How to Engage Employees with Purpose, Strategy, and Vision

Key Takeaways

• Only 13% of employees in Europe are engaged with their work, with 72% quiet quitting and 15% actively disengaged—but proactively reconnecting employees to organisational purpose, strategy, and vision is one of the most effective levers to reverse this trend and drive business performance.​
• Aligned leadership messaging is foundational—employees need consistent narrative from different leaders about strategic direction, reinforced through platforms like Viva Engage for open dialogue, virtual All Hands, and Ask Me Anything sessions that embed strategy into everyday leadership communication.​
• Consistent internal messaging means weaving strategic narrative throughout everyday communications, tagging content to corporate values, and using Viva Connections and Viva Amplify to aggregate strategy updates and target different audiences, transforming corporate strategy into stories employees feel proud to share.​
• At Silicon Reef, we see that when employees understand how their daily work connects to broader business goals—supported by transparent goal visibility across company, departmental, and team levels—engagement and motivation increase, along with business performance and retention.

Just 13% of employees in Europe are engaged with their work, according to Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workforce Report. 72% are ‘quiet quitting’, and the remaining 15% are actively disengaged. And the results for the UK are even more concerning, where just 10% of employees are actively engaged.

It’s no surprise that low engagement is not particularly good for business. Among other things, it brings a decrease in productivity, retention levels, and morale. Conversely, many studies have highlighted a direct correlation between high levels of employee engagement and greater business performance.

Thankfully, there’s an anecdote to this epidemic of disengagement….

Proactively re-connecting employees to their organisation’s purpose, strategy, and mission is one of the most effective ways to increase engagement.

But many of us already know this. In fact, ‘Engaging teams on purpose, strategy and values’ has been the top priority for internal communications and employee experience professionals for the last eight years, topping the chart again in 2025. So, this blog post outlines the strategy and tactics behind the need to connect employees to the organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision.

Let’s jump in.

3 Priorities for Connecting Employees to Purpose, Strategy, and Vision

If the connection between employees’ daily work and the company’s overarching purpose, strategy, and vision is such an important driver of engagement, internal communicators must think tactically about how to connect the dots and portray a consistent narrative.

There are three core priority areas to create this all-important alignment and connection –

• Aligned leadership
• Consistent internal messaging
• Transparent goals and objectives

We’ve considered each priority in a little more detail, and explored the actionable tactics that will get you on the road to an engaged and connected workforce…

1. Aligned Leadership

Let’s start with the fundamentals. Strategic alignment at the leadership level always has to come first. Effective internal communication is authentic and genuine, so you can’t expect employees to get behind something that the leadership team has not yet bought into.

When it comes to engaging employees with your organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision, it’s critical that you build a consistent narrative throughout all of your leadership messaging.

Employees need to receive an aligned message from different leaders throughout the company in order to truly understand and feel a genuine connection to the strategic direction. Whether it’s a reference to the organisation’s purpose as part of the introduction to a departmental All Hands, a quarterly strategy update email from the CEO or the COO running an Ask Me Anything session about the long-term vision, every opportunity to embed the strategy at leadership-level is incredibly valuable.

Tactically, Viva Engage offers the perfect platform upon which to facilitate open conversations between leadership and employees for organisations using M365. It also provides the functionality to host virtual All Hands and Q&A sessions, saving time, improving the employee experience, and reducing the admin burden.

We shared our tips to increase leadership engagement with the Institute of Internal Comms: 4 Practical Steps to Increase Engagement with Leadership using Microsoft Viva Engage.

2. Consistent Internal Messaging

It goes without saying that you need to communicate your organisation’s purpose, strategy, and vision clearly and frequently.

But we don’t just mean having a page on your intranet or a statement within your careers portal. We mean weaving strategic messaging into everyday communications, building your content strategy around your corporate values, and sharing stories about how your company’s purpose is being brought to life.

It’s all about translating the corporate strategy into an engaging story that your employees feel proud of, and understand well enough to repeat to friends and family members.

At a practical level, this might mean tagging each news post to a corporate value, as we built into the Met Office’s award-winning SharePoint intranet using a custom web part. Or using Viva Connections to aggregate strategy updates from right across your digital workspace, helping keep frontline employees in the know. Or even by making use of Viva Amplify to share a consistent narrative via multiple channels that targets different audiences with ease.

3. Transparent Goals and Objectives

Employees perform better when they understand how their work connects to organisational strategy. Yet many struggle to see the link between their daily tasks and company-wide goals. Transparent goal-setting and progress tracking help bridge that gap.

Viva Connections serves as the ideal hub for communicating strategic priorities and departmental objectives. You can surface goal documentation, OKR frameworks, and strategic roadmaps directly on your company dashboard—ensuring every employee knows what the organisation is working towards and why it matters.

Plus, by embedding Power BI dashboards in Viva Connections, you make progress visible in real-time. Teams can see how their contributions are moving the needle on key business outcomes, and leaders can track performance transparently without requiring separate reporting tools.

SharePoint pages work alongside this to host detailed goal frameworks, strategy documents, and cascading objectives—creating a searchable, versioned source of truth that employees can return to whenever they need clarity on direction or priorities.

For ongoing dialogue around goals, Viva Engage communities provide spaces where teams can discuss progress, celebrate wins, and navigate challenges together. This two-way conversation—combined with transparent dashboards and accessible documentation—transforms strategy from something distant and abstract into something tangible and achievable.

When employees see the goals, understand the progress, and feel part of the journey, they’re far more likely to stay engaged and committed to the organisation’s direction.

Silicon Reef – your trusted partner for all things M365

Since 2016, we’ve helped our clients use Microsoft technology to make their workplaces more productive, more connected, and more engaging.

We are people-first M365 experts and SharePoint specialists. We build digital workplaces using Microsoft technology designed to deliver better employee experiences.

Come and say hello to find out what we can do for you.