During my career, I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on a variety of communications engagements. A common theme that I’ve noticed is that communications is more alike other corporate functions than many organizations might realize. It should be guided by the organization’s overall strategy, address the operational and strategic needs of employees and management, and have broad-based support from leadership. These might seem basic and intuitive, but too often, I have seen communications functions that are reactive and tactical, focused on a vocal leader’s priorities rather than top-level organizational objectives. Below are some guiding principles of my approach to employee communications.
Communications should be an enabler of strategic priorities
Too often, organizations treat communications as a pure overhead function – something they have because their peer organizations do. They might produce newsletters, leadership blogs, all-staff meetings and intranet sites, not because they plan to use them to connect employees’ everyday work to current or long-term business strategies, but because conventional wisdom tells them they should.
When communications is seen as an overhead function rather than as a strategic partner, communications tactics lack effectiveness and don’t help an organization meet its business objectives. Every organization has overall goals that drive strategy and tactics in HR, finance, IT, operations, marketing, R&D – why should communications be any different? You would never invest in developing and promoting a new product or service that didn’t align with your business objectives – why would you spend communications resources that way?
Your audience has limited time to receive and digest communications
One thing we can easily lose sight of as communicators is how much time our audience (especially an employee audience) has to dedicate to reading, watching, or listening to the communications we produce. Even though we might have time to look at every email that comes our way from an executive, we must realize that a critical part of our job as strategic advisors is analyzing, responding to and amplifying leadership messages. Our teammates in other departments, however, are busy focusing on meeting the needs of our customers, leaving them with limited time to consume high-level organizational information.
Communicators need to ensure that employees are informed of and ready for key changes, leadership priorities and organizational updates without inundating them with information that could dilute or obscure key messages. Our colleagues already have forty (or more) hours of work that needs to be done in a week. If we’re asking them to set aside an hour of that to read a newsletter, peruse an intranet site, or watch a video message from leadership, we need to be sure they feel that hour is well spent, and we need to know that we delivered the key messages we needed to.
For maximum effectiveness, leadership needs to be all-in
Communications is a pro-am sport. Just about everyone has access to email, word processing and presentation software. While we, as communicators, know that there is more to our field than emails, newsletters and slide presentations, every organization has members who disagree. These unfortunate attitudes from any level in an organization can handicap communicators, but when they are held by leadership or management, they can devastate to the point of ineffectiveness.
For better or worse, any executive can develop a presentation for a large audience, and it’s unlikely they would have reached their position if they hadn’t done so successfully in the past. Too often, because they have managed without the communications guidance of a strategic advisor, they don’t understand the value we can bring to their business objectives. Rather, they see us as a cost center to be trimmed or cut completely in lean times.
On the other hand, some leaders fully embrace communication as a strategic partner in achieving business goals. While often refreshing, these leaders can monopolize an organization’s communications functions, spending valuable communications resources (and employee attention) on pet projects.
For communications to perform at top of scope, leadership must be all-in on the view that communications is a net-positive for the organization’s overall strategy, as opposed to wasted overhead or tactical operators.
Brandon Soublet 