10 Things Internal Communicators Need To Look For in a New EXP

As corporate understanding of the importance of employee experience (EX) grows, a frequently asked question is, what platform should we use? Your choice of employee experience platform (EXP) is critical to the delivery of an EX that engages, motivates, and retains your people.

Internal communicators (sometimes in conjunction with IT or HR) are often charged with making the EXP decision for their organization. 

Ultimately, your EXP needs to deliver on your specific business objectives, and your metrics for success need to be aligned to these. To help you choose which EXP will most effectively do this, I’ve put together a handy checklist of 10 areas to consider. 

1. Strong security 

Not the sexiest of starters, but critical, and one that your IT department will love to hear. With corporate cyberattacks a regular occurrence (Disney being the latest victim), it’s vital that any EXP has robust security measures. 

While it’s long been expected that internal communications can be leaked outside the company walls, your EXP should not be a potential source for this. 

It’s also worth noting that the more secure your platform is, the more likely it is your executives will feel comfortable using it – which will set the tone for adoption by the rest of your organization. 

2. Social features 

For internal communicators, social media-style features in an EXP are essential for many reasons. Enabling your people to like, comment, share, etc. on your internal comms gives you:

• Feedback – on what content is popular, and what isn’t, so you can tweak your plans accordingly 
• Engagement – following comments is a form of employee listening, and the conversations can reveal sentiment
• Expanded reach – through tagging, sharing, and reposting of content 
• Advocacy – for example, letting your people share your stories externally on their own social media (a powerful employer branding accelerator) 

Employees want and expect to be able to interact with internal communications these days, and you can use their feedback to sharpen your strategy and improve your cut through. 

3. Easily integrated into your existing ecosystem 

You need to make it as easy as possible for your employees to use your EXP. One way to do this is to ensure that, as much as possible, it integrates into your current technology stack. For example, if your organization is running exclusively on Microsoft software, how does your EXP interface with this? Can you seamlessly shift between using each of these platforms? Is it possible to share content from one to another? The more you can make your EXP a central, connected tool rather than an add-on, the more likely it is your people will visit it. 

The key functionality to look out for here is an EXP’s integration capabilities. 

4. Clear governance and control

When it comes to EXPs, internal communicators need to balance governance and control with freedom and flexibility. The platform you choose should have a simple governance model that everyone in your organization can understand and follow. This includes giving your team the power to assign central roles and responsibilities (for example, content publisher) to ensure you have control over ‘corporate content’. 

Alongside this, and bearing in mind Point 2 about social features, it’s important that employees can publish and update content themselves. If you have communicated your governance processes effectively, then you should feel comfortable that your employees have ‘freedom within a framework’ and your EXP will be richer, and better used, for that. 

5. Ease of navigation 

With attention spans dwindling and workloads mounting by the day, it’s imperative that your EXP is simple to navigate. If it isn’t, your people won’t use it. 

Here it can be helpful to go back to your business objectives and map out some potential user journeys. Thinking about your average employee: does the EXP make it easy for them to find the information they need quickly? Is it intuitive to operate? 

Essentially, you want an EXP that meets your needs and contains all the features we list here, and has a clean, simple, and engaging design. 

6. Ability to publish fast  

Us internal communicators often need to publish news and updates quickly. Timing is everything. Your EXP must allow you to be able to upload, review, and press ‘publish’ at speed.

This means that when interrogating EXPs, you need to be shown how the back-end publishing system works, not just the shiny front-of-house features. This platform is (ideally) going to be a central channel for your internal comms, so you have to be comfortable that it will help rather than hinder you when time-sensitive information needs to be shared. 

7. Customizable 

As well as the integration of social features, employees expect EXPs to be configurable around their needs. After all, a key emerging tenet of employee experience is that it is designed, as far as possible, with the needs of the individual at its heart (personalized EX). 

To this end, look at how easily an EXP can be tailored by your people to fit their work. For example, can they set up a newsfeed based on the information they choose to see? To really stick, you need your people to make the EXP their own, and one way to do this is through personalization. 

8. Multimedia as standard 

This may sound obvious, but there are some EXPs which struggle with multimedia. Given that modern internal communications increasingly feature hi-definition video, animation, audio (podcasts, voice notes), infographics, GIFs, and more, it’s essential that your EXP can host this content without issues. 

Ask those who pitch you to see demos of how their platforms handle multimedia uploads, downloads, and playback. You need to be assured that any platform you choose can stream this content as standard. Otherwise, you run the risk of delays, buffering, and employees switching off. 

9. Make it fun 

As the saying goes, work that’s fun gets done. With a recent Gartner survey revealing that only 13% of employees are fully satisfied with their experience, you want your EXP to be a place where your people go by choice, and encourage others to join them. 

The FOMO should be real. 

EXPs can help with this by including gamification elements, competitions with prizes, and recognition incentives. Look at how the platform recruits, retains, and rewards employees. Does it feel fun and inviting, or cold and corporate? Which elements of the platform are designed to engage employees, and how effectively do they do this? 

While there are other opportunities to add fun – for example, through your communications and training – the platform needs to keep people coming back for more. 

10. Regularly updated with new features  

The pace of technological change can be bewildering, but it’s also bringing incredible benefits to people every day. The best EXPs are constantly looking at ways to improve their user experience. 

When evaluating platforms, pay attention to how frequently they release new features, products, or add-ons. How responsive are they to customer feedback? Perhaps they even co-create additional services? 

The key considerations to have are:

• Is this platform keeping up to date with the latest technology?
• Is it consistently innovating to enhance the employee experience? 
• In this hyper-competitive space, it needs to be doing both.

Set sail for your new EXP

This list is by no means exhaustive, and you can find more useful information here. In the meantime, good luck with your search for the perfect EXP. (Hint – it’s probably Workvivo!)