Creativity, creativity, creativity. That’s the motto recited by many consultants – and design agencies – seeking to help clients connect with and motivate employees. They will say that it’s a crowded communication environment, in which employees are bombarded with many messages and materials, in many ways, every day. Any campaign simply has to be highly creative, and visually distinctive, to stand apart. All of which is true. To a point.
Gaining attention is of course vital to effective employee engagement. But you want to do it for a reason: to inspire employees to give their best to the company. Concepts and campaigns have to be creative in ways that support this aim. This means you need to have in mind a ‘desired response’ from your audience, which the creativity you employ is targeted towards. If you just wanted to grab attention, you could blaze a naked picture of the CEO across the intranet and that would probably do the job.
On the face of it, ‘desired response’ may sound like psycho-babble, but in reality it can be boiled down to three simple questions:
• What do you want people to know as a result of your engagement with them?
• What do you want them to feel?
• What do you want them to do?
This is a simple shorthand that should guide the formulation of any creative approach so that it works for your business, and aligns people behind hat you need from them. I’m not pretending it’s rocket science, but I do think it’s often forgotten (and not just in internal communication). You can have the most exciting creative concept, and the most compelling visual or tactical execution, but if these aren’t wholly aligned with your ‘desired response’ from employees, you’ll have a lovely-looking campaign that doesn’t do what it should for your company.
So next time you’re presented with highly creative concepts or executions, which do stand apart from what you’ve got in place at present, take a moment to step back and think about the context. Consider what you are seeking to achieve from the campaign. Put yourself in the shoes of your audience - remembering that you will have different groups who might react in different ways. Maybe test the concepts with representatives from these audience segments.
You have one chance to make sure that any creative concept will stimulate the reaction and behaviour you are looking for: make sure that articulating your ‘desired response’ is a key part of your campaign planning.
