Overview of Employee Messaging

Team Engine's employee messaging features make it easy to manage all employee communication from one place without having to rely on bulletin boards, track down someone in person, or use your personal cell phone. Each company receives its own local phone number that you can use to send and receive messages.

Key Employee Use Cases

Companies take advantage of simple employee messaging in lots of ways, including:

• Message employees about major events such as bad weather, Coronavirus, etc.
• Create a simple hotline for reaching HR that employees can text questions to about benefits, payroll, etc. 
• Communicate with new employees during onboarding to get documents signed, uniforms ordered, etc.
• Gather employee information such as time off requests, sick days, etc.
• Send announcements to the entire company (or to just certain teams of employees) for new policies, company events, etc.
• Schedule announcements or messages to be sent at a future date and time.
• Survey employees to get feedback about things like their onboarding experience or record key information (e.g. uniform sizes).

Getting Started

In the sidebar menu, you'll see three tabs - Messages, Announcements, and Surveys.

To get started, set up your employee directory.

Messages

The Messages tab is for one-on-one communication with individual employees. You can also send an individual message to multiple people who are not part of a group.

Announcements

Announcements give you the ability to send one message to an entire group or all employees at once. If someone responds to an message sent to a group or they respond to an announcement, the response will only go back to the "Messages" inbox - no one else will get it (i.e. announcements do not create group chats).

Employee groups are very flexible and could be a role (EX: Foremen), a location (EX: San Antonio), a category (EX: Office Staff), or any other subgroup that is useful to you. Announcements can take around 15 minutes to send to every employee depending on how many people the announcement is being sent to.

Note: If you are specifically asking a question in your message, you should use surveys.

Adding Files to Messages

If you would like to add an image or a document to messages to employees, or to an announcement, you simply have to click the "Upload File" button on the top of the message editor box. 

Be sure to the leave the {{{url 1}}} brackets exactly as they appear in the text field. Please don't copy/paste those brackets to another part in the message or delete the brackets entirely as this will stop your file from auto-filling the brackets and actually getting attached to your message.

Here are some ways we're seeing customers use this feature:

• Supporting culture & building rapport: When someone replies to your text with a reaction GIF, you’ll now be able to see it and reply accordingly. (note: outbound text messages from Team Engine do not support sending of GIFs)
• Faster completion of paperwork: No more wasting days waiting for new hires to remember to bring in their onboarding documents, when they can text or email photos and PDFs from home.
• Documenting of excused absences: Employees won’t lose the documentation you need, when they can text it in to you the moment they receive it.
• Reporting safety issues: Sometimes, a video or audio recording is necessary to understand the context and gravity of a situation, or is needed as proof and documentation of something happening.

This will add a clickable link to the message that the recipient can click on that will open the file in an internet browser like this.

You can receive the following file types which can be viewed in the text message thread itself or within the Documents tab of their employee profile:

• audio files
• video files
• PDFs
• Word docs
• spreadsheets
• photos
• animated GIFs
• many other file types

More image file types — such as GIFs, SVGs, and WEBPs — will now render in Team Engine, based on browser support. This means you can see the actual image, and not just an icon representing the image for download.

Sending Links

To send a link in a message, you can simply copy and paste the link directly into the body of the message and then when the message is sent the link will automatically be shortened and appear as a Team Engine link.

Surveys

A survey is a special type of announcement where you can ask a question and request a response. Team Engine will collect all responses in one easy-to-see place and send reminders to people who have not responded.

For more detail on surveys, see: Employee Surveys

Setting Up Call Forwarding

The phone number you are using to message your employees is a texting only phone number, so your employees cannot call this number. If you would like to receive calls your employees may make, you can set up a call forwarding number. You can do this by going to your company settings, and then entering the phone number you would like to receive calls at where it says "Employee Forwarding Phone Number." Then, anyone who calls the number they're texting will be routed to the call forwarding number.

FAQ

• What phone number do messages come from?
  • There's one phone number for employee messages and announcements, and one phone number for surveys. You can view these two numbers at the top of the "Directory" and "Surveys" tabs.
• How do employees know who it is texting them?
  • We recommend sending an initial announcement to employees telling them it's you (and including the company name). You can also send employees a contact card so they can add the number to their contacts with one click. In the future, all texts will come from the same number. 
• How does texting work?
  • The Inbox is designed to work just like the other texting tools you are used to. Your messages in purple/blue, and the recipients in gray. As soon as a new message comes in, you'll get an email notification if you are signed up to receive incoming employee messages.
• Are responses to announcements visible to all recipients?

  • No. When you message a group of employees, and someone responds, that response only goes to you. At that point, it becomes a one-on-one conversation between you and that employee, not a group chat.