Are you responsible for PR, Media Relations, Public Affairs, or similar? If you are, then the chances are that how you do your job will have changed significantly in the last 5-10 years.

On Wednesday 15th February, the CEC invites you to spend an hour with us looking at how PR professionals need to adapt to succeed in a stakeholder environment that has undergone significant change.

Where stakeholders once received information from a finite number of media outlets, they now get it from a huge range of sources – particularly in the online space. Where once they got news at fixed times in the day, they now get a constant stream of information through 24 hour news channels, or via their social connections on media such as Twitter. As the stakeholder environment becomes increasingly dynamic, many communicators are finding individual outreaches to have diminishing impact.

Creating content that ‘flows’

Many PR teams have responded by pushing the same old company-centric messages through a new range of channels. Instead, leading communicators are creating stakeholder-centric content, designed to flow naturally across stakeholders’ informal networks.

Join us to discuss:

• The skills required for PR success in the social age
• How to identify channels with the greatest impact
• How to create content that provokes dialogue and discussion

You can register for this webinar here – we look forward to having you on the line!

Details
Title: Proactive PR in a Networked Environment
Date: Wednesday 15th February
Time: 7am PST / 10am EST / 3pm GMT / 4pm CET

Tiered Communications Service

Can you relate to the following statements?

• My team has a difficult time saying “no” to routine or low-impact partner requests.
• My team spends too much time supporting tactical projects and too little time on high-value initiatives.
• My team is concerned about allowing non-communicators to “self-serve” their communications needs.

If you nodded in agreement to any of these statements, it might be time to reevaluate (or create!) your existing service level agreements. The truth is all of us in Communications have felt exasperated at times when business partners ask us to complete low-value work. In recent years, this frustration has been compounded as Communications budgets remain flat while business partner requests increase.

Of course, you likely already have some tacit agreements in place with business partners or have agreements tucked in a dusty file cabinet somewhere. In theory these SLAs are great, in practice they are harder to implement because it’s hard to: a.) assign value to individual activities, b.) shift partner perceptions of what Comms can do, and c.) ensure consistency and quality of communications pushed back to the line.

When we explored this challenge, ING Insurance Americas tiered service-level framework stood out. What made it better than your typical SLA? Three things:

1. It was co-created with partners to prioritize their business needs and the related communications support most critical to those needs.
2. It clearly defines and articulates Communications’ responsibility in different service levels.
3. It provides guidance and guardrails to enable partners to take responsibility for routine or lower-value communications projects.

In short, deliberately skewing resources to activities with the highest economic impact is a foundational part of any support function’s positioning as a business partner as opposed to a service center. If you’ve conducted this exercise informally, by yourself without input from the business, or just a few years ago, it’s time to develop a new agreement to guarantee that the work you’ll do in 2012 will be your most impactful yet!

CEC members, see ING Insurance Americas’ tiered service-level framework and follow their process to collaborate with business partners in its development.

CEC Related Resources

• Increase Value through Selective Communications Support
• Resourcing Decisions to Equip Communications for the Future
• Set Service Levels with Internal Clients
• Tiered Services Breakdown Template

CEC Related Blog Posts

• 3 Ways to Be More Assertive with Clients
• Are You An Order-Taker Or Value-Creator?
• Communicating Communications’ Value

Apparently, I’m typical.  For years we’ve worked to entice our banking customers into our branches with the quality of our customer service—wooing them with friendly faces and a hot drink so that they’ll want to entrust us with their financial future.  But by the time they’re easing themselves into our comfy chairs, they’ve already made their financial decisions—they’re simply there because they have to be to finish the transaction.

As I’ve visited with our members in the financial services space, it’s been very clear that we’re grappling with how to make ourselves more relevant to our customers before they’ve actually made their decisions.  We know that social media may be our best shot, but most of us are fighting an uphill battle internally to build the case that using social media won’t prove our ruin as a company. 

For a good pep talk and some ideas on how you can build confidence internally and capitalize on social media to connect more effectively with your key stakeholders, check out our Principles for Social Media in Highly Regulated Spaces.  We’ll be covering these principles—as well as some great examples of how banks are using social media to engage their customers earlier in the decision process—in a special webinar on social media for financial services.

Register for the webinar here.

CEC Related Resources

• Social Media Topic Center
• Build a Strategic Social Media Plan
• Stakeholder Engagement Topic Center

CEC Related Resources

• Why Bother with Twitter?
• Entice You Customers to Play
• Social Media: Where’s the Plan?

Communicators are successfully enlisting line manager support in limiting reputational risks by erring on the side of simplicity in developing tools and processes for managers to use. Clear decision rules guiding the frequency, nature and venue of stakeholder interactions — plus making clear when to involve the communications team — line managers can play an essential role in local stakeholder engagement.

Line managers represent a powerful resource in identifying reputational threats as well as mitigating risks through engagement with key stakeholder groups. In companies with widely varying stakeholder groups across many locations, managers are much better suited to handle the basics of local stakeholder relations than a centralized corporate communications team. Leading communicators account for the real challenges in developing line managers as players in stakeholder engagement.

Case in Point: Alcoa

Alcoa recognized the great potential of their worldwide ranks of line managers and created a Stakeholder Relations Playbook. This condensed set of guidelines and tools made it easy for managers to achieve baseline competence in managing stakeholder relationships. The company discovered that it was not only able to reduce exposure to reputational risks, but better local stakeholder relations yielded direct business benefits.

CEC members can learn more about how Alcoa’s communications team turned line managers into allies in stakeholder relations.

CEC Related Resources

• Equipping Managers to Engage with Stakeholders
• Stakeholder Relations Playbook (Alcoa)
• Refocusing Reputation Management: Build Enterprise-Wide Reputation Management Skills

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Are You Limiting Your Communications Potential?
• Why Is Cross-Functional Collaboration SO Hard???

Not all Communications teams are accepting their fates as the “corporate” voice of the company! We’ve shared solid examples from Deloitte and MoneyGram who are using Facebook to unite global audiences around the company, not just its brands. Likewise, Kraft Foods’ Company Facebook page builds connections with stakeholders by providing updates on news and global initiatives. 

We like the page because it’s working toward two main social media objectives: ‘listening’ and ‘connecting’ with stakeholders worldwide. This strategy is reflected in the design of its landing page, the choice of tabs, and rich global content.

So, what is it that makes the Kraft Foods – Corporate page ‘liked’ by its followers?

1. Defined raison d’être: Kraft Foods uses its corporate Facebook page as a common platform for all company news and global events and to listen and connect with its target audience. This distinguishes it from other Kraft Foods Facebook pages like the Kraft Recipes and Tips page which focuses on North American audiences or the Oreo page for cookie loyalists.
2. Targeted Audiences: Kraft Foods ensures that it distinguishes between its primary and secondary audiences, and pushes nuggets of information that are of interest to the primary audience (namely media, NGO’s and socially engaged individuals).
3. Branded Design and Content: The Kraft Foods – Corporate Facebook page embraces Kraft Foods’ brand identity by using brand colors and imagery. By posting Kraft Foods’ history, CSR initiatives, company announcements and polls, Kraft Foods’ page successfully brings the corporate brand to life.
4. Facebook Owners: Kraft Foods focuses on building a personalized touch to the ‘digital’ medium. In addition to introducing the social media team, Kraft Foods shares their photographs, area of expertise and favorite Kraft Foods brands. This approach of ‘know whom you’re talking to’ is continued further by the team in its interaction with Kraft Foods followers.

Kraft Foods’ – Corporate Facebook page shows how a company can use Facebook’s strengths and design it to suit its corporate goals. It’s informal and fun characteristic encourages consumers to share opinions and stay connected.

Visit our CEC Insight page on Kraft Foods’ Global Facebook Page to learn more about what the company is getting right on Facebook and the potential risks its up against, including:

• High “pull” of well-known Kraft Foods Facebook pages
• Establishing internal support

CEC Recommended Resources

1. How Kraft Foods Uses Facebook to Listen and Engage
2. Key Considerations to Setup a Corporate Communications Page on Facebook
3. How Deloitte Uses Facebook to Create a Social Media Hub
4. Getting Started with Facebook Toolkit

CEC Related Blogs

• Social Media: Where’s the Plan?
• Savvy Strangers > A Facebook Friend
• 6 Steps to Facebook Reputation Management

• If Facebook Can Topple Governments, Imagine What It Can Do For Your Company
• 4 Steps to Create a Global Facebook Page

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.

The increase in staff has been largely at the expense of non-staff budget as communicators shifted formerly outsourced activities back “in-house”.  Forty five percent of communicators reported cutting their non-staff expenses this year and the average percentage share of staff budget in total budget rose to 51 percent compared to last year’s 45 percent.  With an increased in-house focus, the importance of having a highly skilled and competent communications team becomes even bigger priority.

In the 2011 Budget Trends Summary, we look at the activities that communications professionals were focusing on a couple years ago versus the ones that they are focusing on now. It turns out that there has been significant reshuffling since 2007, which puts further emphasis on the importance of communications staff development.

To help you identify what staff development areas to focus on, CEC has identified the 16 key communications skills that every communicator needs and compiled them into the Communications Competency Framework. The Framework is accompanied by the CEC Online Skills Assessment which can help you pin point the competency gaps among your team.

We hope that you will find both the Executive Summary and the Communications Competency Framework useful in helping us optimize your 2012 budget allocation planning.  And as always let me know what you think about our findings.

Relevant Resources

2011 Budget Trend Summary

Communications Planning

Communications Competency Framework

CEC Online Skills Assessment

That said, something that was discussed in CEC’s recent webinar, “Avoiding Crises: Building a Preventative Safety Culture”, is that some (but not all!) of this passion, energy, and expertise has been misdirected. Communicators are doing more than ever to raise employee awareness of the need to be safe, but awareness alone may not be sufficient to drive the desired safe behavior.

Conflicting Messages

The safety messages that employees receive telling them to take care of themselves, or reminding them of the risks inherent in their jobs, aren’t the only messages that they’re receiving. What about the pressure they receive from their supervisor to hit production targets? Or the pressure from peers, who insist that “real men don’t wear gloves/helmets/goggles?”

A Better Way Forward

Some of the smartest communicators we’ve spoken with are taking an employee-centric, rather than a hierarchical, approach to safety. What do we mean by this? According to Joyce Schroeder, one of our webinar panelists, there are two things to think about here:

• Smart companies seek to understand the barriers to safe working practices from their employees’ perspective; instead of telling them to be safe, ask your employees what prevents them from being safe.
• Employees need to own safety – not the EHS function, not HR, not their manager, and not Comms. Employees are the ones who are most at risk, and are therefore best placed to identify solutions to unsafe practices

Bryan Boyd, who has revolutionized Caterpillar’s safety performance, discussed how he has put this into practice.  At Caterpillar, Bryan’s team has given their leaders a lot of support to help them hold dialogue with employees to identify both safety risks and solutions. For instance, many of companies we spoke with have their leaders conduct ‘Safety Walks’. But at a lot of the companies, leaders look for violations and try to ensure compliance. Instead of communicating at employees, Caterpillar’s leaders are provided with questions to ask when they conduct their safety walks – such as these:

• “What obstacles prevent you from doing your job safely every time?”
• “How can I help you create a safer working environment?”
• “Where do you see the next accident occurring in your facility?”

There’s a real difference in tone – at Caterpillar, employees are treated as active participants in a safe culture, rather than a passive recipient of information related to safety. Bryan and his team work to unlock the safety information that’s often trapped at the frontline by asking questions and holding dialogue, instead of telling people what to do and how to act.

CEC Related Resources

• Avoiding Crises: Building a Preventative Safety Culture (Webinar deck)
• Crisis Management: Our Latest Thoughts

CEC Related Blogs

• Engaging Frontline Employees in Safety Dialogue
• Communicating Before and After Crises

Coming soon from CEC

Also, look out for a CEC’s toolkit, “Workplace Safety: Toolkit for Communicators”

Finally, if you have any thoughts on last week’s webinar, or suggestions for our work in this space, get in touch! Email Daniel O’Keeffe on dokeeffeodonovan@executiveboard.com. Thanks!

That’s right. Despite CEO’s best intentions to write frequently and informally, most communicators end up having to write—or heavily edit—these personal posts.

Ghostwriting your CEOs blog can be an exhausting endeavor! You have to come up with an idea, craft a post that mimics the CEO’s voice and vision, incorporate substantial edits from the CEO, make the post live, and then, wait, fingers-crossed, hoping that the post will receive enough comments or views to prove that blogging is indeed a worthy pursuit, which, of course, it may not be at all! CEC Members, visit our Leader to Employee Communication Topic Center to consider the appropriate channel for leadership communication given your objective.

CEO blogs come in a variety of audiences, intents, and styles, but for the purposes of this discussion, let’s focus on the CEO blog that sits on your corporate intranet and whose main audience is employees. If you’re going to have to write the post anyway, why not write about something that will have an impact on employee performance?

Here are my top 10 questions that your CEO’s next employee-facing blog post could answer:

1. What are the strategic goals of our organization? Which ones are the most ambitious? Why?
2. Which market trends should employees pay most attention to?
3. Which key markets matter most to our company? Will those be the same ones in 2020?
4. What are the risks our company is facing? How are we mitigating them?
5. In what ways might pending government regulation in key operating regions impact our company?
6. How have people or teams from across silos of the business come together to produce amazing results?
7. How is our company building an infrastructure that enables employees to communicate and collaborate more effectively?
8. Which of our competitors do you admire most and why?
9. What publications and people do you follow to stay informed on our business and industry?

10.  What’s the most surprising customer or consumer trend you’ve seen develop over the last five years?

To be clear, I’m not advocating that your CEO spill your company’s proprietary secrets in a 500-word blog post; that just wouldn’t be smart business. What I am advocating is that your CEO shares the bigger picture trends and assumptions that most employees, who must focus on a small piece of the business, might fail to appreciate. Would you rather talk about the CEO’s upcoming marathon or newly adopted golden retriever? Read on to learn why that approach won’t move your organization forward.

Why Talking Trends Works Better than Being Personal

Employee’s personal connection to the company and exposure to market context are the two main drivers of their agility, the biggest driver of overall performance in a high-change environment. What’s more is that confidence in leadership has almost zero impact on agility. CEC Members, rely on our research and data on Building a Change-Ready Organization to help teach executives why this is true.

And yet, most CEO blogs that I’ve heard about or come across aim squarely at building employee confidence in leadership. In fact, in times of uncertainty, CEOs ask Communications to help her/him be more transparent, visible, and confident in the eyes of employees. S/he wants to seem personable, like “one of us” to exhort additional effort from employees to keep the company sailing straight even if the waters are choppy.

In the end, the key is to help employees (and potentially other stakeholders) understand how the CEO and leadership team are thinking. Sometimes the CEO and leadership are too close to the company strategy to recognize that most employees aren’t aware of what’s being thought of at the top. To help you help your CEO, consider the information and perspective that the CEO has that, if shared, would help the rest of the organization to think more strategically on a daily basis, not just at the annual strategy summit.

CEC Related Resources:

• Engage Employees in Strategy through Scenario Planning
• Strategy Assumptions Matrix (Lilly)
• Arm Employees with Information to Solve Problems
• Information Needs Assessment Process (ConAgra Foods)
• Information Personalization Session (Saudi Aramco Downstream)

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• How to Talk Strategy in a High-Change Environment
• Make the “Big-Picture” Relevant to Employees
• Questions to Surface Employee Information Needs
• Disappointed by Internal Social Media? You’re Not Alone

CEC Member Discussion Threads

• Use of Social Media & Blogs for Senior Leaders
• Senior Leadership Blogging and Engagement with Employees

Kathy Gersch, CMO at Kotter International

Last week our post, Where Kotter’s 8 Steps Gets it Wrong, generated lots of great discussion in the comments section about leading change at organizations. In this post we interview Kathy Gersch, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kotter International, Dr. John Kotter’s change company that seeks to build leaders’ capability to drive transformation in their organizations.

Change Management v. Change Communication v. Change Leadership

The CEC (Kayleigh): People often conflate “change management” with “change communication”. What is the difference between these two concepts and what is the danger of combining them?

Kathy Gersch, CMO Kotter International: I think it’s important to first differentiate between “change management,” which is what almost everyone thinks of when they think of organizational change, and “change leadership,” which is what Dr. Kotter advocates and what we do at Kotter International.

• Change management is often focused on incremental improvements with a goal of minimizing the impact a change has on an organization.
• Change leadership is disruptive by design. It gives people the freedom to change in a way that propels an organization forward in leaps and bounds.
• Change communication is too often focused on the communication about the change that has already been determined by leadership or a small committee.

Communication plays an essential role in any change process, but the quality of leadership is what determines success. Relegating communication to a reporting function (which is generally the case in change management) is problematic because it does not drive engagement.  The concepts of “leading” and “communicating” are much more complementary, as the act of leading (establishing direction, aligning people, motivating and inspiring) is inherently centered on good communication.

CEC Members: Help build “change leadership” at your company with an empowerment workshop by GlaxoSmithKline’s CPSE.

Determining What’s Urgent

The CEC: At some organizations Kotter’s first step, “Create a Sense of Urgency,” is taken too seriously, that is, every initiative is thought of as urgent! In today’s environment of constant change, it’s impossible for employees to contribute to the number of “urgent changes” required by the business. What can a communicator do to diagnose and push back against “false urgency” created by the business?

Gersch: You have to make sure people aren’t pushed to become urgent about the wrong things. Before an organization begins the 8 Steps, we spend a few days helping its senior leadership team get aligned around what we call a “big opportunity.” This is not just a revenue goal or a progress bar or a growth target. The big opportunity is a picture of what an organization can possibly achieve in relationship to the world around it – something so compelling that people want to make it happen. For example, a medical device company might use “we will deliver superior products and increase market value while helping to revolutionize patient care in the United States” as their big opportunity. That’s something people can get excited about. It’s harder to feel energized about something like “grow sales by X%”–it’s too one-dimensional.

Initiatives aligned around this kind of opportunity focus “truly urgent” behaviors and lead to positive change because people want to do them as a way to help the organization attain that opportunity. Activities that don’t align with the big opportunity in some way are the ones that create false urgency and anxiety-driven busy work because people feel they have to do them.

We offer a few helpful questions on our website that can help you spot false urgency red flags.

CEC Members: Help your business partners determine when their initiatives are truly urgent.

Course Correcting in the Midst of a Change

The CEC: One of the problems we hear from Communications executives is that it’s difficult to course correct in the midst of a change initiative. They often lack the tools and resources to spot where change is being stalled and uncovering why that might be. What would be your advice for these executives?

Gersch: This is a great question, and the answer lies with the guiding coalition, which is a large group of respected, trustworthy leaders from across the organization who each volunteers to lead the overall change initiative. One of this group’s greatest strengths is that it includes people from all levels, top to bottom, and every business unit and functional area, so it collectively sees and hears what’s going on across the company. This makes it a lot easier for these leaders to identify areas where changes are stalling and remove those barriers. If one individual spots something going on in their part of the organization, they can work with people to figure out why it’s happening and then talk with the whole guiding coalition to come up with ideas on how to course correct.

We’ve seen members of the guiding coalition do this at NetApp, one of our clients. As one member put it, “There are always obstacles, and before when we experienced them, we would usually stop.  Now when we hit an obstacle, we learned how to help one another, and take on the barrier.  I learned real teamwork and that I just need to know when to ask for help.”

CEC Members: See how the U.S. Navy used message quick polls to identify strategy absorption problems to guide midcourse message adjustments.

CEC Related Resources

• Change Management Topic Center
• Building a Change-Ready Organization
• Empowerment Workshop for Leaders (GSK CPSE)
• Message Progress Quick Poll

CEC Related Blog Posts

• Where Kotter’s 8 Steps Gets it Wrong
• Effective Leadership in Times of Change
• 10 Ways to Help Leaders Give Up Control

By Kirsten Robinson

If you often feel like a “one man island”—you’re not alone. Communications teams dispersed globally often struggle to interact, share information, and collaborate across time zones and geographic locations.

One way that CEC member Novo Nordisk has overcome this challenge is by launching a simple, yet sophisticated suite of online networking tools to facilitate communicator-to-communicator peer learning across their global team.  It may seem obvious, but the reality is that despite the amount of effort that we in Communications put into creating communications tools for other departments in the company, we ourselves aren’t always the best users of this technology.

Of course, just because internal collaboration tools exist, doesn’t mean that they are in use or make life easier! However, there are some fundamental pieces of advice to consider to make an online network work for your team. We had the chance to speak with Tanya Wymer, Strategy Director at Novo Nordisk, who shared the secrets behind the company’s corporate communicator network. Elements of their network include tools that:

• Help communicators find peers in other countries with shared challenges or projects
• Facilitate discussion boards that help communicators get quick help on specific questions
• Formalize peer collaboration through structured mentoring programs

CEC members, learn how Novo Nordisk implemented tools to improve peer collaboration among their global communicators and see screen shots of the network.

CEC Related Resources:

• Novo Nordisk’s Online Communications Collaboration Space
• How to Get Employees to Want to Use Internal Social Media Tools
• Select the Right Channel for Dispersed Groups of Employees to Communicate
  

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• The Pharma Communicator’s Essential Reading List
• Changes in Pharma Prescribe New Actions for Comms
• How MITRE Measures the Impact of its Internal Social Network