Hands up if your employee engagement survey debrief has ever NOT included a discussion on communications? No one? Not anybody? We’re not surprised.
Communicating effectively with employees is critical to driving engagement with your organisation’s vision, purpose, strategy and culture.
A gap in your internal communications is like a leaking tap, where critical information flows down the drain never to reach its intended audience.
How do you spot and stop the dripping tap before your corporate strategy becomes a total wash out?
Here are three questions that will help you diagnose your internal communications weak spots.
Step 1: Assess awareness. Can your employees recall important information like your vision, values and top-line strategic objectives?
More than just a memory test, assessing awareness of key information is the first step in assessing the effectiveness of your internal communications. While your communication channels need to do much more than push out one-way messages, building broad awareness of important information remains a critical function. A lack of awareness suggests your top line messages are not getting cut-through. This is a problem, but also one that is usually easy to solve with an audit of your internal communications channels. Make sure you consider all the communications channels that your employees see regularly – this could be digital, physical, formal or informal. Observe the messages pushed out through these channels over a few weeks or a month and see what it tells you about the information your employees are actually consuming. If your vision and strategic objectives are competing for attention with pet-of-the-month photos, you can see how things might go awry. Revisit your internal communications framework to ensure channels are fit-for-purpose and employees understand which platform to use for which purpose.
Step 2: Assess understanding. Can your employees explain how their role contributes to your corporate strategy or how they connect with the purpose or values of your organisation?
If your employees know about your corporate strategy but fail to see how they contribute to it, this suggests a problem with your two-way communications channels. The most likely leak in this information flow is the line manager cascade. In large organisations in particular, frontline employees can report lower understanding of corporate strategy than senior leaders. In this situation, you will need to focus on supporting your middle managers, who are like the corporate version of the sandwich generation – balancing demands from senior leaders up the line and frontline employees down the line. It can be a tough gig. But good communications teams will partner with their people leaders as well as their people and culture teams to provide support, coaching and tools that ensure two-way communications with employees flow. Effective line manager and employee dialogues are one of the most powerful internal communications channels you can invest in.
Step 3: Assess engagement. Is your organisation actually making progress towards its strategy or desired culture?
If your one-way and two-way communications channels are working but you’re failing to see progress against your corporate strategy or culture objectives, then perhaps yours is not just a communications problem. When communications emerges as a theme in your employee engagement survey, implementing effective diagnostics will be vital to ensure you don’t waste time and resources on fixing the wrong problem. “We want better communication” does not necessarily equal “we want a new intranet”. Employee discussion groups can help unravel complexities and surface nuances that a five-minute survey cannot. Perhaps your employees are unclear on their role in the corporate strategy because of unclear accountabilities between functions. Perhaps they don’t have clear KPIs. Maybe employees don’t connect with your organisation’s values because they see a disconnect with behaviour. A mature internal communications function will be able to discern when a problem is there’s to fix and when they need to bring other functions to the table.
If you sense there is a leak in your internal communications flows, it can help to engage a professional corporate communications firm to help diagnose the problem. BBS Communications Group can assist your corporate communications team with a range of support including internal communications audits, leadership communications training or communication plans to drive engagement with your corporate strategy or cultural transformation programs.
Learn more about our corporate communications expertise or get in touch to discuss your communications challenges and opportunities.
