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 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 »

Since 2007, communicators have increased the percent of their budget spent on measurement and monitoring by 119%. And today, over 80% of communicators are actively using social media to listen to, talk to, or energize their stakeholders.

For many teams, there has been great focus on improving the corporate Facebook page or becoming more outcomes-focused with the information shared on Twitter. While we may have connected with our employees or our strongest supporters through social channels, we know from our peers in Marketing that the value of a general consumer as a follower may not be what we’d hoped.  In fact, the average consumer follows 8.9 organizations on Facebook and looks to these channels mostly for deals as opposed to general updates about the organization.

What we do know is that social media has been created to give people an environment that provides them with information where they want it, when they want it. Unfortunately, if your current social media approach focuses on communicating on channels in your control, you may be missing the mark of stakeholders’ expectations.

That said, with trillions of sites to monitor the countless conversations that may be going on about your industry, your company, or your products, it is an impossible task for Communications to take on alone. Essentially, we need some help creating tentacles of information in the places where our stakeholders are communicating to lure them back to our site for more information.

Let me share with you a notable approach to this challenge from National Instruments (NI)–a hardware and software engineering company with no more than 15% of its business in one industry alone (imagine the volume of various social sites that could house relevant conversations for them!) With only one communicator dedicated to social media, they were able to put the stakeholders’ information needs first while keeping a lens to their own business objectives. Read More »

Whether it’s the sites we check when we first get to work in the morning or what time we run out for coffee, routines can be hard to break. But choices like these aren’t usually worth doing a critical analysis each time we make them.

The real problems arise when we start to rely on similar tactics for making more important decisions, like internal communication channel selection. Rather than ask yourself, “What is the best way for employees to be informed about this leadership change?” it’s easier to jump to, “I’ll just write a quick post on the intranet.”

Falling into bad habits like this prevent you from strategically selecting channels to make your communication more effective. Luckily, we have a cheat sheet to help you stay out of a channel selection rut.

This channel selection guide will help you choose the optimal channel based on what you want to achieve with your target audience. By considering what information is most effectively communicated through different channels and weighing the pros and cons of each, you’ll be able to quickly choose the best channel for your objective. Read More »

Searching for strategies to cope with information overload turns up countless articles, blog posts and how-to guides. The light at the end of the tunnel seems to be that the more we understand how our brains function under the constant bombardment, the better we can be at filtering through it — or the better Google and Amazon will be at doing it for us.

But there are some instances where we just have to say “enough,” and one of them is company-wide communications. The cumulative impact of multiple functions across a firm sending company-wide messages can quickly swamp employees and managers. Rather than take time away from their primary responsibilities individuals turn to the simplest solution, the delete button. This presents a serious threat when truly important messages are lost in the noise.

So how can Communications help curb the runaway messaging problem? It can be hard to tame functional groups across the organization because they have little incentive to curb their output, which only makes up one slice of the prolifically messaging pie. Policing company messaging systems is often too resource-intensive for Communications to take on single handedly and wouldn’t solve the root cause of the issue. Read More »

I can teach you how to swim. It can be any stroke you want. You probably know some freestyle and you’ve heard butterfly is hard, right? Butterfly it is. You probably won’t be as good as Michael Phelps or win any gold medals but you can swim butterfly. Because I’ll tell you a secret; butterfly is easy. Sure, it’s probably the most tiring way to swim from one side of the pool to the other, but there isn’t anything mechanically difficult about it.

As with learning any new skill, it might sound impossibly daunting at first. But then I’ll show you how to kick like your legs are stuck together and use your arms to pull in tandem. We’ll put it together in a full-body rhythm that will probably feel like you’re trying to do the snake in Jell-O — except less graceful. And that will be it. A little practice, some gentle reminders to breathe when it’s most natural to the stroke and you’re done. You can swim butterfly.

Learning most things is a matter of willingness, aptitude, and finding a competent teacher. As we talk about the importance of Communicators as enablers, it’s clear that this coaching function is more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’.

Breaking down a communications strategy to make it more accessible is the first step in teaching a new communications skill to noncommunicators. The soft skills — a.k.a. interpersonal skills — that communicators deal in can be intimidating because they aren’t often thought of as something that can be taught. More often than not, people have developed a static perception of their own soft skills and will get anxious if they think they are being pushed beyond their comfort zone. If Communicators are going to help them improve, the first step is to convince them that it’s easy.

Professional communicators can help demystify these skills by breaking them down into easily actionable components. Though basic guidelines may seem overly simple to the pros, they can overcome the greatest hurdle for many to unlocking their soft skills — the perception that they can’t improve. 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 »

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 Read More »

In our latest CEC study “Building a Change-Ready Organization”, we argue that instead of “responsive” employees who wait to follow directions and change when told, organizations need “agile” employees to deal with a rapidly changing environment.  Agile employees are a good thing because they are drivers of change, not simply objects of change. They are also valuable because they perform better. If you are agile, your company should want to retain and nurture you (well smart companies anyway).

But what does it really mean to be an “agile” employee? And are you one!?

Below are 6 statements which capture different aspects of workplace agility and together define what it means to be an “agile” employee.  Think about how each statement reflects who you are at your job and honestly answer to yourself whether you “agree”, “disagree” or “somewhat agree” that the statement reflects YOU.

• I adapt my work as necessary to new situations
• I try new approaches and styles to see what works best
• I seek corrective feedback to improve
• I actively seek new opportunities to learn from others
• I help peers to think through new ways of doing things
• I share my successes or failures to help peers learn

Read More »