A guide to Meaningfully Connect - Strategy (Part Two)
By Evelyn Jackson (CEO)
In Part Two of our ‘How to meaningfully connect with employees’ series, we discuss using the insights learned from Part One (Research) to define an effective internal communications strategy and plan that will achieve your organisation's goals while driving employee engagement. Stick with us! Yes, there are multiple steps to the process, but it will be worth it.
To recap…
Meaningful connection is all about connecting your employees and the work they do with an organisation’s goals, culture, and wider community.
Building this connection can deliver higher engagement rates, lower churn and improved productivity, just to name a few. To build a meaningful connection between your employees and your organisation, we recommend following our 5-step approach to developing, nurturing and maintaining it.
Corporate Crayon’s five-step approach to create an effective employee communications strategy that creates a meaningful connection.
In this, Part Two of the series, we focus on steps 2 and 3 in our process: Connection (Strategy) and Human (Planning). Critical in these steps are defining an effective internal communications strategy, a focus on building a defined audience and objectives, and content that will deliver on these outlined goals.
Define your internal communications strategy
Our objective here is to link the ambition of the organisation with the output required to build belief. This is achieved by crafting an internal communications strategy following these next steps.
1) Clearly define your ‘who’ and ‘why’
Being clear on who you are communicating with and why they should care is one of the most important parts of building an effective strategy. In Part One, you carried out research as to who your employees are and spoke with key stakeholders to understand their objectives.
With that insight in mind, create an audience breakdown of your employees. This enables you to see the different employee groupings you have, and align the right communications strategy to them. Groupings could include:
Remote, hybrid or onsite workers
Different departments and seniority
Languages spoken and time zones people work in
Generation
Access to technology - eg. a colleague who works in a warehouse might have less regular access to email.
Alongside ‘who’ you are communicating to, think about ‘who’ makes up your wider communications team. This group could include your key stakeholders such as team leaders, Executive Team, Marketing and Internal Communications.
Consider the business’s objectives and their application - how do we communicate these objectives so that our employees can understand and connect with them? Consider what language is used; a good place to start is simple, clear terminology with no acronyms or complex business terms.
For a team to feel meaningfully connected, they need to understand what they contribute and how they impact the success of the organisation.
This is a great time to build out your employee communications messaging matrix to ensure consistency.
2) The ‘how’ and ‘when’ of your strategy
Everyone engages with and consumes content in different ways. With the greater understanding you have of your audience, you can map the right content types and the channel they are executed on to their needs. Aligning the how and why of your communication to your employees, will give you the best chance of communications success.
3) Defining ‘what’ you are communicating
Look at your messaging matrix and goals and then consider these from the angle of different content pillars. Pillars could include business updates and initiatives, education and employment information. What these pillars are and the content that sits underneath them will require different content types. For example a business update might be effectively delivered as a formal announcement, whereas a change in a H&S Policy might be consumed easily as an e-learning module or cheat sheet. While this is simple to understand and do, it requires the attention and care to implement.
One strategy that we like to use to achieve this is to create a content map. We use our audience and user insights to map colleagues to the right content pillars - it’s a visual way to really understand what content connects with your team. You can then use this information to map out an appropriate communications frequency and timing to suit each audience and channel.
This is an example of how a content map could work:
Plan your internal communications strategy
It is important to consider how everything you have mapped so far informs your wider communications strategy. The planning phase involves thinking about the physical execution of your strategy and how you plan to measure its success.
For an internal communications plan, we recommended 12-18 months to allow for enough time to generate data/ results that can be analysed and optimised. So with that in mind, think about the metrics you will use and what data you need:
How will you measure the success of this strategy?
What metrics will advise stakeholders that their objectives have been met?
How will you collect this data?
When done right, an internal communications strategy can be hugely effective. It takes time to understand your audience and goals, create the plan, craft the messaging, build the creative, launch and measure its success.
That’s where a communications platform like Staffbase can support your efforts. A digital solution such as this to engage your employees can be an excellent way to manage the sheer volume of communications requirements and contributors. It also provides stakeholders the ability to create an interactive two-way comms channel to collect colleague engagement and metrics, therefore helping you to shape the future of communications in your organisation.
Final thoughts
By getting into the shoes of your audience, you can create an internal communications strategy that engages, connects and even delights your team. Taking the time to consider who your employees are and how and when they interact with content will deliver rewards once your strategy is launched.
Research, Strategy, and Planning lay the foundation for building Meaningful Connections. In Part Three of our Meaningful Connection series, we will share how to create impactful, engaging, and beautiful content to elevate your employee communication experience.
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.