How to align and inspire your entire workforce – a manifesto for success

With so much going on in organisations these days, started at different times in different parts of the business, of such great complexity and at such great speed; colleagues and their leaders alike could be forgiven for not knowing which way is up.

What your organisation needs is a single version of the truth: one set of clear, consistent and compelling messages that pull everything together.

What you need is a ‘manifesto’ for success – a key message manifesto.

In this blog, Axiom’s Founder and Managing Director, Chris Carey, highlights what a ‘key message manifesto’ is and what is does, how to pull one together, what it should include – and critically – what to do next to translate it into meaningful action.

What is a ‘key message manifesto’?

A key message manifesto is a document that sets out, logically and in plain English, where you’ve come from as an organisation, where you are today, where you want to be in the future and how you are going to get there. It’s the story of your business; your strategic narrative which encompasses everything else you do.

• It acts as the source for all internal and external messaging to create total consistency
• It helps convey the story for your organisation in a way that aligns and inspires your workforce
• It fosters a sense of belonging and pride in being part of something bigger among your people.

What you call this document is up to you. Over the years we’ve seen them named as various things, often related to the extent to which they are for ‘internal use only’ to facing ‘end users’:

• Our key message control document
• Our value proposition
• Our key message platform
• Our story so far, and the next chapters
• Our journey to excellence, how we will get there and your role in delivering success.
• Call it whatever works in your organisation; whatever you choose, we know it works.

Why should I have a key message manifesto?

Research consistently shows that when colleagues understand what their business is setting out to achieve and how what they do every day fits in and helps deliver success, you get happier colleagues. They deliver better customer service, which in turn drives better performance.

Gallup compared business units that have high engagement levels with those that don’t. It reports that engaged employees:

• Increased sales by 18%
• Increased profitability by 23%
• Increased productivity by 14%
• Increased customer ratings by 10%

A key message manifesto lays the foundations for achieving statistics like this in your business.

Identifying your organisation’s key messages

The starting point is interviewing senior leaders in your organisation. Gather their thoughts on what needs to be ‘ringing in the ears’ of colleagues, stakeholders and customers alike.

Indeed, you might also want to conduct some research with your stakeholders and customers to understand their current experience and aspirations for the future.

You can conduct these interviews yourself; however, we have often found that using external facilitators to run this Employee and Customer Experience research means participants feel they can speak anonymously and with candour.

Next, bring in any employee research outputs you have, such as Employee Opinion Survey data or ‘Pulse’ results, Exit Interviews and so on. And it would be good to look at external measures of success too, such as Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction metrics.

Armed with these insights you can begin co-creating the Collective Ambition for your organisation. It sets out, often in a single graphic on one page, your purpose, your vision and timescales, your values, the work you need to deliver, both strategically and operationally, and the behaviours you’ll adopt to help deliver success.

We often facilitate this work with a group of colleagues, drawn from multiple levels and locations in your organisation.

This creates a North Star, to guide your thinking and align, even eliminate, items of content.

Finally, for now, I suggest you pull together as many internal materials as possible from conferences, events, roadshows, townhalls, presentations and the like. Often this exercise flushes out inconsistencies in both messaging, language and positioning- we’ve even seen the same acronyms to describe different things.

An externally facing equivalent research exercise is also illuminating and sometimes highlights messages which are at odds with the internal messaging.

How to write your key message manifesto

Now you’ve assembled all of the pieces of the jigsaw and compared them to the picture on the box lid, you might find you’ve got 127 pieces of a 100-piece puzzle. Your Collective Ambition will help you set aside the bits you no longer need.

Next you require a logical structure which is easy to follow. A simple timeline often works; where you’ve come from, where you are today, where you need to be in the future and how you are going to get there.

Of course there is a lot you can cover, including how you are structured to deliver results and how you’ll celebrate success and recognise excellence.

And you’ll need a consistent tone of voice that reflects your company’s brand and the circumstances you face. Perhaps that’s confident and uplifting, or honest yet inspiring, or factual and direct.

Jargon tends to cause confusion, not create clarity, so is best avoided. And our international customers, and editing tools in MS Word, tell us short words in simple sentences work best.

Facts and figures can add value too, especially if they’re presented in an infographic form. But they are also seven times more likely to be recalled if they are wrapped up in a story.

Bullet points, proof points and pull-out quotes help too.

Finally, end on a summary and an uplifting call to action.

The characteristics of a good ‘manifesto’

Once you’ve written your ‘single version of the truth’, you’ll need to road test it thoroughly. Working through it with the same group of colleagues that co-created your Collective Ambition often works well.

Ask them: could they use this document to explain who they work for, what they do and the difference they make to a loved one over dinner, or a neighbour over the garden fence? These are great tests.

And in preparing your manifesto, or sense-checking it, can you tick every item on this list?

• Clear – is it easy to read, logical and free of acronyms, buzzwords and jargon?
• Current – have you built in the latest information and insights, do you have a formal process to keep the document up to date?
• Consistent – does it maintain a similar style and tone throughout and does it align your internal and external messaging?
• Concise – does it contain short words in simple sentences, using language, examples and metaphors that work for everyone, everywhere?
• Relevant – does it meet the needs of your target audience, often the wider workforce and through them your stakeholders and customers?
• Relatable – can your colleagues or customers ‘see themselves’ in what you’ve written?
• Compelling – is it designed to provide ‘reasons to believe’, inspire and drive action?

Making your messages a reality – bringing them to life throughout your world

So now you’ve got a single source of the truth – a ‘manifesto’ for success. In short, you’ve got your story straight.

But it will make no difference to anyone if it remains hidden on a SharePoint site, or printed off and left on a shelf.

Now you need to bring your messages to life with all of your colleagues, stakeholders and customers.

For a start I recommend sharing a named and numbered version of your ‘single version of the truth’ – with senior leaders and communicators – so they appreciate the importance of what you’ve co-created and feel privileged to be on the distribution list.

Then, informed by the manifesto, you can begin the creative process of bringing your messages to life.

Over the years, our writers and designers have created themed storybooks, computer-based workbooks, interactive walk-through experiences and installations, key fact cards games, entire conferences – carried through to townhalls and roadshows, competitions (many on a global scale), and of course PowerPoint presentations.

But even the latter can be remarkably innovative and interactive. We’ve brought key message manifestos to life by blending visual metaphors and storytelling, two of the most effective communication methods ever devised. We call this our Big Picture approach – and our customers tell us it works brilliantly. In essence, everything in the manifesto becomes a conversation starter, triggered by the graphic and the narrative that supports it.

See how our team have helped bring key messages to life