Communication and the Employee Experience

It’s obvious but I have to say it.

We live in a world where we’re routinely bombarded with messages of varying importance outside the workplace. And, increasingly, people are seeing that same trend inside their workplace.

How do we reverse that trend and keep our internal airwaves as clutter-free as possible so that important content gets through?

Make use of the connection between communication and the employee experience.

What is the Employee Experience?

Employee experience is just a fancy way of saying the way it feels to work where you work.

For communicators, the most efficient way to focus on the employee experience is to resist treating communicating with employees as a transaction. It’s not about “We, the company, have this thing to say and so we will say it and employees will understand.”

Instead, take an experiential approach to employee communication. Know before you start how you’d like people to feel while they’re reading or viewing your communication — and after. Choose your channels, words, images, structure and layout to serve that outcome.

You see, traditionally, the development of employee communication doesn’t allow for emotion. Unless it’s about building a connection to the brand or sharing extremely bad news. I say it’s time to allow for emotion (in appropriate ways) in all employee communication.

Why not? All our experiences as human beings are framed on emotion. Experiences come from participating in or encountering something on a personal level. Let’s not forget that information, news and other content is delivered from the organization but it is consumed by people. In that sense, employee communication is personal.

The emotions don’t have to be grand experiences or intense. You just might want an employee to feel reassured while reading about a new time management system and while learning how to use it. Achieve that outcome and voila! You’ve made a positive contribution to the overall employee experience. It sounds obvious that you’d want to create a positive experience. However, without the expressed effort to focus on that outcome, transaction thinking often takes over and frustration, confusion, frustration or apathy have room to take hold. I see this happen all the time.

It can’t always be rosy

A positive experience does not necessarily equate to feeling good or happy. From time to time, internal communications are about more difficult topics such as a restructure or missed targets for bonus payouts. You still can’t forgo thinking about what kind of experience you want to create. People can receive bad news and still say the experience wasn’t negative if it’s done with respect and integrity.

Admittedly, effective one-to-many internal communication isn’t the only factor in shaping an appealing and sustainable employee experience. There’s a range of other factors — from the physical environment to the visibility of senior leaders to how well a person’s personal values mesh with the company culture – that combine to shape how each employee feels about their job and where they work.

However, each time you communicate to the employee base, you have an opportunity to shape the overall employee experience. Use that opportunity to focus on how you want people to feel. In the words of the poet Maya Angelou, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”