A guide to Meaningfully Connect - Research (Part One)
By Evelyn Jackson (CEO)
A connection between employees and an organisation is meaningful when it is built with intent, insight and authenticity. Follow our 5-step approach to ensure a meaningful connection is both well established and maintained as part of your internal communications strategy. This is no small task! But it is achievable and organisations that invest in and nurture a meaningful connection with employees will reap the rewards.
Corporate Crayon’s five-step approach to create an effective employee communications strategy that creates a meaningful connection.
We have broken down the steps on how to meaningfully connect with employees into a three-part series. Part One is our Research process including the definition of meaningful connection. Part Two takes the learnings from the research phase to plan an effective employee communications strategy that is aligned with the whole organisation. Part Three pulls the groundwork together to build and execute an employee communications strategy with considered design to meaningfully connect with your team.
Defining meaningful connection
We define ‘meaningful connection’ as connecting employees to the work they do, an organisation’s goals (such as vision and mission), culture (such as values), each other as colleagues, and the wider community that the business is a part of. In a nutshell, it’s the meaningful alignment between the organisation and the people who are part of it.
Connection feels meaningful to employees when it is authentic, relevant and purposeful. For connection to be meaningful to an organisation, it must be a driver and lever to achieve its vision, mission and strategic goals. And often it is seen by increased employee engagement and productivity.
Organisations that harness a meaningful connection with employees enjoy a more energised culture, higher engagement, lower churn and increased productivity.
With the definition of meaningful connection and its importance now clear, we can move on to how to create it. In the first ‘Discovery’ step of our approach, we aim to uncover the ‘unknown’ that exists and bring it to life so that others can discover it. Under the lens of how to meaningfully connect with employees, this refers to research: investigate and conduct diagnosis in order to understand and analyse.
Our goal is to understand who your employee audiences are, as well as how they perceive the organisation they work for and communications they receive. To understand how communications can positively impact employee motivation and effort. By taking the time to understand your employees, you can identify the gap between the current communications experience and the ideal one – therefore enabling you to communicate in a way that fosters a meaningful connection between your organisation and its employees.
Discover the inner workings of your organisation and people
1) Understand your audience
Understanding the ‘make-up’ of your team helps you to know your audience and understand what drives them, what they value, and how they interact and engage with your organisation. Everyone is driven by different goals, as much as they are different in terms of gender, age, work environment, role, time zones and languages spoken. The deeper your understanding of who your employees are, and their differences as well as similarities, the more effective your internal, and external, employee communications strategy will be.
2) Understand your organisation
Clearly communicated business goals and objectives can unite a team and drive growth. Speak to various senior leaders in the business (leadership team, board of directors, stakeholders and team leads) to understand what the organisation's mission, vision, values and strategic goals are. Consider what their communications needs are and what they believe the best employee communications approach is to deliver their desired message. What is it they want to communicate, why? And how do they feel comfortable about doing so? We often find that a facilitated leadership or stakeholder meeting is a great way to uncover these findings as it’s led by an external, unbiased party.
The next part of this step is to speak to your employees. Our goal here is to understand how they feel about their current employee communications experience with the organisation and what their desired experience would look like. What channels and types of communication resonate with them; what makes them feel connected to the organisation? What doesn’t land and why? What frustrates them?
Here are two ways to collect rich employee insights we have found to be effective:
Employee focus groups: the collection of qualitative data to engage with your employees in a way that delivers unique insights and ideas you haven’t heard before.
A targeted employee survey: the collection of quantitative data gives you an anonymous, and therefore honest and authentic, understanding of your employees. This can include communication samples as well as user experience questions that support your communication objectives.
3) Carry out an employee communications audit
Understanding what resonates with employees, and even more importantly, what doesn’t, is critical in the development of your communications strategy.
Complete an audit of the communications channels and tactics currently in place, as well as the people who are receiving these communications:
Analyse the results of any digital employee communications channels: newsletter open rates, engagement rates on Teams/Slack, webinar attendance, award nominations.
Set benchmarks for your current goals to measure future success: employee engagement, internal NPS, retention and business performance.
Final thoughts
The greater the insight, the more effective the output will be. By getting a deeper understanding of your organisation and the people who drive it forward, you can create an internal communications strategy that both meaningfully connects and delivers results.
Research is just the beginning to building Meaningful Connection. In Part Two of our Meaningful Connection series, we will share how to transform the research findings into an effective employee communications strategy.
How Corporate Crayon Can Help
We are an end-to-end agency that helps organisations with research, strategy, development, and implementation of employee communications solutions. Combining our creative talent expertise and a flexible approach, we can support you at any stage of your journey.
Corporate Crayon is also a proud partner of Staffbase – a leading provider of Employee Communications Platforms worldwide. Enabling organisations to reach all employees and ease accessibility.
To find out more about our employee communications solutions, get in touch with us today.