Pharma internal communications strategies have varying success rates. Though organizations share a healthy amount of strategic messages, many employees respond to these updates with indifference. This is a result of inherent mistrust in leadership, as well as a perceived lack of inclusion. In this article, we discuss ways in which pharma and life sciences organizations can strengthen their strategic communications and build back employee trust.
An impressive 94% of all pharma internal communications are strategic in nature. When you consider what an average working day in the industry looks like, it’s not surprising.
From fast-paced clinical trials to R&D planning sessions, stakeholder meetings, regulatory updates, and frontline customer interactions, there are a lot of moving parts. Strategic messages are vital for deciphering this hive of activity. When something’s written down, it’s less likely to fade into obscurity.
The intention of these messages, of course, is to inform employees, prevent bottlenecks, and ensure complete strategic alignment.
But good intentions can only get you so far.
In reality, many of these strategic messages don’t land at all well with employees.
Here’s why.
Though the pharma industry distributes a high volume of strategic messaging, evidence suggests these communications aren’t as impactful as desired.
Why? Because 94% of pharma organizations suffer from low leadership trust scores. This, in part, is a result of the tone and delivery of top-down strategic communications. Inauthentic and blunt messages can result in employees not grasping or trusting the content within.
Gallagher’s latest report also highlights a significant “decision exclusion” problem as a result of siloed communications and data, as well as a substantial decrease in employee engagement levels. (Out of all the industries surveyed, pharma scored the worst in this area.)
To summarize: leadership teams are sharing communications often, but there’s a glaring disconnect between management and non-management.
If left unresolved, these issues can result in operational inconsistencies, slower R&D cycles, strategic misalignment, and employee retention troubles. With 75% of pharma companies struggling to fill open job roles, this is far from ideal.
In the remainder of this article, we share 8 practical tips to help you reenergize your comms strategy and win back your employees.
In the hustle and bustle of drug trials and shifting strategic priorities, it can be easy to share messages that are quick, factual, and overly corporate. But, as Gallagher’s research suggests, these messages don’t resonate.
Employees don’t want to read communications delivered from a faceless corporation; they want to connect to something more human.
To add authenticity, consider the tone and sentiment of your messages. Do your news articles sound friendly? Do you talk about strategic shifts, supply chain shortages, and workload changes in a respectful manner? Do you recognize challenges and provide information on how employees can seek help if needed? It’s not just about communicating strategy — it’s about building culture, resilience, and trust.
Training can be especially helpful here. Distributing e-learning courses, as well as skills based workshops, can give your teams the tools and confidence they need to communicate effectively and empathetically.
An endless bombardment of one-way communications will switch off your employees. They don’t want to be talked “at” all the time. This leaves no room for feedback or healthy exchanges.
Give them an opportunity to share their thoughts and concerns via collaborative channels, such as news and blog feeds with comment threads, discussion room forums, and anonymous surveys and polls. When employees feel valued, and are given the opportunity to shape day-to-day operations, they’re more likely to listen and buy into your strategy.
Yes, strategic messages are important. But focusing on these communications alone can quickly turn your company culture into a barren wasteland.
Balance your top-down corporate messages with diverse communications from across your organization.
For example, you could encourage lab technicians to share research progress and trial successes as a way to demonstrate the real-world impact of your efforts. Or, to help reinvigorate your culture, you could post blog posts summarizing recent team building events, company retreats, or sales wins from your field teams.
Where possible, tie these communications to your overarching company values, goals, and KPIs. That way, the strategic element still remains.
Text-heavy communications can be overwhelming, especially if you share multiple long-form articles a week. So try to break up your delivery with face-to-face events, whether they take place in person or over a video conferencing platform.
These events naturally add a humanness to your strategic messages. They also give you an opportunity to strengthen relationships, encourage team building, and allow for collaborative discussions.
Strategic communications and knowledge sharing isn’t a once-and-done activity. Employees must be able to access these resources whenever they need them, whether it’s to prepare for an upcoming sales meeting or ensure their lab practices comply with updated SOPs.
To improve accessibility, store your communications in a centralized, mobile-accessible digital workplace solution. With only one tool to worry about, teams won’t have to waste valuable time scrolling through inboxes or telephoning managers for assistance. They’ll have everything they need within the palm of their hands.
Centralizing your communications in a single platform helps employees find the information they’re after. But, to take things a step further, choose a vendor that provides intent-based AI search, AI overviews, and Q&A chatbots.
These capabilities speed-up information retrieval significantly. They also help employees better understand complex policies, SOPs, and technical reports.
To prevent AI “hallucinations” and inaccurate summaries, opt for a provider that delivers secure, localized AI. In Claromentis, our AI functionality is trained using the content on your digital workplace only. Meaning every AI overview and chatbot summary is trustworthy and includes relevant citations. The model also works in tandem with your user permissions settings, ensuring no sensitive clinical information slips through the gaps and falls into the wrong hands.
Understandably, many pharma and life sciences employees experience internal comms overwhelm. While this information overload may seem inevitable due to the nature of the industry, there are ways to reduce the noise.
Implement granular user permissions in your digital workplace to hide any irrelevant communications and personalize experiences. This ensures individuals only see content that directly relates to their role and responsibilities. That way, there’s less information to read and retain.
While your written instructions and strategic guidance may seem clear to you, your employees may interpret them in different ways. This can result in inconsistent operations, confusion, and non-compliance.
To mitigate this, complement your written communications and SOPs with practical resources.
For instance, you could standardize lab inspections with digitized e-forms and automated workflows — eliminating the chance of variations between teams. You could also provide marketing teams with snippets of approved clinical copy to help them during the creation of drug labels, promo materials, and ads.
Your organization is already well-versed in conducting experiments and assessing vast volumes of data. Your internal communications improvements are no different.
In order to assess the effectiveness of your changes, you need to measure their impact.
The pharma and life sciences industry clearly has an internal communications problem. Messages are delivered regularly — and in bulk — but, in many instances, they land as well as a blow to the face.
This is by no means intentional. Priorities change quickly. Daily operations are invariably busy. It can be all too easy to communicate corporate messages quickly, and without thinking twice.
However, if you want to improve employee experiences, boost retention, and enhance strategic alignment and operational efficiency, you need to resolve this problem sooner rather than later. This requires a tonal shift — more authentic, human-sounding communications — as well as a change of strategy and delivery.
Though technology isn’t a quick fix, it can significantly help you make these adjustments. With a secure digital workplace solution like Claromentis, you can:
To find out how our AI-powered digital workplace can reinvigorate your pharma internal communications, book a quick discussion call with one of our experts. Tell us your requirements and challenges, and we’ll walk you through the features and pricing packages that align with your needs.