The Connect Between Organizational Effectiveness and Strategic Communications

Happy New Year!

This is my first article of the year 2025 and I decided to write this because our statement of purpose at Sola Abulu & Associates (SA&A) is that we are a strategy and communications training and consulting firm committed to enabling businesses, brands and organizations achieve their desired objectives through strategic communications, organizational effectiveness and reputation risk management.

And while the strategic communications element and reputation management may be clear, I think the organizational effectiveness connect may not be as obvious.

What is Strategic Communications?

So first of all, lets start with the well-known definition of what strategic communications is. It is the purposeful use of communication by an organization, business or brand to achieve its objectives. This is a VERY BROAD definition that expands the involvement of communications into almost every area of business and organizational strategy.

Strategic Communications is not just about managing the press or handling social media accounts, running publicity campaigns or engaging with stakeholders - it is also about making use of the knowledge, skill and expertise of core communications specialists to ensure that you constructively and ethically influence the thinking, behaviour, attitudes, perceptions and actions of your workforce and internal stakeholders in a way that results in collaborative working and enables the organization to achieve its objectives.

Communications as A Productivity Enhancing Tool

In other words, you use strategic or purposeful communications to enable the organization to function as it needs to, in order to be effective. Particularly in organizations with hundreds or thousands of employees, And in that regard, making senior leadership more effective in driving productivity and profitability behaviours and thinking. When employees understand what the organization is aiming to achieve at the strategic level, they can then make the right decisions in terms of priority spend and attention/focus at the working level. There is tighter attention on value creating activities rather than value eroding ones.

Even in a small organization like ours, I find that the more time and effort I spend explaining the overarching purpose we are trying to achieve on a strategic level, the more the team is equipped to come up with innovative solutions that enable us to achieve those goals in a meaningful way within the required period of time. Any lack of clarity as to WHY we are doing certain things, would result in a robotic tick-the-box approach that is not likely to deliver results. But once the strategic significance of a project or program is clearly articulated and explained to the key members of the team, they are able to function better in the way that is required to deliver expected results.

This must be the goal for every leader.

To ensure that all employees are on the same page in terms of what is most important for the business and the organization, in a particular financial year or operational period. And strategic communications has a big role to play in this.

Shaping Organizational Culture

It also has a role in helping to shape a corporate culture around desired behaviours, code of conduct, corporate values, ideals, ways of working etc. All of this is important because employee behaviours have a direct impact on safety, compliance, productivity and profitability.

Organizational culture has a direct impact on work ethic, performance and quality standards. The only way that management can build and intentionally nurture a high performing organization is by shaping a culture of delivery, continuous improvement, innovation and value creation and strategic communication has a critical and core role to play in this regard.

The specific practise areas that deal with various aspects of organizational effectiveness are as follows:

• Transformation & Change Management Communications
• Culture Communications
• Safety, Ethics & Compliance Communications
• Employee Engagement Communications
• Leadership Communications

All the above are sub-elements of what is known as Internal Communications and each one works on the fundamental principles of strategic communications but is applied in a different way. Eg Transformation and Change Management Communications can be a very sensitive and complex communications project and depending on the magnitude, scope and nature of the change may require specialist skills to help support the management of the change.

Now if this is not well understood , the communications around a transformation process may be sub-optimal, mis-managed or handled at a tactical level without a structured and strategic internal stakeholder management process embedded into the thinking and approach. This would likely lead to a very disruptive transition process and could actually derail the change management process if care is not taken. This article on The Psychology of Change Management in Corporate Communications gives some insight on how this can be done in a practical way when managing a complex transformation process.

What About Leaders?

A question that could come up is that why should the Corporate Communications team have to get involved in Leadership or organizational communications if HR and Leaders are already in place to give leadership and direction?

The simple answer is that very few leaders are good communicators.

Even fewer are excellent communicators. And depending on the complexity, scale and size of the business or organization, managing leadership and organizational communications is a full time job that requires a certain level of skill and specialist expertise that HR practitioners and leaders do not have and cannot be expected to have. Communications is a distinct practise in itself.

If you would require highly skilled communications resources and expertise to manage a transformation project then you need to resource appropriately for it and ensure that you get someone or a team that understands how to harvest insights from within the organization to build a communications strategy that enables the transformation project to be executed seamlessly without disruption to the organization or employee unrest or a drop in productivity over the period.

The HR and Communications Dilemma (Policy mindset vs People mindset)

Finally, I think it is also important to recognize that communications experts are best positioned to lead, manage and support communications to employees within the organization. 21st century communications is no longer just about top-down communications where employees have no choice but to accept whatever management is saying. It helps when communication is deployed in a way that achieves desired results.

Internal Communications specialists can help to develop and deliver a targeted approach by ensuring that the KNOW-FEEL and DO is actively included in the messaging and communications strategy and approach within the organization.

The KNOW

Ensuring that staff are informed about any organizational development, operation, event, policy or compliance requirement that they need to be informed about.

The FEEL

Ensuring that employees feel valued, respected, recognized, inspired and motivated to do the work that they have to do for the organization to deliver on its promises

The DO

Communicating specific actions required from employees on matters relating to business delivery, organizational effectiveness, productivity, profitability, innovation etc.

The communications specialist is best positioned to understand how to develop a structured and targeted communications strategy that segments employee categories according to interest and influence in specific issues/matters and ensures that messaging and engagement strategy is purposefully designed to ensure that the desired outcomes in terms of action and behaviours and results are achieved.

Again - all this is most relevant for large organizations with complex hierarchical and layered organizational structures and reporting lines. The absence of a structured approach to internal communications is why many organizations struggle with employee engagement and organizational effectiveness as a whole.

I also find that the policy-mindset that many HR practitioners are trained with is actually a fundamental barrier to effective employee engagement. To create a conducive environment for employee productivity, you need to take a people friendly approach and not operate from a policy-mindset perspective. This requires a mental paradigm shift that not many practitioners and leaders are eager to embrace.

The top-down leadership communications approach is no longer effective in complex organizations. It cannot also operate successfully in a vacuum. It needs to be supported by a vibrant communications structure and eco-system that only a trained and highly-skilled internal communications specialist can build, nurture, maintain and leverage upon for the benefit of the business and the organization.