What does it say about most workplace policy communication that a memo enforced by leadership failed, and an amateur video made by the employees it targeted became one of the most watched pieces of content in the company?
A group of leaders, annoyed at how Gen Z employees dressed, pushed a strict dress code and told HR to enforce it. The backlash was immediate: employees showed up in flip-flops in protest. Leadership’s instinct was to write a firmer memo. Ours wasn’t. We asked the employees to show, in their own words, how they’d bring the policy to life. What came back was a rough, funny, self-made stop-motion video. We used it as-is. It outperformed every leadership communication that quarter, and adherence to the policy followed.
That’s an uncomfortable finding for a lot of communication teams, because it means the polish, the branding, the leadership sign-off, none of it was the reason the message worked. The reason it worked is that the audience made it.
A GCC transformation I worked on ran on the same principle at a bigger scale. Four very different audiences, legacy staff, new hires, HQ, site leaders, needed four entry points into one story, and measurement went past open rates to track whether employees described the centre’s work in their own language and whether internal mobility was actually shifting.
If leadership had written that dress code memo themselves and simply changed the tone, would it have worked? What would you have to give up control of to find out?
