Driving Corporate Culture: The State of the Art

Best Practices on Communicating to Align and Engage Employees

Anne Curley

The job of setting the stage for the four-part segment that opened the 200l Spring Seminar, "Driving Corporate Culture: The State of the Art," fell to Anne Curley. It was quickly obvious that the task was in good hands.

Her extensive experience as head of corporate communications at SC Johnson & Son and Firstar Corporation (In an earlier life, she served as business editor of the Milwaukee Journal) gave Curley a hands-on understanding of what constitutes good internal corporate communications. In her current role as a part-time internal consultant to SC Johnson and an external consulting, research and writing practitioner, Curley was positioned to provide a "best practices" report on how leading-edge organizations are using internal communications to align and engage employees.

Several factors are driving the increased interest in internal communications, Curley said. One is the understanding among more CEOs and other senior managers that today's growth strategies depend on good communications. Second is the realization that most CEO failures stem not so much from flawed strategies as flawed execution. They fail to keep their employees
aligned and engaged.

A third driver, Curley said, is the growing focus on employee empowerment. "To increase innovation and speed," she explained, "power must be decentralized. There must be better information-sharing and a new level of internal dialogue."

Employee retention is another key driver. "We need to create the kind of culture that people enjoy being a part of," Curley said. "And as we all know, communication is generally considered one of the top dimensions of job satisfaction."

The bottom line, she said, is that "we've reinvented our concept of employee communication, moving from a contentment model that focuses on employee relations to an engagement model that insures that people are focused on the right things with the right information at their fingertips and in the right communications environment that will encourage them to perform at their best."

Best practice organizations are responding to this shift, she said, by "mainstreaming the communications function, integrating communications practices into normal business processes." Instead of limiting internal communications to the traditional announcements, publications, speeches and special events, smart managers are opening new channels to organizational development, training, strategic planning and information services/knowledge management.

Best practice companies are also learning how to better leverage their leaders as communicators, she added. This requires communications training, consulting and support that will make managers more effective leaders.

Curley walked the audience through a model for creating an environment where people can connect, share information and ideas, achieve understanding, win belief and ultimately feel a sense of shared ownership.

Connecting involves getting into the other person's head and working within their frame of reference, she said, and surveys are a good tool for doing this. Drawing on some best practices in employee opinion research, Curley cited five ways to "understand" employees: Conduct monthly, short surveys that combine standard and topical questions; use employee research as a measure of management performance and effectiveness in communications; use technology in new ways such as mini-surveys on Web sites for instant feedback and electronic voting at the start of meetings to measure opinions on a specific topic; focus surveys on behaviors, not opinions; and, finally, use factor analysis to understand what items are most influential to those employees you want to retain.

Other strategies that are being used to "connect" include more audience segmentation in order to customize communication and taking advantage of rituals and corporate lore to give employees a sense of belonging. "Some companies," Curley said, "are using industrial theater at meetings to bring people together and learn to share common problems."

As far as sharing information is concerned, Curley said best practice companies are trying to foster dynamic, real-time sharing of information and ideas through value-adding networks. "We are seeing geometric growth in virtual communities of practice, purpose, interest and learning," she said. "To stimulate sharing within these communities, don't try to anticipate every topic; create links, upload lots of information or establish other structures. Since no one can fully anticipate where value will emerge from a network, the key is to simply foster community building."

There is also growing use of visual strategy mapping, she said, which helps every person "at the table" to see the relationships and proportions of a strategy the same way. Another trend is action learning that, instead of conducting abstract discussions about strategy, engages employees in real-time learning around real business needs. Other techniques such as experiential learning and storytelling are also being used to create understanding.

Moving beyond understanding to "gut level beliefs" requires other communications techniques, Curley said. Alignment audits allow senior managers to look in a very systemic way at how the organization's structures either support or fail to support key messages. In addition, performance metrics are being used to stimulate ongoing internal dialogue and focus on priorities.

"It's important to remember that the key to belief is not persuasion," she added. Employees don't want to be sold. They want open access to facts, the logic behind decisions and the dialogue they need to reach their own conclusions.

"That brings us to the final and highest level of communication," Curley said, "the kind that creates a shared sense of ownership." To achieve this, leaders must recognize the value of the group in helping to set norms, measures, goals and even strategies. "It involves going beyond buy-in or participation to interaction that shapes outcomes," she added.

"The process I've been describing can drive a lot of understanding, a lot of new connections, a great deal of credibility and a strong sense of ownership," Curley said. It's all part of what's happening in internal communications as companies try to more effectively support business strategies and brands. What we have learned," she concluded, "is that smart companies are mainstreaming good communications practices and smart communicators are showing them how to do it."