Office Politics: Communication has never been so important
The work force of 2020 has changed. As many as 60 per cent of workers no longer work in a traditional environment – almost a fifth normally work at home and a similar number use shared office spaces. Around a third are often on the road or with clients. Plenty do some days in all those settings.
And that was all before the Covid-19 crisis. Few British workers have ever lived or worked through anything remotely like this disruption to the jobs market or the economy. It’s not true everywhere – in 2003 SARS was a major blow to places like Hong Kong and Singapore, while many countries have faced natural disasters which impacted ways of working forever.
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We are in unprecedented times, with millions more now working from home or furloughed. Employers have a huge role to play in the well being of their staff. That’s true for all companies no matter their size. In many cases – in financial services, technology or manufacturing for example – those workforces cross borders, continents and many time zones.
Everbridge was set up after 9/11 after it became clear businesses needed to be better prepared to communicate with their staff during crises. The most important lesson is that written plans quickly become obsolete in the face of actual critical events.
We know that employees generally trust their boss. New research we published this week polled over 9,000 people in 13 countries on what they thought about how their companies communicated with them during critical events like pandemics or natural disasters. More than 70 per cent of them told us they would like more frequent updates from their employer during a crisis – what’s happening, what they need to do and importantly when it’s safe to come back to work. Most said they would willingly share personal contact details and almost a third would even let their employer track their location on GPS.
In a long-running crisis like coronavirus, those updates are even more important as official advice evolves daily. The Government is never going to be able to give advice for every company or workplace – only bosses can do that for their staff.
The mode of communication is also important: 7 in 10 told us would rather get a text message than anything else. Email and social media have a place but most people don’t want that to be the first or only way to get information. Apps – like those proposed to tackle Covid-19 – only work if people install them. It’s important to remember that sometimes simple and established technology is still the way forward: it’s reliable and everyone knows how it works.
The bad news is most people don’t think their employer is currently very good at this – a problem thrown into stark relief by the current crisis. Here in the UK, just 21.6 per cent of staff think there’s enough being done to communicate with them. This rises to around a third in place like Singapore – and plunges to 16 per cent in Italy.
There are solutions. Our technologies are used by more than 5,000 companies to communicate with their staff – and by 3,700 public authorities at city, state, region and national level around the world. It sent 3.5 billion messages in 2019 and is now helping businesses and governments in the US, India, Norway, Sweden, Iceland Greece and others respond to Covid-19. It makes it possible to send specific information to tailored groups of people.
Crises are difficult. They are often frightening. We all know that today nobody has every answer to how to manage life during the virus. But employers must put their staff at ease with clear, timely communication in a way that they trust.