Empower employee voice with front end content creation

Using technology to empower employee voice

Employee voices are a crucial part of a thriving enterprise culture. According to CIPD:

But as workers become more remote and the office hub fades into the background, how can enterprises ensure their employees are still heard? Front-end content creation empowers everyone with the tools to communicate, share expertise, and play a part in keeping human-centric culture alive.

What is front-end content creation?

Front-end content creation is a way of encouraging employees to share insights with people on the intranet without having to use your intranet CMS (content management system).

Front-end editing lets users dive straight into crafting stories, without having to navigate your intranet CMS to find the right content trees or repositories. It takes the pain out of keeping CMS access secure, while still empowering every employee with a platform to share stories. Even mobile users can share insights with mobile-enabled front-end content creation - meaning your whole workforce can add their input wherever they are. 

Why is front-end content creation valuable?

As a feature, front-end content creation is highly effective at engaging users, improving the overall employee experience and tapping into the expertise within your enterprise.

92% of us trust the word of our friends and colleagues over top-down brand channels, per The Nielsen Global Survey of Trust. Turning employees into contributors helps share the load of content creation, bringing unique perspectives from different areas of the business and, at the same time, making your intranet a more reputable source.

5 top tips for front end content creation

You know what front-end content creation is. You know why it’s valuable. But do you know how to use it? The five tips below will help you get started with front-end content creation.

#1. Give people guidance

Letting users loose on your platform without any guidance can cause headaches for intranet managers. Irrelevant, unhelpful, or even inappropriate content is no use to anyone, so offer prompts and ideas to help employees produce the content you want on your company intranet. 

Don't leave people in the dark, guessing what their content should look like. Make style guides and content guidelines available on your intranet. Give people ideas for topics and types of content they can contribute, even using social #hashtags to collate content and spread the word.

#2. Enable rich media

Internal influencers may only spend 5% of their time creating content, with the rest going toward day-to-day tasks. Writing articles takes time, but you can spare that time by leveraging rich media, like native video, audio, gifs, and images to tell stories.

For creators, rich media helps reduce the amount of time it takes to produce content, as videos or audio can be recorded and published easily without the need to type anything out. It also helps bring content feeds to life, as vibrant multimedia replaces daunting walls of text.

#3. Consider where employee voice plays best

When insights come from colleagues, they offer readers a new perspective. With a new approach comes new opportunity, allowing front end content creators to tell stories that may otherwise go untold.

Your sales team can offer insight that HR can't and vice versa, so tap into that positioning to get the creative juices flowing. ‘A day in the life’ pieces can shed light on corners of your enterprise that may not get enough visibility. Even opinion pieces, which can be entirely unrelated to your business, help to spark valuable conversations.

#4. Use visual storytelling

Visual storytelling is a more effective and engaging form of communication. Forbes reports that viewers retain 95% of a message from video as opposed to just 10% from text. While producing videos may seem something reserved for leadership comms and marketing departments, it's easier than ever to get your employees in on the mix, too. 

There's no need to roll out the red carpet. Take a page from TikTok's success and make production as easy as filming with your phone.

With this, any written article can just as easily translate to video. You can add a human touch to employee interviews and department spotlights to convey more personality. If your people work remotely, jumping in front of the camera can also help bring people back together again.

#5. Maintain governance with review models

Intranet content must be governed to remain accurate and useful. Maintain robust governance by establishing approval processes and leveraging Unily’s content review lifecycles. 

With user permissions assigned, when users submit their content to be published it can be reviewed by your editors first. With Unily’s content review lifecycles, entire content trees can be verified for accuracy within the CMS. By setting the length of lifecycles, content owners are notified when their posts need reviewing, with content that passes its deadline automatically unpublished. Content review scores then provide you with an at-a-glance view of the overall status of your repositories.

Discover the features that power engagement

The Unily employee experience platform is packed full of innovative features and powerful functionality that brings the employee experience into the future of work. To find out more about the features behind employee engagement, reach out to an expert today.