EP#96: The Road to Alignment – with Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland

On this episode of GovComms, contentgroup CEO David Pembroke speaks to Zora Artis and Wayne Aspland about their recently-released research that is now available on the GovComms Institute. Zora Artis is the CEO of Artis Advisory and an alignment strategist with almost three decades of experience working with government, private, and non-profit sectors. Wayne Aspland is the Principal at The Content Factory. He has more than fifteen years of experience in corporate, leadership and internal communications. In this podcast, Zora and Wayne discuss their recent study: The Road to Alignment. The pair firstly discuss the definition of alignment, which they believe as being all about unity. This study is a follow-up to their 2018 study into strategic alignment, which found that many organisations struggled with their alignment strategies, and that this was because people either didn’t know how to align or they were not committed to it. Since writing this paper they realised that COVID-19 has caused some organisations to be more aligned and others to be less. Working remotely has played a role in this, as well as other variables that were present before the pandemic hit such as having ill-defined values. Zora and Wayne have created a four-step strategy: one VISION, one STORY, one TEAM and one VOICE. The pair discuss this strategy step-by-step in this podcast episode, explaining that these steps involve gaining support from an organisation’s executive team, creating a narrative about your organisation that resonates with your staff, and working together with them to ensure that this narrative is communicated by the staff correctly and effectively with each other and the public. Zora and Wayne show that communications done well can act as a fundamental enabler for alignment. To read Zora and Wayne’s latest paper visit: https://contentgroup.com.au/govcomms-institute/ To find out more about alignment visit: The Content Factory: http://www.thecontentfactory.com.au/ Artis Advisory: https://www.artisadvisory.com/ Discussed in this episode: What is alignment, and why is it important? How has COVID-19 impacted the level of alignment in organisations? What role do communications professionals have to play in improving alignment?