How To Communicate Your Business Plan With Employees

Lindsay Podrid is Vice President and Creative Director of Tribe, Inc.

Once your company has decided on your business strategies and approach for the upcoming year, you’re then left with the task of communicating it to employees. Keeping your workforce up-to-date and well informed about the goals of your organization will go a long way in helping those goals be achieved.

After all, who are the ones usually doing the actual work? Your employees, of course.

This leads to the next question: What are the best ways to drop some business plan knowledge on workers in your company? You may want to start by asking them. A quick survey emailed to every employee or printed out and distributed to non-desk workers can provide a clear understanding of what information your audience wants and needs to know. This will save you from having to explain information not important to them and will also allow the employee to grasp the essential concepts quickly so they can get back to work.

Once the information rollout begins, remember to keep it simple. Programs and catchphrases are great tools to keep things interesting but overdoing it is, well, overdoing it. Employees reach a point of program overload where they find it hard to keep track of the next corporate initiative because they all have different names and different ways they are supposed to be interpreted.

Eventually, employees will miss important information because they see it as just another program to keep up with. The solution to this is to just have an overarching theme or context so when an employee receives a communication, they will know it is something they need to pay attention to. To help communicate this, brand the program with a specific color palette and fonts that when they show up in an employee’s inbox, they will take the time to open and actually read it.

When these communications are being made, make sure company leadership plays a role. Employees need to see that executives and managers have “bought-in” to the business plan and fully back each initiative. Workers can hear this straight from leadership via written blogs, video blogs or HTML emails sent directly to employees. This “straight from the horse’s mouth” approach builds confidence in employees and brings everyone together for the betterment of the company.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BusinessNewsDaily.