In a world where trust is more in demand than ever, how can we build that necessary high degree of strategic buy-in with our employees? After all, if we want them to buy into our strategy, we need to win hearts and minds to encourage them to take the journey with us.
Great communication relies upon trust, and that relies on having a structured, well-thought-out delivery plan that maps the business strategy and its milestones throughout the year. For example, consider these elements of your strategic process:
1. Communication channels
There are plenty of communication channels to choose from, so consider those which will touch all of your employees in some way. For example, digital communication channels are ideal for home-workers and can encompass emails, intranet updates, newsletters and video – but you may also have workers that don’t particularly engage with tech in their roles; perhaps face-to-face or delivery staff. So be sure to offer in-person communication options too, such as briefings and team huddles. Map out your channels and check that they touch every worker, and in a variety of ways. When you have mapped your channels, assess who is responsible for them, and audit their effectiveness. For example, do you have a weekly team briefing that is cascaded across your business? Does everyone currently get it? Find out and build this measurement into your work.
Get out there!
One key point – make sure directors go around to your different business locations and don’t forget the night shift if you have one! All too often businesses simply focus on communicating to the easy win staff – those based at the head office! Get out on the road, go and visit your satellite locations and really engage with your staff.
What will this look like? Rolling up your sleeves, bringing a coffee (ideally for the team too!), sitting amongst your workers and stimulating an open, honest – and enjoyable – conversation in an environment where everyone knows they can speak freely. Listen to difficult comments – in fact, encourage people to be really honest – and not only will you find out what is REALLY happening on the ground of your business, but you will build support, trust and genuine engagement from your workforce as they get to know you – and your senior colleagues – as real people, rather than just faces gracing the corporate literature.
2. Inclusion
Formal top-down messaging is likely to be viewed with some scepticism, especially if it has been copywritten to death by PR people! So make your messaging authentic by including employees across your organisation, especially your subject matter experts. When you need to make an update on a certain functional or technical workstream, hand it over to the right person for the job – no matter their level of seniority in the organisation.
The fact is, some of your biggest experts are likely to be your youngest and your most junior staff. Think about that front-line customer service advisor in your call centre who really knows what is bothering your customers right now or your new IT apprentice who can instantly tell you about systems downtime and pinch-points on your e-commerce channels.
Get these employees involved, on board to champion the strategy themselves. Naturally, you will need to equip them with the training and tools needed to brief messages on to their own teams. Colleagues will support and encourage them, and love hearing messages from ‘one of their own’. As part of this, create a culture of two-way communication, so that thoughts and feedback are returned back up to the top of your organisation to create a valuable feedback loop.
3. Consistency
To help you manage communication, you should invest in a strategic process. A tool like the Balanced Scorecard has long been the preferred methodology for thousands of businesses worldwide, for nearly three decades. As a comprehensive strategic management system, the tool naturally incorporates communication into its structure. Simple, intuitive and yet highly powerful it allows businesses to objectively define:
- How well they are communicating their goals
- How daily work is being aligned across the organisation to the strategy
- Whether projects, services and products are being prioritised according to the strategy
- Whether progress is being measured and monitored in the right way (e.g. against strategic targets.)
Communication, like strategy development, isn’t an ad-hoc activity that can be rolled out on the fly. It needs to be well defined and thought out, with updates given on a regular basis to the right people – from the right people – using the right channels. Furthermore, its success needs to be measured and the process continually refined and improved.
