How to engage your employees and save time with texting

Sam DeFlitch

November 19, 2021

You’ve probably been using texting for years to chat with your friends and family members. With the shift toward a more distributed workforce with flexible schedules, it’s also time to consider using text messaging for employee engagement.

At Mainstay, we help businesses like yours support employees along every stage of their journey by making it easy to plan, initiate, and analyze conversations with your employees. Our Employee Engagement Platform enables your busy HR team to have personalized, automated conversations with your workforce and gain valuable insights into what’s on their minds. With that information, you can measurably boost employee satisfaction while demonstrating to your employees that their needs are being heard— all through a familiar form of communication: Text messaging.

Step aside, email: Text messaging is the best way to improve employee engagement

Your HR team has likely always relied on email for the majority of your communication with employees. However, email is no longer an effective communication channel. It’s easy for your emails to get lost — and never read — when your employees’ inboxes are bogged down. Additionally, frontline employees, in particular, may not be able to check their email for days at a time. Combine that with the fact that they often don’t have regular interactions with other team members or supervisors, and it’s easy to see why they need a better way to access clear and consistent information. 

Enter: The text message. By using text messaging, your HR team can provide employees with timely, relevant answers to their questions — and you can automate responses to support them around the clock. You can also use texting to start conversations with empathetic check-in messages, reminders to sign up for benefits and training opportunities, and quick employee surveys. In return, you’ll collect aggregate feedback on employee sentiments to learn what really matters to your people. 

How to engage your employees with text messaging

Texting your employees might be new to your HR team, and you may not know where to start. Good news: We’ve got you covered! Our guide, “9 ways to engage employees and save time with texting” explores ways that innovative HR teams are using text messaging right now. It also provides texting tips  your team can use to support new employee preboarding and onboarding to improve retention and ensure lines of meaningful communication are always open — so your team can build strong relationships with employees that result in positive outcomes. Here are a few of the topics we discuss in the guide: 

Texting employees to cultivate a sense of belonging

Your HR team can use text messaging to ensure each employee feels a sense of belonging throughout their entire journey — from preboarding to training and development and career advancement. By sending personalized conversations, encouraging nudges, and interactive surveys, you can support your employees with empathetic messages and provide real-time access to information they need — when they need it most. This meaningful engagement creates important bonds between your company and your employees, which builds a sense of belonging that leads to improved employee retention. 

Encourage honest conversations with your employees

It’s no secret that clear, consistent communication is key to developing meaningful relationships with your employees — and even better employee engagement over time. While email is most often used for formal or transactional information sharing, texting is widely accepted as conversational and more open. This makes text messaging the perfect channel to solicit honest thoughts and opinions from employees. While candid feedback may sometimes be hard to hear, it is essential for improving your business and creating a great work environment. Encouraging open and honest conversation is key to demonstrating to your employees that they are being heard, and texting is the perfect channel for that. 

Support employees before their first day

The time between when an employee accepts a job offer and their first day of work is often the period when they are most excited and enthusiastic about the role. That makes it the perfect time to begin building relationships with your new hires. Empathetic, 2-way text messaging is the most effective way to create rapport and establish your new employees’ connection to the company. Your HR team can use text messaging during preboarding to get new hires up to speed quickly — so they’ll be ready to hit the ground running on day one. 

Learn how to use text messaging in your employee engagement strategy

As a busy HR professional, you’ve got a ton of responsibilities: Providing employees with timely information, answering their questions, and keeping them engaged throughout their time with your company are just a few. Mainstay’s Employee Engagement Platform makes it easy for your HR team to quickly and automatically deliver the best response to your employees for any situation via text messaging — while providing you with real-time insights on what really matters to your people. 

Download “9 ways to engage employees and save time with texting for free today to find out how you can start supporting your employees with SMS text messaging.

Share on social

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Subscribe for free

Sign up to receive Mainstay's latest insights on engagement trends and Behavioral Intelligence — right in your inbox.

Book a call with us:

Get a guided tour of Mainstay’s Engagement Platform

Mainstay’s Engagement Platform uses Behavioral Intelligence to help businesses build meaningful relationships, optimize insights, and drive action.

Sign up for your personalized demo to find out how Mainstay makes it easy to spark conversations with your employees and guide them toward positive results.

Channels

Instant support — anytime, anywhere

Mainstay’s behaviorally intelligent chatbots make it easy to engage with employees on the channels they prefer to use:

SMS text messaging
Live chat
Web chat
Social media

Let's talk

Get a guided tour of Mainstay’s Engagement Platform

Mainstay’s Engagement Platform uses Behavioral Intelligence to help schools and businesses build meaningful relationships, optimize insights, and drive action.

Sign up for your personalized demo to find out how Mainstay makes it easy to spark conversations with your students or employees and guide them toward positive results.

Channels

Instant support — anytime, anywhere

Mainstay’s behaviorally intelligent chatbots make it easy to engage with students and employees on the channels they prefer to use:

SMS text messaging
Live chat
Web chat
Social media

Let's talk