Service Untitled

So besides daily staff meetings, what other things can a company do to keep all of the employees on the same page? Something that more and more companies are embracing are internal blogs, written and viewed by employees.

These internal blogs serve a similar purpose to daily staff meetings. They provide updates, information about what is happening, and more. They can be viewed by the employees at the beginning of the shift and updated by managers a few minutes (or the night before) the shift starts.

Having an internal blog works better for some companies than others. Here are some general, but recommended things that I think a company should have before getting a blog or series of blogs instead of or in addition to a daily staff meeting:

• The company has to be fairly technically savvy. Low-tech companies may not embrace it quite as much as others. I’d consider fairly technically savvy as companies that use email a lot, have a least some services online (like a helpdesk, etc.), and use the Internet a lot.
• Whoever is posting (like shift supervisors) needs to know how to use a blog or a blog edit. Pretty much, they need to be able to troubleshoot basic HTML and use text editor functions.
• Whoever is posting needs to dedicate at least 15 minutes or so to writing the post everyday. This should be done before the shift begins and has to be done everyday.
• Whoever writes the blog should know what is going on and be able to write an informative, concise post that can explain everything without going on forever.
• Someone at the company should be able to setup a blog (not very hard, but not easy for a non-technical person). Many web hosts have “2 Click Installs”, etc. for major blogging scripts like WordPress. It may be worth getting an account at a web host that offers this (if yours doesn’t already) to keep things simple.
• A password should probably be applied to the blog (most web hosts offer a way to password protect a directory).

Some companies do both a daily staff meeting and a blog, others do just one, and all too many do both. If you are going to do just one, make it count (theoretically, both should count). Be sure to be thorough in your posts or in the meeting and really talk about what the staff needs to know.

Internal, daily blogs work great for companies that have a geographically spread out staff. This could include companies who outsource their support, have remote employees, etc. Staff meetings work better for companies that have one office and everyone works in the same place.

Also, it is customer service week this week in the UK. Check out  this link and this link. Tom at QAQNA posted some suggestions about what companies can do to celebrate and Maria at CustomersAreAlways let me about the week and provided the link to the first site. I’ll post a bit about Customer Service Week tomorrow.

Short post today, but I have quite a bit of content planned for later this week as well as next week.