I'm a big fan of  Procter & Gamble. I like many of P&G’s products and I also admire the way the company approaches communicating with customers. Here are three lessons we can learn from P&G to apply to reaching and engaging our employee audiences: 

• Know your customers, but don’t stop there—make it your mission to delight them. Consumers have a deep personal relationship with P&G brands, in large part because P&G works hard to design products that meet customers’ needs. How well do you understand what employees want from communication—and how successful are you at meeting those needs?

• Innovate relentlessly. P&G seeks to achieve “discontinuous innovation,” creating brands or categories that don’t exist until P&G invents them. Think Pampers or Swiffer or Febreze. By doing so, P&G drives demand and avoids having to compete against generics and other price-driven products. Is your communication innovative? Are you anticipating future communication trends and practices?

• Do more with less. Although P&G has not been known for its efficiency, in recent years P&G has worked hard to improve productivity. Cutting costs is certainly one motivation, but the other is actually more intriguing: P&G understands that it needs to reduce bureaucracy. As one analyst puts it: “(Bureaucracy) takes longer for decisions to be made for new products to get to market, and that’s when you run the risk of competitors moving faster than you do.” Are your processes productive? Are you nimble enough to move quickly?

Hope these thoughts inspire you.