If someone asked you today how you feel about your job you might say all positive things—you’re on a roll on your current project, you’ve gotten some good feedback recently from your manager, and right now you’re contributing to the organization in a way that you might not get to do elsewhere. But how did you feel about your job six months ago? And do you think you’ll still be at your company in a year?

The various changes and related stress that employees have faced over the past few years may not impact engagement today but it does have a great impact on their engagement capital—a look into engagement that includes employee perceptions of the past, present, and future.  Creating an organization with high engagement capital is a top priority of both Communications and Human Resources team.  How aligned are your current efforts? Read More »

Most crisis communications plans that I see are robust when it comes to controlling the things that companies can control.  For example, most plans comprehensively outline escalation rules, crisis team org charts, calling chains, initial holding statements, etc.  These are the resources whose applicability can be predicted with relative certainty, regardless of the crisis.

But after your Communications team has gathered the facts, called together the crisis team, and issued the initial response, what do you do next?  The short answer is – “a lot.” And while I’ll admit that it’s difficult to plan in advance for every crisis permutation, there are several things that you can do to better prepare yourself for managing the ensuing stakeholder debate and impact on reputation.  Here are four strategic activities that I think will help your organization:

(1) Listen to how stakeholder conversations are taking shape.  We all know that the world of communications has become increasingly complex in recent years.  Gone are the days when organizations had significant control over when news would be released to the masses and how the subsequent conversation would evolve.  Now, information flows to stakeholders through their own complex web of influencers.

These principles remain true in a crisis situation, making it critical that companies closely monitor how conversations are taking shape.  CEC members can take check out our profile of different Social Media Listening options to see how to improve non-traditional media monitoring. Read More »

The media are always after a good story. That is of course unless they already have one that is too big for them to handle.  And sometimes, you may think that an unfortunate piece of bad press can do great damage to your company’s reputation only to have it never gain traction in the press.

Certainly when I worked for a major TV news broadcast organization, the aim was never to damage a company’s reputation, but if that happened as the story unfolded, that in itself could make the story more compelling.  So if you think you need to get the media involved, consider the following:

1. Context is everything: If the media is already covering something big, chances are that it may actually pay no attention at all to the event that involves your firm.

2. The media’s attention is relatively short: Just as your company’s unfortunate piece of bad press pushed something off the headlines, in most cases the next big thing will push the event affecting your firm down the pecking order. Read More »

In our recent toolkit for Managing Communications in Global and Dispersed Organizations, we looked at a flexible governance framework to help communicators make decisions in the moment about escalating situations centrally or handling them locally. Many of the activities that local communicators have to manage are pretty straightforward and low sensitivity.  As such, the corporate communications team doesn’t need to get involved with these decisions – things like handling a local media enquiry, creating a local press release, or organizing the regional office’s quarterly volunteering event. In these situations, the best solution is to equip local communicators with tools and support so they can “get on with it” and are not sitting around waiting for help from corporate.  This way, corporate also doesn’t need to get bogged down with minor decisions and can focus attention on bigger issues.

How can local communicators become self-sufficient so that corporate only gets involved in those most critical or ambiguous/sensitive situations? Below are four tips for effectively supporting local communicators:

1. Understand local communicator needs

• TIP: be an active listener – ask smart questions to understand what local communicators need and what kind of support they currently lack
• CEC Tools: check out these Quick Tips for How to be a Quality Listener and our other Dialogue Self-Service Tools Read More »

In my experience communicators tend to be fairly strong planners.  If you ask for a crisis plan, you’ll see binders full of material checking almost every conceivable box.  If you want to see the plan for the Quarterly Town Hall, you can wade into pages of key message maps and logistical details.  But when you ask about a social media plan, suddenly the documentation (and the strategy) seem a lot thinner.  Yes, we’re on Facebook and Linked-in; we tweet and we’ve given our CEO a blog; but how many of us have a cogent social media plan tied to corporate goals, endowed with credible metrics, and benchmarked against competitor activity?

If you do (and you’re willing to share a scrubbed version of what you put together with the membership), e-mail me at griebj@executiveboard.com because we would love to collect more examples for people to view.  (The #1 search term on the CEC website is “template”).  If not – but you’d like to get there – read on for a virtual tour of the CEC’s Social Media Strategy Builder.

At this point, it might be helpful for me to refer you to the CEC Social Media Strategy Builder on the CEB Website.  We offer dozens of other tools and templates but if you are looking for a  single roadmap for yourself or a social media working group to organize your discussions around, this would be the place to start.

Phase 1: Company Strategic Priorities and Business Goals: The key to unlocking all our hopes and dreams for social media is to ground our plan in our ongoing corporate objectives.  This keeps us from getting distracted by the newness of the space and makes it easier to sell the plan internally to non-communicators.

Examples from the Membership: Read More »

For many communications teams, the start of the fall season marks the beginning of the budgeting and planning process. The heads of the function face a difficult challenge: How do I allocate my scarce resources among a myriad of communications activities in order to maximize my function’s effectiveness? For the eighth year in the row, CEC conducted our annual membership Resource Allocation Benchmarking Survey to allow our members to uncover how others are tackling this perpetual challenge.

For the past couple weeks, CEC has been rigorously analyzing detailed budget data submitted by our members as part of the 2011 Resource Allocation Benchmarking Survey.  The aggregate report will be available in two weeks, but already we are very intrigued by some of the interesting trends that are emerging this year.  We want to give you a sneak peek into some of the ones that we have uncovered so far.

Trend 1: Heads of the Communications function are less optimistic about their expected 2012 budgets than they were last year. While in 2010, 54 percent of members companies expected increases in their 2011 budgets, the increase materialized for only 41 percent of them. On the other hand, though only 13 percent expected their budget to decrease in 2011, 34 percent of companies saw their budgets getting cut. As a result, many member companies have been less optimistic in their 2012 expectations with only 41 percent expecting their 2012 budget to go up and 41 percent expecting no change at all.  Read More »

Traditionally when we (and our business partners) think of Communications tools we think of the various forms of messaging that we create and disseminate through our suite of channels.   This blinkered focus on the outputs that communicators create is undermining our ability to influence our audiences.

We talk at CEC about the distinction between “Big C” and “small c” communication.  Big C are the messages that come from the communications function – presentations, memos, newsletters, videos, posters and the like. Small c is the communication that is happening between stakeholders all the time. It is the small c communication that is 99% of what stakeholders are exposed to – the everyday back and forth people have with their networks.  So why aren’t we equally weighting this in our communications planning?

Big C communications feels more comfortable for a lot of communicators– we are in control of what is said and how it is distributed. The output is also visibly attributed to Communications so people can see what we’re doing and we get credit for it.  While these are fair justifications they mean many communicators are limiting their potential to drive real business value.

As part of communications planning you should pay equal consideration to the three different roles we as communicators can play:

1. Create Messaging: develop and share communications that is driving a specific audience outcome (i.e., what do we want the audience to think/feel/do as a result of receiving this communication).

• TIP: listen to the audience first to make sure you understand the language they use and current perceptions they have to maximize the chances of the message resonating. Be audience-centric not company-centric in your communications.
• CEC Support: Write in a More Engaging Way (resource center)

2. Enable Others to Communicate: coach or support others to communicate more effectively with the audience. This could be leaders, managers, employees, external advocates or the media. Read More »

Job security does not exist. The only way to ensure your future employment, in my opinion, is to develop new skills continuously. Now on that somber note, I present you with some hope—a look into three critical, but typically weak skills for corporate communicators complete with resources to jump start your learning and application.

Note: This is the continuation from CEC’s Back-to-School Special where we explored 3 of the 16 critical skills for the modern communicator.

Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness

I consider and proactively prepare for how stakeholders in other countries or cultures will respond to a communication strategy.

Why it Matters: This skill is the least-developed among communicators, but it’s also the most important to work on for two reasons. First, most of our CEC members tell us that their company is expanding into new, emerging markets. Suddenly, their audience has shifted from being U.S.-only to include employees and stakeholders on five continents. Second, whether or not their company is expanding or contracting, many Communications functions are reorganizing. For example, Communicators formerly aligned to a specific region are now formally reporting to Corporate.  In short, broader and more formalized networks of communicators are being employed at CEC member companies, which creates a whole new set of collaboration and ownership challenges.

Featured Resource: Managing Communication Across Global Teams—Use a simple framework to reveal how best to communicate and collaborate with communicators worldwide. The advice and resources contained within will help to build your sensitivity for and appreciation of differences in your business and develop decision-making mechanisms to respond quickly to potential crises or issues.

Business Acumen

I have an understanding of my company’s “ecosystem”, including the industry, global trends, macroeconomic changes, and regulatory changes.

Read More »

It’s the look.  The facial expressions give it away every time.

I’ve spent the past few months traveling the globe presenting our newest CEC study “Building a Change-Ready Organization” and as I talk to communicators around the world, I’ve personally witnessed the rapid change in expressions as virtually everyone simultaneously reaches the same three conclusions:

• In the decade ahead, the biggest difference between success and failure for most companies is the ability of their employees to adapt to change. (Yeah, I kinda knew that was true)
• The most important quality required to be change-ready is agility. (Sure, that only makes sense)
• Most companies are not really that agile. (I was kinda thinking we’re agile, but if we’re being honest with ourselves, we’ve actually got a-ways to go).

But rather than just taking my word for it — decide for yourself.  We’ve come up with (and by “we,” of course, I mean our excellent senior research analyst Kayleigh O’Keefe doing all the hard work, with me just making a bunch of annoying word-suggestions) a brand-new CEC Agility Quiz.

Read More »

Long-term, rock solid strategic plans may be relics of the past, but future scenario planning is in vogue. One of Communications most critical tasks is to communicate strategy so that employees work in alignment with the company’s key priorities.

Today, as priorities shift frequently and employees are overwhelmed with information, it’s harder than ever to not only communicate the company strategy, but fully enable it to be implemented through good communication.

If you really want your strategy to stick, we think that you need to create a forum for conversation with and among employees that focuses on what’s behind the strategy; that is, the market context and assumptions that underpin it. After all, employee understanding of this important, but little discussed information is a top-three driver of employee agility.

To consider the difference, let’s explore two alternative communication approaches to strategy kickoffs—a common vehicle used to “share strategy”. In the first, the strategy is communicated at a large town hall. In the second, the assumptions or influences on the strategy are used to generate conversation among employees and enable them to make decisions daily in line with strategy.

The Straightforward Approach

At Company A, the Communications team organizes a major strategy kickoff session at the beginning of each year. Employees at headquarters crowd into an auditorium while those at regional offices dial-in to listen to the standard hour-long teleconference. The CEO and his cadre of senior leaders run through the company’s top four or five priorities for the year. In sparse PowerPoint slides, they explain the “why” behind the strategy and paint a picture of what success will look like. Bold, energizing statements like “In five years, we will be the number one retailer of socks in Brazil!” flow freely.

As the hour draws to a close, the CEO asks employees if they have any questions. Rare, however, is the organization where an employee questions and challenges a strategy in a room with peers and her manager. And so, the strategy effectively communicated, employees race back to their desks and full Outlook inboxes, and pick up where they left off, the new strategy already a vague memory. Read More »