to distribute important company information is digital signage. 

Distributing messages to highly visible places ensures that employees are informed and that they get reminded about important company updates and events. 

Project management and document-sharing tools

Project management solutions such as Trello and document-sharing platforms such as Google Workspace are also places where employees collaborate and communicate daily. 

So when thinking of all the different channels to include in your employee communications strategy, consider these as well. 

Workplace Scenarios When Multichannel Comms Is Critical

There are certain workplace situations when multichannel communication plays a critical role. Let’s dig deeper into them. 

Mergers and acquisitions

Internal communications departments play a critical role in making mergers and acquisitions more successful. These situations are usually stressful for employees, and during these times, employees expect relevant and timely information to reach them via their preferred channels. 

Various studies conducted on the outcome of M&As show that 30% of them fail within three years. The majority of them fail due to disparities in organizational culture.

Hence, IC professionals are tasked with aligning employees from the merged companies and ensuring seamless integration. 

Change management

Changes such as digital transformation initiatives require frequent and consistent workplace communications. An integrated multichannel communications strategy can make this process much more streamlined and efficient. 

When organizational change happens, it usually impacts the work of every employee, regardless of their location and job nature.

📹 Check out our Masterclass about how to create a successful change communications strategy. 

Crisis management, emergency, and workplace safety

The COVID-19 pandemic was a real-life example of when crisis communication was critical for ensuring business continuity. 

To ensure maximum workplace safety, employers had to find a quick way to reach their frontline staff that didn’t have a designated working space. 

Mobile communications and timely mobile push notifications became an absolute must for organizations in healthcare, retail, and many other industries during this pandemic. 

Intranet and instant messaging platforms were best for reaching in-office employees, while email was essential for reaching partners and other stakeholders. 

Employee advocacy

Multichannel workplace communications can be the most powerful method for driving employee advocacy in the workplace. 

When done right, reaching employees with relevant and engaging content can result in greater employee ambassadorship, and it can positively impact the organization’s marketing, sales, and HR initiatives. 

Moreover, if employees can seamlessly share that content with their personal networks, multichannel internal communications can turn into the most efficient marketing channel for companies. 

Various HR initiatives

Human resources departments often deal with company-wide initiatives in which their performance mostly depends on employees’ engagement and responsiveness. Unfortunately, many HR professionals struggle to reach every employee, via the right channel, at the right time. 

Some examples may include open enrollments, new hire announcements, referral invitations, team building planning, company-wide surveys, and many more. 

So using various channels is absolutely necessary to reach every employee on their favorite platform. 

How to Create and Streamline a Successful Multichannel Communication Strategy

Now that you understand the importance of multichannel communications strategy let’s take a deep dive into the steps for implementing and managing a successful strategy. 

Integrate all communication channels

The success of every multichannel communications strategy depends on the ability to integrate all of your organization’s communications channels into a single platform. Only when you can easily distribute information to all the internal channels can you say that you have met the most important prerequisite. 

Choosing the right technology is a critical step here, and most companies rely on easy-to-implement social intranets that come with pre-built integrations with all of their existing internal communications channels. 

Segment your audience

To ensure maximum engagement with your company’s content, you need to make sure that the content resonates with the audience. 

To ensure such hyper-personalization, comms departments need to be able to make lists and segments based on various criteria such as departments, locations, job functions, interests, channels, and other properties. 

Only then can you ensure that the right content reaches the right audience and achieve the best possible readership. 

Go mobile for a better reach

Your intranet provider should ideally have a native mobile app to better serve deskless and frontline workers. 

Moreover, even office workers are sometimes better available on mobile devices than on their desktops. According to Statista, the population of mobile workers in the United States is forecast to increase from 78.5 million in 2020 to 93.5 million by 2024. The source defines mobile workers as workers who are equipped with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets by their company to work on tasks and workflows assigned to them.

Collaborate with other departments

In many cases, IC departments need to collaborate with other team members and various departments on new releases and company updates. 

To streamline this process, it is important that all the stakeholders can easily collaborate on the copy and the overall content strategy. 

Ideally, your intranet platform should have a central comms calendar where all the stakeholders can plan, review, approve, and give feedback on the content in one place.

Leverage the power of AI

Leveraging AI is one of the best ways to make your multichannel communications strategy more efficient. With AI, internal communications departments don’t have to create content from scratch. 

For example, Haiilo’s AI-powered AVA can create content more aligned with your company’s style. You can change tonality to friendly, formal, or professional. You can also make texts longer, shorter, simplify, or summarize. When all is set and done, you can ask AVA to create matching hashtags for your post. 

Measure, measure, measure

One of the biggest challenges with multichannel communications is understanding which channels work best for which audience.

Luckily, the most advanced internal communications platforms offer an easy way to get valuable insights about workplace communications initiatives, including the best channels to reach employees. 

Haiilo platform helps organizations understand their audience and get insights through reach and interaction tracking on posts, articles, and events.