If your Communications team is like most in the CEC network, you’re being asked to stretch  your team’s resources more than ever.  In fact, we know from CEC’s latest Resource Allocation Benchmarking Survey that more communications activities are being in-sourced while FTE resourcing remain flat.  This emerging trend leaves communicators in a tough spot – if your plate was already full and now even more is being added to it, how do you know what to work on?

Further complicating the story is that the nature of requests that communicators are being asked to execute is skewing towards the non-strategic.  During a recent CEC conference, a group of Heads of Communications were asked what percentage of their team’s time was spent reacting to tactical requests.  The consensus figure was about 70% (though some said the number was more like 90%).  So, it seems pretty clear that, while we communicators talk about being more “strategic, when it comes down to it, evaluating all the possible demands and selecting the work that truly creates value is actually quite difficult.

How CEC can help:

Though this blog might  have started off by painting a grim picture, I promise that it’s not all doom and gloom — there is a silver lining to this scenario.  In fact, CEC has created some terrific resources aimed at helping Comms teams assess and select the projects that are tied to the tangible outcomes that your organization is trying to achieve.  Here’s how we can help: Read More »

As a researcher, I spend my days constantly questioning why things are as they are.  And, not surprising, this incessant investigation has a tendency to spill over into my personal life.

It doesn’t help that my area of research is Communications.  So, needless to say, I regularly find myself reflecting on why I communicate the way that I do and what the implications are for my interactions with colleagues, friends, and family. 

In attempt at self-improvement (or recognition that we all ought to take some of our own medicine sometimes), I recently took CEC’s “Dialogue Style” Assessment Tool to learn more about my communication style.  What I learned was pretty interesting and, if I’m honest with myself, accurate.

Discover Your Dialogue Style:

What did I learn?  For starters, my dialogue style is an “Analytic.”  The diagnostic tells me that I believe fundamentally that “if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well.”  I have a tendency to give my coworkers and direct reports detailed information related to projects.  If they don’t understand, I expect them to ask questions of me.  Read More »

In working on the Communications Executive Council’s major research study for the year, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with dozens of Heads of Communications about their major challenges and goals for the year.  And if there’s one commonality across nearly all companies, regardless of industry, geography, or revenue band, it’s that they are dead set on having (or showing) more of an impact on “the business” in 2012.

Traditionally, the topic of demonstrating Communications’ value to the broader business has been a touchy one.  Broaching the subject often leads to a discussion of the lack of concrete measurements and usually a comment explaining that much of what we as communicators do is “more of an art than a science” 

I’m not going to debate that this isn’t a perennial Communications challenge — it is.   But when it comes to demonstrating value, one thing seems pretty obvious to me — to have any kind of REAL impact, we communicators need to get people to actually DO something.  That is, we can’t just settle for increasing the company’s presence and share of voice across audiences and channels.  We need to think beyond affecting perceptions and target the real goal of communication – stakeholder behavior change.  And this typically requires partnerships.

I will admit this much – behavior change can be hard, and we in Communications can only do so much by ourselves. The best solutions require partnership with business units and other functions.  However, in my recent research conversations, Heads of Communications have been quick to point out several potential partnership roadblocks to be aware of.  Here are four that I found interesting:

1. Dependence on individuals – Talk to most Heads of Communications and they will tell you that some members of their team are able to build strong cross-functional partnerships while others can’t — “It depends on the individual,” they’ll often say.  This might be true to some extent, but we at the CEC think there is much that you can do to build the skills to effective cross-functional partnership like business acumen, interpersonal influence, and audience understanding. Read More »

As we close the book on 2011, most of us are probably drafting our plans for how we intend to achieve our 2012 objectives.  If you’re like many of the communicators who I have spoken with recently, you are eager to structure your communication plans so as to demonstrate the value that Communications can create for rest of the business.  Perhaps you’re even using the CEC’s recently published toolkit on building an outcome-focused communication planand starting off the planning process by gaining a deep understanding of your Comms objective and target stakeholder audience.  After all, how can you begin to think about creating an action plan if you don’t first fully appreciate the communications goal?

While this advice might seem intuitive, communicators often lose sight of or altogether fail to consider the specific Comms outcome that they are hoping to achieve through their efforts.  But even more important than asking ourselves “What is the Communications objective that we hoping to achieve?” is another intuitive, yet critically important question — “What is the business outcome that we’re hoping to achieve?”

Reverse Engineer Your Comms Plans  Read More »

As 2011 draws to a close we look back more than 200 blogs published by CEC Insider during the calendar year.  The posts featured below were our top 5, having been downloaded by more CEC Insider readers than any others.  They address five communications topics that, while all different, are sure to remain of interest to communicators in the new year.  

3 Skills to Improve Your Job Security

• Job security does not exist. One of the most effective ways to ensure your future employment is to develop new skills continuously.   Since launching the CEC’s overhauled competency framework in the spring, nearly 1,000 communications have already taken the Skill Maturity Assessment to indentify and address the skill gaps of themselves and their team. In this blog, we examine the three weakest skills of most communicators.

               Additional Resource: CEC’s Communications Skill Maturity Assessment and Diagnostic

  Spot the Symptoms of Change Fatigue Read More »

Managing stakeholder perceptions has always been challenging, but given the growing complexity of the current communications environment, it can often feel like an insurmountable task.  Think about it — as our companies’ business operations continue to change, our customers, employees, and external partners are all becoming far more diverse than ever before.  At the same time, the channels and sources that these stakeholder groups use to consume information continues to evolve.  It’s no wonder that a recent CEC poll Heads of Communications revealed that proactive reputation management was the 2^nd overall priority for 2012, only two percentage points behind employee engagement efforts.

Given the need to address this important topic, the CEC recently launched its next major research initiative —Building an Outcomes-Focused Reputation.  As part of the study we’ve already spoken with communications executives at several dozen leading organizations to better understand the challenges that they are facing in managing stakeholder perceptions as well as the tactics they use to measure, monitor, and improve and their corporate reputations. (Take our 2 minute Quick Poll and tell us what you’re doing to manage your reputation!)

Current Approach:

Faced with increased stakeholder scrutiny and fickle audiences, most companies are focusing on building their company’s reputation by turning up the volume on positive messages related to their organization.  Read More »

Building a Bank of Goodwill

Financial advisers often emphasize the importance of building a personal emergency fund.  What they’re referring to is a rainy day fund, consisting of a certain amount of money (e.g., 8 month’s salary) which can be drawn down during tough financial times.  Should you lose your job or get slapped with an unexpected major expense, you could rely on these savings to help you weather the financial storm.

In the communications world, a similar concept exists with regard to an organization’s reputation — this is the concept of the “bank of goodwill”.  Much like your rainy day fund, the idea behind the bank of goodwill is that companies can stockpile their reputation assets when times are good and lean on them as a buffer from negative stakeholder perceptions when times turn bad.

On its surface, the concept seems plausible.  After all, in the financial savings example, few would argue that having extra money in the piggybank wouldn’t give you some degree of financial breathing room.  But whereas money can be universally spent on a wide range of goods and services, perceptions are complex, specific to each stakeholder group, and increasingly fickle.  Additionally, academic researchers struggle to quantitatively prove the theory of the bank of goodwill.  Nevertheless, one need only look to the news for examples of big, well respected companies who have been recently blindsided by massive financial and reputation hits due to crisis or scandal.  I’ve spoken with some of these companies and they’ve all said that, if there is bank of goodwill, it gets exhausted quickly. Read More »

“Hope for the best – plan for the worst.”  I’ve heard this saying many times in my life, used in a wide range of contexts.  Most recently, it came up in a conversation with a CEC member in the Financial Services industry who was referring to his company’s approach to crisis communications.  He emphasized how little room for error there seemed to be these days, mentioning that, despite prudent business practices over the past few years, the public still considered his company “guilty by association,” simply due to a general loss of confidence in the industry.  Trust had eroded and scrutiny was on the rise.

Data from CEC’s sister program, the Corporate Ethics & Leadership Council (CELC), confirms that this is not an isolated perspective.  A recent study of corporate leaders reveals that 77% believe media scrutiny has increased, while 82% report a proliferation of new risk types.  These developments combined with the continued rise in citizen journalism and fluid information flow are making communicators feel more vulnerable to crises.

Faced with such a risky environment, it might seem difficult to truly “plan for the worst.” After all, this assumes that your company can create a comprehensive list of potential crises as respective plans. And while I won’t recommend that you don’t plan for individual scenarios or try to prevent crises from happening (check out our latest resources on avoiding crisis), I do think there are some things that companies should do to ensure that they are prepared to respond effectively when a crisis hits. 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 »

Safety communications has received a lot of interest from CEC members in recent months as more organizations look to Communications to aid in (re)engaging employees around safety.  Unfortunately, it is often a tragic event or disturbing trend in employee accidents that leads business partners to approach Communications for help.  Regardless of initial spark for these campaigns, one thing is clear: organizations are seriously concerned about safety and want to know what they can do to help prevent accidents, injuries, and unsafe behavior.

Through my conversations with communicators who’ve recently worked on safety campaigns, I’ve found that their first step is often to build awareness of safety policies and procedures.  In the more effective campaigns, communicators help employees to build personal, often emotional, connections to safety issues.  For example, several companies have seen significant reductions in accidents by helping employees consider how an injury could affect their families and friends, often through victim storytelling and subsequent dialogue sessions.

While effective in some situations, this tactic is best used when the safety challenge can be solved by awareness alone.  A common challenge cited by communicators is complacency.  In these situations it’s often not that employees don’t know how to work safely, but rather that they’ve performed the same tasks over and over, without incident, and have developed bad habits or have lost appreciation for the dangers of cutting corners.

But what if there is a more complicated challenge to address – say, between productivity and safety — where an awareness campaign alone won’t work?  Here are a couple communications tactics that will help: Read More »