Staff communication strategy: one-way message or two-way AI?

ADVISORY COLUMN: WORKPLACE PRODUCTIVITY

As a leader, you must find ways to communicate a new strategic plan to employees, the board and other stakeholders. But should you send the usual long, dry report? Can AI transform this high-stakes chore?

Communicating a strategic plan: it’s one of the activities executives hate. Why? The excitement of a retreat fades; now comes the hard part.

So, you need to convey the plan to folks who weren’t there, but must implement it.

Typically, you send out reports. Then, you conduct a town hall with PowerPoint slides. Many attend, but few meaningful questions are posed. Finally, you decide to entrust the communication to managers. Their ‘Chinese telephone; attempts only make things worse; he blind leading the blind.

Can AI be used to turn around this state of affairs? Here are some of the emerging best practices.

In former times, executives would argue that employees didn’t need to know the corporate strategy. If they would do what they were told, all would be well. Perhaps that point of view worked in the past, but today’s world demands more.

Today, you are hiring brains, not brawn. You want employees who comprehend the thinking behind strategic choices. This is the only way they can make the right adjustments when the unexpected occurs.

This means that staff must understand not only their place in a strategic plan, but the underlying reason their part even exists. Unlike everyday business problems, this isn’t easy. Why?

At the heart of the matter is the fact that sharing a strategy is challenging. Because it deals with the future, there is no hard data available.

Instead, executives must draw upon invisible chains of logic, and make bets on outcomes they can’t prove. Most employees find this kind of abstract thinking challenging. But as a manager, you have no choice.

It’s no wonder so many surveys show workers don’t know what their corporate strategy is.

Fortunately, as a leader, you must interact with staff more than ever before. In the past, you might have blamed stakeholders for not engaging appropriately. Back then, it was perfectly acceptable to lob the strategic plan over the fence to an unwitting audience. Whether they caught it was their business.

Today, there are no such excuses. Consider the notion that you are responsible for developing their understanding. That’s why you need to move beyond one-way communication.

Fortunately, with the help of new artificial intelligence tools, you can.

For this purpose, use an SLM or source language model such as NotebookLM.

It belongs to a tiny class of large language models or LLMs that generate responses exclusively grounded in user-provided or uploaded sources, rather than relying solely on their pre-trained general knowledge.

In other words, you provide the data and the app does the ‘thinking’.

I recommend that you upload your strategy documents to NotebookLM. Then, craft a series of prompts for staff to interrogate them. For example, craft different questions in the form of prompts at three levels.

- Basic Prompts to comprehend the strategy. These are ideal for newcomers to the company who need to know the history, and why certain aspirations are now being formed. This level focuses on definitions and summaries;

- Intermediate Prompts are meant for the average staffer. Prompts would ask for analysis of trends, contrasts, implications, or partial evaluations; and

- Advanced Prompts require complex, multi-step reasoning, integration across documents, evaluation of assumptions, or generation of novel insights.

An employee who begins with a recommended prompt can go deeper in subsequent steps, pursuing individual questions to clarify understanding. As such, each person’s experience would be different, especially at higher levels of strategic skill.

You can even gamify the experience. With a bit of creative design, you can set the questions within a context as the devil’s advocate. Then, offer each response a ‘score’.

The point is to create an interactive flow that offers unique answers to each staff member.

The good news is that these features aren’t expensive or time-consuming to set up. And they could engage employees with varying levels of skill, knowledge and motivation.

In other words, someone who would never be excited about reading a strategy report or attending a town hall can now become engaged.

The old days of rolling out a strategic plan via a monologue are over. For the first time, you can invite online dialogue. Use AI to let people question, dissect, and reimagine your plans on their own. When they help shape the future, they own it.

Francis Wade is a management consultant and author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity. To search past columns on productivity, strategy and business processes, or give feedback, email: columns@fwconsulting.com