How communicators can translate leadership updates into bite-sized employee messages

Leadership announcements are an important comms avenue for an organization’s top brass to share a message with the general employee population. But in many instances, the language of these announcements is more suited to the boardroom and can be tough for a rank-and-file employee to relate to.

“If you’re not communicating to associates in lay terms and breaking down these complex concepts in ways they can really understand and believe, you’re not going to get the engagement you’re looking for,” said Christy Noland, vice president of executive and business communications at Elevance Health.

The gap between leadership’s intent with messages and employees’ understanding of them can prove to be a major pitfall. Employees often don’t have time to read a full leadership announcement to appreciate all of its nuance.

But breaking these messages down for employees involves a whole lot more than just taking a sentence or two from the original announcement and calling it a day. It’s a process that works to pull the key points from the noise. Here’s how that looks in action:

1. Pressure test messages with leaders until the meaning is crystal clear. Comms pros should meet with leadership right after an internal announcement is made to determine what the big picture items are that they want employees to get out of the message. Noland told Ragan that her team sits down with leaders after any leadership message is distributed to figure out what vision and priorities the leader wanted to get across. “We listen to what they want associates to walk away with,” she said. She added that part of this process involves pressure testing customized employee announcements — often with multiple rounds of rewrites with C-suite involvement. “You can’t lose the strategic intent when you’re breaking down the larger message,” she said. “There needs to be a back-and-forth dialogue between communications and leaders to ensure the language reflects the priorities of the business while still making sense to employees.” In practice, that means working with leaders to clarify jargon and prioritize what employees must know long before the message goes out — that’ll make it much easier to break down later.
2. Break announcements into short, employee-centered mini-messages. Many times, leadership announcements can be wide-ranging and steeped in language that an everyday employee isn’t familiar with. Meghann Klein, senior director, strategic communications, revenue and technology group at Marriott International, said that to avoid confusion, her team will break down parts of leadership announcements into pieces, covering one element of the communication at a time. If it’s got five strategic points, that can mean five short emails over five days — or whatever cadence matches your needs. “We serve it up in big macro company strategy ways and then we translate it down into either discipline or organizational or more targeted ways,” Klein said . “It’s a layered and sequenced approach. You might see the original message that comes from our CEO and then get some other stuff in the middle, and you’ll remember the first and last pieces. So we break it into continuous story elements along the way that matter most.”
3. Use a templated structure to get the point home to scanners. You’ve got only a few seconds to capture an employee’s attention. Noland said that by structuring the breakdowns of leadership announcements in a repeatable and bulleted format, she’s able to give employees the big takeaways from the announcement and give a and a structure that’s easy to remember. She said this often comes in the form of a short headline summing up the announcement, a brief rationale behind the announcement and one thing employees should do with the information. “Employees need to not only understand what the news is, but they need to be able to act on it fairly quickly,” Noland told Ragan. “If employees can’t do that, then the communication hasn’t succeeded.”
4. Turn strategy into visuals . Visuals help employees grasp the core points of a leadership announcement without forcing them to wade through dense text. Noland said that Elevance Health will translate complex C-suite announcements into visuals that employees can quickly understand. As a method of reinforcement, she said that the company’s CEO will share these graphics at multiple town hall meetings in a row to help drive the point of a given announcement home in a short, snappy way. “For all associates, we’ll have a really clean graphical depiction of the strategy from the announcement,” she said. “Our CEO always starts by saying, ‘Remember these five things — if we don’t get these right, everything else fails.’’’

Leaders might be the ones setting the company’s vision, but it’s internal communicators who translate that vision in a way that makes sense for all employees. By breaking leadership announcements into more accessible messages, comms pros can turn top-level strategy into action across an organization.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.