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Get Your Team On Board with Templates

You’ve got templates. You’ve had them custom-designed to include time-saving automation features like branded tables, key message boxes, and entire pages of content. Visually, they communicate your brand’s unique story. Functionally, they solve common problems. Your templates are awesome.

So why isn’t your staff using them?

Here are 3 ways that you can get employee buy-in for new templates:

1. Give your staff an identity

Nobody wants to feel like an anonymous cog in a massive machine. Before implementing new templates, walk your staff through your company’s corporate identity and reinforce how valuable each employee is to your business.

Once you’ve reminded your staff about what they stand for (values), who they are (brand), and why they matter (mission), introduce them to their new easy-to-use and customised templates.

Highlight how these templates not only communicate a visual tone across the board and lock down brand assets like logos, colours, and typography, but emphasise how each template has been designed to streamline workflow and solve problems.

2. Touch on the problems, then provide the solutions

Put yourself in their shoes, then put them in the picture. Outline the problems your employees face on a daily basis, like deadlines, workload, style guides and duplicated content (especially between departments). Then rush in and save the day with a solution: templates.

Ask leading questions that provide practical one-click solutions. “Aren’t you tired of wasting time formatting your documents and worrying about brand guidelines or styles? These templates allow you to focus on the content and message of your document because everything from margins to fonts have been designed to save you time. You can even add a stunning pre-branded graph with just one click!”

3. Don’t be suggestive, get specific

Don’t suggest to your team that they use the templates, insist on it.

Make sure that you have pre-approved and updated templates available to all staff, and that they know how to use them. Equally important, make sure your staff understands why they need to use them consistently.

From documents and spreadsheets to presentations, consistency is crucial for brand building, and is especially valid to corporate identity.