Whether you’re welcoming new hires, rolling out new software, or launching a company-wide initiative, your employees expect the same personalized experience as your customers.

However, for many companies, internal communications still happen through disjointed emails, siloed intranet posts, and static learning platforms. While some employees are actively engaged and stay up-to-date with trainings, open enrollment, and other important news, there are also employees who are harder to reach. (You know exactly who we’re talking about). 

To engage as close to 100% of employees as possible, IT, HR, and enablement teams are integrating in-app and email communications into a single, automated journey that reaches employees at exactly the right moment. 

While this was nearly impossible for years, new cross-channel communication tools make this easier than ever. 

Here are four times you need to unify in- and out-of-app messaging to engage even the hardest-to-reach employees.

1. Automating employee onboarding

Getting employees comfortable with the internal systems that keep your business running (like Workday, Salesforce, or Zendesk) is time-consuming. Most employees will forget whatever training they learned in one-off meetings, and get stuck (or slowed down) when they use those tools on their own. 

By combining email and in-app guides into a single journey within today’s tools, IT and HR teams can design onboarding journeys that unfold automatically and adapt to real employee behavior. 

To personalize onboarding journeys, teams should: 

  • Trigger in-app walkthroughs when a new hire logs into a key system for the first time
  • Send personalized follow-up emails with additional training resources for their role, seniority, or preexisting knowledge
  • Re-engage employees who haven’t completed certain steps with behavior-based reminders

2. Streamlining compliance 

When security or compliance updates rely on a single company-wide email or video-based certification, completion rates plummet. And even if users are “completing” compliance certifications, chances are they’re not really paying attention. Even small knowledge gaps can create serious risk.

To help everyone follow compliance best practices, IT teams should automate reminders, track completion, and personalize follow-ups based on behavior. You can start this by: 

  • Delivering required policy notices or acknowledgment requests directly inside the apps employees use every day
  • Sending automated email reminders only to employees who have not completed the task
  • Using branching logic to adjust the journey and skip messages for anyone who has already complied

By giving employees clear, timely reminders, compliance feels like a natural part of the workflow.

3. Driving internal software adoption

Rolling out new internal software or processes can be difficult. Employees are busy, and if change is not clearly communicated, adoption lags and investments go underutilized. With coordinated in-app and out-of-app touchpoints, teams can turn new system rollouts into guided experiences that engage employees at the right moments. 

If you’re rolling out a new software at your company, try these three tips to get started:

  1. Announce new tools or process changes with in-app messages, targeting the users most likely to be impacted.
  2. Follow up with users after rolling the new software out via email campaigns that link to quick-start resources.
  3. Automate reminders for employees who haven’t logged into the new system or completed a key task yet. 
  4. Bonus: Gather targeted feedback from your most and least engaged users. Ask them what they love, wish could be better, and why they are or aren’t engaging with your software. 

IT and Operations teams can launch new technology more confidently, track adoption, and ensure employees know what is changing and why.

4. Improving employee engagement  

HR and internal communications teams spend countless hours trying to drive participation in training programs, internal events, and benefits rollouts. However, engagement often relies on manual emails and spreadsheets, providing little insight into what’s actually working.

To fix this, HR teams need to create personalized cross-channel campaigns that reach employees where they are. This could look like:

  • Announcing internal events or programs through in-app guides, and following up with disengaged users via reminder emails
  • Targeting communications to specific user segments, by team, location, seniority, or engagement level
  • Measuring performance across every touchpoint to understand which content and channel is driving participation

HR and communications teams deserve the same sophistication and visibility that marketing teams use to engage customers.

Reach your employees with Pendo Orchestrate

Employee-facing teams are under pressure to move faster, communicate better, and do more with fewer resources. With a user engagement platform like Pendo Orchestrate, you can shift from manual reminders and disconnected emails to a single, intelligent communication engine that works across channels.

If you’re already using Pendo for product analytics, in-app guides, or user feedback, Orchestrate helps you stitch those tools together into something more powerful: a cohesive journey that meets users where they are and moves them where you want them to go. 

Take a self-guided tour, or talk to an expert to learn more.