Driving Effective Employee Communications

The “Sunday drive” is an old-fashioned concept. The family piled into the car and Dad would then drive around aimlessly. The idea was to see nearby sites with which the family was previously unfamiliar. It would start with a whimsical notion of a quiet country road, just seeing where it would take them, and the adventures, scenes, and surprises it might bring. 
      In these days of high gas prices and little free time, however, it is a rare if not altogether forgotten pastime for a quiet weekend. Just the same, imagine jumping in your car and backing out of the driveway without a destination. At the end of the driveway, do you go left or right? And once you’ve made that decision, then what?
      Yet some people in business today operate their employee communications function in much the same manner. Their “cars” are the tools and channels at their disposal to communicate with employees: newsletters, executive emails, and speeches delivered at town hall-type meetings. They create 12-month schedules for what they will write about when.
      Just because they have those tools and schedules, their default mode is to use them to deliver often-irrelevant information to employees.
      What is frequently missing, however, is a sense of the organization’s destination, like that meandering Sunday drive. So employee communications rambles around without a consistent set of relevant messages, without links to the direction in which the organization needs to go, without a sense of what employees need, ultimately toward no coherent end.

The Communications Plan is your GPS 

Effective employee communications requires a plan tied to the realities of the business and where its leadership is driving it. Unlike that Sunday drive without an end in mind, the business’ ultimate destination determines whether you figuratively go right or left.
      An employee communications plan is like a GPS, guiding decisions and ensuring that the right information gets to the right people at the right time through means that reach them effectively. With your destination programmed in, your GPS will guide you via the most direct route.
      There is a practical way to develop an appropriate communications plan for any given set of circumstances. But it requires some work, serious thought, and analysis. Nevertheless, the initial steps are always the same, regardless of the circumstances.

• What is your objective? A typical objective is to engage your internal audience in the challenges and opportunities the organization faces. This requires that they receive relevant and timely information that will help them see how what they do every day can help the organization surmount the challenges and take full advantage of the opportunities.
• Who is your audience? The people that work in your company are not a faceless monolith. Internal audiences are as diverse as external ones. Are you an international bank or are you in manufacturing? Are your employees unionized in multiple plants, or field salespeople working on commission spread across a continent selling medical devices? Define the audience both specifically and generally, in ways that mean something to you and your management team.
• What do you know about your audience? Learn as much as possible about your internal audience. Again, consider their position within the company, their relative sophistication and their responsibilities. What you communicate must be relevant and actionable. How you deliver information should take into account their preferred means of receiving information, be it email, videos, face-to-face meetings with their supervisors, or some combination. Don’t overlook whether employees can access online information readily. Factory floor workers or retail store salespeople, for example, can’t rely on a daily intranet update for the latest company news.
• What should they know, and what should they do with that knowledge? Perhaps the most critical series of questions cuts to core of employee communications. What is it that you want employees to know, and why? What do you want them to do as a result of getting your communication, and why? If your communications are of the “FYI” ilk, you’re probably wasting everyone’s time — while neutralizing the importance of future critical communications in a “boy who cries wolf” manner.
• How will the effort be measured? It’s one thing to make plans but still another to establish the means by which we measure the outcome to determine whether they achieved their objectives. So a core element of the plan must be measurement, which is more than just a return-on-investment exercise. It also helps guide future planning, enabling you to assess the ways that the plan fell short and where it worked best, thereby helping you learn important lessons for future such efforts.

Answering these questions will put you in a better position to develop an appropriate and effective communications plan consisting of what (content), when (timing), how (through what vehicles) and, specifically, to whom (target audiences).
      In short, the key to successful employee communications lies in fully understanding your audience, what they need to know and why, and what they should do with the information you give them.