I recently spoke at the Institute of Internal Communications Festival 2023. Wonderful venue – Tewin Bury Farm – and an engaged crowd of internal communicators.
In my session, I talked about the growing demand on organisations to deliver purpose alongside profit, and the increasing need to communicate aspirations and commitments to people and planet, authentically and effectively.
A critical part of this involves embedding purposeful strategy into the fabric of a company, so it informs decision making and behaviours, and becomes part of its DNA and culture.
Internal communicators are having to become educators, translators (often of quite complicated and technical sustainability language) and change experts.
Communications now plays such a key role in helping to drive the “responsible” agenda. Internal comms teams are working to craft cohesive narrative which people can get behind, with robust comms strategy and content to open up conversations across departments and teams, to make purpose meaningful on an individual level, get people involved and measure resonance and success.
We know it’s not always straight forward to cascade purposeful communications well, but it’s vital we’re able to ensure employees feel connected to the wider mission and vision and understand the contribution they can make. It plays into important human connectivity, helps people align their values with those of their organisation and ultimately affects the approach people take to their work. It also affects the success and speed of positive change.
We hear from organisations that there are key challenges to getting this right:
If you want to successfully embed your goals for people and planet into the DNA of your business, we talk about the need to ‘hardwire’ and ‘softwire’ it in.
The first critical step is to outline a strategy and then ‘hardwire’ this practically across your organisation. Activity might include taking a look at the entirety of your operations and making changes to accommodate and enable targets to be met and positive impact to be driven. You might adapt HR policies, re-design incentives, alter updates on results and reconsider risk management.
While you are beginning to embed it into the fabric of the company, you need to be ‘softwiring’ it too. Communicating aspirations, actions and changes to key stakeholders to encourage connection, awareness, ensure traction, resonance and to get people involved.
By making messages around strategy digestible, and actions ‘doable’ for all employees, internal communicators can start to shift the needle on environmental and social issues, as well as perceptions of company culture and purpose alongside profit.
We know however, that to achieve ground swell, you first need to create marginal wins. A sustainability strategy is only as good as its uptake, so it is important to build consensus with stakeholders. This can be done through finding and developing advocates and champions and critically, identifying the cynics and the blockers (in order to be able to put forward communications to persuade and encourage and show they have been listened to too).
Being able to articulate the legitimate impact and benefit to business will be important, as well as presenting information in multiple different ways, across different touchpoints, so people can discover and explore for themselves. The ultimate aim is to ensure each employee understands the role they need to play to help deliver goals and ambitions.
We know there are many demands on everyone’s time. With so much noise and pace, the key question is not only how we keep responsible business high on the agenda, but also we prioritise communications around it. It is only through consistent awareness, education, listening, inspiration and honest and innovative communications, will be all collectively be able to drive positive change for people and planet.
Are you working through similar challenges in your organisation? We’d love to see how we can work with you.
