The number is striking and the implication is direct. Research by Gallup found that globally, only 20% of employees are engaged at work. That means 80% of the global workforce – and a very significant proportion of Australian employees – are showing up, completing what is required, and contributing something far short of what they are capable of.
This is not primarily a talent problem. It is a communication problem.
Employees who are not engaged are almost always employees who do not feel genuinely connected to their organisation – to its purpose, to its strategy, to the people they work alongside, and to the specific contribution their role makes to something that matters. And that disconnection is, in the vast majority of cases, a product of how the organisation communicates with them.
Not whether it communicates. How. The difference between communication that informs and communication that genuinely connects is the difference between an engaged workforce and a merely present one.
At Corporate Crayon, we are an employee communication strategy partner working with Australian organisations to build the communication frameworks, research foundations, and creative execution that turn 80% disengagement into something genuinely different.
How do you effectively communicate with employees in Australian organisations?
Effective employee communication in Australian organisations requires four steps: discovering what genuinely matters to your employees – their motivators, personal values, and communication preferences; connecting employees to the organisation’s strategy so they understand how their specific contribution advances shared goals; creating and implementing a communication strategy that is timed, targeted, and specific to different employee cohorts; and reviewing regularly to ensure the strategy remains relevant as employees’ needs and preferences evolve.
Key Takeaways:
- Research by Gallup found that globally only 20% of employees are engaged at work – a figure Corporate Crayon believes can be meaningfully improved through a strong employee communication strategy with meaningful connection at its centre
- Effective employee communication starts with genuine research: understanding what motivates employees, what their personal values are, and how they prefer to give and receive communication
- Connecting employees to the organisation’s strategy – helping them understand how their specific role contributes to organisational goals – is one of the most powerful engagement levers available
- Research from Gartner (2019) shows that helping employees understand how their work connects to the goals of others and the organisation can improve performance by up to 10%
- Only 20% of employees are engaged globally – effective communication strategy is the primary lever for improving this
- 4 steps: discover what matters, connect to strategy, create and implement, review regularly
- Timing and targeting are as important as content quality
- Connecting employees to strategy can improve performance by up to 10% (Gartner 2019)
- Corporate Crayon helps Australian organisations build employee communication strategies that genuinely connect – start the conversation today
Why Employee Communication Is an Engagement Strategy, Not an Information Strategy
The most common mistake in employee communications for Australian organisations is treating it as an information distribution challenge. How do we get the right information to the right people at the right time? This is a useful question. It is not the right question.
The right question is: how do we build genuine connection between our employees and the organisation they work for? That question produces very different answers – and very different communication strategies.
Information distribution produces newsletters, intranet updates, and all-hands communications. Connection produces trust, belonging, understanding, and the felt experience of being genuinely valued and genuinely part of something worth contributing to.
Employee communication planning that starts from the connection question – and builds backwards to the specific channels, formats, timing, and content that create connection for the specific employees being reached – consistently produces better engagement outcomes than planning that starts from the information distribution question and works forward.
The distinction matters enormously for Australian organisations dealing with hybrid working, multigenerational workforces, and talent markets where employees have more choice about where they direct their energy than ever before.
Read More About: Internal Communications: Why Knowing Your Audience Changes Everything
Step 1: Discover What Really Matters
The first step in building an effective employee communication strategy is the one most Australian organisations abbreviate or skip entirely: genuine research into what actually matters to their employees.
Not what HR believes matters to employees. Not what the last engagement survey summary suggested. What employees themselves – when asked in an environment of genuine psychological safety – say about what motivates them, what they value, and how they prefer to give and receive communication.
Employee motivator research that goes deeper than a digital survey – through focus groups, one-to-one conversations, and appreciative inquiry that surfaces the nuanced, individual-level insights that quantitative tools miss – gives Australian organisations the authentic foundation for a communication strategy that genuinely connects.
The three questions to start with are:
- What motivates your employees? Common motivators include collaboration, development, recognition, and purpose – but the specific weighting varies significantly by team, role, generation, and individual. Understanding your specific workforce’s motivator landscape shapes everything from the tone of communications to the recognition frameworks you design.
- What are their personal values? Employees have personal values alongside the organisational values they are asked to align with. Understanding these – and finding the genuine points of connection between personal and organisational values – is what makes communication feel authentic rather than corporate.
- How do they prefer to give and receive communication? Written, verbal, visual, face-to-face, digital, synchronous, asynchronous – the preferences vary widely and are strongly influenced by role, environment, and working arrangement. Australian frontline workers have very different communication access and preferences from corporate office workers. A communication strategy that ignores this produces significant cohorts who are effectively unreachable.
At a minimum, Australian organisations should invest in engagement surveys, focus groups, and one-to-one meetings as their discovery baseline.
Step 2: Connect Employees to Your Strategy
The second step is the one that most directly addresses the engagement gap. Connecting employees to the organisation’s strategy – helping them understand not just what the strategy is, but how their specific role contributes to its delivery – is one of the highest-leverage communication investments available.
Employees who feel they add value to the organisation are more likely to be highly engaged and to put in discretionary effort. That connection between individual contribution and organisational purpose is not automatic. It does not happen because the CEO sent an all-hands video explaining the new strategy. It happens when employees can see, specifically and personally, how what they do every day connects to the goals their organisation is pursuing.
Employee communications design agency thinking applied to strategy communication – translating organisational direction into the specific, visually compelling, personally resonant content that makes the strategy feel relevant to each employee cohort – is the creative execution that bridges the gap between strategy and connection.
Research from Gartner (2019) quantified this connection precisely: helping employees understand how their work connects to the goals of others and the organisation can improve performance by up to 10%. For Australian organisations managing significant headcount, a 10% performance improvement produced by better communication strategy represents a substantial and measurable return.
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Corporate Crayon helps Australian organisations build the employee communication strategies that connect people to purpose – and produce the engagement and performance outcomes that follow. |
Step 3: Create and Implement Your Employee Communication Strategy
With genuine research foundation and strategic alignment established, the third step is building and deploying the actual communication strategy.
The communication strategy should serve a clear purpose: connecting employees to the work that needs to be carried out so they are inspired to deliver. Not informed. Inspired.
This distinction in ambition produces a different approach. Informed employees receive accurate, timely information. Inspired employees receive communication that connects their work to something they genuinely care about – to a purpose that resonates with their personal values, to colleagues they feel genuine connection with, to a contribution that feels worth making.
How we support employee communications at Corporate Crayon specifically addresses the gap between information and inspiration – building the communication strategies that produce the second outcome by starting with genuine research into what the first step has revealed about your specific workforce.
Timing is a critical and often underestimated dimension of the communication strategy. For Australian organisations where many employees work virtually or flexibly, the question of when to communicate – as much as how and what – determines whether the communication lands or gets lost. Overcommunicating at high-frequency intervals produces noise. Undercommunicating in periods of change produces uncertainty and anxiety. The timing architecture of the communication strategy needs to be designed as deliberately as the content.
Read More About: Meaningful Employee Connection Starts With Research: The Discovery Foundation
Step 4: Review Regularly
The fourth step is the one that most separates communication strategies that remain effective over time from those that become irrelevant. Regular review and recalibration, guided by a strong communication strategy and support from a communication strategy consultancy Australia.
Employees change. Their needs shift with life stage, with the organisational context, with the external environment, and with the accumulated experience of working for the organisation over time. A communication strategy designed around what your workforce needed in 2022 is not necessarily the right strategy for what they need in 2026, particularly without updated internal communications insights.
Regular review means returning to the discovery phase periodically – checking what has changed, what is working, and where the strategy needs to be updated to remain genuinely relevant and impactful. It also means monitoring the quantitative data: what channels are employees actually using, what content is generating the responses that indicate genuine connection rather than passive receipt, often supported by a communications research consultancy Australia.
For Australian organisations investing in communication as an engagement strategy, the review cycle is not a quality assurance step. It is the mechanism through which the investment stays current and the return keeps compounding, strengthened by an internal communications consultancy Australia.
Corporate Crayon – Employee Communication Strategy Consultancy, Australia
Corporate Crayon is a strategic communications consultancy based in Australia. We work with medium to large Australian organisations to build the employee communication strategies – grounded in genuine research into employee motivators and preferences – that create meaningful connection between employees and their organisations. Our four-step approach (discover, connect, create, review) produces communication strategies that genuinely engage rather than merely inform. We partner with Chief People Officers, HR Directors, Internal Communications Directors, and People and Culture leaders across Australian organisations.
Conclusion
The four steps – discover, connect, create, review – provide the framework for closing that gap. Genuine research into what employees actually need. Strategic communication that connects individual contribution to meaningful organisational purpose. Timed, targeted, channel-appropriate deployment. And regular recalibration as the workforce evolves.
At Corporate Crayon, we help Australian organisations build this. If you want to know more about our employee communications expertise, or to start a conversation about your specific communication challenges, we are ready. Start the conversation today
FAQs
How do you effectively communicate with employees in Australian organisations?
Effective employee communication in Australian organisations requires four steps: discovering what genuinely matters to employees through research into their motivators, personal values, and communication preferences; connecting employees to the organisation’s strategy so they understand how their contribution advances shared goals; creating and implementing a communication strategy that is timed, targeted, and specific to different employee cohorts; and reviewing the strategy regularly to ensure it remains relevant as employees’ needs and preferences evolve over time.
What is the Gallup research on employee engagement and communication?
Research by Gallup found that globally only 20% of employees are engaged at work. Corporate Crayon believes this figure can be meaningfully improved through a strong employee communication strategy that places meaningful connection at its centre – replacing the information distribution approach with a genuine connection approach that addresses what employees actually care about, in the way they prefer to receive it, connected to the organisational strategy and purpose they are contributing to.
What three questions should Australian organisations ask when discovering employee communication needs?
The three foundational questions are: what motivates your employees (their specific motivator landscape – collaboration, development, recognition, purpose – which varies by team, role, generation, and individual); what are their personal values (the genuine values alongside organisational ones, and where authentic connections between the two exist); and how do they prefer to give and receive communication (written, verbal, visual, face-to-face, digital, synchronous, or asynchronous – which varies significantly by role and working arrangement).
How does connecting employees to strategy improve performance?
Research from Gartner (2019) found that helping employees understand how their work connects to the goals of others and the organisation can improve performance by up to 10%. The mechanism is engagement – employees who can see how their specific contribution advances the organisational goals they understand and care about bring more sustained effort and more creative energy than those who perform their role in strategic isolation. Communication strategy that builds this connection is a performance investment, not just an engagement investment.
Why is timing important in employee communication strategy?
Timing shapes whether communication lands or gets lost. Overcommunicating at high frequency produces noise – employees filter it out rather than engaging with it. Undercommunicating in periods of change produces uncertainty and anxiety that undermines wellbeing and performance. For Australian organisations where hybrid and flexible working have reduced the shared rhythms that once made informal communication naturally timed, the timing architecture of the communication strategy needs to be designed as deliberately as the content and channel.
How does Corporate Crayon help Australian organisations improve employee communication?
Corporate Crayon is an employee communication strategy consultancy working with medium to large Australian organisations. We help organisations build communication strategies grounded in genuine research – through employee focus groups, surveys, and one-to-one interviews – that create meaningful connection between employees and their organisations. We develop the content, design the channels, time the communications, and build the review frameworks that keep strategies current and effective. We partner with Chief People Officers, HR Directors, and Internal Communications Directors across Australian organisations.
