3 Tips for Communicating Strategy to Employees

 

Effective strategy is about more than just plotting the future of a company, it also involves a healthy amount of communication to let individuals know how their work contributes to achieve these goals.

So how can companies communicate strategy effectively throughout their organization? Here are three tips to help you get this process right.

Tailor the information

Strategic plans will often require a range of different targets spread across numerous different departments. While this in an inevitable part of modern communications, it also poses a number of risks around the provision of information to different stakeholders.

Tailoring the amount of information you provide for each part of the business can ensure that you are setting the right goals and are achieving meaningful change across your organization.

Get the medium right

Communicating effectively to your staff will require the right medium in order to achieve a meaningful change. There are many ways that this could be achieved, from a corporate newsletter to email.

While these options might be appealing for time-poor managers, they are unlikely to be the best mechanism for communicating effectively especially because of the lack of engagement. To tackle this, consider investing in strategy mapping software like StrategyBlocks. This technology makes it easy to consistently communicate company strategy through a highly visual medium.

Encourage feedback

Good strategies evolve over time, adding new aspects and losing parts which are not working. Often, these problems will be first identified by frontline staff, making it crucial for communications to run both ways.

Leaving the communication of your corporate strategy as a one-way street will only make it harder to detect problems with your strategy and can leave a company struggling to avoid serious hazards.

Taking these steps will ensure that employees understand the importance of your strategic initiatives and can guarantee these run according to plan.