Getting a Seat at The Leadership Table
Do your leaders prioritize public relations and marketing over internal communication? Execs often view internal communication as a lower priority than external. This deprioritization tends to happen because publicity is more easily seen and measured in real time while seeing the results of internal communications is less of a straight line.
Fortunately, when you need to articulate the value of internal communications to numbers-focused execs, empirical research can back you up.
Here are a few data points to reference.
- An Economist survey found that communication barriers in the workplace can lead to project delays or failures (44%), low morale (31%), missed performance goals (25%), and lost sales (18%)—some worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- A study of 651 organizations across various industries found that companies with highly effective internal communications are 3.5 times more likely to outperform their peers.
- Researchers found that transparent two-way internal communication and motivating language can strengthen employees’ sense of belonging to an organization.
Most internal communicators and HR professionals agree that the purpose of internal communication is to support culture and belonging. If that matters to your leaders—along with outcomes like new initiative successes, increased productivity, and lower employee turnover—here’s how to get executives excited about your internal comms.
1. Measure and share the impact of internal communications.
If you can’t quantify the value of internal comms, neither can your executives. Track and analyze metrics like attention, readership, and engagement rates when running internal employee communications programs, particularly leadership and manager communications. Then, tie those metrics to overall company performance or financial results. For example, if you launch a campaign focused on employee engagement and your eNPS (employee net promotor score) increases the following quarter, connect the dots for your leadership team.
2. Make internal comms more fun.
How can you make your communications more fun? Lighten up, be less serious, and joke around. Take a cue from Gen Z and, where possible, add more personality, authenticity, and informality to your communications. A meta-analysis of 49 independent studies on workplace humor found that it can impact everything from work performance and decreased burnout to satisfaction with supervisors and workgroup cohesion. Stanford Graduate School of Business Professor Jennifer Aker says,
“When we ask people what holds them back from using humor at work, many believe that humor simply has no place amidst serious work. We’re worried about harming our credibility and not necessarily being taken seriously. And yet, in large-scale studies that we run and that others have run, the large majority of leaders really prefer employees with a sense of humor and believe that employees with a sense of humor do better work.”
3. Simplify internal comms for your executives.
Your leaders may be hesitant to participate because of the barriers to contributing. Here are a few ways you can make it easy for them to engage:
- Establish a routine: Carve out a schedule to meet and execute the communications programs the leader will be contributing to, and take a moment to review the results from the prior output before you discuss and gather content for the next.
- Page templates: Provide structured email and intranet page templates where leaders can simply fill in the content details for specific sections like business performance, strategic goals, updates, or shout-outs.
- Video scripts: Create outlines and key talking points for execs to deliver in video messages when discussing something like a new initiative, a reorg, or an acquisition. Recording and editing snippets from online meetings is easier than ever, and less formal is more authentic. Use these snippets to deliver the key messages and drive traffic back to the full presentation or discussion.
- LinkedIn posts: Draft LinkedIn posts leaders can use to share company news or personal reflections. If you want to include anecdotes, schedule a 15-minute Q&A with the leader to gather the raw material and have them approve your drafts.
By implementing these strategies, you can foster a culture where internal communications are valued, and leadership is actively involved. Share the impact of your work, make it fun, and simplify the process.
