The Role of CEO Communications In Driving Business Success

CEO communications play a critical role in driving organizational alignment, motivating employees to do their best, and building a positive workplace culture. 

Still, many Chief Executive Officers don’t engage in their company’s internal and external communications initiatives. 

HR and internal communications professionals need to do a better job of encouraging their organizations’ C-level executives to get involved and enabling them to become great leaders. 

In this blog, we will cover the benefits of proper CEO communications and explain how HR and IC professionals can support their CEOs on their journey to becoming great communicators. 

1. Improves Company Culture

Certain leadership styles can go a long way in improving the overall company culture and creating more connected workplaces. 

Culture is built top-down. Meaning, that if CEOs don’t understand the importance of a positive workplace culture, no one else will. 

Hence, CEOs must have regular culture talks with senior leaders and the rest of the company.

As nicely explained in a Forbes article:

The CEO should facilitate discussions through humility, vulnerability, and openness while utilizing the brainpower in the room, allowing senior leadership to weigh in on conversations. 

This approach creates opportunities for employees’ voices to be heard, and it ensures trust in the workplace.   

💡 How to help your CEO?

As an HR or internal communications professional, you can help your CEO in different ways. First, perform an internal company survey to measure the current state of your workforce and their perception of the company’s culture. 

Based on the insights and discovered culture gaps, you can organize live sessions led by your CEO. During these sessions, people should be encouraged to openly speak and share their concerns and suggestions for improvements. 

2. Ensures Better Organizational Alignment

71% of employees believe that their leaders do not spend enough time communicating goals and plans. 

Another research showed that highly aligned companies increase their revenue by 58% and are 72% more profitable. When goals and accountabilities are crystal clear, people are 2.8x more likely to be highly engaged at work.

Good organizational alignment starts with the CEO’s ability to communicate the company’s mission, vision, and goals efficiently so that the message reaches every employee. 

💡 How to help your CEO?

Because of the extensive information overload employees experience today, it is hard to achieve great organizational alignment. It is on HR and IC departments to enable their CEOs to cut through the noise and ensure employees understand, and are aligned with, the ultimate business goals. 

Oftentimes, a proper multichannel communication strategy is critical here. Today, organizations use multiple channels to communicate important company information, and this is often the reason why the information gets lost. 

Human resources and internal communications departments can significantly improve the overall organizational alignment by understanding which internal channels work best to reach the right audience at the right time. 

3. Drives Higher Employee Motivation and Productivity

Overall workplace communications is critical for higher employee engagement and productivity. According to the State of Business Communication report, 72% of business leaders believe that effective communication has increased their team’s productivity. 

The main role of CEO communications should be to motivate employees to do their best, boost employee morale, and improve the overall employee experience in the workplace. 

To achieve this, it is important that CEOs communicate using clear, authentic, and inclusive language. 

💡 How to help your CEO?

Again, you first need to understand the current state of employee engagement in your workplace. To do that, make sure that you perform regular engagement surveys.

Ideally, your survey solution should give you, besides just raw data, valuable insights and actionable recommendations for improvement. Once you understand what are the engagement gaps that need to be filled, you can organize CEO communications initiatives around them. 

For example, if remote work causes a lack of engagement in collaborative projects, you can organize a set of initiatives on behalf of your CEO. You can have a company-wide employee newsletter with remote work best practices, or an internal podcast where your CEO and employees openly share their tricks and tips for successful remote work. 

📹 Check out our Masterclass: Strategies for Driving Employee Performance and Motivation

4. Builds Trust In (and outside of) the Workplace

Workplace trust is one of the main core company values every organization tries to nurture, and CEO communications can have a significant impact on building trust in the workplace as well as outside of the workplace. 

Research by MIT Sloan shows that trust is a critical driver of engagement. Trusting employees are 260% more motivated to work, have 41% lower rates of absenteeism, and are 50% less likely to look for another job. However, only 1 in 4 workers don’t trust their employer, and trust is built top-down.  At the same time, most employers overestimate their workforce’s trust level by almost 40%. With this misalignment in trust, it’s no wonder that worker engagement is suffering.

Also, nearly half (48%) of a company’s reputation is attributed to a CEO’s reputation. So the importance of CEOs building trust outside of the workplace is paramount. 

Open, frequent, and transparent leadership communications can go a long way in building trust with both internal and external audiences. 

CEOs should engage in company-wide conversations, share important company updates, and communicate both successes and failures. 

💡 How to help your CEO?

You can help your CEOs with building an editorial calendar of internal and external content they can share with employees and on their social media platforms. 

Given that not many CEOs have enough time to devote to such initiatives, it is critical that you leverage the right technology to support them. 

Luckily, modern employee communications platforms allow you to schedule and deliver CEO-generated content on various internal and external communications channels and streamline the entire process. 

Advanced solutions also leverage generative AI technology so that CEOs and communications professionals never have to build content from scratch, and they can create content 10 times faster. 

5. Boosts Employer Branding and Talent Acquisition Efforts

Social CEOs who engage in internal and external conversations also have the power to influence the company’s employer brand and its ability to attract high-quality talent. 

According to research, 78% of professionals would prefer to work for a company whose leadership is active on social media. 

Furthermore, Korn Ferry’s CEO for the Future study found that 74% of interviewees cited a genuine sense of mission and purpose as a vital trait that all CEO communications should possess.

💡 How to help your CEO?

First, start producing CEO and employee-generated employer branding and recruitment marketing content. Interview your employees and help them put together inspiring stories about their work experience in your organization. 

You can also organize internal and external culture podcasts or webinars hosted by your CEO. Then, make it easy for your CEO to easily share this content with the wider audience and attract relevant talent to your company. 

6. Increases Sales and Brand Awareness

CEOs with great communication skills can also influence their business’ bottom line – profits and revenue. 

However, one research about CEOs on social media showed that only 47.4 % of CEOs participate on social media sites. 79% of Inc 500 CEOs and 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a presence on at least one social media network. 81% of employees believe that CEOs who engage on social media are better equipped to lead companies in the Web 2.0 World, and 71% of them think that this improves the brand image. 

Last but not least, 77% of consumers are more likely to buy from a company whose CEO and leadership team engage on social media.

Based on these stats, it is obvious how powerful CEO communications can be. But how to make it as efficient as possible?

💡 How to help your CEO?

First of all, it is important to get your CEO’s buy-in. Your CEO needs to be willing to produce and share the company’s content with his or her own networks. 

You can do so by measuring the performance of CEO-generated and shared content. Oftentimes, employees are more likely to share CEO-generated content than company-generated content. 

You can also measure the impact, reach, and reactions of content that gets shared by your CEO versus your company’s brand. 

Once you get your CEO’s buy-in, make sure that you make the process as seamless as possible with the right technology. For example, Haiilo is an employee communications and advocacy platform that makes both content creation and content sharing seamless for your CEO and your employees.