LOCALiQ | Columbus Marketing Blog

By: Graham Ericksen, Chief Strategy Officer of Modus

Once upon a time, a company’s intranet was a place where HR and legal documents went to gather digital cobwebs. Not so today. 

The modern intranet is the backbone of the digital workplace, an online destination where employees can go to collaborate, crowdsource ideas, engage and interact and find important information. 

Companies that effectively use their intranets see strong boosts in employee productivity and employee satisfaction. (Innovative leaders like IBM, Oracle and Cisco report the ROI on their intranets to be greater than $1 billion.) 

Yet despite these many benefits, not every company -- especially small or medium-sized businesses -- have the resources needed to do a full intranet overhaul. 

If that’s the case for your company, then consider an often under-utilized tool that’s an effective, engagement-driving, low-tech version of a corporate intranet. This tool is familiar to every business. It’s called email. 

Email? Isn’t that the thing that is adding noise to our employee engagement channels? On the contrary. It’s not about getting rid of email. It’s about getting the right email.

After all, your organization is already focused on the inbox. When done right, email can deliver info in a concise and relevant format that busy people will pay attention to.

Here are six strategies to make email a key building block of your own company’s internal communications and your employee engagement efforts.

By: Catherine Conlan

After a big hiring year in 2016, many HR managers say they are turning their attention to employee retention. The reason: all that recruiting work is wasted if the employees don’t stick around. 

“Employee engagement will play a big role in the HR realm in 2017,” says Brad Stultz, human resources director at Totally Promotional, which custom prints promotional products in Coldwater, Ohio. “With record low unemployment rates continuing across the country, employees find themselves in a position to change career paths on a whim.”

To that end, here are the 2017 HR trends that HR managers envision.

Remember those predictions that Baby Boomers would redefine retirement and become the first generation to continue working well past 65? Turns out that’s not what’s happening any more. A Gallup Poll finds that by age 68, only about a third of boomers are still in the workforce, including just 16 percent who are working full time.