How to build a ‘what this means for you’ employee messaging framework

When employees receive a major company update, they first want to know what it means for their work. A repeatable messaging framework can help communicators craft messaging to answer that urgent question.

“The most important thing to keep in mind is putting yourself into the role of the individual who’s receiving the information,” said Lisa Claybon, vice president of corporate affairs at a global foodservice company.

That kind of employee-first lens should always be a part of any framework, as a single announcement can mean very different things to teams working at the same company. The framework can help keep the core of the message intact while customizing it when needed.

“You have to understand where you’re hitting people,” said Debra Helwig, internal communications leader at Pinion. “It’s about how I do my stuff, where I get my stuff or how I feel about my stuff. Knowing the tenor of what you’re addressing will totally change how you structure the communication, who it comes from and what kind of scope it has.”

1. Figure out what employees need from the update.

At the beginning of the building process, comms pros should determine what different employees might need from a given message. Start with a standard set of questions that moves the message from company priority to employee relevance.

Those questions should include:

• What’s the top-line news at hand?
• Who is affected?
• What does this mean for a given audience?
• What do they need to do now?
• Where can they have their questions answered?

Claybon said that means starting with the employee’s daily reality.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about, if I am a junior employee getting information about a systems change, what is most important to understand?” Claybon said. “What’s going to change in my day-to-day activities? Do I need to do something different? Do I need to prepare for the potential change, and what is it going to mean after the change comes through? Not what this means for the company business strategy — you want to capture the attention of what it means to the individual first.”

2. Determine what belongs in the main message and build branches off of it.

Once a communicator knows what different employees need from the update, the next step involves determining where the details belong. They should keep the main message focused on what everyone needs to understand, then branch off details that only apply to specific audience needs.

Keep in mind, the branches shouldn’t look the same for every employee group.  One audience branch might explain how the update affects a certain team’s workflow, while a connected action branch might spell out what that team needs to do next with deeper, team-specific context. The support branch can also change depending on how much guidance the audience will need. These branches in the framework enable easier message customization.

3. Build in a manager layer.

The framework should also help communicators think through how to empower managers to reinforce company messaging.

“If managers feel underinformed and they don’t know who to contact, when their team looks at them for an answer, they make stuff up,” Helwig said. “Give them all the information and give them that direct connect so they have an ability in a very quick way to get an answer if they need it.”

This can be simple:

• Know: What managers need to understand about the message.
• Share: One or two parts of the message to reinforce that are team-focused.
• Do: The action the team needs to take.

The end goal is to ensure employees get clearer answers from the people they already turn to with questions, while giving managers enough context to make the message easy to understand in terms of how it affects their teams.

“Giving managers more than they might see in a single message will help make sure that they understand it and have had time to think through it,” Claybon said. “Then they can put it in their own words, so it becomes more authentic to the team members they’re delivering messages to.”

For a template that’ll help communicators turn a broad company update into clear employee guidance with provisions for message branches, where to put the details and manager guidance, join Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council.

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.