Internal Communication: The Multi-Site Company Challenge (6/7) – Promoting Headquarters Initiatives

In multi-site organizations, as in any company, many projects are rolled out organization-wide, impacting all or part of the business. And in a multi-site organization, when you're "out of sight, out of mind," making your work visible is all the more critical. Promoting headquarters initiatives? That's the 6th challenge you need to tackle!

This article on feedback and field insights is excerpted from our Ebook: Internal Communication — The 7 Challenges of Multi-Site Companies >>> Download the full ebook (FREE)

Organization-Wide Initiatives Are Everywhere

With few exceptions, whether a company is monolithic or distributed (like a retail network), every organization regularly runs initiatives that affect the entire business. For example:

• Marketing: logo refresh or a full rebrand
• Finance: implementing framework contracts to optimize supplier costs
• Operations: ISO quality certification
• IT: harmonizing IT systems (to move beyond ​Shadow IT​ or rationalize costs)
• Facilities: moving to new offices
• Sales: responding jointly to a tender
• HR: rolling out a single company health plan for all employees, or harmonizing employment contracts
• etc.

Yet these projects sometimes end up being abandoned — either because they don't deliver the expected impact, or because they fail to generate stakeholder buy-in. This represents a real waste of resources (budget, time) for the organization.

Involve and Explain to Drive Buy-In

As internal communication professionals, your mission is to prevent these situations. Specifically by ensuring that:

1. the projects being rolled out have been explained and legitimized to local stakeholders, so they understand what's at stake;
2. beforehand, those stakeholders were involved upstream to help identify, analyse, and select the best solution;
3. the rollout is accompanied by appropriate communication;
4. afterward, outcomes are evaluated so that the solution can be adjusted — or even abandoned — if it doesn't deliver the expected value.

When it comes to promoting headquarters initiatives, the natural instinct is to focus on the communication that accompanies the rollout. Far less thought goes into impact evaluation. And even less into upstream involvement — yet involving people upfront is what drives buy-in!

Read also: [Practical Guide] 10 Client Initiatives to Improve Internal Communication

Evaluate to Legitimize — or Pivot

Indeed, when it comes to promoting headquarters initiatives, downstream evaluation (and communication) is crucial. It serves two key purposes:

• performance ​(measure, to drive a continuous improvement mindset),
• and legitimacy ​(measure, to ensure stakeholder buy-in).

In the modern organization, all internal stakeholders must​ be treated as internal customers ​of the business — every single one, without exception (employees, teams, sites, and subsidiaries alike).

Because each one can exert decisive influence on whether a project succeeds or fails. The era of "model soldiers" is over. Disengaged employees today can turn into whistleblowers, become counter-ambassadors for their own company, leave for a competitor, and more. Or simply disengage — at a staggering cost: €14,580 per employee per year according to the IBET 2019 report.

Feedback to Build Trust

Of course, it will be essential to complement quantitative impact measurement​ (metrics-based) with qualitative feedback​ from the field — through internal surveys or working groups involving frontline employees, for example.

Any feedback, suggestion, or idea from employees is a valuable source of insight — providing decision-makers with a 360° view. A critical lens for ensuring the strategy remains relevant and objectives stay grounded in operational reality. While simultaneously reinforcing, at the field level, the feeling of being heard and valued.

A sine qua non condition for trust between headquarters and frontline teams. Because promoting headquarters initiatives doesn't mean running a propaganda campaign — it means bringing headquarters and field stakeholders together to talk and cooperate.

Read the next article: Internal Communication: The Multi-Site Company Challenge (7/7) – Reducing the Org Chart "Layer Cake" Effect

Read the previous article: Internal Communication: The Multi-Site Company Challenge (5/7) – Encouraging Employee Feedback

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This article is excerpted from our Ebook « The 7 Challenges of Internal Communication in a Multi-Site Context« . In it, you'll discover: the key challenges facing internal communication in a multi-site organization, along with practical advice and best practices to address them.

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