We recently conducted an online survey of communicators in the healthcare industry and found that 63% of those that responded named reaching non-desk employees and volunteers as their biggest challenge.

If you work in the healthcare industry I’m sure that this isn’t a surprise.

From nurses and laboratory technicians to emergency medical technicians and surgical technicians, healthcare audiences are some of the most diverse in terms of how they receive their information. They are on the move, all the time, and typically have very little downtime during their working day.

Opening and maintaining a dialogue with these employees can help an organization gain useful insight into what’s happening ‘on the ground’.

Here are our top tips on reaching front-line staff:

• Design for an on-the-go audience. Remove all barriers to accessing your employee communications. Ensure your digital communications can be viewed on any device: laptop, desktop, tablet or smartphone be that email or intranet pages

• Move away from one-to-all mass emails and only send to those employees who need to receive the message

• Consolidate communications where you can. News round-ups in digest format are popular, and you can include links for further reading

• Personalize and tailor content to each of your audiences that helps them with their day-to-day job. Provide the news they must have, plus their relevant regional news

• Consider the “What’s In It for Me?” factor. In today’s inbox we size up quickly whether to read or delete. Everything about your emails should be easily scannable and clickable

• Get access to measurement from your campaigns to get insight into how each of your audiences are engaging with your emails—and use insight to increase the effectiveness of your emails.

Communicating with time-poor, highly mobile employees is a difficult task. This means that internal communicators need to be more creative in their approach to communication.

Rather than rely solely on one or two means of communication, a multi-channel approach, centered around a ‘master’ channel, has emerged as the most efficient and effective way to open that dialogue with front-line staff. A multi-channel approach offers the best opportunity to get your messages to the right people, at the right time, via the right channel.

For more on reaching front-line staff, download this free whitepaper

Newsweaver is a proud supporter of the Strategic Internal Communications for Health Care conference in Washington, DC, September 26 – 28.