Communication is the “Sway”

We‚Äôve been doing some hardcore internal communication revamps here at Kinetix‚ÄîI‚Äôm talking head-banging, crowdsurfing, electric guitar hardcore. You may have seen Patrick Ward‚Äôs breakdown of how we integrated Slack, a real-time messaging and collaboration tool for teams, into our company communications. Slack got our teams talking more, and doing so more efficiently. But we still needed a way to ramp up our weekly communication strategy.

Enter: Sway.

Sway was the brainchild our group of summer interns cooked up when tasked with finding a solution to improve our weekly in-house communications. Before interns and Sway entered our lives, we sent a simple email template to our company distribution list with a list of that week‚Äôs birthdays and anniversaries, as well as any big company news that everyone needed to be aware of‚Äîpretty standard stuff.

But, if you know Kinetix, you know standard doesn’t cut it for us.

So our interns set to work on a solution and, before they left us to go back to their college worlds, gave us Sway. From there, our admin team picked it up.

Sway allows you to easily drag-and-drop any kind of template you want. It‚Äôs billed by it‚Äôs parent software Microsoft as a presentation platform, but the easy-to-use program made it perfect for our office‚Äôs needs.

The program itself is a great tool, but it’s creating something of even more value within our office: a constant loop of communication.

One side of this loop involves the obvious: communication from the company to all employees. When you are looking for an easy way to keep employees engaged and make them feel connected to the bigger picture, there’s no easier way to do so than with a fleshed-out, weekly communication. Ours involves keeping everyone up to speed on clients, birthdays and anniversaries, employees who are crushing it (which is an added level of engagement) and any other big news going on in the office.

That side of the communication loop is the bread and butter. If you’re not engaging your employees, your weekly communication strategy is off.

But there‚Äôs another side to the communication loop that creates an added level of engagement for our employees: it‚Äôs crowdsourced from all different areas of the company. Every area of the company has a place to shine within the weekly communication now, and some of those departments are creating the areas of the communication themselves. The result is a weekly communication that isn‚Äôt just made for the company, but it‚Äôs made by the company.

If you’re looking to ramp up your internal communication, Sway is a great place to start. People aren’t going to look at something that’s not pretty to look at—that’s just a fact. But once you’ve got the platform, don’t just feed content to your employees, really get them involved in what is going to be shared with the whole company. You’ll end up hitting your goal of engagement much closer to the bullseye.