Powering Success: Why events are vital for communicating business goals

In our recent blog, we looked at the increasing importance of internal events for employee engagement and maintaining a strong company culture in today’s hybrid workplace. Internal events are also critical for communicating and aligning everyone around your business strategy and objectives.

After a rather wobbly start to 2023, with the ‘will we, won’t we’ threat of recession hanging over us, recent forecasts from the Bank of England and IMF have been more positive. With the UK economic outlook finally a little brighter, is now the perfect time to bring your employees together to reassess business opportunities and refocus on your objectives?

To ensure success, your employees need to understand what you want the business to achieve, and how you plan to achieve it. No matter what industry sector you work in, fostering a shared vision among employees at every level of the business will help them to understand how their own role and their team or department contributes to the overall success of the company.

Yet multiple studies carried out over the past few years have revealed that anywhere between 60% (Gallup) to a staggering 95% (Harvard Business Review) of employees do not understand what their company’s strategy or goals are. If your people don’t understand what they’re all working toward, how can you expect your goals to be met?

The key to strategic alignment is clear communication, and while there are multiple channels you can use to share your company goals with employees, nothing quite beats the power of an event for making sure everyone is on the same page. An event such as an off-site town hall meeting, away day, or company conference, allows you to really drill down and educate everyone on what your goals are, and the role that they play, in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

Internal events encourage participation and collaboration, giving people the opportunity to spend time discussing and really getting under the skin of the company objectives, understand what is expected of them and how they are going to work together to meet those goals. This is even more important given that hybrid and remote work often make it harder for people to collaborate properly, which can result in silos.

Being part of a collaborative event, with everyone in a room together, creates energy and helps with that inspirational piece, which is important for encouraging people to go away and do what is expected of them. It helps to make the message you are trying to communicate more exciting and memorable. Then you can measure post-event to ensure everyone is on board and the message has been understood. All of this is difficult to achieve with an email.

While we’ve talked mainly about internal employee audiences, it’s equally as important to ensure your channel partners understand and are aligned to your company objectives. The message might be slightly different, but they still need to understand the overall strategy, what is expected of them, and how their role contributes towards it.

Events that intentionally align your employees (or partners) work to the bigger picture will help create a more engaged workforce that are focused on a common goal and confident in their ability to meet that goal. A study by Slack found that 90% of aligned workers know what success looks like at their company, 86% understand their company strategy and 75% feel empowered to make decisions, while research by LSA Global found that highly aligned companies grow revenue 58% faster, and are 72% more profitable than their unaligned peers.

To discover how Powwow can help you create an event that aligns your people around your business objectives, get in touch with the team today