Communicating with employees from the platform via Email / SMS / Employee portal

Communicating methods you can use within your foundU platform

Looking to communicate with your employees? See our on-demand Masterclass!

As we all know, communication is a key part of managing any business, and communicating with employees can be a time-consuming task but it is very important.

foundU provides you with various levels of functionality to communicate with your employees, we link you to specific articles on each of your options below.

As foundU offers multiple ways to communicate from your platform – often it can be tricky to determine which methods to use. There are 2 key questions to ask yourself before you jump in and choose your method to communicate:

• Consider the size of your audience - Do you want all employees to receive your message or just a select group?
• Do you require Acknowledgement? - How you send a message or document will depend on if you require your employees to accept it.
  
  

You can see by the diagram above that size of the audience is a big factor in choosing your communication method.

To communicate to all Employees, you can choose from:

• Announcements and Resources
• Adding a mandatory item to your Onboarder (in conjunction with foundU Support)
• Bulk email or SMS

For a segmented group:

• Adding a mandatory item to your Onboarder (in conjunction with foundU Support)
• Bulk email or SMS
• Using a group from roster/ rosters

For an individual:

• An email or SMS
• Using a group from roster/ rosters
• A shift comment on the roster

If you need your employees to acknowledge something you have the options of:

• Capturing an acceptance of Terms and Conditions via a mandatory item in the Onboarder. Even existing employees will see this item.
• Sending a document to an employee via Documents in the Employee profile. Employee signs and acknowledges and sends back.
• If you send an Email or SMS (if integrated) to an employee, you can view that it has been sent via the comms log or the Comms record in the Employee Profile. The employee cannot acknowledge it; however, you can see that it was sent.

These images will help you consider the communication type based on Audience size and Acknowledgment.

Looking for how to send general communication? See all your options below!

Employee or admin announcements

With the Announcements and Resources function, you can communicate to all employees or all admins. Think of this as your “always everyone” communication whether it be admins or employees.

When using Admin announcements for communicating a message to admin users, a banner will display at the top of your foundU Platform. This may be useful where you'd like to provide additional information to those managing staff in your business.

You can even add quick access to documents for admin users by adding the document URL!

When using Employee announcements for communicating a message to employees, a banner will display at the top of your employee portal/ app. This may be useful when you'd like to provide additional information to your employees. You can also add links to any resources that you would like all your employees to have access to.

Documents for employees to sign and acknowledge

If you've created a new policy e.g. new work from home policy or a document which you would like all your employees to sign, you can use your document templates to create the document requiring the employee signature and you can also produce a report on who has accepted the policy.
(You can even personalise it by using name placeholders). 

Send SMS or email (with attachments)

You can also send an SMS or send bulk SMS (if enabled) through your foundU platform.

You can also send an email or bulk emails directly from foundU including sending an attachment!

A history of the communication will be stored in the Employee profile and Operation profile via Communication > Communication log.

Employees acknowledge a document in the Onboarder of your platform

When new policies, handbooks and Terms and Conditions are released by your business, you may want your new employees to acknowledge this, we can set up a mandatory item in your Onboarder to do so.

This digital version of your T&Cs can be added via a link to your employee's onboarding process followed by an 'I agree' checkbox. When an item is added to the Onboarder in your platform, acknowledgement can be captured for:

• Any new employees will acknowledge this in the onboarding process.
• Any existing employee will see it when they next log into their Employee App.

Here's an example of what this looks like for an existing employee once they log into their Employee app.

Roster, Day and Shift comments for employees

You can also utilise the Roster, Day and Shift comments to communicate messages to a whole roster, for a specific day or to an employee on a particular shift.