Implementing internal communication methods to enhance employee engagement seems straightforward.
Leadership shares updates, and employees absorb information. However, traditional top-down plans often result in apathetic audiences.
This guide reveals techniques for crafting participative plans where people feel invested in receiving and responding to messaging.
Where Do Traditional Plans Fail?
Typical organizational communications check the necessary boxes:
- CEO video addresses
- Monthly all-hands meetings
- Posters on breakroom walls
But do these inform and engage employees? Often, no. Common pitfalls include:
- Lack of relevance: Leaders relay corporate news without connective tissue to individual roles. Employees wonder, “How does this apply to my objectives?”
- Information overload: Inboxes overflow with a barrage of disjointed messages across multiple platforms—relevance and retention plummet.
- Limited participation: Planners broadcast static messages through prescribed channels, allowing little room for feedback. Employees feel talked at rather than engaged in an evolving dialogue.
Simply relaying information internally checks an HR compliance box. But message saturation means few announcements receive mindshare.
Rethinking communications to emphasize relevance, consolidation, and participation becomes critical.
Connect Through Shared Purpose
All organizations share (or at least claim to) unified missions, visions, and values that define “why we do what we do.”
These present opportunities for anchoring communications around shared purposes rather than isolated business targets.
To leverage this:
- Spotlight purpose in all messaging: Whether launching products or reporting revenue, connect announcements to organizational purpose as the guiding “North Star” to reveal higher meaning.
- Localize relevance by having team leaders translate headlines into implications for each group’s functions specifically.
By consistently tying communications to aspirational purpose and pragmatic relevance, organizational missions evolve from posters on walls to integral parts of operations.
Consolidate Channels
Another obstacle organizations face is fragmented communications flowing across disjointed platforms.
- Corporate newsletters
- Team Slack channels
- Divisional meetings
- Project management platforms
This divides focus and floods inboxes.
Instead, funnel messages into unified streams based on audience and purpose:
- Organization-wide communications: For news relevant across all groups, leverage platforms allowing enterprise-level messaging through options like:
- Corporate mobile appsIntranet social networks
- Digest newsletters
- Team communications: Foster collaboration through team chat apps for group-specific conversations and working updates.
- Project communications: Via project management tools concentrate conversations, timelines, and tasks by initiative.
Consolidating channels aligns internal groups around central communications hubs for improved signal-to-noise.
Emphasize Two-Way Participation
Traditional communications flow top-down with minimal input from employees. This overlooks tremendous bottom-up insight from frontline teams.
Participative communications put some messaging control into employees’ hands via options like:
- Crowdsourcing: Invite staff to submit ideas and vote on policies impacting their roles. This provides real-time insights into pain points and preferences.
- Pulse surveys: Quick polls give regular temperature checks on employee needs and attitudes. Response analytics inform better engagement.
- Post-event feedback: Gather event reactions, suggested tweaks and lingering questions while memories remain fresh.
- Ambassador programs: Tap respected voices from cross-functional groups to test messages and gather authentic peer feedback.
- Office hours: Host frequent Q&A sessions for employees to discuss communications topics with leadership.
By encouraging participation through these and similar methods, employees transform from passive message consumers into engaged partners invested in communications they help shape.
Bottom Line
Creating enterprise-wide communications plans feels daunting, especially when juggling corporate, team, and project streams.
But emphasize relevance, consolidate channels, and facilitate two-way participation. This allows for crafting messaging that enlightens, empowers, and engages every employee.
