One of our most popular diagnostics is the Skills Maturity Assessment.  It is a two part, quick survey in which individuals assess themselves on their maturity levels across key 18 competencies and they are also assessed on the same competencies by their manager. As a result, managers and individuals can have a productive conversation about the key strengths and development areas for the individual, but also about what the manager can be doing to support his or her direct report’s development.

Looking at the data that we collected from the 1500+ individuals who participated, we found that managers and individuals perceptions of which competencies are the most important for the individual’s success within his/her role are very often not well-aligned. Managers often place importance on very different competencies than their direct reports.  We found that the gap in alignment between manager and individuals is often correlated with the amount of support an individual receives from their managers.

Here is how participating communicators managers stack up:

• 60 percent of communicators agree that their manager is a great coach
• 74 percent feel that their manager is open to new ideas
• 72 percent regularly receive formal feedback  from their managers
• 71 percent regularly receive informal feedback from their managers
• 55 % of communicators say they have an IDP (Individual Development Plan) that emphasizes the skills needed to succeed in their organization

The good news is that it looks like many communicators are receiving quite a lot of feedback. Yay!  But when it comes down to coaching the manages ratings start to fall a bit, and once we get down to actually having something concrete, like an IDP explicitly written down, suddenly we are down to barely more than half of the respondents.

So if you are one of those communicators whose IDP is not quite what they would like it to be, where do you start? CEC has a bunch of resources to help you with your development and you can check them all out on our website. Or even better, why not send this blog to your team leader and see if your entire team can participate in the diagnostic so you can get a real 360 assessment and start a productive dialogue with your team and your manager about your development.

Recommended Resources:

Communications Training Resources

Plan Your Development

Skills Maturity Assessment

Responsibilities and Competencies of Key Communications Roles

Here at CEC, we are currently in the middle of our largest annual research project and this year we are tackling behavioral change.  Over the past couple weeks, I have been reading up heavily on the behavioral psychology field and their conclusions about what drives human behavior.  Not surprisingly, human behavior is very complex and difficult to change.

To be able to influence and change human behavior, communicators need to first understand what currently drives their target stakeholders’ behavior. This is not an easy task because people don’t always know what drives them to behave certain way. Lots of people’s actions are subconscious and even if people think deeply about what drives them, they have different levels of ability to articulate and describe it. This puts a lot of pressure on Comms to ask the right probing question because without knowing what buttons to push, you run the risk of investing lots of resources into failed efforts.

One example from the health field that I think is perfect to illustrate what happens when communicators don’t start their behavioral change efforts with thorough understanding of their audience is the past failure of smoking awareness campaigns targeted at teenagers/children.  In an effort to decrease the prevalence of children smoking, lots of money was spent on creating a campaign targeting teenagers’ awareness of the consequences of smoking.  The main focus on the campaign was showing the long-term consequences of smoking on people’s health – lungs destroyed by lung cancer, lower life expectancy, increased vulnerability to other diseases etc. However, the prevalence of children smoking was not dropping nearly at the rate that the creators of the campaign expected. Read More »

Newsletters are one of the most powerful weapons in every communication function’s arsenal when it comes to reaching and engaging company employees.  Communicators use newsletters for everything from rolling out the annual company strategy, to announcing an employee appreciation day, to letting people know that the 5^th floor bathrooms will be shut down for an entire day (a crisis situation for someone with my 3 bottles a day of Diet Pepsi habit).

Many Comms functions have newsletter open and readership rates as one of their main functional KPIs. So it does not come as a surprise that lots of communicators are obsessed with figuring out what works and what doesn’t when it comes down to getting people to open their newsletters AND getting someone to actually READ what is in it.

One of our CEC members recently posted a “newsletter readership rate” one-question survey through our CEC Employee Discussion Forum and received 170 responses from fellow communicators at other companies within couple days.  Out of these 170 respondents, 44 percent reported that they have more than 40 percent readership rate for their newsletter (you go guys!), and 9 percent reported that they only get 10 percent or less of their employees to read their newsletter. Here is how everyone stacks up: Read More »

Increased globalization, rising number and diversity of stakeholders, and faster and faster speed at which information spreads have heightened the importance of communication within our member organizations. Other functions are turning to communications to help them deal with this new, more-complex communication environment and expecting communicators to bring more “to the table” than ever before.  These expectations put pressure on communicators to deliver new, innovative ideas and products as well as demonstrate a clear impact on bottom line.

In our functional capabilities diagnostic, we have asked communicators to evaluate 20 attributes of successful, world-class communications function based on their importance and effectiveness. The 3 key things that participants found the most important were: reducing low value work, selecting work that will create value, and testing and measuring communications effectiveness. However, when asked to rate how effective they are in achieving these, reducing low value work and testing effectiveness were the two things that communicators rated themselves as being the least effective in.

However, with flat budgets, and more complex demands from the business, these are the 3 things that the communicators need to excel at, now more than ever. So what does being great look like at these and how do you get better at it?

Reducing Low Value Work

Communicators who are good at this consistently evaluate their portfolio of offered communications activities and weight each of them in terms of both their effectiveness as well as their ability to crate business value.  For example, ING has put together a great Service Level Tiering Process for stepping away from low-value activities both by co-opting partners in prioritizing Communications’ activity portfolio and supporting partners as they undertake lower-value communications activities on their own.

Selecting Work that Will Create Value

Communicators who excel at this focus on selecting work with an explicit linkage to measurable business outcomes and resist work that is unrelated to business objectives. Toyota has put together a Problem-Solving Process to help communicators diagnose the business problems underlying partners’ requests for communications support, ensuring that communications solutions target and help drive business outcomes partners truly value.

Measure Function’s Effectiveness

The best communicators evaluate the impact of their efforts by measuring and assessing actual changes in stakeholders’ behavior—tied to specific company priorities rather than focusing on transactional metrics that cannot be directly tied to business impact. CEC has put together a great Communications Measurement and Reporting Toolkit to help you do just that.

Key Resources:

Reducing Low Value Work

Selecting Work that Will Create Value

Measure Function’s Effectiveness

There has been a rapid growth in available communications channels in the last couple years.  This channel explosion places an unprecedented pressure on the communications function to design a strong channel strategy to use these efficiently and effectively.  All of these new channels present an opportunity for communicators to reach out to large audiences and spread information and messages with rapid speed. But it also takes lots of more of communicator’s time to navigate these channels and measure and evaluate how effective they are in their usage.

While many communications teams have a dedicated channel and/or social media person on the team, every communications professional (regardless of your specialization) needs to have a good grasp of channel management. As part of my new project focused on designing a channel audit diagnostic, I have spoke to several of our members to figure out what types of channel related metrics (data) would help communicators use channels in more efficient and effective way.  Here are some of the challenges faced by our members that we are hoping to help them solve with the new channel audit diagnostic:

1. Tracking Usage

Most communicators I spoke to have a good idea about the overall channels usage in their company. They can tell what percentage of their mailing list typically opens their newsletter; how many people listen on to their webinars; or how many people showed up for their CEO/Employee roundtable. However, while lots of communicators know their absolute numbers, they can rarely benchmark themselves to other comms functions in other companies to see how well they are really doing in these metrics.

2. Measuring Comms Effectiveness

While usage numbers are important, high usage is not the same as high impact and effectiveness.  At the end of the day, what really matters not how many people read your blog, but how many of them actually went and took action or modified their behavior because something you said really resonated with them. Many of the communicators I spoke to express a desire to be able to determine better which channels are more/less effective in helping them drive real behavioral change-related outcomes among different groups of stakeholders.

3. Impact of Channels on Employees’ Productivity

A big part of modern communicator’s job is not just to use channels effectively, but also to ensure an organization-wide efficiency in channel usage across the company.  Not all channels are created equal when it comes to boosting employees’ productivity, and some can even be detrimental to it (30 Facebook updates a day, 20 corporate-wide emails in over-worked employee’s inbox). Consequently, communicators need to worry not only about their own channel effectiveness, but also focus on guiding the employees and other functions on how to use channels to their advantage in productive manner.

I would love to hear your thoughts on some of the new challenges you face due to the channel explosion, and what measures/metrics you have in place to track one (or all three) of the above.  As well as how are you making all these new channels work for you!

And make sure to check out some of our great channel-related resources:

Channel Selection Tool

Social Media Latest Outlook

Mobile Technology Latest Outlook

For many of our members (and for CEC as well), January is the month when the annual performance review process kicks off. The review process is a great way to evaluate what you did well in the last year, but also to focus on your key areas of development. For most of us, the review process ends at the individual level, but it is equally important for the Communications function as whole (and for the team members who together constitute “the function”) to take thorough stock of its achievements and future objectives.

Based on our research and partnership with hundreds of companies over many years, we have identified the 20 key attributes of business value-focused communications function and compiled them into a compact Anatomy Game board . The Anatomy showcases the best practice for each attribute to help our members achieve functional excellence in each of the functional responsibilities. We found that a truly business value-focused communications functions focus their efforts in 4 key areas:

1. Sense Opportunities for Creating Value

Truly valued communicators don’t just fulfill clients’ requests, but proactively identify opportunities to meet stakeholder needs, address areas of potential reputation exposure and surface internal business partners’ communications needs and priorities.

2. Optimize Resources to Highest-Value Work

Many communications’ teams reported stagnating budgets in 2011, with only slightly more optimistic forecast for 2012. Scarce resources place lots of pressure on allocating them in the most efficient and impactful manner. Most successful members create a strategic high-value activities focused plan, and optimize their most important resource – their staff.

3. Extend “Reach” by Enabling Others to Communicate on Your Behalf

Most of our members have 1 to 5 communicators per 1,000 employees. This ratio makes it virtually impossible for the communications team to really connect and touch every employee and stakeholder out there. Top communications teams successfully leverage their stakeholders by getting managers, leaders, employees and external stakeholders to advocate on their behalf.

4. Create Value by Crafting and Disseminating Messages

Almost every communications team out there is focused on creating and disseminating message. However, what distinguishes the truly best communications teams from all the rest is their ability to not only have their message heard, but to actually motivate their audience to take action and to actually change stakeholders’ behavior in way that has a concrete and measurable impact on company’s business objectives.

Why don’t you take a look at our newly updated Anatomy and let us know how your function stacks up?

Recommended Resources

The Anatomy of a Business Value-Focused Communications Function

Managing the Function Topic Center

Skills and Roles of Modern Communicator

The last month of the year is a great time to look back at 2011 and take a stock of the things we’ve learned.  I sorted through all the neat data and stats CEC collected in 2011 and here are the top 3 statistical gold nuggets:

1. Communications budgets grew on average only 0.5 percent, but staff budgets increased by 2.7 percent.

The Heads of Communications are focusing on staff in their budgets which means that they consider YOU a worthy investment. Now that’s the good news. On the other hand, Heads of Comms are cutting non-staff and outside vendor spending. The result is that you probably found yourself with some extra responsibilities added to your already overflowing plate. This will likely not get better as more than half of Heads of Comms reported that they expect their budgets to fall or stagnate next year as well.

To see how this trend plays out within YOUR company’s industry, check out our latest Online Benchmarking Tool (Warning: The tool is highly addictive and will make you scoff at ever playing Angry Birds again!) Read More »

For the past couple months, I have been working on compiling 16 different “role profiles” of some of the traditional and not-so-traditional roles that you can find on current communications teams.  For each profile, I have interviewed several communicators holding this position to pick their brains on the key responsibilities and skills that their role demands. The resulting role profiles reflect not only their current responsibilities but also some of the more aspirational activities that they would love to add to the list in the near future to increase their impact and effectiveness.

However, not all communications teams have a large number of communicators which can be strategically allocated among all of these 16 (or more) different roles.  A quick look at our membership shows that a quarter of the communications teams have 10 or less people and about half of them fall in the 20 and under full time staff members category.  So what do you do when you have a small team that requires everyone to wear “multiple hats” to get the job done? Read More »

We have just released our annual 2011 Aggregate Benchmarking Report highlighting the key communications budget trends for 2011/2012. In my previous blog, I highlighted the growing importance of staff in communications budgets; but there is another interesting trend that we found from our data: Companies are decoupling their communications and marketing departments’ budgets.

While in 2007, 33 percent of communicators reported that their communications department’s budget was part of the marketing budget, this percentage fell to 21 in 2011. In addition, the share of marketing related expenses in communicators’ non-staff budgets also fell by 10 percent between 2007 and 2011. Read More »

We have just released the Executive Summary of our 2011 Resource Allocation Benchmarking Survey findings highlighting the key communications budget trends for 2011/2012. The budget data collected from our members revealed some very interesting findings that every communicator should take into account when planning for 2012.

In 2011, many communicators saw their budget growth rates drop close to zero as their companies’ revenues stagnated. However, despite slower budget growth, communicators finally saw their budgets recover to the pre-2008 levels when looking at communications budget as a percentage of total revenue.  More interestingly, despite stagnating budgets, communicators across all company revenue bands continued increasing their staff levels at an even faster rate than last year. Read More »