One of employee communications’ key goals is to ensure employees understand the company’s business strategy. At every level, employees should be able to align their work to the strategy and take greater personal responsibility for their own contributions to its success.

If a study of 20 companies from the University of Technology in Sydney is any indicator, it isn’t working. What’s worse, the results of the study will undoubtedly be held up by skeptics as evidence that internal communications really isn’t all that important.

The study found the vast majority of employees in these companies could not pick their company’s overarching, publicly-stated strategy from a list of six different choices. Yet the companies were strong performers in their industry segments and against their competitors. “At one level, this is a serious indictment on the importance of publicly stated strategies and their value as points of guidance for employees,” writes Timothy Devinney, professor of strategy at the university. “What we are seeing is that even for the best firms, the ‘vision thing’ may not matter all that much.”

The question unanswered by the study is how much more successful would these companies be if employees did understand the connection between their own work and the company strategy? Devinney’s article—published in The Conversation, also did not address how strategy was communicated to its employees.

The fact that only 29.3% of employees could match their company to its publicly-communicated strategy suggests that the communication isn’t good. Sadly, this finding matches several previous studies, like this one from 2012. I have to wonder if the communicators in these organizations ever conducted their own measurement effort. If so, what steps did they take to improve these outcomes?

(The results were even worse when employees were asked to match the company’s publicly-espoused environmental strategy, which suggests internal communication of corporate social responsibility initiatives is also in need of a tune-up.)

The study did find glimmers of hope, if only organizations pay attention to them. For example, writes Devinney, “Some employees do a better job at understanding the differences between their firm and competitors. These individuals are also better at being able to explain their company strategy in words to others. These people may be the key strategic enablers.”

The emphasis is mine. I have found few organizations that identify internal ambassadors who can communicate effectively at a peer-to-peer level, building literacy about the strategy where it matters: on the job.

The study also found that middle managers understand strategy better than lower-level staff. While Devinney suggests that may be enough—“Lower-level staff may simply need to understand their tasks and not why those tasks matter”—it also suggests that companies relying on a “cascade” model of communication should rethink their approach.

The fact is, other research has concluded that companies need employees who are aligned with the corporate strategy. According to a Corporate Executive Board study, productivity suffers dramatically if employees facing change (which these days is almost everybody) don’t understand the connection between their marching orders and the strategy behind it. “Progressive companies that successfully align employees to their corporate strategy are realizing the competitive advantages originally targeted in organizational transition,” according to the CEB report. “Aligning employees to the corporate strategy—helping them understand their new call to action—is a critical driver of success in today’s market.”

A lot of executives will slash internal communication budgets with a clear conscience based on the strong performance of companies whose employees aren’t aligned with strategy. That would be a mistake. Jack Stack famously reversed Springfield Remanufacturing’s fortunes when he decided to “expose all aspects of corporate finance and operations to scrutiny by every employee—from janitor to cam-rod rebuilder to inventory manager—and enlist their ideas for enhancing the bottom line. In exchange for improving the business, the workers got bonuses and stock,” according to a 1995 Los Angeles Times article.

Your company may not be on the brink of ruin, but the gains from employees who can link their own work to the company’s strategy are too great to ignore. Rather than give up, companies need to lean harder on their communicators to produce higher business literacy levels among staff.