Sea Side Scrap Book » Leadership Communication: 5 Tips To Engage Employees

Leadership Communication: 5 Tips To Engage Employees

When we think of leadership communication most organizations focus on information tools. These include intranet sites, staff magazines, CEO blog, Town Hall meetings and so on. Whilst all these employee communication methods are to be applauded, they inform employees about what is going on. To truly engage employees in the process of change, for instance, a merger or acquisition, a re-organization, financial results or corporate social responsibility, leadership communication methods need to be designed to actively engage employees.

The fundamental difference between employee engagement and information is the former focuses on changing employee behaviour to support the achievement of business objectives. The latter is about providing information to employees about what will change, when and why.

These following 5 tips illustrate how you can ensure leadership communication will achieve desired business outcomes.

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1. Step one is reviewing all the current tools and methods you use to communicate with employees. You need to scrutinize the content of that communication and determine whether it is one way information or whether some could be adapted as an engagement tool.

2. Step two is very important for transformational leadership because you want to create an \”Aha!\” moment for employees. This means you convey information in such a way that creates a paradigm shift in their thinking about a topic. The focus for employees needs to be that they finally understand what the change will mean to them, how they can contribute and why it is important.

3. This third step is about conducting focus group research to find out what employees actually think about a particular topic and then what information you have to counter their views and to create a change in how they think. The objective is to find out what information will make employees stop and say, \”Aha! now I get it\”. Once you have the answer to this it is easy to design engagement strategies that will focus employees on the change to the organization and the work that they do.

Focus groups are a good format as they allow issues to be explored further and sometimes will uncover issues or ideas which hadn\’t been considered prior to the session. Focus groups generally are held for one and a half hours duration and in groups of 8 – 10 participants. The facilitator\’s role is to lead the discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, bringing them back to the main issue if they have gone off on a tangent or to ensure that all the topics that you wanted to cover within the allocated timeframe are covered. A well facilitated focus group will identify the key messages for your communication strategies as they relate to a particular business issue.

4. The fourth tip is that once you have the focus group outcomes, you can then begin designing leadership communication strategies that engage employees. You should have a clear understanding about what employees know and what the facts are, and the gap between the business facts and staff perceptions. This forms your key message to create the \”Aha Moment\”.

5. The fifth tip is that you take the key information from the focus groups, identify a business issue that you feel certain your leadership communication strategies can impact. By using that information you then implement a personalized leadership communication strategy that can be measured by business outcomes.

Once you have gathered all this information you then need to design leadership communication strategies that engage employees around the one central message. Many of these employee communication strategies will actively involve employees in some aspect of change by designing communication methods that will require employees to participate. These engagement strategies are then supplemented by communication information tools.

For more information make sure you obtain our excellent free report on how to design transformational leadership strategies.