How to Communicate Your Strategic Plan to Employees

When you implement a Balanced Scorecard or any other strategic plan, one thing is easy to forget: no strategy works if employees don't know how to align with it, or don't know about it at all. Your internal communication strategy can make or break the effort. This article covers the goals and elements of a strategic communication plan, the obstacles that keep teams from adopting a strategy, and lessons from Canon USA's strategy communication.

What a strategic communication plan covers

A strategic communication plan is a written plan for how you will tell your team about the organization's objectives. It sets out the messages and tactics you will use to engage employees with the strategy. In his book Balanced Scorecard: Step-By-Step for Government and Nonprofit Agencies, Paul Niven outlines the objectives and key elements of such a plan.

Start with the objective

Before writing the plan, Niven recommends deciding what it is for. Common objectives include:

• Building awareness of the Balanced Scorecard or strategic plan at all levels of the organization.
• Teaching key Balanced Scorecard concepts to all audiences.
• Gaining the engagement and commitment of key stakeholders, and encouraging participation in the process.
• Making sure team results are shared quickly and effectively.

Niven gives Nova Scotia Power's communication objective as an example: "To present the concepts of the Balanced Scorecard to the key constituents involved in both sponsoring and providing input to the implementation, and to provide all involved with regular updates regarding the team's progress during the implementation." It states who the communication is for and what it should say, which gives every later message a reference point.

Work through the W5 elements

Niven's "W5" approach sets the key elements of the plan: who, why, what, when and where. Communication runs both ways, so plan how you will collect feedback as well as how you will deliver the message.

• Who is both the audience and the communicator. Define the groups involved in the implementation, then assign a communicator to carry the message to each one.
• Why and what are the purpose and the message. The purpose is the objective you chose above, such as gaining the commitment of key stakeholders.
• When depends on what each audience needs. If you are unsure, err on the side of too much. In "Leading Change," John Kotter writes, "without credible communication, and a lot of it, employees' hearts and minds are never captured."
• Where and how covers channels. Dr. Robert Kaplan suggests communicating the plan "seven times in seven ways": brochures, speeches, newsletters, videos, the company website or intranet, workshops, even internal blog posts. Any channel that reaches the audience will do.

Five obstacles to strategic alignment and how to overcome them

If people at work keep asking "Why are we doing this project?" or "Why did we stop focusing on this?", the answers should be in your strategic plan, and your team should be using it to find them. When they aren't, check whether everyone actually understands the plan. These five obstacles often stand in the way of teams adopting your business strategy.

1. No interaction with the strategy

Ask how many people in your company could name the plan's key themes without opening the intranet. Teams often hear about a strategic plan once, in an orientation session or an executive memo, and rarely touch it again, so it is easy to forget. To keep it in front of them:

• Print your five strategic themes on business cards and ask people to carry them. This is called a "pocket strategy."
• Give internal communications over to themes and initiatives: post the themes in the break room, share success stories in meetings, and recognize people and projects that represent key areas of the plan.
• Draw a strategy map like the one below and post it on the intranet and office walls. ClearPoint can help you publish your results to the intranet consistently.

2. No connection to the strategy

Employees may work on strategic initiatives every day without seeing how their role connects to the strategy. If they can't link their daily work to the organization's five-year direction, they won't understand or remember much of the plan. To build that connection:

• Using the pocket-strategy cards, ask teams to circle the themes they contribute to most and write how. Share the cards in internal meetings.
• Have executives highlight one team or department each month whose work directly supports the strategy.
• Draw clear links between work plans, budget and strategy, so every department activity ties back to the plan. ClearPoint's alignment reports show these connections.

3. Weak links between current work and the future strategy

Strategies usually describe where the organization wants to be five years out. If you don't keep linking today's work to that long-term vision, the plan loses relevance long before you revisit it. To keep the link:

• Create and discuss key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets. Start with a five-year target, work backward to targets for each year including this one, and share results along the way.
• Explain how projects connect to the strategy. If you are modernizing your infrastructure, say which strategic goal it serves.
• Meet regularly and share progress as it happens. ClearPoint's workflow automations make it easier for owners to post their updates.

4. Low motivation to get involved

Talking about a strategy is often not enough; you need to sell it to get buy-in. Executives may leave long strategy discussions energized, but people who weren't in the room need a reason to get on board. To build motivation:

• Tie incentives to metrics. A group that hits its KPI targets might earn bonus pay or an office celebration.
• Drive ownership by assigning individuals to update and report on specific parts of the plan.
• Bring the strategy into the tools people already use. With ClearPoint's Teams integration, people can see the strategy and make updates without leaving Microsoft Teams.

5. No chance to give feedback

Leadership teams write strategic plans, but employees do the daily work. To keep their buy-in, and to hear perspectives leaders may have missed, give everyone ways to react, ask questions and contribute. Keep people informed with frequent performance updates; at ClearPoint, everyone follows strategy progress through weekly emails. Then ask for feedback in team meetings, because employees are best placed to know why results look the way they do.

Lessons from Canon USA

The May–June 2007 Balanced Scorecard Report included an article by business writer Lauren Keller Johnson, "Common Sense in Strategy Communication: Four Lessons from Canon USA." Canon USA's strategy won it a place in the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame. The four lessons below come from that 2007 article; the fifth comes from our own experience.

Don't rely on written communication alone

People absorb information differently. Posters miss people who aren't visual learners, and a long email misses everyone who skips long emails. Use a mix of video, audio, visual and written communication, and be creative: Canon USA produced "Strategy in Action: Canon Americas' Strategy Playbook," with a color-coded corporate strategy map designed by a graphic artist who had worked for USA Today.

Make the message clear and relevant

Define your strategic terms. If "customer" is a key term, say who your customers are and why you are targeting them. Use plain language instead of acronyms and jargon: Canon USA's strategy map didn't talk about "maximizing ROA," but asked employees to "find ways of lowering the cost of doing business," "work together," and "make Canon number one in all businesses."

Keep communication flowing in both directions

Employees won't give feedback unless they know you want it and know where to send it. Choose the venue for bottom-up feedback that fits your organizational structure, and set it up soon.

Tap into the workforce's vision

Having a plan is different from knowing how it affects employees. Leaders who see the strategy from the front line are more willing to consider new solutions. Stay alert to what is and isn't working, and be ready to adjust the plan based on the feedback you get.

Make your progress visible

Touching on strategy only once a quarter or every six months lets interest fade. Encourage departmental teams to meet weekly to review their KPIs and discuss how their work connects to the overall plan, and meet monthly as an organization. The more often you report, the simpler each report should be, since nobody will spend hours on spreadsheets every week.

With ClearPoint you can share dashboards that show the most important KPI statuses at a glance, use visual status indicators, build strategy maps for the company and each department, and let the software generate and distribute reports to each audience on a predetermined schedule.

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