Leadership Communication: 5 Tips To Engage Employees

Most organizations use tools such as the intranet, emails from the CEO, Town Hall meetings and blogs as a means for the CEO to communicate with employees. However this focus on information tools whilst necessary in letting employees know the details of what is happening do little to engage employees with the reason for change. This is especially true when those changes relate to a merger or acquisition, a restructure of the organization, the announcement of financial results or other complex change messages.

In these instances an engagement strategy needs to be designed to ensure that employees truly embrace the reason for change. Transformational leadership is about engaging employees in changing behaviours to support the new business objectives. However whilst information is important, as part of leadership communication it only serves to provide information on what is changing and when, it is not an engagement tool.

These following 5 tips illustrate how you can ensure leadership communication will achieve desired business outcomes. 1.

The first step is to review the current ways you are communicating with employees and determine whether your leadership communication methods are engagement tools or simply information tools. So this first tip is to gather up all the ways you communicate with employees and decide whether they are one way or two way communication vehicles and whether the messages are information or could be enhanced with an engagement strategy.
2. The second tip is important because your ultimate aim as a leader has to be to create the “Aha Moment” for employees.

The “Aha Moment” is based on information that challenges the employee's belief about an aspect of the business.

The information that suddenly helps employees say, “Now it makes sense”, “Now I understand”, “Now I can do something about it”. Once you know what the “Aha Moment” is this will form your key message and the basis of your design of your employee communication strategy.
3. This third tip explains the best type of research to find out what the “Aha Moment” is, and the best type for this purpose is focus group research. Focus group research allows you to ask employees about your business and their thoughts on competitors, to identify the largest gap between what customers think and what staff think customers think, and to identify what would create a paradigm shift in employee's thinking.

It also helps you identify how you will measure the impact of your leadership communication strategies in the change in employees thinking and to determine how significant it is to achieving the business objectives. Benefits of focus group research are that they are a good format for allowing topics to be explored further and frequently 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 should lead the discussion but leave the actual dialogue to the participants, and steer them around to the main issue if they have gone off topic and to ensure that all the topics that you wanted to cover within the timeframe allocated are. Well facilitated focus groups identify the key messages to focus your leadership communication strategies on as they relate to specific business objectives.
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. Step five is all about taking the information you have gathered from the focus groups sessions and with that identify a business goal that you feel confident that your leadership strategies will impact. Use of that research data forms an essental part of your leadership communication strategy that can be measured by business achievements.

The outcome is that with all this information you are then in a position to design leadership communication strategies that will engage employees around the one key business message. Most of these employee engagement strategies will mean that employees will be actively involved in some aspect of change through direct participation. As always with all change management strategies these engagement techniques will then be supported by communication information tools.
For more information make sure you obtain our excellent free report on how to design transformational leadership strategies.

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