Finding organizational alignmentthrough communication.
Help employees understand where the organization is going and their role in getting there.
Where alignment breaks down
Organizational priorities and information move through leaders, managers, teams, channels and locations before reaching employees. Employee questions, ideas and operational information move back through the same path.
Employee voice moves back through the same path
- Questions, ideas and operational information
- Feedback moving back through the organization
The same method, every engagement.
Every engagement moves through the same five stages, scoped to the situation at hand.
Listen
538 gathers leadership priorities, employee experience and existing data before forming recommendations.
Diagnose
538 identifies where alignment is breaking down and separates communication symptoms from organizational causes.
Advise
538 reviews the findings with leaders and prioritizes the interventions most likely to help.
Implement
538 turns the recommendations into leadership communication, manager tools, listening mechanisms and channels.
Measure
538 tracks understanding, behavior and feedback against the plan, and adjusts as conditions change.
Built for organizations with employees working across different roles and locations.
538 focuses on communication challenges that become harder when employees work across schools, campuses, field locations, facilities, jobsites, service territories and shifts. As employees spread across functions, locations, shifts, professional identities, organizational levels and access to information, alignment takes more deliberate work to maintain.
Higher Education
Athletic departments, universities, and campus units navigating staff alignment, organizational change, leadership communication, and highly differentiated employee groups.
K–12 Education
Districts where leaders need to communicate across administrators, principals, teachers, classified employees, operations staff, and multiple sites.
Public Agencies
Organizations communicating across field, frontline, shift-based, operational, and office workforces.
Distributed Workforces
Organizations where information has to travel from leadership through supervisors to employees across jobsites, facilities, and locations.
Selected Experience
Sectors that have shaped Martin’s approach to internal communication, before 538 and since.
Start a conversation about what you’re seeing.
Organizations reach out to 538 when they are navigating change, struggling to reach a distributed workforce, or unsure what employees understand about organizational priorities.