By Kathy Carl, Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO)
As an HR executive, I am responsible for how and what OnSolve communicates to our team during the COVID-19 pandemic and response. The fact is during a crisis effective employee communications tend to anchor in common tenets regardless of the crisis at hand, which means doing exactly what organizations should be doing throughout the year, only more so.
Let me share some highlights on our approach:
Single Focus: Safety
When it comes to COVID-19 messaging, our core concerns are health and safety. And not just about our employees. We know that our team is also worried about loved ones’ well-being and we provide information about that as well. We talk about schools, and day care, and caregiving—every safety concern of the team is a safety concern of the company.
Always Engaged Leadership Teams
Our direction comes from our Executive Leadership Team that meets every day for at least 30 minutes, and from our Senior Leadership Team, which meets monthly. They discuss issues that relate to running OnSolve, and every aspect of safety in every step we are taking or will take, both now and when we start the return to work. We benefit from diversity of thought and perspective across the company.
Fourth Fridays
And then we have the all-hands-on-deck Fourth Friday meetings. Leadership and staff all meet (fully remote of course) to learn about those new directions, and for staff to share their own concerns, questions and contribute ideas to help us move forward safely.
Newsletter
Mid-month we send out a newsletter. We’ve always done one, but today, much of its content is focused on COVID-19 information, whether from us directly, or from our insurance provider or other resources like our Employee Assistance Program.
Surveys
And we don’t reach out just to send messages. We reach out to listen as well. We send out surveys after Fourth Friday meetings, after leadership meetings—really, throughout the month. From them we learn about our employees’ challenges, concerns and new ideas.
Today, we’re sending out on average 15 messages each month: basically one every other day, across multiple channels. But that’s not enough for us. We don’t want to just increase the number of times we touch and are touched by our team with messages. We also want to expand the channels we use to do that: for instance, today we’re examining adding video notifications to our mix.
We do all this because we know that accurate and timely information is the most important tool we have to ensure our team is knowledgeable, up-to-date, and—most importantly—safe.
