How employee communications technologies are enabling ‘continuous listening’

Two-way communication has long been the gold standard for internal communicators, but the latest employee communications technologies have made it a more tangible reality.

Where companies once struggled to get employees to regularly check the intranet, or tried to extrapolate a year’s worth of feedback from one annual survey, now tools like Slack, Yammer, Workplace from Facebook, Microsoft Teams and more offer opportunities for “continuous listening.” That’s a phrase Betsy Sewell, head of product marketing for Aware, a governance, risk and compliance solutions company, uses to describe internal comms programs that continually source feedback from employees.

This kind of constant engagement has become even more important in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. According to Gallup, highly engaged teams are more resilient that their peers, something that Sewell cites as key evidence for the need for the most up-to-date communications technologies.