The most obvious connection to employee communication is in the workplace—what we at Davis & Company often call “environmental communication” (as in: communicating in the work environment). Although you’re not selling peanut butter, you are trying to reach employees. That’s why you should make sure you are leveraging communication opportunities where people work: in offices, warehouses, stores, manufacturing plants or any other environment.

How to start? Analyze the environment. There’s a term in retailing called “mystery shopper”—where someone poses as a customer to see how service is delivered—and you can leverage that technique to assess the current state of environmental communication.

Start outside the facility. How do people enter to come to work? What do they see first? Do they pause to punch in? Do they change in a locker room? Where do they break for coffee? Where do they have lunch? Do they ride in elevators or climb stairs? Do they visit the credit union? What are other places employees frequent? Where do they walk fast without stopping and where do they pause?

When our firm conducts site visits, we often see that communication is awry: posters are located in hallways where people never go, bulletin boards (or video screens) are hung to face the wrong direction, newsletters are distributed in awkward places, not in the traffic flow.

This would simply be bad decorating if not for the fact that we’re losing the chance to reach employees when they’re not distracted by other things—and, as communication becomes more challenging, this is an opportunity we can’t afford to miss.

Get out of your office and go “shopping.” You may be surprised at how much you learn.