5 things to help clearly define your strategy so your employees get it

Engaged employees increase productivity, contribute to better customer satisfaction and improve a company’s bottom line. Studies prove it. So what can you do to make sure your employees are engaged?

Help them make the connection between their role and the business strategy. That starts by giving them a simple, clearly defined strategy they can relate to.

A vicious cycle

Think about the way many organizations communicate strategy. It is developed by senior leadership, translated into a power point with lots of broad concepts, corporate jargon and charts, and then pushed out to the organization in an email or all employee meeting at the beginning of the year.

Then managers have to make sense of it, share it with their teams and the organization is left to assign their own interpretation and meaning. This can create conflicting messages, a lack of understanding, and no call to action. Nobody gets it. The result is many unengaged employees. The problem can worsen when leaders call for more communication in an effort to engage and the noise increases with no clarity or relevance. It’s a vicious cycle.

Not to worry. You can stop this cycle, improve your employee’s engagement and positively impact your bottom line.

Focus on Content

Start with eliminating broad concepts and using clear and simple language to define your strategy. Think about common terms often used to describe strategy such as growth and innovation. Unless these words are clearly defined they can mean just about anything. Growth... it can mean organic growth, growing the global customer base, growth by margins, grow through acquisition. And innovation, what company doesn’t have innovation in its strategy? Explain exactly why your company is innovative.

5 things you should consider to clearly define strategy.

1. Be global: Ensure the core terms you use will work globally; strip away jargon or buzz words.
2. Be all-encompassing: Define all the important terms even if they seem obvious to you.
3. Be precise: Use clear and specific language in defining your terms.
4. Be real: Describe how the company/you are thinking about the business today and where you want it to go as if you were talking directly to a front-line employee.
5. Be visual: A picture is still worth a thousand words.
    

Have you assessed your content recently? What have you done to make your content more specific and digestible?