Communicating with Confidence: Turning Line Managers into Comms Allies

Line managers continue to be one of the most important pieces of the internal comms puzzle. 84% of IC and EX professionals say they rely on manager communication, and rank ‘manager team meetings’ and ‘manager one-to-ones’ as two of the most effective comms channels within their organizations.

This reliance on line managers supporting internal communication comes in addition to the ever-significant role they play when it comes to employee engagement, productivity, and retention.

In fact, it’s been widely reported that line managers have the single biggest impact on team performance, accounting for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Employees who report to ‘effective’ managers are more than 15 times more likely to be high performers, and over three times more likely to remain with their employer.  

The challenge we’re facing is that three in five IC and EX pros feel manager communication is ‘below expectations’ in their workplace.  

As a reader of this blog, I’m sure this isn’t the first time you’re hearing this. But it’s an IC challenge that continues to be raised year after year by in-house teams across the globe.

So, let’s make a change.  

This is the third blog post in our Communicating with Confidence mini-series, where we consider the ways we can improve internal comms and engagement within our organizations by communicating confidently with different key stakeholder groups. Check out How To Influence the C-Suite and How To Collaborate Effectively with IT!

In this article, I’ll explore the relationship between internal comms and the all-important line management population. I’ll discuss what we’re up against, and consider the ways that we can empower and enable our people leaders to become true IC heroes.

The relationship between internal comms and line managers

As internal communication and employee experience professionals, we have ultimate ownership of our comms channels.

We are often responsible for managing our EX platform, our intranet, owning internal events, supporting CEO comms, and overseeing all of our other online and offline channels.  

... Do you see where I’m going with this?

Like any other channel in our communication mix, line manager comms needs to be managed.

It needs to be proactively supported, measured, and analyzed. It’s unfair and unrealistic to place such a huge expectation on line managers to be one of our most important communication channels if we’re not putting the support structures in place that provide them with the structure, content, or resources they need.  

Despite the fact that 73% of internal communicators flagged ‘effective communication’ as a valued leadership skill, only 15% said training was mandatory for the line managers in their company. And another study found that nearly half of line managers say they have to rewrite the content they receive from their IC function before they can share it with team members. Until we begin investing time and resources into providing proactive support and high-quality resources, we’re not going to see any changes.

And remember what Einstein said: insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results…

Dan Holden, Chair of CIPR Inside, summarized it best when he said:

Businesses invest in their channels such as intranets and social enterprise platforms, but aren’t making the same investment in their line managers.

3 ways to support line manager comms

It’s a pretty convincing case. However you look at it, line managers are a crucial comms channel.

Let’s walk through three of the most important things to prioritize to best leverage line manager communications.

1. Structure and process

The first thing that’s going to ensure you can ‘communicate with confidence’ with your organization’s line management population is putting the right structure and process in place.

Line managers are busy people who are often receiving a ton of information and messaging from all over the place. So it’s important to prioritize ease and convenience for people leaders by setting up a clear structure and process to help them cascade key information.

Perhaps it’s a ‘manager zone’ within your intranet that triggers an alert to all people leaders when a new piece of content is uploaded. Or perhaps it’s a weekly ‘manager brief’ that sets out the top three things to be communicated the following week. Content needs to be packaged and formatted in a way that is easy and convenient for managers to share with team members.

Whatever your structure and whatever your process, keep it simple. Avoid bombarding line managers with content, and help them to prioritize the most important topics.

2. Training and support

As we discussed earlier, it’s unrealistic to expect line managers to automatically be internal comms pros if we haven’t done anything to invest in their communication skills. Remember that not every people manager is a natural communicator, and some will need to lean more into the resources and support that we provide them with.

We’ve already established that it’s a core part of our role as IC pros to enable and empower people managers to communicate effectively. So delivering some form of comms training – whether it be formal or informal – can be incredibly valuable. It’s all about starting to build a solid support structure for your people leaders.

You might be in a position to introduce company-wide communication training, e-learning, or workshops for all people leaders. Perhaps a section on ‘effective communication with your teams’ can be added to new manager onboarding documentation. Or maybe you can schedule monthly drop-in calls, or ‘clinics’, that leaders can join to ask for support or flag any challenges.

3. Content and templates

Last but certainly not least are your content and templates.

It’s vital that we share high-quality content that line managers do not feel they need to completely rewrite. Whether you’re sharing weekly briefing packs, updating a team leader hub within your intranet, or hosting manager briefing calls ahead of key announcements, the content you share needs to be top-notch.

It should be engaging, consistent, short, and punchy. It also needs to be easy for managers to localize messaging, which is where templates can be super helpful. Things like email templates with highlighted sections for managers to personalize or team meeting agenda templates can help to bring consistency to line manager messaging while encouraging tailored messaging for different teams.

I hope you’ve found this blog post helpful!

Workvivo is the world’s number one employee experience platform, and it can help make line manager communications feel like a breeze.

Schedule a free demo to see how Workvivo can transform your organization.