How we set about creating effective communication in the workplace

With thousands of different media connecting us and keeping us up to date, we often feel overwhelmed. This is especially true if you are the newbie at your company — with a fast-paced work environment and an ever-increasing need to be connected since the advent of email and smart phones, there is just no hiding. Slack, Clubhouse, Intercom, Whatsapp, Calendars… Sometimes it seems to be coming at you from every direction.

The result of this overwhelmed feeling unfortunately leads to co-workers under-communicating or simply dropping the ball on tasks, because there are just too many places to look 👀 A number of our clients noted this as a High Priority issue for them, so after we did some external research we embarked on Phase 1 of 4 to help make work communication much more streamlined and efficient…

It’s all about the WHY.

One of our famous quotes in the office is “it’s all about the why” (à la Simon Sinek). This quote lives as our focal point when developing, creating a new feature or implementing a package. Our why was simple: communication in the workplace needs to be effective (reach a wide and/or targeted audience) while providing familiarity as to not overwhelm the user. With all this in mind we launched the Hi5 Notice Board in 2018.

Notice Board allows Administrators to make company announcements and share news directly from the CEO’s desk. In 2020, we’ve added a Calendar view and Notice scheduling, clapping & commenting. You can also create company Events on the calendar.

To access this feature on Hi5, you can go to the Notice Board tab. From here you will see all the notices, events, pulse deadlines and birthdays that you need to pay attention to in your Calendar view.

How to use the Notice Board Calendar

The new calendar view is pretty neat and lets you get a glance of how busy your year/month/week/day will be on Hi5.

As the Admin you can create new notices by clicking on the Add Notice button in the top right corner of the screen.

A new notice will pop up. On the left, you will be able to edit the subject and content of the notice.

Getting slightly smarter, on the right you will be able to select the co-workers you would like to send the announcement to:

• By default, a notice is sent to All in Company.
• To send to particular groups in the company, filter by Roles, Departments and Offices.
• Choose which Permissions should be able to see this notice (Admins, Line Managers and/or Employees).

To align with our statement of providing an effective one-stop for company updates, you can decide whether everyone should receive a notification by email, push notification on mobile, or both. You can also deselect both if you don’t want anyone to receive a notification (they will see a notification on their Hi5 Dashboard).

Would you prefer to schedule a notice to go out on a future date? Cool — simply tick the Schedule Notice box and choose the date.

Once you’re done, click Send Notice or Save as Scheduled. Now you and everyone in your group selection will see a new notice on the Notice Board!

Notices never disappear, so you can always find it in the same place.

Good communication, especially in the workplace, is key for effectiveness, productivity and teamwork. By using the Notice Board we hope that the overwhelmed feelings in the office will dissipate and be replaced with Hi5’s of gratitude 🙏