A communications audit is a time-consuming but powerful step for aligning employees with leadership’s vision and the values of the organization. A typical audit for our clients begins with a data dump existing material, from vision statements and corporate values to existing communications.
After that quick immersion into the culture, we hold stakeholder conversations to learn more about leadership’s vision, mission, purpose and other cultural ideals for the company, as well as how they see the values guiding behavior.
Those conversations are followed by employee focus groups, including a wide range of employees throughout the company. The communications audit often reveals a surprising disconnect between what leadership believes drives the company and the employee realities.
Being able to identify the gap between the culture leadership envisions and where employees are allows us to develop messaging and create internal communications to close that gap.
For employees to show up as the best versions of themselves and provide an impactful work experience, it's essential to help them recognize how their everyday work supports leadership's vision and leads to its success. (For more on aligning employees with leadership’s vision, try this Best Practices one-pager.)
The communications audit gives us a deep dive into the culture that helps us craft more powerful language to express the vision and values. The goal is to capture the heart and soul of the company and connect employees to the organization in a way that's more than just being there to do a job.
For many companies, the vision and values are developed by committee and can come across as a generic laundry list of corporate-speak. But the visions language is not written as a group. Rather than speaking committee-to-employee, we recommend an approach that speaks human-to-human. The hope is that you’ll arrive at language that truly captures the soul of the company and inspires employees.
Nailing that language requires not only a thorough discovery and analysis through the communications audit process, but also a degree of creativity and writing skills to develop the right language to express values unique to the organization's culture. It’s more poetry than PowerPoint.
In addition to connecting employees to the heart and soul of the organization, the most powerful vision and values language also empowers employees to make decisions on their own that align with leadership's vision. Good internal communication provides employees with concrete, actionable examples of how the organization's values play out in their role and the importance of exercising the values and vision on a day-to-day basis. (For more on providing those sorts of concrete examples, try this Forbes article.) It gives them a guiding beacon of how the vision and values relate to their work and helps them make decisions in situations where training may have lacked or was unforeseen.
Interested in a communications audit for your company? Tribe can help.
