Knowing what is important to your organization is important to employee engagement. Engaging employees is important to your performance. The more engaged your employees, the better your performance. So, using your regular company communications to remind employees what your corporate values are increases your opportunity to connect with employees and ensure that they’re hearing and understanding your intended message.
At VGM, we value supporting our community—through contributing dollars and volunteer hours to nonprofits in the locations where our employees work. Previously we referred to these efforts using a variety of terms: philanthropy, corporate giving, community giving, be the change, giving back, community support and more. It was not immediately clear to employees that the information we were sharing was all related to the same effort. In CEO updates we called it one thing, in the employee newsletter we used a different term, on social media we described it another way. Our inconsistency took away from the impact of sharing stories of the good work that VGM and our employees were doing in the community.
In order to maximize the impact on the employees, and to make the messaging easiest to consistently create, we honed this corporate value to one key consistent, repeatable message: Make a Difference.
Now anytime we refer to anything having to do with volunteering, donating funds, or supporting charities, we don’t have to brainstorm creative ways to say it. We use the key message Make a Difference. It helps highlight for the employees something that is important to our company, that we know is important to them without there being any confusion.
If your organization, like ours, has a number of corporate values that you want to make sure you’re sharing with your employees, I encourage you to hone each of them down to a key message that you can use repeatedly. Having these key messages at the ready, whether there are three or 13 or 30 of them, makes drafting your communications much more efficient and much more impactful.
