Texting To Enhance HR

While email is sometimes seen as a necessary human resources (HR) communication tool, texting your staff can be remarkably more effective.  Let’s look at some of the merits of texting your staff to enhance HR.

Texting for a Response

Why not? One HR manager we talked to recently said waiting for staff to respond to emails is like waiting for butter to churn by itself. 

Did you know that 40% of company emails are not opened by staff? While a 60% success rate might be good for a baseball player, it is positively dreadful in the business world.

If you are looking for a response to an internal communication from your employees, mass texts (98% open rate) are not only easy to distribute, but they will be read.

Examples of how texts can be used to achieve HR objectives include texts for conducting surveys, texts for scheduling meetings, and texts for educating employees about benefits. 

Texting for Millennials

75% of millennials prefer SMS communications for deliveries, promotions and surveys.

Of course, we are not all millennials, but research is pretty clear that texting is how people will communicate in the future. It is therefore important that HR departments anticipate these future changes in communication preferences today. 

Check your email in the last 5 minutes? Have you checked your phone? Everyone — not just millennials — checks their phones constantly.

As more millennials enter the workforce and apply for positions, HR departments need to consider their preferences for texting due to its convenience, speed and flexibility as a communication channel.

Texting for Engagement 

As noted before, text messages have a 98% open rate, but here are some other statistics to keep in mind. Did you know that 95% of SMS messages are read within 3 minutes?

While these statistics may seem hard to believe, consider your own behavior with your phone. Do you generally open a text immediately upon receiving it? Do you read it?

Have you checked your phone’s settings to determine how much time you spend each day or week texting? You might be surprised if you do.

If you want to increase employee engagement at your company, you need to start texting your staff. They are most likely on their phones right now, so it makes strategic sense for HR departments  to communicate with them through a device already in their hands.

Texting for Efficiency

Texting your staff is not only effective, it is efficient. With the press of just one button, you can text hundreds or thousands of staff at one time. 

Alternatively, you can also easily customize your text messages in case you have something slightly different to say to different departments.

Texting can also help organizations efficiently communicate real-time alerts. For instance, maybe there is a last second change as to where a meeting will take place and an email will not catch people in time.

The takeaway here is that texting your staff can enhance all aspects of internal communications for organizations in any industry. The end result is not only increased organizational efficiencies, but improvement in the morale of employees, many of whom will appreciate the ability to communicate via a technology — texting — they already use all the time.