Sharing quarterly financials with employees can help build trust and engagement. It also helps them see how their business unit, immediate team and individual job role contribute to the success of the company. But the financial reports that the company shares with investors and other stakeholders are generally too dense with financial terms and concepts for laypeople to understand.
Here are five ways to explain financials in infographics:
Add some visual interest that’s more intriguing than a standard bar chart of columns. For example, if your company manufactures toothpaste, you might show YoY sales numbers with several toothpaste tubes squeezed to match the numbers. An Italian restaurant chain might use rigatoni for bar charts and a pizza as a pie chart. A bakery could show pie charts as donuts.
Remember you’re talking to people who may not hold a degree in finance. Explain the numbers in everyday language and avoid terms bandied about by Wall Street analysts. Acronyms like OPM or COGS will confuse many employees without more description. Don’t go into the weeds, but help them see, for instance, that EBITDA simply measures overall financial performance.
Give employees a helpful visual clue for whether certain financial results are good news or bad. You could even use a full range of emojis, but we’d advise keeping it simple with a happy face or frowning one. Sometimes we’ve used a thumbs up and thumbs down icon. The goal is to give them a useful shorthand for interpreting the complexities of financial results.
Speaking of EBITDA, that number might be less relevant to employees than the order backlog for their individual business units that signals consistent work, or the cost savings of a company-wide initiative to foresee supply chain issues before they slow production. If a dip in sales for one division is offset by stronger sales in another, that’s interesting for both groups.
Employees differ in the way they prefer to consume information, so it’s sometimes helpful to present the same content in more than one way. An infographic with five or six sections of financial results can be posted on the intranet and in the employee newsletter, but those same infographics could also be easily animated for employees to watch as a video.
