Diagnose before you prescribe.
538 doesn’t walk into an organization assuming it needs a newsletter, a survey, a town hall, a new platform, or a workshop. The problem is diagnosed first. Then the research-informed tools most likely to address it are put to work.
Listen
Understand organizational priorities, stakeholder experience, and context through leadership interviews, employee listening, existing data, and a review of current communication.
- Leadership interviews on priorities and intent
- Employee interviews and focus groups
- Review of existing surveys and engagement data
- Audit of current channels and communication artifacts
Diagnose
Identify where alignment is breaking down, and distinguish communication symptoms from the organizational causes underneath them.
- Communication-flow mapping across levels and locations
- Identification of silos and information gaps
- Assessment of manager cascade points
- Distinction between communication problems and organizational ones
Advise
Bring leaders and stakeholders into the findings, challenge assumptions where warranted, and prioritize the interventions most likely to matter.
- Prioritized findings, ranked by impact and feasibility
- Evidence-informed recommendations
- Clear separation of quick wins from structural fixes
- A short list of workable options, scoped to what's feasible
Implement
Turn recommendations into leadership communication, manager tools, listening mechanisms, change communication, meetings, and channels.
- Leadership and manager communication support
- Employee listening mechanisms
- Change communication sequencing
- Channel, meeting, and cadence redesign where warranted
Measure
Define what evidence would indicate progress, evaluate employee understanding, behavior, and feedback against it, and adjust the plan as conditions change.
- Understanding and awareness measurement
- Feedback and sentiment tracking over time
- Comparison against the original baseline
- Adjustment of the plan as conditions change
Measuring what changes
538 defines success measures at the beginning of an engagement. Those measures can include communication reach, employee understanding, manager behavior, adoption, employee feedback and relevant organizational outcomes.
Exposure
Did the intended audience receive or encounter the communication?
Understanding
Do people understand the priority, decision, change or expectation?
Behavior
Are managers or employees doing something differently?
Outcome
Is that behavior contributing to the organizational result the work was intended to support?
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.