Slack: ‘Not sharing corporate vision makes employees doubt success’.

Companies should communicate their strategy with employees at least once a month, a report from Slack suggests. This is crucial to keeping employees on track to achieve their goals. If the vision is not shared, employees doubt its success.

The State of Work report is the result of a survey of 17,000 knowledge workers aged 16 to 64 in various sectors and locations and with various functions. Slack extended the results of this survey by interviewing economists, occupational psychologists and research participants. The study showed that employees feel a relatively large distance from the strategy of their organisation. For people who receive monthly communication about their business strategy, the feeling of involvement is much greater than when this does not happen. Poor communication about strategic goals leads to employees who are not in line with the company’s strategy. This lowers morale among staff.

Results advantageous for Slack himself, with remarks

Slack’s report is of course partly designed to entice companies to make more intensive use of collaboration software (including Slack himself). However, there are a number of points that are really striking. The report highlights problems that could be solved with the use of technology, but that require basic cultural changes to be solved.

For example, when employees understand their company’s strategy, 84 percent feel aligned and 88 percent say they know how their daily work contributes to the goals. If this is not the case, only 22 per cent and 33 per cent feel it respectively. Of the employees who felt involved, 75 percent found themselves sufficiently empowered to make strategic decisions. For those employees who said they didn’t feel connected to the strategy, this was only 22 percent. It is therefore a significant influence on the health of a company. However, a culture change within companies does not happen out-of-the-blue by using new software. Collaboration software such as Slack can, of course, play a major role in sun change. The full report provides more examples of the positive effects of good internal communication.