Upskilling your employees with business fluency education

Communicating about the business is easier when all stakeholders know the landscape and the language your organization operates within. That’s why educating employees about how your business operates and makes money is a net win for comms—it creates an elevated baseline for the substance of your messages and the degree of strategic nuance you’re able to convey. t also strengthens your relationships across business lines.

But business fluency initiatives aren’t just for you—they also build belonging into the employee experience by letting all employees feel included in high-level discussions about company growth and performance. In doing so, you’re upskilling emerging talent and future leaders in the process.

During Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference in Nashville last month Erin Mercer, Director of Enterprise Internal Communications at Jackson, shared how the insurance organization’s business fluency and mentorship programs manifested as a successful upskilling initiative.

Here’s what stuck out.

Education starts with comms

A slate of new hires prompted Mercer’s team to rethink how it could get them up to speed quickly and help them understand Jackson’s business and company values. The development plan for education about the business started with acknowledging that comms was central to their understanding.

“We wanted folks to go to us as they’re thinking through how to guide communications forward, how to guide their employees through their journey in the organization,” she said.

This began with surveying the comms team to figure out what they needed to know about the business to feel most confident every day. It began with learning about the basics of the organization:

• How does Jackson make money?
• What makes annuities different and important for Jackson’s clients in the marketplace?
• What makes Jackson’s company structure different now that it’s independent—and what does that independence mean?
• How does each person’s role fit into this big picture?

Landing on these fundamental questions prompted Mercer’s team to partner with leadership and create a series of sessions specific to comms that answered these questions.

The series invited SMEs from across the organzaition to speak about each topic, and the team was given time to ask any additional question they had during the sessions.

The benefits of this were twofold:

• It helped comms leaders informally mentor new specialists, consultants and even graphic designers, This empowered new team members to build and strengthen relationships across the organization.
• It helped those who came and spoke to the comms team feel more invested in Jackson’s communication, prompting them to connect with comms more often and speak up about the things that are most important to them.

This pilot was such a success that Jackson decided to widen it out to the whole organization.

Expanding the model across the enterprise

Mercer’s team then took another step back, evaluating organizational surveys to distill what employees said they needed. Much of the feedback centered around what Jackson was doing now as an independent organization, how they wanted more connections with leaders now that they were back in the office, and how they wanted more touchpoints with each other to understand what other departments were doing.

This led to the creation of a custom leadership communications hub that housed educational resources about the business and its formal mentorship programs.

Business fluency tools in this hub include:

• A “meeting in a box”, essentially a PowerPoint deck that includes information for leaders to contextualize with employees as they’re talking to them during town halls, team conversations and one one-on-ones.
• Conversation guides for tackling complex subjects like annuity products.
• Custom communications training for leaders grounded in Jackson’s mission, vision and values. This emphasized how the projects and initiatives people are working on are all connected.
• Quarterly earnings information that empowers leaders to feel more comfortable talking about how much money Jackson is making and what it means for their teams.

Mercer’s team continuously measures each leadership touchpoint to understand how this process can improve.

Bringing it directly to employees

After this proved successful, the team worked on bringing the knowledge directly to its employee base.

Mercer’s team launched a new intranet story series, “Understanding the Business,” that breaks down what each department is doing, what initatives they prduce, and how that work matters to all employees.

Certain departments are platformed at relevant times in the year.

“This year, for example, we’re making sure that we focus our stories on our HR department and the great work we’re doing around Mental Health Awareness Month so it feels natural to our employee base” Mercer said. “They’re able to connect the dots between what’s happening in a different department with what’s happening that directly impacts them.”

Format-wise, the comms team has had great success with:

• Taking a content marketing approach to continue to keep content fresh.
• Leaning heavily into video and infographics.
• Thinking through the user experience by placing a link on the intranet home page to collect each piece in one place as it’s published.

Tying it all together

A second series, “A Day in the Life,” focuses was launched soon after to focus more on driving connection by going deeper into how individual roles connect back to the work described in “Understanding the Business.”

This integrated effort inspired the legal team built out a similar lunch and learn series for everyone who reports up through the Office of the General Counsel.

Partnering with HR’s learning and development team, meanwhile, helped Mercer’s team figure out how to better highlight the connective tissue between these initiatives and formalize the insights in a video series, “Business Insights,” that lives in Jackson’s learning and development platform.

It breaks down the same questions that started with the comms team, illustrating the lessons in two-to-five-minute clips that are geared toward early-career employees to complete during their orientation.

“We tie everything back together as much as we can,” said Mercer. “Anytime we launch a new story or a new video, it gets tagged back to that department.”

Mercer goes into greater detail about how these series work together, and how success is evaluated, in her full presentation: