Are your employee communications emotional enough?

Emotion Unlocks Action

When we interact with emotion-based creative content it can make us happy, sad, afraid, surprised, or even angry. Ultimately, it makes us care about the subject matter more and can motivate us to act. 

Turning strategy into action is the mission of any ambitious employee engagement team, so investing in creative campaigning to stimulate action should be a priority. At its best, creativity can be the difference between people embracing an internal initiative or ignoring it (and wasting your investment).

Creativity is a valuable commodity, but, as anyone who has ever endured a meandering brainstorm – or squirmed while watching Alan Partridge’s iconic Monkey Tennis clip – will recognise, great creative ideas are rarely plucked out of thin air.

The inspiration behind the best creative ideas is generally driven by a mix of creative talent, targeted research, persistence and lots of relevant data.

Magic Ingredients: data, strategy and ideas

When I joined the VCCP Partnership to work for Good Relations a few years ago, I was reminded of the data and creative work murals I used to see on the walls when I visited previously in my time as a client working for O2.

They reflect the truth that great campaigns are only possible if time and expertise is invested in getting every step of the process right, from research to strategy to execution.

The vital, inter-connecting roles of insight, strategy and creativity are reflected in my team’s three-phased approach to employee engagement campaigning – ‘Listen’, ‘Lead’ and ‘Live it’.

Our ‘Listen’ phase helps us to gain a deep understanding of the company culture and the needs of the employee and also helps us to get a better perspective of the engagement challenge. We take time at this stage to identify the business impacts an engagement campaign needs to drive.

The ‘Lead’ phase is all about applying the analysis of our data and insight to develop a targeted communications strategy and plan. At this point, we start developing communications assets to support company leaders and influencers in fulfilling their campaign roles. 

Finally, ‘Live it’ is the fun bit where we develop and craft the creative elements of the campaign that will bring strategy to life. Our campaigns are always built around a core creative concept; an overarching idea that runs across messages, channels and activations. 

Investing in Insight

Landing a winning creative, campaign-enhancing concept takes time, patience, collaboration and a true understanding of the employee that’s driven by research and data.

In my experience, the time invested up front is worth it, because it really does unlock the creativity that gives engagement campaigns the best possible chance of grabbing the attention of employees, appealing to their emotions, inspiring them to take positive action and achieving lasting impact. 

Perhaps that’s why Monkey Tennis hasn’t caught on?

Check out some of our creative engagement campaigns here.