A guide to Meaningfully Connect - Content (Part Three)
By Evelyn Jackson (CEO)
In this final guide in our three-part series on developing meaningful connection with employees, we cover the key creative and implementation steps to bring your strategy to life. The creation of engaging content, the creative use of clear and consistent branding in line with a simple implementation strategy are the final pieces of your internal communications puzzle.
To recap…
When you build a meaningful connection with employees, you genuinely connect them and the work they do with the wider organisation’s goals, culture and community. And this guarantees high performing employees and a culture that thrives. It takes work, but the investment of time and resources to nurture this connection can not only lead to increased productivity and revenue, it can also improve engagement rates, reduce churn and positively impact company culture.
Forbes recently found that highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability and meaningful connection is one of the critical elements for higher engagement.
Part One of our series focused on the core insights you need to really understand your audience and the organisation’s goals. This is the ‘Discovery’ research stage of our approach. Part Two then defined your internal communications strategy and plan with the classic pillars of who, what, when, where, why and how. These are our ‘Define’ strategy and ‘Human’ planning stages of our approach.
Corporate Crayon’s five-step approach to create an effective employee communications strategy that creates a meaningful connection.
In this, Part Three of the series, we pull all of this hard work together into your creative design, content and strategy application. Our final ‘Considered Design’ and ‘Simple Application’ stages of our approach.
Considered Design
The fourth step of our Corporate Crayon approach to internal communications centres on considered design. Knowing what you need to say and to whom is only half the battle; thoughtful branding, asset design and messaging are all elements that pull your strategy together.
It’s critical that employee communications are designed with intent and purpose in order to meaningfully connect with your audience. As captured in Staffbase’s latest blog on 2024 internal communication trends, communication design should also be honest and human. This builds security and trust between your team and the business.
Here are the key elements of considered design:
Your messaging matrix: This is important as it ensures that your messaging is consistent no matter what channel or asset is used. It is even more critical if you have various stakeholders in the organisation that are creating or communicating your strategy.
Clear Tone of Voice: Every strong brand has Tone of Voice guidance outlined in their brand guidelines. As mentioned earlier, being human is a key way to meaningfully connect with employees. By applying a consistent and clear Tone of Voice throughout your communications, it helps your team to trust, consume and engage content.
Branding: Branding is the pillar that meaningfully connects your audience and aligns your strategic objectives with your organisation. It brings a one-dimensional message or concept to life with the clever use of colour, fonts, creative and visual storytelling. And makes your communications personalised to your company and your audience ensuring adoption, engagement and understanding.
What is the one thing that you need to pull these elements together? Consistency.
Whether applying these elements to visual branding, written or verbal communication, consistency is crucial to achieve your communication goals.
The best way to achieve consistency is by creating tools such as corporate brand guidelines for branding and applying these guidelines to your communications playbook. This then pulls everything together - messaging, tone of voice, branding and asset design, to create a cohesive, clear and consistent communications strategy for your audience and stakeholders. Stuck on what your unique Tone of Voice or Brand is? Our team would love to help.
Simple Application
You have made it this far! After all of the hard work researching, planning and building your strategy, you are finally ready to consider the implementation of your employee communications plan. This step is all about execution and striving for simplicity in your application and processes for organisational efficiency and effectiveness.
Consider the application of your content - copy, imagery, design, videography, events - every single content pillar and channel you have built into your plan. Ensure you review various content pieces together to ensure consistency of look, feel and application. Revisit your audience needs to match and respond to for guaranteed engagement.
Test and validate
Before pushing ‘go’ on your communications strategy, it’s important to loop back around to your stakeholders, employees and colleagues. Test your content and all assets to ensure it is clear, that available reporting gives the insight needed and that the message resonates. Respond to the audience testing and rework where necessary. Give your leaders and key stakeholders a preview of the communications strategy and content so they can feel connected to the process and support wider team engagement once it is live.
EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY
Finally, consider technology as your implementation friend. Look at communications technology that:
is simple for your audience (look back to your audience mapping and consider each target group)
helps you as an internal communications lead be more efficient and effective
provides flexibility for other stakeholders to deliver comms in a consistent manner
and gives you the data and insights needed to measure success
Monitor results and optimise
Success - you have launched your strategy! Don’t forget that some of the best insight you can feed into your next programme is what you’ve learnt from what’s been done before. Review your objectives and KPIs, and map them against the results you are tracking. What have employees loved and loathed about the communications that are live? And most importantly, what can be done to optimise and improve on the work already done to generate better results? Don’t be afraid to tweak along the way. Revisiting content is critical to staying relevant and creating meaningful connection.
Final thoughts
Creating, harnessing and maintaining a meaningful connection with your employees takes work. Whilst our 5-step process may look simple, once you dive into the nuances of developing effective internal communications, you’ll find it’s not. The good news is that engaged, connected employees are the secret sauce for business success.
Is investing in internal communications that meaningfully connect your team with your business and its goals worth it? 100%.
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.
We are a proud partner of Staffbase. Staffbase is the fastest growing employee communications cloud, equipping many of the world’s leading companies with solutions to inspire every employee with motivating communication.
To find out more about our employee communications solutions, get in touch with us today.