A New Approach to People-Focused Communications

According to McKinsey Quarterly, 19 million employees left their jobs between April 2021 to September 2021. That’s the entire state of New York. If that’s not staggering enough, 36% of employees left before they even had another job offer. This trend has not stopped. In Achiever’s 2023 Engagement and Retention report, employee attrition continues to rise, with 81% of employees finding jobs independently.

Numerous factors are influencing employee exits. According to Achiever’s report, compensation is not high on the list. After three years of a pandemic, employee needs have drastically changed. While motivators such as compensation and work flexibility are still important, keeping top talent requires a stronger focus on relational needs as much as transactional ones.

Rethinking employee and human need

Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs has been a long-standing framework for understanding basic human needs. It’s typically presented as a pyramid and articulates that humans are motivated by increasingly “higher” levels of need. Once basic needs are met, we reach our purpose (or self-actualization). The pyramid also suggests that achieving our needs is a linear, step-by-step process—once we complete one step, we are ready to move to the next.

In his book Transcend, Scott Barry Kaufman, a supporter and friend of Maslow, suggests that Maslow never intended for the human need to be depicted as a pyramid, and it’s an inaccurate depiction of Maslow’s work. While Maslow saw need as hierarchical, he also believed that being human was an experience and that our needs change depending on our chosen direction. Instead, Kaufman suggests that a sailboat is a better metaphor for life, and the integration and balance you find within yourself influences how you navigate the world.

You don’t ‘climb’ a sailboat like you’d climb a mountain or a pyramid. Instead, you open your sail, just like you’d drop your defenses once you feel secure enough.

How organizations can use the sailboat

The sailboat metaphor is the perfect framework for organizations, especially HR, to understand employee needs better and change how we think about employee experience. Employees want to feel more connected to each other, their leaders, and their organization. They want to thrive and work with an organization they know will help them get there.

How HR aligns with different aspects of the sailboat.

  • Safety — feeling protected, having job security, and that physical, financial, and emotional needs are met.
  • Connection — Personal connections and relationships – colleague to colleague, manager to employee, employees to their leaders and organization.
  • Self-Esteem — feelings of respect, worthiness, recognition, and value because your voice is heard.

The sail represents growth. It provides movement and helps us navigate wherever we want; growth is a direction, not a destination.

  • Exploration — Fueling the curiosity that drives innovation and transformation, the ability to learn and grow and advance your career
  • Love — This should not be mistaken for connection; love is the ability to care about people you may not know, contribute to the common good, and serve customers and the community.
  • Purpose — Achieving business outcomes and feeling that you are working at a place that shares your values.

Additional sailboat elements:

  • The Seabird is “thriving” — when employees feel personally and professionally fulfilled and can look down on their achievements.
  • Ocean — a sailboat can’t move without the currents of technology underneath it. The ocean represents the communication and technology systems that influence the boat’s direction and, sometimes, threaten its stability.

Why does this matter?

If HR programs and services are the foundation for the experience, communications are the connective tissue throughout it. Effective and meaningful communications help employees feel that sense of security so that they can unfurl their sails and find fulfillment. As we rethink employee needs, we also need to stop communicating linearly.

A new approach is about context and experience. And understand employee needs at a much deeper level, then align communications to meet those needs. We understand that employees crave the ability to advance their careers. These opportunities exist. We need to communicate with them better. Take, for example, career development. Traditionally, we communicate career development as a linear progression. You start at one level and then get promoted level by level. However, advancing your career is more than moving up the corporate ladder. You can advance your career horizontally (same-level opportunities that expose you to new work) and diagonally (temporary assignments).

A framework for people-focused communications

Now is the opportunity for employers to rethink their approach to people-focused communications. Taking Kaufman’s sailboat, we’ve created a message map to align and articulate the HR program and services that underpin employees’ different needs.


You might think this the same if you’re familiar with employee value propositions (EVPs). It is not. Even an EVP can be overly transactional and a laundry list of differentiators—” If you work with us, this is what you will get.” The two should align, but they are unique assets. The EVP helps communicators identify key employee touchpoints. This message map helps you think about the employee more contextually and understand employee needs more deeply, aligning communications to meet those needs and developing messages to drive awareness and understanding. The sentiments of your message map should be present in all of your employee and HR communications. And ideally, you’ll reach a point where all employees will have heard these messages one way or another.

As leaders navigating a tight labor market, we must remind ourselves what employees like about working, why they’ve joined the organization, and what drives them to leave or stay. This new approach articulates to employees that they can come to your organization and have vast opportunities and the ability to go in many directions. More importantly, they can reach their potential in numerous ways — and ultimately thrive.

This article is based on a workshop I presented at the Millennium Alliance’s CHRO Assembly: Transformation HR in March 2023. 

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