Deep Dive: Effective Employee Communications

Effective communication boosts productivity, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. Why then do so many companies struggle to effectively communicate, especially with employees?

Since one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to communications, consultant Sabrina Kropp recommends companies develop strategies to fit their corporate culture, achieve their desired KPIs, and reach their target audiences. From her experience at large corporations, she shares her thoughts on how to go beyond the quantifiable metrics to engage the hearts and minds of employees.

What is effective communication?

According to Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication report, employees “spend 88% of their workweek communicating across multiple channels.” Effective communication, however, doesn’t just mean more of it. Ms. Kropp draws parallels to marketing.

“You really have to think about it the same way marketing approaches it, how do they sell or how do they market. It’s segmenting the audience,” says Ms. Kropp. “You have some overarching messages, but you need champions and advocates that amplify the specific messages for folks.”

The creation of communication champions or amplifiers increases the opportunities to distribute and reinforce corporate messaging. By engaging with the many different channels where people receive their messages, these champions can ensure they reach a wider audience. However, finding the right channels might involve experimentation, which Ms. Kropp highly encourages.

“Be comfortable with trying some things, figure out what works, and build on that,” she says. “It constantly evolves and changes as your workforce changes.”

Developing effective comms, of which the messaging, channels, strategies, and delivery systems are just pieces of a whole, Ms. Kropp cautions that it’s never going to be perfect. The key is to continuously evaluate, experiment, and improve on what works well.

“It’s never going to be everything that every person needs, and if you’re leading or driving comms, you really have to understand and accept that,” she says.

You can, however, gauge how effective your communications are through a two-pronged approach. The first is easily measurable. The second is more observational, but equally important.

“We always track KPIs and metrics for open rates, etc., but that’s not the measure of effective comms. If somebody reads it, that’s great. You’ve hit the first milestone,” Ms. Kropp says. “The rest is that they understand it, that they buy into it. It’s harder to measure, but do you have the hearts and minds of your organization?”

One way to measure it is by asking questions, whether in a full engagement survey or through pulse surveys, such as do people believe in your culture, are they driving toward the same initiative, do they understand the corporate strategy. It’s necessary to see if they can articulate what the company’s purpose and values are and make connections to their role in it. Another way to look at it is how much discretionary energy employees are giving the company with the belief that when the company succeeds, they also feel that success.

“Can I put a number on that? Probably not, it’s a feeling,” she says. “But if you are all pulling in the same direction and you’re growing, then I would hazard a pretty good guess your communications are working because, unless they’re throwing money at you, you’re building customers, people are aligned, you’re building products, and it’s because people believe in what you’re trying to do. It means that people understand. They have a clear vision. They understand your leadership, and your leaders are able to articulate that, yes, I feel like we do have the hearts and minds.”

What role do business leaders play?

Those leaders play a crucial role in corporate communications. Grammarly’s report, however, found gaps in the perceived effectiveness of communication. Business leaders felt their organizations’ communications were 24% more effective than employees felt they were. This disconnect highlights the challenges comms leaders face when developing effective communication strategies.

Ms. Kropp recommends a stepped approach that starts with a solid CEO communication plan before building alignment through the leadership team, and then focusing heavily on mid-level managers.

“You’re starting at ground zero and CEO comms is your first place to start,” she says. “The piece you have to get in place is the CEO leadership team alignment driving in the same direction. Then you’ve got to invest in that top group of leaders, because they are the ones that day-to-day really touch employees, and they’re the ones that have to carry that message.”

This time and resource investment includes providing development opportunities, communication toolkits, and training and support. Through this investment, the mid-level managers are able to help employees relate the messaging to their department’s goals and the individual’s contributions to the overall strategy.

“Those are the folks that have the most direct impact and influence on employees,” Ms. Kropp says. “They have to believe (in the message), they have to put their spin on it, like, how does my department impact it? They have to put that personal spin on it, like I see where the CEO says we’re going, but how does that impact me as an employee? They really help to drive that employee communications and engagement piece as well.”

She believes this focus on the mid-level managers is what gives companies a competitive edge in building an effective communication strategy and driving the business forward.

“You’ve got to invest in that manager piece because this is going to give you a step up. The mid-level managers are going to exponentially drive that connection point because they have a more personal approach with employees. They know what their department does. They know how it impacts the organization or if they don’t know, they need to know and be able to articulate that.”

Alignment on the messaging is important for business leaders, but so are, in Ms. Kropp’s opinion, consistency, authenticity, simplicity. Employees more willingly engage with leaders they can trust and that they find credible. It’s important to remember when building out a communications strategy, especially for executive comms.

“You’ve got to have some kind of consistent communication that comes from the CEO leadership team. It cannot be the flavor of the month. What do you want to talk about and how often do you want to commit to it? You commit, and you do it,” she advises. “Sometimes it’s not always the most intriguing message because things are OK with the company but find things to talk about, because you’re going to have a lot of really great examples of culture. You can always talk about culture, innovation, or strategy. Like, what are we trying to drive for. And then that backs into what you communicate.”

Once that consistent schedule is in place, the focus shifts to helping the leader find their authentic voice by sharing their personality and being vulnerable to a certain level.

“I always ask senior leaders how much are you willing to share? How much are you willing to be vulnerable?” Ms. Kropp says about consulting with executives. “Again, that’s different for everyone. I wouldn’t necessarily say a CEO needs to be vulnerable to all 10,000 employees but being vulnerable to your top 100, to talk about what you’ve struggled with leading is a great way to really cement trust. There are nuances to that, but being authentic really takes you a long way, especially in terms of what the workforce dynamic expects now. What are you authentically trying to say?”

This is where comms professionals can help their senior leaders in crafting these messages. Not only should they be consistent and authentic, but the messaging should be simple. That presents its own challenges.

“It is easier to create a hundred PowerPoints than it is to create one. I know that people will laugh, but it’s from experience,” she says. “If you have 100, people feel like you have a great message. No, your message is too much for people. Think about how people take in information. It’s bytes, bits, it’s things that people want to hear about, but they also don’t have the time or energy to figure it out. You’d better be very clear on what you’re trying to say.”

How can we improve our communications?

Striving for this clarity and simplicity is one way to improve communications. By focusing on what’s in it for the employees, how it impacts their daily work, what the employee value proposition is, comms can tailor the message and help make the connections for employees.

Ms. Kropp points to the example of discussing company financials. “You can make that connection at the top line, like ‘if the company’s successful, we do this.’ It paints a story of what your vision is or what your purpose is, also how you’re impacting the world or the community. Whether you have it officially articulated or it’s just something that you strive for, but what’s in it for the employees. That’s the connection you really need to make.”

Metrics can help you understand what resonates with employees, and this goes back to experimenting to find where, when, and how employees engage with the messaging. What can alienate employees, though, is when they see a disconnect between the messaging and the behavior.

“You gotta walk the talk. The worst part, the toughest job as a communicator is trying to spin a message that doesn’t match the actual culture at a leadership team level,” says Ms. Kropp. “It’s hard to do that because, I can spin and put messages together all day long, but if you don’t walk the talk, your stuff is not credible at all. And people are smart, they see through it very quickly.”

Another way company leadership can improve communications in an organization is to include the comms team in strategy discussions. This prevents the development of strategy in a vacuum and ensures that messaging will align with the intended mission, the company culture, and employee expectations.

“Culture eats strategy for lunch all day long. I think if you don’t have your comms team side by side with you when you’re working on strategy and rolling it out, then you’re failing at what you need to do,” she advises. “If you put a good comms person in that group, they will help you, guide you to say, look, you got to bring this top leader group in. You need a comms leader or group in there from the beginning of that discussion to understand how to lead you through it.”

Ms. Kropp stresses the need to get buy-in from that top leader group since they will be the ones that cascade the message to their teams and will need to ensure the team understands their role and can execute the strategy. Including them in the process makes them more invested in the outcomes. ?

“People just want to be heard. They want their insights to be heard and appreciated, their level of experience, their tenure at the company. Sometimes it means, as leaders, you have to be quiet and listen,” she says. “The worst thing that can happen is you just present something, and people didn’t feel like they were part of it. Ninety percent of the time, at least from my perspective, they will actively work against it being successful because they didn’t get a say. They’re just not invested; they’re actively working against it to make it a failure.”

Improving communications can also be done by investing in your comms teams, providing them with appropriate training, development, tools and resources. This includes programs that will both distribute information but also track metrics such as open rates, time of day for greatest activity, and content that gets the most engagement. Through this actionable information, the comms teams can build a more effective strategy of delivering information how and when it will reach the most employees. This goes back to Ms. Kropp’s sentiments on experimentation. ??

“Experiment, don’t boil the ocean, try some things, don’t let perfect get in the way better. Go try some things. Don’t spend six months trying to figure something out, go try some things, and see what works. Get a focus group together. Ask people what they want, what they’re looking for,” she encourages comms teams. “This moves very fast. Be able to pick through all of the feedback to find those golden nuggets and go work on those.”

It requires comms teams who want to improve to be agile and adaptable. Through experimenting, teams are able to understand which systems work best for their company and create the infrastructure to support their comms initiatives.

“A lot of times you have people that don’t believe in it or understand it or what you’re trying to do. Sometimes you stand alone on stuff like that. You just have to kind of fight the fight and know that what you’re doing is the right thing.”

This notion of doing the right thing echoes one of Mrs. Kropp’s frequent sayings, “a hill worth the climb.” For her, showing up as authentic, credible, and trustworthy is a hill worth the climb. And her goal is to help companies create communications that reflect that.

“I would climb the hill of we do the right thing as much as we can for employees. We’re trying to create a culture that they can thrive in, they can grow in, and that is a place they want to work. That’s the hill I would die on.”

Graphics by Jason Behnke