The employer-employee relationships globally is going through a rough patch at present, largely due to lack of effective communication. According to Gallup, decreased workplace communication is the biggest drawback of hybrid work.
The problem is that workplace communications methods are outdated. We are living in the digital age and our attention spans are shorter than ever. Delivering information through overused email templates and routine powerpoint slides is not working anymore.
Employees need bite-sized data which is easier to remember and reduces digital overload.
Visual content, such as infographics, videos, and GIFs are remarkably useful to bridge the communication gap in the workplace. They break down complex workplace analytics into digestible formats. The use of images and icons humanize corporate communication, resulting in better employee engagement.
In this article, I will provide you a complete guide on how you can use visual communication to improve your HR strategies and processes.
Bonus: I will also share visual communication resources for HRs, including free human resource templates and a Free HR Report Maker that can help you deliver messages effectively.
Click to jump ahead:
- Why visual communication matters for HR
- Visual storytelling for company culture
- Visualizing performance reviews and feedback
- Data visualization tips for HR metrics
- Tools and resources for HR visual communication
Why visual communication matters for HR
Heard of the ‘Picture Superiority Effect?’ It states that we can remember better whatever is studied as images than what we study as words.
So, when you share visuals or infographics to communicate information, chances are your team will remember it better.
Let’s see in detail how visual communication helps HRs:
1. Boosting employee engagement
HR communication is often siloed — there is a lack of consistency and information is passed on to employees without relevant context. Result? Employees feel confused and not valued.
Here’s where visual communication matters. It helps you convey information better, making it easier for employees to retain information.
“A good infographic can cross language, culture, and literacy boundaries. It can do the heavy lifting, replacing a mountain of words. Dashboard information is transformative for executive summaries. Adding movement by creating a gif is a simple and effective elevation for any static flowchart.”
Jacquie Boer, an expert in reputation management
According to a TechSmith’s The Value of Visuals Report, 67% of employees perform better because of visual communication instead of textual communication. The report also states that plain-text email conversations creates tension between businesses and employees because millennial workers (making up for the largest portion of the workforce) prefer using images and videos over simple texts.
Reyansh Mestry, Head of Marketing at TopSource Worldwide, says that TopSource observed a 25% increase in the speed at which new hires complete training modules when visual aids are used. Their feedback surveys also indicated a 40% improvement in overall comprehension of the onboarding material.
Here are some effective ways visuals help boost employee engagement:
- Use visuals like charts and infographics to explain goals and processes.
- Create and distribute short videos to share org-wide updates.
- Communicate company’s performance and strategic plans through charts to improve transparency in the workplace and build a culture of trust.
- Use images or infographics that show human interaction to evoke emotions. This helps boost team collaboration
- Create accessible infographics to make all employees feel included.
2. Explaining organizational structure
One underrated way to improve employee engagement is to create an organizational chart. It helps employees understand organizational hierarchy, reporting relationships, the roles of responsibilities of different members, and most importantly, how individual employees fit into the organization.
You can also use the org chart to explain decision-making workflows to employees and how they contribute to overall goals. It becomes easier to assess and manage employees’ workloads and allocate resources efficiently by visualizing how each team functions.
Moreover, the visualization of org structure offers employees clarity about the growth path in the organization, making them feel motivated.
Remember the org chart Dwight created in ‘The Office’ to explain the chain of command? He explained the hierarchy in the organization and the emergency powers. Well, you can create something similar (minus the exaggerated titles and irrelevant details, of course).
You can use this Rounded Square Simple Organization Chart template by Venngage to create an organizational structure.
3. HR reporting and decision-making
While visuals enable effective downward communication (flow of information from HR team to employees), they are equally important for upward communication (reporting data to leaders). You can add charts and graphs in HR reports to convey employee turnover rates, performance metrics, or other HR-related information. Thus, HR reports help leaders understand employee trends and facilitate quick HR decision-making.
Eliot Vancil, CEO of Fuel Logic LLC, says that visual data presentations make it a lot easier to make decisions. Their HR team gave a full visual report on employee success and engagement metrics during their quarterly reviews. The clear graphics helped the management team quickly understand important issues and opportunities, which let them make choices more quickly and with more information. It also saved time ensured a more unified approach across departments.
Let me explain it better with an example. Here is an HR report that explains the benefits of the general management program launched by the program. While the information is helpful, it can be a tad bit difficult for leaders and stakeholders to understand the outcome of the program just by reading the text.
Using a human resource template with charts is a much better option for reporting. For instance, you can use the Human Resources Report Template to communicate recruitment strategies, HR budget, or employee training outcomes.
4. Enhancing Company Culture
Tell us you are an infographics company without telling us you are an infographics company.
This is exactly what I thought when I joined Venngage! The above two images are from my onboarding manual. The visuals made it so much easier for me to understand how Venngage, as a no-design tool, works and differentiates itself from other tools in the market.
Using a tree chart to visualize the vision helped me learn the company’s aspirations. Now, imagine just the text and a random background image to communicate the vision. It would hardly be effective, right?
You can create similar infographics to convey company culture.
5. Employee training
Planning on conducting employee training and going with the same traditional presentation format (title and text) to share information? You might want to rethink because plain text makes information boring and difficult to read.
Using visuals like infographics and charts is a much better option to conduct training sessions.
Would you want to read a presentation with plain text as shown above? You’ll probably be disinterested and so will your employees.
Now, look at the below template for phishing training. It’s colorful and has visual elements to explain about phishing attacks and how to avoid them. Visuals add life to your presentation.
6. Explaining policies and procedures
Sharing lengthy docs to communicate company policies is hardly helping anyone. Most employees either don’t read the policies or don’t remember them.
In the HR Leadership Podcast, Nina Kontos, Senior Director of Global Internal Communications, Employee Experience & Learning at Axonius, explains, “People always want to understand why and if you tell them why you end up helping them understand the story and how you got to the decision versus them feeling like something is done to them and that’s important to think about with HR.”
So, by using visuals, you can share the whole context with your employees, explain the comany policies and processes in a much simpler manner so that they can remember it easily.
Here is a working hours policy template I found online with large paragraphs of text. It’s difficult to find relevant information in such cases and you’ll have to spend more time explaining the policy to employees.
All text and no charts leaves a document with no spark!
On the contrary, you can use a template like the one given below to explain policies in an easy manner.
Visual storytelling for company culture
Here is a brilliant example of using visuals to explain the company culture:
These bar charts by Amazon beautifully explain that Amazon has a diverse workforce and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is embedded into the company’s workplace culture.
Here are some ways to use visual communication to improve company culture.
1. Define your company’s visual identity
“The main weakness of companies is their image bank, and the absence of a visual database that is inspiring & original. The Getty image effect has done more harm than good, making communications standardized, tasteless and uninteresting. How can you say that you are the industry leader or that you’ve created your own category within a market if there’s nothing visually to show for it? Worse still, employees may feel just like the image they’ve seen everywhere: uninteresting, replaceable & not worth investing in.”
Orianne Bornand, Corporate Communications Director
This quote perfectly describes how companies are doing visual communication wrong. Just adding images or icons for the sake of it is doing more harm than good because it sends across inconsistent messages and confuses employees.
Before you start visual communication, create a brand design manual for typography, color palettes and logo usage. This helps improves readability employee engagement. Moreover, consistent designs enhance internal branding and employees are able to connect better with the company’s values.
💡 The Brand Kit feature on Venngage helps you add your brand’s preferred typography, color palette, and graphic elements.
2. Showcase employee stories
As a leader, the best way you can empower employees and motivate them to perform better is to celebrate employee achievements.
Instead of simply acknowledging an employee’s achievements over a team call, you can show employee stories using photos and videos to create more impact.
For instance, you can use the Company Employee Achievement Email Newsletter Template by Venngage to highlight employees’ achievements.
3. Create a visual “About Us” page
To grow your business, all employees need to work as one unit. This requires them to be aligned on company’s goals, purpose, aspirations and guiding principles. Creating a visual ‘About Us’ page for businesses helps employees get a better clarity of the company’s core values.
For example, look at the LinkedIn’s career page screenshot below — the diagrams help (potential) employees visualize the core values and remember them better.
You can use Venngage’s Mission and Vision Statement for HRs Template to connect to people, explain the company’s goals, plans, and core values.
Visualizing performance reviews and feedback
1. Design performance review infographics
Continuously tracking employees’ performance is one of the biggest challenges for HRs, especially for large teams. But you need to do it effectively to set/revise employee goals, find training opportunities and offer incentives.
Simply filling out forms or sheets hardly helps in tracking performance because you have to go through different documents with different KPIs and inconsistent formats. Here too, you can use visuals to conduct successful performance reviews and share feedback. Use pre-designed evaluation templates for HRs and share them with your team for standardized data collection.
For example, if you want to collect employee performance data from team managers, you can use the Employee Performance Review Template.
Here is the Employee Performance Evaluation Template you can use to assess whether your employees are getting their jobs done and if they are doing it the right way. One look at the infographic and the reader would know the employee falls under which category.
2. Visualize feedback surveys
Communication is always a two-way street. As an HR leader, you need to get regular feedback from employees to understand their challenges and improve the company culture. This makes employees feel valued and increases employee retention rate.
You can use the Employee Satisfaction Survey Checklist Template by Venngage to conduct detailed surveys.
Once you have the survey results, visualize the data using different types of charts for deeper insights. This helps identify common challenges faced by employees and find areas of improvement. You can easily customize the below survey results template to visualize employee feedback.
3. Create visual recognition programs
One of the best ways to empower your employees is to create recognition programs where the organization acknowledges and appreciates employee contributions and announces highest-performing/star employees. Here are a few ways you can visually recognize employees’ efforts:
- Give digital badges or certificates to employees on achieving their KPIs or completing skill training. You can share the certificates on company’s social media pages and internal groups.
- Create a wall of fame to acknowledge employees’ efforts.
- Add dedicated sections for employee achievements in company newsletters.
Use the below template to create achievement certificates for employees.
Data visualization tips for HR metrics
HR leaders deal with diverse and large volumes of data related to payroll, employee performance, and employee training. It gets difficult to represent different data categories in a coherent manner. Here are a few tips for visualizing data to report HR metrics effectively:
1. Choose the right chart or graph
When selecting the chart or graph to represent data, first identify the purpose of data visualization. Consider questions like: Do you want to show change in trends over time or share employee metrics for decision-making? Who’s the target audience? Then select the graphs accordingly. Here are a few use cases of different types of graphs:
- Pie charts: To show the composition of employees in different departments.
- Bar charts: To represent the number of employees hired from different sources.
- Line charts: Highlight changes in employee performance ratings over months.
- Column charts: For employee performance comparison.
2. Use interactive elements
Data visualization shouldn’t mean a bunch of charts put together with no context. You need to add interactive elements to make data visually appealing and engaging. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Add descriptive texts, annotations and captions to explain the purpose of visuals.
- Label relevant charts, lines, axes, and data points for clarity.
- Pick relevant templates and customize them as per your brand guidelines.
- Add filters and dropdowns for HR dashboards.
3. Create HR dashboards
One easy way to visualize data is to build customizable HR dashboards using no-code tools or Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. You can create charts within these solutions, categorize and filter data and collaborate with your team.
Tools and resources for HR visual communication
Now you know how visual communication can improve employee engagement but the real challenge is how to create visuals. This is exactly why you need HR visual communication tools like Venngage.
“Sometimes, I know I need a visual, but I do not know what it is. These (visual communication) tools can provide some better options to help us find the right way to present the information.
Filiz Azktan, Organizational Development Consultant
Visual communication tools provide you with pre-designed templates to create HR infographics, charts, reports, presentations and policies.
Venngage for HR
Visual communication should not come from just one team — it has to be embedded into the company’s processes to build a unified workspace culture. Venngage, an infographics design tool, helps you build
It has thousands of HR infographics templates that you can customize as per your requirements. You can create infographics, charts, reports, presentations, newsletters, surveys, checklists and a lot more with Venngage.
The drag-and-drop editor helps you edit templates easily, without any hassle. You can add a variety of icons, elements and images to streamline communication and other HR tasks.
Other tools for visual communication
You can also use tools like Canva, Piktochart, or Adobe Spark to enhance visual communication. Here are some unique use cases of these tools:
- Canva: Try its video editor to create professional videos and add animations.
- Piktochart: Upload documents and turn them into visuals.
- Adobe Spark: It is a graphic design tool that helps create content calendars.
Leverage visual communication to empower employees
Employee engagement and retention are probably the toughest challenges for HRs in the modern world. One of the major causes for these challenges is lack of efficient communication. However, visual communication is slowly changing the narrative, helping HR managers connect better with employees.
Wondering how to implement visual communication in the workplace? Venngage can help. You can use Venngage’s HR infographic maker and free HR templates to share complex information, engage employees, and inform them.
