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

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 »

The end of the year is often thought of as a time for reflection — and getting things done.

As you close out the year and get revved up for 2012, check out some of our top tools and templates. In the last year, your CEC internal communications peers have been using these guides to do their jobs faster and more effectively.

You can also check out our top external tools.

CEC’s Top Four Internal Communications Tools

1. How to Conduct Focus Groups

• What it is: This three step process will show you how to effectively run focus groups to test planned campaigns and gauge audience perceptions on communication strategies.
• Why it’s cool: Focus groups can be a highly effective listening tool to understand audiences, but are usually the domain of market researchers or vendors who charge a lot for something you can do yourself. Read More »

By now, you’ve probably caught on to our theme for the year: Change. When asking the question, “has your company gone through change recently?”, there isn’t a single CEC member who has said, “Nope. Everything is the same as it’s always been.” I think we all agree that Communications is paramount in times of change. In fact, if you take a look at CEB’s Executive Guidance for 2012, the number one priority for a company’s success is having a clear and consistent communications language. We’ve also learned from our study “Building a Change-Ready organization” exactly what drives employees during times of change and what Communications can do about it.

But how do we measure our impact in times of change? How can we prove, without a doubt, that Communications is driving the bottom line in an ever changing environment? Take a look at the following scenario: Read More »

Line managers are critical in ensuring success when making a major organizational change. As we know, they have the greatest influence over employee behavior, and can play a particularly vital role in contextualizing change for their teams.

Both intuition and experience, though, tell us that that line managers aren’t always up to this task. Many simply aren’t strong communicators, and the turbulence of change can disrupt even those who are strong the rest of the time.

How does your organization prepare managers for the additional stress and difficulty brought on by change? Many communicators are so pushed for time that they simply rely upon managers to muddle through. Others provide manager training of varying quality, to help managers cope with the increased demand of navigating the change.

Assessing for change-readiness

Significantly fewer companies, however, formally assess how ready their managers are to lead the change before it all begins. Although everyone knows how important they’ll be, many organizations enter a period of change without a clear view of their managers’ strengths and weaknesses; often, it’s only as the change unfolds, or else retrospectively, that managers’ skill gaps become evident. Of course, by this stage, it’s too late – the damage is done! Read More »

Ongoing change is a new reality. In the last two years, employees worldwide have experienced, on average, 3.5 major changes (enlarge graphic to the left). That means that most communicators have spent a lot of time planning for and talking about change. To help you craft a change communication plan that works, I suggest that you ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. What is the desired stakeholder behavior change?
2. How will this behavior change impact the stakeholder?
3. What information should we share with stakeholders about the change?
4. How do we help leaders and managers to drive stakeholder behavior change?
5. How do we sustain change over time?

These questions will help you craft a change communication plan that builds your employee’s agility—their ability to adapt to any change—because as you plan to communicate about one change you are really:

• Creating communication systems that connect employees to people and information
• Equipping leaders and managers with the skills to help employees make their own decisions
• Enabling employees to lean in to change (rather than simply process and accept that change is happening to them)

Let’s take each question in a bit more detail. Read More »

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 »

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 »

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?

Read More »