How to effectively communicate your organisational strategy

How do you effectively communicate your organisational strategy with employees and stakeholders?

It starts with listening!

Effective communication is two-way, and strategies that stick aren’t just set from the top. Human-Centred Design (or HCD) lets you involve employees from all levels of your organisation in the development of your strategy.

Let’s bring this to life through an example, involving on of our clients: a Victorian mutual bank.

Our client wanted to create and implement a new members' experience strategy to expand their customer base.

First, we co-designed the strategy together with the mutual bank, demonstrating the two-way communication element of HCD. We did this through the following steps:

1. We started by understanding who their members are through detailed research. This gave us an understanding of the mutual banks’ positioning and the needs of their members.
2. Next, a workshop with the client executives confirmed their purpose and values – these formed their identity, which was crucial to carry forward in the new strategy.
3. With these insights, we helped define improvement opportunities in their products and services. We worked with a range of stakeholders, from board members to the bank's operational managers, to key in the major themes. This human-centred approach let us identify the underlying pain points together.
4. Having identified opportunities for improvement, we now needed to brainstorm how to turn them into reality. Again, we encouraged participation from all stakeholders, capturing their ideas and mapping them to the members' life cycles.
5. Through techniques like life stage mapping, product mind mapping, impact versus alignment matrix, and focus tiles, we narrowed down which key product offerings would form the basis of the new members' experience. Storyboards, life-stage mapping, and other mock-ups helped us create tangible representations of each solution at each step.

With the strategy designed, the final step was to communicate it in a clear and compelling way to all stakeholders.

To do that, we used the themes gained from the ideation process to create a series of statements that resonate with the client, while challenging their utmost capabilities to meet their members' true needs.

Visual aids and storytelling techniques made the strategy more engaging and memorable. As the client’s executives identified the products that would best deliver this strategy, they felt a sense of ownership towards the new strategy. The statements were presented to the board, successfully obtaining their buy-in.

For a summary of the steps we took, see the diagram below:

Overall, these steps helped us to effectively communicate strategy – without the inclusion of multiple stakeholders and two-way communication, the strategy would not have resonated as much with our client and their stakeholders. Using HCD also ensured that the strategy is user-centric and addresses the needs of the target audience – the mutual banks’ members.

If your organisation is embarking on a journey to implement a new strategy, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] or visit us here