The way your company and executive leadership team communicate with employees and external stakeholders, such as media, community members and industry peers, significantly impacts how these audiences perceive your business.
Elmore can partner with you to create a thoughtful and comprehensive communications strategy for internal and external audiences that will propel you toward your communications goals. Today, we’re diving deeper into employee and executive communications.
What are employee and executive communications?
Simply stated, employee communication is the flow of information to internal audiences — your employees. A comprehensive employee communication strategy involves multiple channels and types of messaging, ranging from culture-shaping communications that tell the stories of your people and programs, business communications that help reach organizational goals, and executive communications that engage employees.
Executive communication extends beyond internal audiences to how visible your C-Suite is with external stakeholders. This might be done through thought leader articles or op-eds in industry publications, speaking engagements, conference panels, social media content or award nominations, to name a few.
What are the benefits of employee and executive communications?
Employee and executive communications have never been more important than they are today. While communication keeps people informed, it can do so much more than that. Internal and external stakeholders want to feel a connection to your business. The right strategy can help build that connection. But there are other benefits, too:
- Reinforce key messages
- Showcase storytelling opportunities
- Enhance alignment with business goals and values
- Shape company culture
- Build trust and advocacy
- Increase engagement and morale
- Drive desired actions and behaviors
- Position your C-Suite and company as industry trailblazers
Why might you need an employee and executive communications strategy?
No matter your mission or size, your company can benefit from a deliberate approach to engaging with employees and the thoughtful positioning of your CEO, the primary influencer of your company.
If you are soon undergoing a rebrand, restructure or leadership change, now may be the perfect time to consider your communications strategy. Both internal and external audiences will be eager to hear from the people in charge about the vision for the company and what to expect in the future. A thoughtful rollout of such news, coupled with an adherence to key messages, will inform and increase buy-in from stakeholders.
In other cases, your company may be aiming to drive certain employee behaviors or generate awareness for company initiatives. Outlining the messaging, strategies and means by which you’ll share this information is part of a well-rounded employee communication strategy.
So, what’s Elmore’s approach?
Elmore begins with understanding your external strategy to ensure consistency and cohesion among all communications, no matter the audience. From there, we audit your existing communications efforts, reviewing your communications ecosystem, including channels, messaging and frequency. We’ll learn what your workforce looks like, and how they best consume information. We may survey or speak with employees to better understand their experience. We’ll also review what your leadership team has (or hasn’t) done to promote visibility to key stakeholders.
Then, we create and execute our strategy. This can be an evergreen, ongoing effort, or can happen around a particular initiative or moment of importance for your company. Whatever your needs, Elmore can help develop and implement employee and executive communications plans to exceed your goals.
Contact us to learn more or to get started.
