Having spent 20+ years working in communications it’s not surprising that I’m a big believer in the pivotal role that communications should play in an organisation.
A strong communications team can:
Inspire and engage your people – bringing to life you vision and values, your strategic priorities, and the role your people can play in delivering them.
Build and bolster reputations – using amazing storytelling and inspiring PR and social media campaigns to deliver tangible results.
Drive business productivity and efficiency - communicating the things that really matter, being clear on your asks as a business, and cutting out unnecessary noise.
Protect reputations – Combining effective horizon scanning with strategic issues and crisis management.
Save time and money – working with your People teams to reduce attrition rates with a clear strategy around employee engagement and experience.
Create a culture that you’re proud of – uniting your leadership team around a common purpose, clear narrative, and commitments to how you’ll support and engage teams before embedding this across the business.
None of this is the job of the communications team alone but ALL of this, I believe relies on your organisation being able to effectively communicate: both internally to its people and externally to the media, customers and clients.
The key to this effectiveness and the strength of a communications team, is the ability to focus on OUTCOMES and not OUTPUTS. To consider the purpose of WHAT you are doing, to ask WHY and be clear what you want the end result to be.
Communications teams are notoriously overstretched as they juggle competing priorities from multiple departments and a myriad of ‘urgent requests’. They’re usually great at multi-tasking and unsurprisingly, usually really good at writing that last minute communications that HAS to be sent.
But all of this means that communications teams often end up working on a whole range of tactical tasks that are output driven, without being able to take a breath and think through what latest press release, intrant article or social media post will achieve.
Is this a bad thing?
Yes. Because you may have a range of well created communications that read well and look nice, but has anything happened as a result?
This level of output also then means that ironically, it’s harder to demonstrate value. Yes, you can point to loads of content created, but what has this actually achieved?
Without being clear on the value created, it’s much harder for communications teams to argue a case for more resource or the importance of them having a ‘seat at the table’ and thus the cycle of small teams focusing on tactical outputs continues.
How do you can change this?
This is why, I think an OUTCOMES focused approach is so important to communications. If you have oversight of a communications team or head up a comms team yourself, ask yourself these three questions:
What are the big priorities for our business now and in the future?
Why are they important to the business’ overarching vision and values?
How can communications support their delivery?
By asking these questions and getting clear, concrete answers your communications team will have the tools to:
Develop a communications strategy for the short term that is aligned to your business strategy
Focus on the areas that matter, not who shouts loudest
Create meaningful metrics that demonstrate success and value
Build a longer-term strategy with clear achievement states linked to business success
Being clear on outcomes also means you can assess if you have the right people within your communications team to deliver what you need, and where you need to adapt the levels of resource or expertise required.
A strong communications team can be an organisation’s greatest superpowers but only if they’re set up for success.
Is your comms team focused on outcomes? If not, now’s the time to start.