At PepsiCo, Projekt noted that their communication strategies are complicated by the fact that their 280,000 workers are a mix of essential front-line workers delivering products to businesses and grocery stores, factory workers, and knowledge workers who have transitioned to the work-from-home environment. Each group is faced with its own challenges, and the company faced with creating communications specific to those needs.

Joining Projekt were Margaret-Ann Cole, global talent leader at Porter Novelli, and Patrick O'Connell, head of marketing and communications at KONE, an international elevator and engineering firm. The different experiences of these companies provide some useful insights for those in other industries as they put together their employee communication strategies.

"We've tried to leverage what already exists," O'Connell said. "There's this body of thought that we should try something new. But this is probably not the time."

Rather, he said, focus on leveraging existing channels of communication. "We use a basic email push. It used to happen weekly. Now we're doing it daily."

The panelists provided several other tips to leverage existing communication tools, as well as incorporate new solutions.

Consider your audience

Employees going to work every day, in a retail setting, factory or other situation that exposes them to the public and potential COVID-19 infection are going to have very different concerns than those working from home.

"At the very beginning of the crisis, we set up a simple email box for people to ask questions," Projekt said. "We started to see questions coming in that formed the basis of communication. We need a travel policy, a safety policy. We had a lot of stuff going on on the manufacturing side, and we had to start putting new practices in that we hadn't been used to. The questions helped us understand what was on people's minds and what content we needed to deliver."

Not only does the content need to be tailored to the audience, but the delivery, as well. "For each of those audiences, it's slightly different," O'Connell said of KONE's messaging. "For work-from-home, it's a little more robust, more rich items, such as video blogs. For our frontline folks who are largely mobile, the idea there is short, simple blasts. A safety reminder or an important change or process. Those are the ways we're thinking of those two different audiences in a similar way."

Keep a finger on the pulse

The questions your employees have today weren't the same ones they had a week ago, nor will they be the same next week. "As the crisis changed throughout the world, the information employees needed was very different," Projekt said. "We built a website around PepsiCo and coronavirus, FAQ to help our people to deal with what was going on. We also tried to really focus on bringing the information to our people that they need the most."

One of the company's initial efforts was an "Ask the doctor" series, but now they're getting more questions about personal finance, managing stress, and coping with mental health issues.

"When people are working from home, they still have a whole host of different issues," Cole added. "Working parents, caregivers who have dependents. This has been an important moment for us to make sure we're providing benefits and tools for them."

Get creative

While leveraging previous communication techniques can be useful, it's not always possible, especially when social distancing is at play. "Our leaders at the local sector started to do a lot of regular meetings," Projekt said. "Our manufacturers have morning shift meetings and they had to consider how to continue to do those but do them safely, how to transition the shifts safely."

KONE faced a similar issue when the company's new CEO started this spring; he could no longer make the rounds to meet his employees and customers in person as planned. "We've turned that into a chat with him," O'Connell said. "It's a cross-section of about 15 employees who are randomly selected. We're programming it in a way where it's allowing him to share what's going on from a leadership perspective. What he's engaged in at a corporate level and how he's working with direct reports. We're summarizing that as a 'journal entry' of sorts that goes into our daily communication."

At Porter Novelli, the coronavirus pandemic is just accelerating a transition that was already on the horizon. "Before this all happened, one of the things we'd been considering is a complete flexible workplace," Cole said. Work when you want, where you want, as long as you get the work done. The key to that is not so much people being out of the office, but when you are in the office, how you create that sense of community."

Panelists discussed how podcasts, webinars, and even social media campaigns were being used to drive engagement across their organizations. "One of the things that we've done is sharing content across the organization," Projekt said. "We've started to do a lot of things locally to thank our frontline workers: signs, selfies, videos. In some markets, we got celebs to record messages."

Make the commitment

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the webinar was not to let up on your communication efforts. "I hope that our employees look back on this and have a really positive experience and engagement and connection," Projekt said. "How are they going to feel coming out of this? Are we still as engaged then as we are now?"

The reality is that for many, the workplace will never go back to the way it was. "We've immersed ourselves in this new reality, and maybe some of that doesn't go away," O'Connell said. "There are lots of different ways for salespeople to productively interact over Zoom, and they like it. It gives them a lot more focused time."

Now that employees have been introduced to new avenues of communication, not only will some find they like using them, but some will come to expect them as the new workplace standard. "We've already set the bar really high," Cole said. "The interactions, the transparency, the authenticity, how we're talking to clients and employees. That's not going to change. People are going to now expect that."

Read more: 

• Business continuity & social distancing: 3 tips for transitioning to a work-from-home model
• Managers need a crash-course in work-from-home skills
• 7 solutions to sales problems caused by COVID-19 social distancing