Red e App recently published a whitepaper entitled “Strange Bedfellows: The Convergence of Innovation and Compliance in Long Term Care” – focused on the future of the long-term healthcare workforce, the role technology will play, and why compliance and innovation must coexist. This post is an excerpt from the full document, focusing on the primary considerations when maximizing communications, and is part of a series of blogs that will be released discussing various topics from the whitepaper.

There are two primary considerations when it comes to maximizing the impact of communications.

What you are going to communicate – what is the content that is going to resonate most with the recipients and how do the needs of these stakeholder groups vary; and

How are you going to communicate – not all message types or communication platforms are equal

We briefly touched on the importance of purpose in the blog on work trust, which speaks to the what.

To recap, Work trust is a behavioral outcome that results from an organization’s quantitative and qualitative investment in creating a culture of care that enables strong operational leadership and empowers the workforce.

Work trust most often exhibits itself in the form of a feeling of being supported, empowered, and part of a collective for the betterment of both the individual and the whole. Work trust is central to a healthy ecosystem whereby individuals, and by association, a company, can thrive.

It’s also a critical driver for employee engagement. Qualitatively, the behaviors exhibited by leadership have a marked impact on work trust, which in turn can be measured by levels of employee engagement, performance, and retention.

In this section, we are focusing mostly on the how. Let’s start by understanding the four basic message types that are typically used in a work setting. These can be described as:

Broadcast messages are pushed out to everyone in an organization and are typically used for company-wide announcements, alerts, and updates. Those allowed to initiate this type of message are normally limited to a handful of individuals.

Team Messages are effective for group messaging that allows for ‘reply all’ to everyone in the group. Anyone in a pre-designated group can initiate or reply to a message.

Peer-to-Peer messages function effectively like personal, one-to-one, messages most commonly used with texting and other popular social applications. Frequently, this mode of messaging will include read receipts that cannot be disabled.