🎨 🧪 Create Your Annual Plan like an Artist and a Scientist
Ritual 08: 10 Road-mapping Recommendations for Internal Communications and Culture
☎️ Hello. Hello. Thank you for dialing into this edition of The Switchboard. I’m Julia, Founder and Editor-in-Chief. I hope you enjoy exploring the ways we communicate and connect at work and beyond via this newsletter. Here’s why I write and the Index of past posts.
With 2024 approaching, the changing of the calendar offers an opportunity to reflect, reset and reimagine priorities. A strong planning process can set you up for success. Many organizations begin road-mapping for the next year in the fall, but it’s never too late to plan. December is often a quieter time for this activity.
This is a guide for how to approach your annual Internal Communications and Culture strategy as an artist and a scientist. Learn how to bring creativity, experimentation and analysis to your planning process. Below are insights and best practices from leaders featured on The Switchboard and me. Here’s our top 10 recommendations:
🦚 Begin with Inspiration
📈 Listen to Analyze Impact
✅ Organize by Action
🎯 Align with Organizational Goals and Leader Voices
📅 Outline Your Calendar
🏹 Identify Risks
📕 Define Roles, Responsibilities and Support
🥇 Discuss Success
📝 Summarize in 1 Page or Less
🏆 Don’t Leave The Plan on a Pedestal
🦚 1. Begin with Inspiration
🎨 Artist: Think of your work as a blank canvas — bring ideas to life.
If you had all the time, energy and resources, what program(s) do you dream of making happen at work? Perhaps you’ve always wanted to host a C-suite conversation series, create an employee cookbook or jumpstart employee club energy.
Seek out inspiration from sources internally and externally through newsletters, magazines and books so that you can create hotdog moments to transform employee experiences. I recommend keeping a list of ideas all year long in the same place — a doc, a folder, a notebook — and review what you’d like to experiment with in the next year. Surbhi Ugra suggests:
Think about the latest and greatest in customer experience. What’s the latest big thing that industry-leading companies are introducing to people in their day-to-day lives? Good employee experience should be seamless and bring the same convenience and care for employees at work as they get anywhere else, but these capabilities take time to implement. When creating a long-term strategy, leaders should pull from this type of aspirational thinking across industries!
📈 2. Listen to Analyze Impact
🧪 Scientist: Research, assess and listen for the true results and future interests.
To look forward, we must look back. Research is key to this step. Go on a listening tour to talk with employees, analyze survey data and engage in conversations with leaders. Review lessons learned from projects over the past year — are there key trends to carry forward or areas for change? Be ready for many opinions, you’ll need to synthesize them to steer your strategy in the right direction. Here’s what a few leaders featured on The Switchboard have to say about this step:
Do your homework, and find out what communication strategies and tactics are working best for staff, through surveys, small group chats, and listening tours. You're guaranteed to get conflicting feedback — staff are going to both love and hate everything about your All Hands meetings, emails, tools, etc — but that feedback will help you fine tune your communications mix to reach your teams where they are. -Christopher Pearsall
Include a robust discovery phase to uncover the most impactful EX moments your strategy will cover. Do this by engaging in deep employee listening through 1:1 conversations, focus groups, or surveys - ideally, a combination of the three. After discovery, continue to work with a subset of employees to co-create EX moments together. Doing so will ensure your strategy is rooted in facts and improves the experiences that matter most to your people. -Jared Taylor
We like to work backwards from the opportunity, so our plans are grounded in data like employee survey feedback and external benchmarking while also being explicit as to how we will measure our success. We also use the opportunity to help our leaders refine their voice and create storytelling arcs that create meaningful connections. -Michael Maney
✅ 3. Organize by Action
🎨 Artist: Embrace the emotions in order to set your intentions.
Think of the verbs that you hope employees will feel from your work. Group your ideas, programs and impactful moments under these overall actions. These questions could also help frame planning sessions by focusing on each for 30-minute discussions. Here are three actions, prompts and tactics to get started:
Inform: How will you educate employees?
💡 Newsletters, video series, leader briefings
Connect: How will you bring employees together to foster community?
💡 Employee clubs, leadership programs, major meetings
Inspire: How will you make employees proud?
💡 Ambassador programs, celebrating major milestones, unique access
Personalize the verbs for your organization — the actions you choose can form your mission statement for your team: We seek to inform, connect and inspire employees — update with your version. When you are planning, put yourself into the shoes of your employees as Morgan Baden advises:
Ground your plan in “WIIFM:” What’s in it for me? As you write or revise your annual internal communications strategy and plan, at every step, ask yourself “why and how will this matter to employees and their day-to-day work? What’s the point of this tactic or output?”
Building a clear through-line between the elements of the plan and how they will impact people, teams, and the business will help everyone stay attuned to the bigger picture and how their work contributes to it. And that’s crucial because, if your internal communications aren’t regularly articulating that connection, you’re at risk of losing it.
🎯 4. Align with Organizational Goals and Leader Voices
🧪 Scientist: Strive to understand the bigger picture to connect the dots of opportunities.
It’s important to know what your partners' goals are to ensure you can plan to best support them. Finding out what their priorities are in advance allows you to be a strong collaborator. Many leaders I’ve interviewed here emphasize the importance of being a business partner first with the recommendations below:
Approach the creation of an employee experience strategy and plan with a clear understanding of the business outcomes they hope to achieve. By doing so, leaders can ensure that their plan is aligned with the overall goals and objectives of the organization. This alignment is crucial for driving meaningful business outcomes and ensuring that the employee experience is optimized to support these outcomes. -Q Hamirani
Internal communicators are true business partners - Business Units, departments, teams need help figuring out the best way to communicate to their people if they hope to achieve their business goals. Before setting down to write a plan or develop a strategy, try hosting a planning discussion with the Business Unit leader to understand their priorities for the coming year and use that discussion as your North Star. Not only will this help your efforts, but it'll give you a chance to help them connect things back to overarching corporate priorities and goals, too. -Chase Warner
In addition, as you are writing Executive communications plans for your leaders, lean into their personal voices as Christine Alabastro advises:
Everyone has a unique story, demeanor, and presence. Your role in elevating an executive is to find that voice, elevate it, and ensure it resonates effectively with each audience. Authenticity is key, so spend time both formally and informally with your executive to grasp their personal style.
📅 5. Outline Your Calendar
🎨 Artist: Sketch your vision, but leave space for innovation.
Map out the year with key dates, milestones and heritage months. Look back at the prior year to help you get started. I am a big fan of Pyn’s HR Calendar with a surprise and delight filter because you should know when it’s World Nutella Day or National Pizza Day! Here’s how Holly Nicola approaches calendar planning:
At the beginning of the last quarter of the year, we come together to map out all of the non-negotiable events of the year like the Performance Management Cycle, key DEI events, and those that are regionally important to our communities across our company. We then take our calendar and meet with various partners across the company to map out and plan their various launch plans or announcements for the year. The output of this exercise allows us to be aligned as we enter a new year, and also gives us an opportunity as a team to get serious on the things we want to do or need to stop. Most importantly, it's a time to bond before a new year begins!
Consider approaching culture with experiments. Save blocks of time on the calendar with the understanding that plans will evolve later as Kursat Ozenc advises:
Think about your culture as a product, which can open up a whole new set of possibilities. Create quarterly culture experiments with clear metrics instead of a yearly majestic plan. This will allow you to test new ideas quickly and learn from your mistakes. Make sure experiments are based on employee feedback loops so that you can get real-time insights into what is working and what is not.
Second, approach your culture experiments as if they are part of an innovation portfolio. Have variety with your safe bets (recurring events), strong bets, and risky bets. This will give you a space for growth and innovation. You can create a constantly evolving and improving culture by following these two best practices.
🏹 6. Identify Risks
🧪 Scientist: Be realistic and prepared for the unexpected.
In addition to the moments you plan for, there’s also the ones you can’t always anticipate. Develop your crisis communications checklist for what to do at difficult moments. Consider any risks you might face as an organization and how to protect your people. For all the moments you can’t plan for, here’s wisdom from Laura Hunter:
Add in Project Loki (or Project Chaos, Ulysses, Maelstrom, Bangarang or Barnham - all names I've used before) to your plan. This is the project that you don't know about and can't plan for. I put this project on the official plan to ensure that we hold between 10% and 25% of our team's capacity for new things that are always additional to our current work.
For your comms leadership, keeping this project front and center in your plan reminds everyone that while we are a strategic function, we are also first responders when the strategy changes or an emergency crops up and we need the capacity to do so while continuing the important work of maintaining employee trust with dependable, consistent communications activities.
📕 7. Define Roles, Responsibilities and Support
🎨 Artist: Outline the plan to align on the greatest reach.
Whether you are flying solo or have a team, it’s important to define the roles and responsibilities you’ll play for internal communications and culture across the organization — who will work on what and the expected deliverables.
If time allows, set up templates for employees to build upon to execute their projects. Consider setting up a request form for support for other teams — define the ways you can be most helpful with their programs. Be clear and firm with room for flexibility when reasonable.
🥇 8. Discuss Success
🧪 Scientist: Define how you will measure impact.
Set clear expectations of success from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Set up metrics to measure your impact with dashboards. Here’s advice from Diane Tate:
A successful annual internal comms plan (1) addresses meaningful problems, (2) is grounded in your org's overall priorities and values, and (3) is responsive to changing business needs.
To address meaningful problems, be sure to identify key pain points, and ensure these pain points are tied to your organization's top priorities. When it comes to designing solutions, ensure they incorporate input from key stakeholders and are grounded in your company's or group's values. Finally, ensure your plan is flexible so you can respond to ongoing changes in the business.
📝 9. Summarize and Surprise
🎨 Artist: Present your plan like a present.
Save room for a 1-page summary of your plan at the top of your strategy document. After you have followed all the steps, look over your plan and write the short version that links to the key sections below it.
As Wes Kao of
guides, cut the preamble: “Start right before you get eaten by the bear.”Often if you are presenting your plan, you’ll lean into this summary, but you can also take it to the next level with personalization as recommended by Emily Singer Mandel:
Planning is a necessary part of any business, but real talk ... it can be quite boring to watch people's planning presentations or to read their docs. If I am doing a communications plan for a particular person, I like to slip in something that they can connect to on a personal level. One time I put in a suggested event tied to a leader's favorite sport. When we got to that slide, he got so excited he stood up in the middle of the presentation and said: Really?! Yes!
🏆 10. Don’t Leave The Plan on a Pedestal
🧪 Scientist: Review your strategy often to stay on track for impact.
Your plan should evolve and grow with you. Return to it frequently. Set calendar blocks every week to keep you on track and every month or quarter to track progress. Build into a monthly team meeting. Carve time out on Fridays. Here’s insight from Megan Stack:
Communication strategies often are created with gusto and then parked off to the side when the next big thing comes in - and the next big thing always comes in! A big reorg, a new executive, a shift in the company's strategic direction. So treat your strategy as a living document. Review it with your team and stakeholders on a quarterly basis. This will help you evaluate success, course-correct if needed, and keep the strategy alive so you aren't starting from scratch each year.
What has helped your planning process? Is there a step you would add to this list? Let's support each other by sharing recommendations. ☎️ Thank you for reading The Switchboard. It’s written by me, Julia Levy. I interview every leader and write each article.
To help others discover the stories I write, consider sharing this post on your favorite social network, giving a heart or commenting with your thoughts. It makes me happy to hear from readers — reply with what resonated.