Messaging at work used to be taboo. But today, teams use messaging tools like Slack and native texting apps to connect with one another throughout the day. They practically eschew slow channels like email, and ignore distracting phone calls. Even HR teams, who discouraged texting in the early days of its conception, are using HR SMS throughout the workday.
Professionals new to HR SMS are sometimes skeptical. How can a casual channel like texting be used in the workplace?
The answer lies in text messaging for human resources. Business text messaging platforms empower permissioned professionals to send, receive, and organize work-related texts, saving them for review or future reference in a shared inbox.
Read on to learn how your HR team can use HR text messages for day-to-day tasks—and how they can help streamline your operations.
Support the Onboarding Process with HR SMS
The onboarding process can be complex—but it’s critical for high employee performance and retention. If your employees are part of a structured onboarding program, they are 69% more likely to stay with your organization for up to 3 years.
Most HR teams send onboarding information to their new hires’ emails. While this is the best channel for sending important or confidential documents, most new hires will have completely full inboxes during their first days at work. Any timely messages should be sent through HR text messages, which are far faster. In fact, texts have an impressive open rate of 98%, almost guaranteeing that your new hire will see your text.
Your HR team can text new hires with:
- Onboarding meeting reminders
- Paperwork deadline reminders
- Culture tips (favorite lunch spots, best office snacks, etc.)
By sending these important messages via business text messaging for human resources, you can ensure that your new hires will see the content and, more often than not, complete their onboarding tasks quickly.
Use HR SMS to Manage Training
Companies spend more than $130 billion each year on employee development. But often, simple organizational problems make it difficult for employees to take advantage of these training opportunities.
Sometimes, employees miss training events because they just forgot about them. Reminders sent through email—especially reminders sent right before the event—are sometimes missed, since employees don’t check their emails every few minutes. In other cases, employees miss training opportunities due to a sudden increase of work, and, if these opportunities are small-scale, the employees may feel like rescheduling would be too difficult.
To increase training turnout and encourage rescheduling when possible, your HR team can:
- Text multiple reminders to training attendees
- Encourage trainees to text in if they need to quickly reschedule
- Send follow-up texts with links to quizzes or other training-related content
Because training is often done on a larger scale, your HR team can send one-to-many texts using their business text messaging platform. After your team member selects a list of employees and creates a relevant template, the platform automatically fills in personalized information for each employee using merge tokens that draw on custom fields. This makes sending these reminders a lot faster for your team.
Send Company-Wide Reminders with HR SMS
Every employee has to turn in paperwork and attend company-wide meetings throughout the year. One of HR’s biggest challenges is getting employees to remember these key events and participate.
While HR teams can shoot off emails to let employees know that paperwork is still missing or there’s an upcoming company event, this can be a time-consuming task. With HR text messages, teams can automate the reminder process. Teams simply create an HR SMS drip campaign to regularly remind employees about an upcoming deadline or event. Employees can text back with any questions, and your team can see all incoming messages and reply. Every employee can receive a notification a week, a day, and ten minutes before the deadline or event, so no one misses the critical information.
When sending company-wide reminders, remember to:
- Add custom fields into the templates, so each employee receives a personalized reminder with their name
- Remove people who have completed paperwork from the original list
- Remind employees that they can text back with questions
Sending reminders via HR SMS drip campaign is a great way to reduce the amount of time your HR team spends chasing down employees for paperwork and attendance.
Offer a Q&A Channel with HR SMS
HR teams juggle everything from 
new hire onboarding to employee retention to federal regulations. They are constantly busy. While HR teams are always happy to answer questions from employees, face-to-face or phone call conversations are often distracting and time-consuming.
In many cases, a simple text is the fastest and most appropriate way for employees to send your HR team questions. Business text messaging platforms provide a shared inbox, which empowers all of your team members to see each incoming employee question. As soon as a question comes in, team members can decide whether it’s appropriate to answer via text, and if it’s not, ask for the employee to give them a call.
Your HR team should publicize the Q&A channel, letting employees know that you can answer questions about:
- Paperwork
- Upcoming events
- Office-related problems
- Benefits
- Regulations
Answering simple questions via business text messaging for human resources will cut down on distractions and allow your team’s workday to flow much more smoothly.
Want to try out business text messaging for human resources? Try our HR SMS platform for free.
