Introduction
Messages is a feature that allows you to post a message to your employees, sent directly to their ESS Hub Inbox. Messages is a feature designed for mass communication across your organization as they are a great way to let your employees know of company-wide announcements or reminders. Messages can be set up to be sent to all employees, or they can be sent to specific employees based on their assigned Cost Center or Job Info.
This article will outline how to construct a message to send to your employees and maintain messages that have been already sent.
Creating a Message
To create a message to send to employees, navigate to the Messages tab within ESS Admin: Actions tab > ESS Admin > Messages.
Then, click the blue button that says "+ New Message".
You'll first be prompted to enter the following fields to set up your Message:
- Show Message Until - The date entered in this field will set the expiration date for how long this message will display within the employee's inbox.
- Subject Line - This will show as the Subject Line of the message within the employee's inbox.
- Body - This is where you construct the message you wish to send to your employees. Please note that you are also able to include pictures and embed URL's into your message as well. These can be a great way to supplement celebrational messages or company-wide announcements. You'll notice that there's a "Preview message" button that you can click to preview your message to see how it will show for the employee. This can be helpful to see how pictures and links will appear to the employee within the message.
- Post message for - This is how you select the employee you wish to have this message sent to. You can send this message to all employees, or specific employees based on their assigned Cost Center or Job Info. You also have the ability to "Notify Employee Via Email" that a message has been sent to their ESS Hub Inbox. This will only send a notification to the employee via email that a message has been posted. It will not send the actual message itself.
- Require Acknowledgement - Indicated whether the message should require acknowledgement from the employee. By requiring the employee to acknowledge, the message will be the first thing that pops up for the employee upon logging into their ESS Hub.
After clicking "Save", the message is now posted to the employee's ESS Hub. If the message requires acknowledgement, it will be the first thing that the employee sees upon logging into their account. Then from there it will be saved within the employee's Inbox until the message's expiration date as the employee does not have the ability to delete it.
If you elected to notify you employees via email, this will be what the email looks like:
Maintaining Messages
After a message has been configured and sent to employees, the message can be found within the Messages section for you to monitor. There, you are able to maintain the message if any corrections need to be made and also view who has viewed and acknowledged the message.
For each message that has been created and sent out, you will be able to see the subject line of the message, the date range that the message will be posted for, and a headcount of employees that have either acknowledged or viewed the message. Should you need to make any edits to the message, or delete it entirely, you can click on the three-dot menu located in the top right corner of the message.
To view the specific employees who has viewed or acknowledged the message, click on the number representing the amount of employees who have either viewed or acknowledged the message.
Here you are able to see the specific employees who have acknowledged the message and the time stamp of when they did. If several employees have acknowledged the message, there is a search bar available for you to search the name of the employee you are looking for.
Once a message expires, it will automatically go from an "Active" message to a "Not Active" message; you will not have to delete it. This means that the message will no longer be listed within the ESS Hub Inbox for employees to see. It is recommended that you store expired messages as "Not Active" instead of deleting them altogether, as this allows you to save the message for future use and maintain a record of the messaging that has been sent to employees.
From the Message section, you are able to toggle between Active and Not Active messages.
To activate an expired message, click the three-dot menu and select "Edit". Then you will want to change the expiration date of the message to a later date. Before saving, you do have the ability once more to edit the subject and body of the message, who the message will be sent to, and whether the message should require acknowledgment.