Employee Engagement Has Changed: Three Questions Leaders Can Ask Themselves to Ensure Their Message Sticks.
What matters: The ability of leaders across organizations to impact the everyday experience of their workforce in ways that drive trust, collaboration, and, ultimately, growth, requires the development of smarter strategies that create authentic engagement, inspire action, and deliver results.
Creating a message that resonates with your number one asset—your people—can be the difference between better performance and morale or your initiatives falling flat.
Employee engagement—and expectations—have changed over the last several years. Hybrid work environments, remote working, and the need to create an authentic company culture no matter where your employees are have created new issues for employee engagement. Employee engagement used to conjure up thoughts of catchy phrases, newly created logos, and banners hanging gleefully from every corner of the corporate office. There’s a reason these tried-and-true tactics have been around for so long, and it isn’t necessarily because they work. It’s because they were obvious and easy to do. But our work realities are now more nuanced than ever, and when you’re moving quickly to launch a new project, obvious and easy feels like a golden ticket—even in today’s environment.
If you want your employees to do more than watch that swag on their (virtual) desks collect dust, a more robust engagement plan is needed. You can have the strongest message in the world, but without a sound strategy to really bake it into the fiber of your organization, remote or otherwise, you won’t have engagement. You’ll just have words on a page (or inbox). Moreover, instilling a sense of trust in your workforce has never been more critical to creating and fostering an employee experience that allows your company to thrive.
In order to make sure that the life, and ultimately the impact, of your company’s message is maximized, leaders need to ask themselves these three questions:
DOES THE MESSAGE RESONATE?
In order for employees to buy into your message, it has to ring true. It should sound and feel like a natural extension of what’s already working in your organization. That means that the language should take on a familiar tone. For example, if you work at a start-up and the existing tone is more casual, this is not the time to introduce a lot of corporate jargon just because you believe it will cause people to sit up and pay attention. It will have the opposite effect. Keep your message simple, memorable, and authentic.
WHO ARE YOUR INFLUENCERS?
You know the usual suspects. In every organization, there are people in positions of power. The perception is often that these are the people who make things happen. And that may be true. But, if you’re really paying attention, you’re likely to notice that the people who really make things happen are often the employees, franchisees, or vendors in less obvious leadership positions. These are the folks that other people follow. As a strategic communicator, it’s your job to build authentic relationships with this group of influencers—and do so well before you need to rely on them to carry your message.
WHAT’S YOUR STRATEGY FOR CASCADING THE MESSAGE?
Your message is strong and you’ve got the right people’s attention. Seems like it should be smooth sailing from here. Unfortunately, this is when momentum is most often lost. It can feel like such a feat to get to this stage that we often underestimate the importance of employing a detailed approach to cascading information effectively. Questions like, “What channels are most effective?” “Who should carry the message?” and “What’s the right timing?” can help ensure that you’re being thoughtful about the best ways to truly reach every part of your organization.
In the end, the ability of leaders across organizations to impact the everyday experience of their workforce in ways that drive trust, collaboration, and, ultimately, growth, requires the development of smarter strategies that create authentic engagement, inspire action, and deliver results. It may be a challenging time for both organizations and employees alike, but taking an outside-in approach to testing, learning, and iterating how your message resonates with your number one asset—your people—can be the difference between better performance and morale or your initiatives falling flat.
Jenny Garner is Head of Employee Experience at Salient Global.