Reinforcing Desired Behaviors through Strategically Placed Communication

Strategic communication is about creating behaviors to advance the vision, mission, and values of an organization. This means creating a multi-disciplinary approach to ensure people throughout an organization understand where it is headed and how they can help. The framework of strategic communication starts with leadership finding ways to communicate their vision clearly. This means not only holding sessions to voice the vision, mission, and values, but to create a clear understanding of how people need to behave to create consistency across the organization. There are 3 areas that can help to reinforce the vision for an organization and can be overlooked.

Hiring: Do you hire people who are a good cultural fit or just based on their skill set? Skills can be taught but attitudes often cannot be altered. Ensure that your human resource department or those in charge of hiring understand they type of individual that will fit nicely into the culture.

Onboarding: Once hired, it is important that the new hire has a clear understanding of the vision for the organization and how their work helps to bring it to life. One Great Place to Work, Baird Associates, uses onboarding to teach the organizational values then gives new hires actual ethical dilemmas that the company has faced and has them resolve them with the values in mind! From day one these individuals are thinking in terms of the values.

Recognition: There are many opportunities for recognition that need to be utilized to reinforce desired behaviors. This can be one-on-one recognitions, or group recognition. The key is to ensure that it is ongoing and not something done initially then forgotten.

Find ways to consistently reinforce the desired behaviors and your people will better understand the desired expectations and create opportunities to reinforce the vision, mission, and values of the organization.