As we soon begin the home stretch of the 2016 presidential election season, voters will want to know that the person they elect to run the country is a successful, proven, experienced leader. But the electorate also will want to gain insight into the human side of the candidates. What makes them tick? What inspires them? Are they nice people? Would I want to have coffee or a beer with them? Voters want to be able to relate. It’s the same for employees and the executive suite.

Open communication between leadership and employees is integral to building employee trust, morale and engagement. Dry business language and performance metrics through company emails barely scratch the surface of who a leader actually is. More important, they do very little to make a company’s leaders relatable and connected to employees.

Making business executives relatable can be a challenge, especially for companies with multiple office locations and work-at-home employees. In some cases, employees not only have never met their CEO but also don’t know what any of their senior leaders look like.

As successful communicators, we must find ways to build, enhance and grow leadership-employee relations. After all, we are the eyes, ears and voice of employees and leadership. We have the intel and connections to go beyond quarterly emails and newsletters and tell deeper, more relatable stories about the organization and its people.

Employees and voters are hungrier than ever for their leaders and brands to be relatable. We rely on social media, customer reviews and blogs to stay in touch. Brands can interact with consumers in real time and tell stories in ways that they couldn’t before. There is a sense of comfort in knowing someone is on the other side. This hyper-connected world has redefined the landscape of communication—we’re accustomed to making personal human connections everywhere we go. That switch doesn’t turn off when we enter our workplace. This has changed expectations for how communicators engage employees.

Executive profiles can help initiate that connection. But résumé highlights and professional bios only help to establish credibility—they don’t shed light on the leaders’ personalities. You can take your executive profiles to the next level by weaving in personal anecdotes and details that bring out their depth and character.

The first thing you’ll need is a C-suite sponsor who will champion the project. Connect with someone who shares your passion for employee communication. And don’t limit yourself to HR or marketing executives.

To sway C-suite doubters, you might want to build a mock-up of what your final intranet product will look like. Include pictures, profiles and contests that will engage your employees. Once you’ve done that, the following tips will help:

1. Relate Outside the Office. Ask executives about who they are outside of work. Anecdotes and shared experiences can help make people relatable.

2. Inspire With Passion. Appeal to your employees’ emotions, imagination and hopes. Passion is key, and you can tap into it with the right questions. Have executives look back on their childhood ambitions, share stories about what shaped them and reflect on those who have inspired them. An executive shared a touching story about how the seed for a career in law was planted when he befriended a blind law student while volunteering at Reading for the Blind.

3. Illustrate With Stories.Employees want proof that their leaders are strong and successful. But, again, the way to prove this can be fun and relatable. At Esurance, one executive shared a story about how he sold pizzas door to door as a kid to pay for his band’s trip to Florida. The link to a sales career was easy to see.

4. Connect to the Business. It’s important to find ways to tie executive profile content to the company’s business. This does not mean including business metrics or asking technical questions about the job, but a little reference goes a long way. For example, Esurance executives offered words of wisdom about safe driving, which fit with the brand’s identity as an insurance provider.

5. Engage Through Incentives. It’s not a surprise that engagement makes an appearance. The most interesting stories mean nothing if no one reads them. You have to bring employees to your content. A powerful yet simple way to do this is by creating incentives. An interactive element can boost employee engagement. Host a quiz on your intranet homepage, asking questions that only employees who’d visited the executive profile pages would know how to answer. Everyone who responds correctly is entered for a chance to win prizes.

Author Betty Bender once said, “When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.” It’s human nature to want to feel connected and able to relate. Walking through the workplace doors shouldn’t change that. Employees want to feel a personal connection to their leaders. Communicators have the ability to provide that. The gap between a call center employee and the CEO is only as big as you allow it to be.

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Use persuasion to engage employees

You have the power to sway employees’ opinions about their leaders. Rely on the three modes of persuasion as you draft questions for the C-suite: ethos, logos, pathos. Prepare questions that will demonstrate credibility, align with the business and appeal to the emotions. Connect and relate, all while entertaining and inspiring.

Here are some useful interview questions:

• What is your alma mater?
• If you could give your 16-year-old self driving advice, what would it be?
• What was your childhood ambition?
• What do you like to do on the weekends?
• What tech gadget can you not live without?
• If you could meet any celebrity, dead or alive, who would it be?
• What’s your favorite movie?
• What is one random fact about yourself?

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