HR Strategies for Employee Engagement (Collection), Second Edition

1. Know Your Employees

In this chapter, you learn

• Why it’s important to know your “employee audience”

• What demographics can reveal about employees

• How to learn more through focus groups and other qualitative research

If you were to enroll in a college course on marketing, the very first rule you’d learn is this: “Know your audience.” That’s because the most effective way to reach people—and to motivate them to take action—is to understand who they are and what they need.

This may sound basic, but assessing employees is a step that’s often skipped in HR communication. We plunge into creating communication without thinking about the people we’re creating it for. Even worse, we assume that employees are just like us, taking for granted ...