What are the most effective ways to demonstrate your value to your employer in internal communications?

Getting clear on the strategic priorities and goals is your first step, and that includes departmental goals. Not only will this make your strategic planning possible but you may find that your first tactic will be to ensure there is company-wide clarity on how all these pieces fit together - role clarity is an incredibly important part of improving overall performance. Wherever possible, attach numbers to your goals to demonstrate commercial understanding.

Let's go deeper than company mission and overall strategy when aligning communications value to business value. Creating communications that have a specific business purpose (e.g., employer brand campaigns to increase attraction and retention, or increasing employee awareness of top customer trends to inform their work) can help you move beyond tracking clicks and reactives or sentiment to tracking knowledge gain and behavior change. This is powerful, because at the end of the day, we all need to show value by either making or saving the company money. Creating a more direct line to business goals helps communicators prove their value in hard numbers.

As an internal communicator leader or practitioner, one of the most important things you can do to demonstrate your value is to ensure the overall purpose, strategy and ultimately work product of the function connects to the business strategy. Adding value where it matters most will ensure not only that employees take notice, but the leaders and key stakeholders you advise daily notice as well.

Before you start measuring, ask some basic questions. Like: "What is the business measuring?" "Where does the business want to be in a year's time?" And "What could best demonstrate the impact of internal comms on either of those answers." We aren't limited to the old "click rate, adoption rate and employee engagement score" measures. "What you measure" is the most important place to start.

Start from the business plan ?? It shows what is important in your organization and makes you focus on the right things. Dare to prioritize ?? Focus on the strategic issues that are most important to your organization AND where internal communication can have the most impact. Communication goals = business goals ?? Set goals that are linked to the business goals. OKR, Objectives & Key Results, can be a good tool. For example, x% should know our strategy, x% reduced staff turnover, X% increased trust in management, x% incresed number of employees who recommend us as an employer . This type of goal also increases collaboration with other departments - which makes us stronger and increase the power to act!

It's important to differentiate between communication objectives and business objectives, and align them to enable measurable impact If results are falling short, e.g. newsletter deployments, staff meets etc. aren't leading to improved team morale and retention, new business wins etc. take a step back and ask why You have to diagnose the root of the problem and not the symptoms to make progress, and ensure that the progress is also visible to and understood by leadership 5 Whys and root-cause analysis are good places to start

Think about it this way - Internal Communication exists whether you facilitate it or not. So get to understand what other leaders and influencers across the business are already saying and the message their colleagues are already receiving. Only then can you help to shape it.

You need to transform your basic thought about networking from "what can your connections do for you" to "what can you do for your connections". Once you are thinking from what you can do for your connections, the next step is to think about which connections you can introduce to each other. That's the way to build a network that transforms an organization - and puts you in the center of that transformation.

Get to know the business and their mission, vision, strategic planning and goals and figure out how you can support the business achieve that. Aligning and focusing your internal narrative so employees understand how what they are doing supports that bigger picture and allow people to do work that means something to them as well as the organisation.