One of the most important elements of a successful plan is evaluating what's been working well and what you might want to do differently. Where is your internal communications team getting bogged down? How can you help them find time to focus on the important and not just the urgent? What initiatives have been stalled somewhere along the way?
Here are five aspects of your employee communications you might want to evaluate:
How well have you succeeded, across the year, at communicating the topics that are important to your strategic plan? Communications professionals are often forced into reactive states when various leaders insist their message needs to go out now. Look back across the year to see how frequently your planned strategic communications have been derailed or crowded out by others’ priorities.
Calendarization of your strategic plan’s messaging can help ensure you communicate the important stuff over the course of the year — breaking topics down into manageable sizes to avoid overwhelming employees with too much at once. Schedule each topic across the appropriate channels and then use that calendar to help you say “no” next year to some of those urgent requests.
If your team is stretched, then think about what sort of tasks bogged you down this past year. We spoke recently with a former client who said she realized her team was spending an inordinate amount of time on new hire announcements that were keeping them from more strategic work. She’s now marketing an AI solution she created to get those announcements done more efficiently.
Brand standards are just as important in internal communications as they are to your external marketing. But over time, adherence to those guidelines can slip, especially if you don’t have professional designers on every project or when AI is used to create images or graphics. Look back across the year’s work and see if you might need to refresh the team’s familiarity with the guidelines.
We find that many clients prioritize metrics, but measure so many different things they’re not sure what’s important. For instance, it may not matter, in the grand scheme of things, how many employees clicked on the new cybersecurity policies. Measure the result you’re trying to achieve. For instance, for cybersecurity communications, it might be a reduction in employee phishing incidents.
