Bringing Clarity to today’s big business challenges
In today’s increasingly complex corporate landscape, how you respond to business challenges is more important than ever.
We work with organisations to understand the issues, develop the ideal response and apply our unique blend of strategy and creativity to deliver the optimal solution.
Outlined here are some of the key issues we are seeing in the market and how Clarity can use its expertise to effectively tackle and address these challenges.
Building a strong brand
As we rapidly evolve towards a more visual world, how your company represents itself has taken on a new level of importance.
Through design-led creative thinking we focus on what makes your business distinctive, different, and desirable, ensuring you stand out from your competitors.
Clarity applies an evidence-based approach to inform the creative process which ensures the final result is authentic and aligned to business strategy and direction, while also factoring in how the brand relates to all stakeholders.
We have experience in designing and conducting research to determine how an organisation is perceived amongst its key stakeholder groups and the extent to which its visual brand is an accurate reflection of this. At Clarity, we work with businesses to create brands that authentically capture their unique point of difference and confidently own their distinctive position in the market.
Addressing employee attraction and retention with an impactful and authentic employer brand
In the dynamic landscape of the contemporary workplace, employee attraction is a key challenge for many businesses.
It raises the importance of having a strong Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and employer brand which serves to help clients attract top talent via recruitment marketing, as well as foster a strong connection to the culture and employer brand among existing employees.
Building on our strong brand credentials, Clarity has developed specific expertise in this area – working with clients to articulate their EVP as well as develop an authentic employer brand that will resonate with both existing and prospective employees.
We’ve collaborated with NPBsecurity, PilbaraMinerals RioTinto, and FirstQuantumMinerals to deliver unique and effective employer brands and incorporated these into recruitment marketing campaigns to attract high quality candidates.
What is the key to an effective employer brands and recruitment
marketing?
1. Placing the employee at the centre of the EVP
This requires development of an evidence-based proposition that truly resonates with potential candidates as well as reflects the character of an organisation, bringing “Why work for us?” to life.
2. Audience Segmentation
There are multiple ways to reach the right audiences and we have leveraged both traditional and digital platforms to target job seekers, making sure ads for certain roles are effectively reaching the right people.
3. The importance of good design
It’s a crowded market with many other organisations trying to reach the same people. Impactful design that cuts through this noise is vital and a key component of an effective recruitment campaign.
Making Your Communications Strategic
1. Delivering business strategy through communications.
We’re increasingly being asked to assist in making communications within an organisation more strategic and help deliver against business objectives.
Since COVID, many communications teams have become increasingly reactive and find themselves primarily responding to requests from across the organisation. We have worked with Corporate Affairs and Communications teams across a number of companies and government departments to take their communications to a strategic level, supporting the achievement of organisational goals and setting clear company direction.
One of the key tools we have developed is a Strategic Communications Framework that ensures an organisation’s communications are strategically aligned with business planning and ensures communications flow effectively through the business.
2. Articulating strategy (and change) to the frontline
Another challenge for businesses, is to communicate their strategy to employees, bringing to life their role in delivering the strategy and linking everyday tasks to the bigger picture. This can be difficult! We have seen some organisations find it difficult to express how their strategy impacts frontline workers, what employees will see as a result of strategy execution and why they should care. This is where purpose and culture can play a key role in demonstrating why strategy is important, as well as creating an environment that is conducive to any change resulting from strategic initiatives.
3. Visual representation of strategy
It’s also important that your strategy can be clearly articulated in a way that makes sense to all stakeholders and is easily understood. Our design team is highly skilled at taking your strategies, goals, tactics and projects, and turning this into a visual depiction of where you want to go and how you will get there.
How valuable are your values?
The art of communicating and embedding organisational values
Communicating and embedding values into the heart of your organisation requires a considered and strategic approach. Ideally you should not only be promoting your values but ensuring they become an integral part of the organisational culture and evidenced in day-to-day behaviours and operations.
When working with clients to develop and implement a “values campaign” to promote new, refreshed or forgotten values, there are several guiding principles that, when adhered to, ensure your values play an important role in delivering against business objectives and building a positive culture.
Embedded – Across multiple business processes, from policy, recruitment, training, performance reviews, recognition programs, etc.
Addressed – Behaviours need to be addressed when they do not align with values
Visible – Highlight the importance of the values via ongoing communication across all levels of the organisation
Ongoing – Adopt a long-term perspective with the values reiterated regularly and cited in different ways
Relevant and Relatable – Language, tone and messages need to feel like your company character and personality and be relatable to employees.
A clear expression of your company purpose and what it stands for helps employees connect their personal values with those of the company. It is for this reason that we recommend values be framed and communicated in the context of the company’s narrative (i.e. the story we tell about ourselves), allowing people to relate on an emotional basis to the overall story and purpose.
Building Stakeholder Trust and Support through Effective Engagement and Communication
Strategic and effective communications, stakeholder engagement and consultation are critical to the success of major projects involving multiple stakeholders, often with conflicting interests. When stakeholders are well engaged and informed, they are more likely to trust a business or project outcome, have realistic expectations based on fact and can actually play a key role in contributing to the success of a project. This often calls for significant planned and timely engagement with relevant internal and external stakeholders to ensure all issues and concerns are understood, considered, and managed, followed by ongoing communication.
The optimal interplay between engagement and communication occurs when issues identified via engagement form the foundations of a communications framework. Key messaging pillars can be formed to ensure stakeholders’ issues are addressed and communicated in a way that is relevant to each stakeholder type.
While messaging pillars ensure consistency in messaging, it must be acknowledged that new issues can arise from consultation at any time, so it is imperative that the communications framework be agile to accommodate evolving issues as they arise.
Best Practice in Stakeholder Engagement
1. Consideration of the IAP2 Spectrum
Clarity consults the IAP2 Spectrum to inform the development of engagement and communications strategy in the context of a clients’ objectives.
2. Implementation of Guiding Principles
Clarity adheres to a set of core values which ensure proposed strategy is appropriate and meets the expectations of stakeholders.
3. An Appropriate Level of Consultation
To ensure the right level of consultation, Clarity may recommend that a gap analysis forms part of the initial stage in developing an engagement strategy. This allows us to determine to what extent stakeholders have already been consulted to date, what information has been gleaned from this and to what extent it has provided the required level of detail and therefore what additional methods and levels of consultation are required.
4. The Stakeholder’s Voice Throughout the Process
Following initial stakeholder engagement, it is important that the voice and views of stakeholders continue to be heard and accounted for. We therefore recommend that we remain involved in subsequent project stages to ensure the views of all stakeholders are considered on an ongoing basis, facilitating a proactive communications and risk mitigation approach.
5. Interaction with External Planning Initiatives
There are often other initiatives running concurrently to a client’s plans or project. When designing an engagement approach, Clarity accounts for these in terms of ensuring stakeholders are engaged concurrently where applicable for multiple projects or at least analyse feedback from stakeholders in the context of other relevant projects.