Top Communication Opportunities for 2023

Striving for excellence in workplace communication enables a vibrant experience for employees at work. This communication improves how employees feel about an organization and empowers them to deliver a fantastic customer experience.

Having an organization full of satisfied, engaged employees directly results in more satisfied customers. This combination creates a powerful feedback loop, which has a positive impact on the company's bottom line.

C-level executives and communication experts have come to realize that each employee's experience, the overall workplace experience, and every valuable customer's experience all influence each other with an identifiable interdependency.

If an organization reflects the values of its employees, when it comes to promoting the organization's brand, the employees usually become strong influencers about the brand on social media.

Ask any satisfied employee of any major-consumer-brand company, and they usually and wholeheartedly say that they are proud to work at the company.

They are also very likely to let their feelings be known on social media. In fact, individual popularity on social media is, in part, driven by where a person works, especially on business-related social media systems like LinkedIn.

With popular brands, employees are also likely to be customers. Being a fan of a company's products and brand is likely one of the important reasons that a person wants to work for the company.

One company that does this extremely well is Apple. Ask any satisfied Apple employee what they think of Apple products, and you will usually get lots of enthusiasm about the products. Apple's customer loyalty is 90% and has been that percentage for the past three years, since 2020.

The Open Business Council reports that Apple achieves an extremely high level of customer loyalty by focusing on Apple employee satisfaction along with customer satisfaction. Apple realizes that contented employees provide better-quality customer service. Providing an exceptional customer experience benefits the company and its customers.

The top communication objectives are to encourage efficient, energized, and empowered employees who focus on the company's priorities. A motivated workforce delivers desired results by achieving targeted goals. Employee engagement makes this possible.

Communication experts understand how to increase engagement by using internal communication practices that encourage collaboration. These communications support making connections between employees. Increased engagement also comes from when, where, and how communication occurs.

A strategically designed system of digital signage is a vital tool in accomplishing this goal of increased engagement by using internal communications opportunities. This system provides the message delivery mechanism. Just as important is the content delivered.

The best practices include encouraging, enabling, and empowering staff to participate actively in the assimilation and curation of the communication content. C-level leaders and people managers at all levels need to make use of these internal communications opportunities to stimulate employee engagement.

There are two extremes in the spectrum of organizational culture.

One is the organizational culture forms itself out of neglect, abuse, poor judgment, disruption, and mismanagement. Twitter is considered by some to be an example of this type. The key driver is chaos.

The other extreme is an organizational culture designed to guide and motivate employees with enthusiasm to do their best for the organization's mission. SpaceX is considered by many to be an example of this type with its mission to Mars. The key driver is the mission.

It is interesting to note that both companies have Elon Musk as the CEO. The organization's culture, in these cases, is the greater force, not the CEO.

The trend for improving organizational culture is to coach leaders to understand their limitations, be more adaptable, and increase authenticity and empathy in their communications. This is a paradigm shift from communications being considered a work task to a vital characteristic of an effective leader.

The strategic value of internal communication comes from creating an alignment of interests among employees that makes a strong connection with an organization's mission. In such an effort, internal communications are about the things that make sense, creating participatory understanding and a true awareness of why the organization's mission is important.

When organizational culture is manifesting well, leaders have great conversations, and they listen to employee feedback to better understand the workplace environment. They align the operations with the teams and collaborative work needed to achieve the strategic goals.

Companies that take strong public positions about controversial social issues are on the decline. Because of the economic downturn, C-level executives are reducing activities that do not improve revenues.

Organizations can still have values, yet executives do not need to feel compelled to express opinions on things unrelated to the business. Silence is preferred on unrelated social issues that do not impact business operations.

The looming recession and the potential of massive layoffs create a need for a strategy to handle reorganization. There is a strong communication opportunity to keep employees and leaders informed in light of the rapid changes occurring.

Embracing internal communications opportunities allows a company to have a strategy that promotes stability and success in times of uncertainty and limits any damage from disruption.

There is a widespread recognition that workplace communications are increasingly important. Trust in politicians, governments, mainstream media, and religious leaders declined substantially in America and elsewhere.

For many, the most trusted source of information is the company that employs them. This is true as long as the company has a strong, positive, identifiable culture. Employees look to their company for guidance and its senior executives for leadership. That makes workplace communication more crucial than ever before.

Communications experts need to avoid being stuck solely in crisis management and be proactive with internal communications opportunities to introduce, clearly articulate, and reinforce a desired organizational culture, not one developing by happenstance.

Leaders are encouraged to define organizational culture with unrelenting intent in ways that are collaborative, creative, and clear, which empower employees and enable the company to thrive.

Contact ConnectedSign to learn more about how to use digital signage to take full advantage of your internal communications opportunities.