Internal communications, the messaging delivered to employees, is one of the most critical components of an organization’s overall communication strategy.

While communicating to staff is a fundamental aspect of any business, many companies fail to realize the importance of doing so with a focused, relevant, intentional and timely approach. There are effective and ineffective ways to communicate to employees, and discerning the difference can be a game-changer.

Understanding the employee’s perspective should be one of the first steps in any internal communications strategy. Too many organizations talk to employees without truly understanding what it’s like to work for the company. The disconnect between management and staff becomes apparent, and employees immediately discount the communications. Messaging should align with the culture and be relevant and practical in its delivery. Prior to developing communications, the C-suite should be advised on the current employee moral, the chief complaints and the perceived benefits of working for the organization.

Secondly, messages should align with the organization’s overall goals. The communications need to be intentional and clearly relatable to the broader, top-level objectives of the company. By leveraging a key message platform across your organization, you will drive higher employee engagement and enterprise-wide alignment of the organization’s mission, vision, values and strategic direction.

Honest and timely communication is a third aspect of effective internal messaging. Often, employees learn of company information through the “grapevine” or through an outside source. Organizations delay communicating with staff, rather than addressing potentially negative situations immediately. It is important for companies to admit challenges and communicate aspirations. It is okay to have goal-oriented messaging, as long as employees know you are striving to get there. If the communications are both realistic and inspiring, they will foster a positive work environment and a team-focused mentality. An outside communications consultant can assist in tailoring your messaging, while providing a fresh perspective.

Effective internal communications is vital to the success of a company. It makes a workforce more engaged, productive and helps support a more competitive employer brand.

Recently, the Reputation Institute released their Most Reputable Companies list indicating that communicators are now placing an increased value on the role reputation plays on consumer behavior.

As someone who has spent the last 16 years in consumer and business-to-business public relations, I would argue that reputation is not a new measurement of the public relations strategies I’ve been involved in because public relations provides secondary, and in many cases, primary influences around reputation.

There are many components associated with reputation, but a few of my favorites include customer service, product quality, pricing vs. value, branding, cultural buying attitudes, on-time delivery and sometimes advertising.  Not one of these alone can catapult a company to the top of the reputation list; however, failing at one of these, specifically customer service or on-time delivery, can drop you to the bottom of the list very quickly.

Reputation is something that is earned over time, not bought.  From a consumer-purchasing standpoint, people will pay more for the same product just because of the reputation of a company or product.  Take insurance for example.  Most companies sell the same or similar policies and products.  However, there are high priced companies that claim they don’t sell on price, but will be there for you when you need them.  Then, there are those companies that sell on price.  It’s not that they won’t be there when you have a claim, they’re just not known for their service.  In these instances the consumer has a choice.  And many consumers choose the higher priced companies, because they feel like there is perceived value in the reputation of the brand.  This strategy is not new.  These companies have been telling this story and building their reputation for years and years.  Their marketing and communications departments have been tying this external message to their collateral material and agent sales training for years.

I realize this is just one example, but my point is that companies with great reputations are not new at this positioning.  They have intentional public relations and communications strategies, both internal and external, that help support and build on their reputational strategies and aspirations.

If you’re with a company that isn’t worried about reputation, I would caution you to at least understand where you stand within your market versus competitors’, and what your customers think about you and/or are saying about you.  These two elements alone can tell a very interesting story, and one that you can build a public relations strategy around in order to get to the reputational level you’re trying to achieve.

But remember, it’s a marathon not a sprint.

I’m writing this post to help those of you that are trying to figure out what “sustainability “ means. If I had a dollar for every time I was asked about what sustainability means, well you know the rest of the story. It’s very difficult to give a 30 second sound bite at a party about sustainability. Trust me, I’ve tried it multiple times. I normally start to get blank stares when I get to the part about transparency, integrated reporting, shareholder proposals and especially supply chain. So, here I go…

Sustainability from a corporate perspective is the social, environmental and economic impact that a company has on a multitude of stakeholders, just by doing business. My definition does not include being a “green” company, because honestly, I don’t even really know what that means, and I’m in the industry. I mean, I do know what “going green” means, but until you put into context what a company is actually doing to “go green,” or compare it to other sustainability metrics for the company, it has absolutely no meaning and is completely “marketing speak,” but I’ll save that one for another Zelo PR blog post.

So, back to sustainability. Let’s start with the why. Why would a company even talk about sustainability? There are a multitude of reasons why companies are now reporting on and sharing their sustainability stories with stakeholders, but I will focus on just a few.

The first, for public companies, is that they are beginning to see more and more shareholder proposals filed against them for transparency into their sustainability metrics, measurements and goals. These proposals are coming from institutional shareholders that are typically holding shares of the company stock in some sort of Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) fund. These shareholders want transparency into information about the sustainability practices of the companies they are investing in. Because most companies don’t want to fight the proposals at their annual shareholder meetings, they tend to negotiate with the shareholders and then put together a plan that will eventually provide some disclosure/transparency to stakeholders around their sustainability measurements. And, while there are different ways to report on this topic, the de-facto global standard for sustainability reporting is the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) G3 guidelines.

Another reason a company (public and private) might have to communicate its sustainability results is by being a supplier to a large retailer like Walmart or Target. Companies that are Walmart suppliers (nearly 60,000) are encouraged to fill out a voluntary Supplier Sustainability Assessment form, which is a compilation of measurements that record the impact that making their product has on the environment, social and economic areas that fall within the product lifecycle.

Nowadays, you don’t even have to be a supplier in the retail industry to receive one of these assessment forms from your customers. More and more companies from industrial manufacturing to power generation are also using these assessments, and sometimes even binding sustainability contracts, to evaluate their supply chain for potential risks that ultimately might connect them with their supplier through a media story, audit, or government finding.

The final category- at least for the purposes of this post- are companies that produce or sell a product that has an impact on sustainability including energy efficiency, green house gas (GHG) emission reduction and solar and electric power, just to name a few. These companies use sustainability as a platform for their marketing efforts, but also to make customers, the media and the general public aware of the positive impact their products can have on the core measurements of sustainability. This type of marketing is different from green marketing because there is a correlation between the sale of their products and sustainability measurements.

I hope that by reading this post you now have a better understanding of what sustainability means and why companies are beginning to care so much about it. It’s complicated I know; so don’t get frustrated if you still don’t get it just by reading this post. I have a feeling this is only part one of “What is Sustainability.”

To get a better understating of the actual sustainability measurements used within the GRI guidelines go to www.globalreporting.org.

So let’s talk about reputation vs. image. My take on reputation is that it’s a long-lasting measurement about the internal and external nature in which a company does business. It can encompass customer-service, product quality, advertising, social responsibility, internal culture, how employees are treated and promoted, and on and on. Image, by contrast, is a shorter-term or more superficial way that a company portrays itself, typically to the general public or its customer base. And, while many companies today go for image over reputation, it’s interesting to find out that in many cases their internal culture does not match their external image or advertising. I think one of the key factors about reputation is that it’s typically embedded throughout the organization and oozes out to the external stakeholders to observe. I truly believe that if a company opts to invest in a positive reputation, while driving an internal culture to match, they can weather many difficult situations including challenging markets and competition. Can you remember a Super Bowl Ad from 2007? Unfortunately, I can’t.