Human Resources (HR) teams are in charge of the entire employee life cycle of a business, spanning selecting and hiring new recruits, facilitating training and employee education, and also managing severance, employee benefits, and firing. Due to the expansive impact they have on a business, HR is one of the teams that are able to leverage email communication most across a company.
HR teams can create a range of dynamic emails that engage employees, share information, and drive communication. However, if HR teams don’t make effective use of all of the space in an email, they can quickly bore employees and start to send out emails that seem redundant.
In this article, we’ll dive into an overlooked area of emails, the email signature, demonstrating exactly how HR teams can use their email signature to get more from email communication. Considering how ingrained HR is in every other department, a small improvement in HR email communication can become a huge benefit for all.
Let’s dive right in.
Why Is It So Important That HR Gets Email Right?
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Out of all of the teams in an organization, HR is one that has contact with almost every other team. In fact, with clear insight into holistic trends across an organization, HR teams are responsible for keeping rates of work satisfaction and engagement as high as they can. In 2023, over 90% of HR professionals are turning to data analytics to facilitate this role.
HR emails go out to absolutely everyone in a business. The first email a new employee gets when they join a company is typically going to be from their HR team. Equally, the last email someone gets before leaving will equally come from HR. That said, the middle period of an employee’s tenure in a business is just as important, with HR being the one team that continually communicates with an employee over their life cycle with a business.
As HR teams have regular contact with every department across each employee’s life cycle, it’s vital that their email communication is as effective as possible. By crafting better emails in HR, you’re able to save the entire organization time, drive interaction, and create a healthy employee-oriented company from the inside out.
By focusing on maximizing the impact of HR emails, you can snowball this progress into every other area of your business, helping everyone to thrive.
How HR Teams Can Get More from Their Email Signatures
The vast majority of HR teams – or businesses in general – will have a detailed communications guide when it comes to sending emails from a business account. These rules and regulations will cover core ideas of tone, prohibited language, and etiquette that employees should use. However, one commonly overlooked part of email communication is the email signature.
Email signatures are small areas of an email, right at the bottom, which typically include additional information about the sender. An email signature could include the sender’s full name, alternative contact details, their job title, and links to the company website. Yet, while basic information is typically what businesses choose to include in these spaces, HR teams can actually get a lot more from them.
Using a signature maker tool, HR teams can create highly personalized and deeply interactive pockets in every email they send out. Beyond just formalizing your HR emails, you can use email signatures for a number of HR-related functions:
- Survey Links - One core role that HR teams tend to take on is ensuring that employees remain satisfied in their current roles. While managers will have a more direct understanding of how their team is fairing, HR teams can provide a more holistic understanding. By including a link in an HR email signature that directs employees to an anonymous survey about their work and their job satisfaction, you’ll be able to collect lots of data. Survey links are a powerful tool as they provide absolutely everyone in your business direct access to the survey whenever they want to take it. Building up satisfaction data via email signatures will help your HR team stay on top of workplace happiness trends and keep your workforce running smoothly.
- Distributing Information - HR teams are one of the departments that will regularly come into contact with employees from all over an organization. Due to this, their email signatures are a fantastic place to share information that relates to all employees. Whenever you have an internal bulletin, instead of sending this out and clogging up all your employees’ inboxes, you can simply include small updates in email signatures. This strategy will reduce the number of emails that people receive while still ensuring your HR team can distribute information across the organization.
- Date Reminders - As you’ll be attaching your email signature to every email that your HR department sends out, these spaces make an excellent place to put date reminders for upcoming events. Perhaps your business has an important webinar that’s just on the horizon, or you have an employee training day coming up. By listing these important dates in your email signatures, you’ll ensure that none of your employees forget any important dates that they are meant to be involved in.
Email signatures don’t have to only be a space for your name and job title, they can be used by HR teams as a thriving noticeboard of links, updates, and important information that employees need to be reminded of.
Final Thoughts
For HR teams that are looking to take communication to the next level, using email signatures to create surveys, share space for feedback, and distribute information can be an effective way of boosting the value of every email they send out. Simply by including additional elements in your email signature, you are able to convert what would be a singular message into one that contains a number of other elements for employees to interact with.
By creating multi-use spaces within emails, you’re able to push the bounds of what is possible with human resources emails. Over time, you can use email signatures to gather more information, build up comprehensive anonymous employee surveys, and better deal with your growing workforce.
As one of the central driving departments for business progress, ensuring your HR team is as streamlined as possible will help all other areas of business to follow. Starting with email signatures and refining email communication, in general, is an effective place to get the ball rolling.
