If you’re a regular reader of The NASPP Blog, you’ve probably caught wind of my passion for employee engagement and communications. In today’s blog, I’ll explore some important and creative ideas for crafting your stock plan’s communication approach for 2016.

I’m always on the lookout for new ideas and trends in getting the message out to employees. If you’ve got a stock plan, you’ve probably figured out that the stock plan is only as good as your participants think it is, and communicating about the plan is an important factor in determining its success. With so many modern tools and choices at our fingertips, figuring out the best options for communication can feel overwhelming at times. To help with that, I’ve come up with 5 communication ideas for 2016.

Cultivate Plan Champions

Sometimes the task of engaging employees feels extra-large because of the quantity of people involved. If your stock plan participants number in the hundreds or thousands, then you know what I mean. While you definitely want your outreach and education to reach all participants, you may also want to consider investing time and resources into developing a handful (a few or dozens, depending on your stock plan size) of stock plan champions – employees who already ooze engagement and, armed with the right information, could spread the word among their peers in the workplace. Consider some smaller meetings or one-one-one sessions with these champions to educate them and encourage them to spread the word. Some ideal candidates for the role may be those who frequently show up at your door to ask questions, or are vocal about their appreciation for the plan. Studies have long shown that word of mouth in the workplace does have an effect – people trust their friends, including co-workers.

Publish Benchmark Information

A wealth of stock plan information is publicly available, which makes it fairly easy to compare the attributes of your stock plan to those of your industry peers and competitors. You’ll want to gain support and approval from management before taking this step, but evaluating your stock plan compared to other plans and highlighting some of your plan’s unique or attractive features can help employees understand how their stock compensation may compare to the rest of the industry.

Create Videos that Reflect Corporate Culture

Hands down, some of the best stock plan videos I’ve come across have a common thread: they all reflect some element of the company’s unique culture. I recall listening in on a session at our 23^rd Annual Conference this past fall where a panelist who works for Facebook talked about a family of foxes that lives on site at their corporate headquarters (the foxes even have their own Facebook page). The company created stock plan videos featuring…you guessed it…a fox, which added a unique factor, oozed creativity, and tied into something special about the company’s culture. Instead of a boiler plate corporate video, think of what may plug in well to your company’s culture and let that inspire a theme for your stock plan videos and communications.

Diverse Populations Need Diverse Communications

There are so many forms of diversity in employee populations, and all of them need to be considered. I keep hearing buzz that addressing the needs of a very diverse group of participants continues to be a hot topic. There are generational issues to consider, including how values, work habits, and communication preferences vary among different generations. Baby boomers are working longer, and there are more and more millennials graduating college and entering the workforce. There are cultural considerations in communicating with participants from multiple geographic and cultural backgrounds. If you haven’t seriously contemplated all of these factors in the past, this is the year to evaluate your stock plan demographics and really dig into which modes, formats, and messaging are going to succeed in engaging employees across the board. Just as with marketing efforts, it may be necessary to “target” select participant groups for different communications in order to ensure the message resonates with the audience and achieves the intended goal of engagement.

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” (Peter Drucker)

All of the above steps are virtually pointless if you don’t measure their impact on employee engagement. Communicating is not about throwing information out to the universe and hoping it sticks. If you haven’t been steadily measuring your communication strategies and efforts, make it a goal for 2016. There are many ways to measure – I’ll share a few here:

• Conduct an employee engagement survey (keep the questions and survey on the shorter side – the longer it is, the less likely employees are to remain engaged long enough to complete it).
• Track email click rates (How many people opened the email? Did people click on links in the emails?)
• See if you can gather data from your IT department on employee technology behaviors (How many employees use email? Which social media sites are most popular?)
• Consider allowing participants to rate content. This will give feedback on what is most useful and engaging from their perspective.

Bonus!

I said 5 tips, but I couldn’t resist a 6th: Be discerning with your content. Set a high standard for the content you put out to participants. Chances are, they are already inundated with messages from a variety of sources on many topics. Being consistent in putting out high quality content builds trust – participants begin to realize that any information coming from you is worth their attention.

Remember, whatever you do – be prepared to measure, measure, measure it!

You don’t need to do a complete overhaul all at once – focusing on one or two key areas can make a difference. Now’s the time to set your communication goals for 2016.

-Jenn