Everybody’s a Professional Communicator – With the right tools

Running any organization in a digital era requires expert communications skills. 

And with the right tools and templates, everybody’s a professional communicator.

Large organizations employ broad teams of professional communicators in order to ensure the company’s customers, shareholders, and employees are effectively informed. Doing this on a global scale requires a complex web of communications plans and activities. 

But smaller organizations now need to operate with the same degree of expertise. Non-profits, educational entities, religious organizations, government organizations, and privately-held companies need to ensure their people, their customers and the communities in which they operate receive communications that support the company’s image and objectives. 

With the right tools and templates, any organization can deliver a professionally-run communications program wherein customers trust the organization, employees are informed and supported. 

The following is a list of the types of corporate communications and change management initiatives that is supported by the tools and templates offered in this site: 

• Strategic planning of large-scale global corporate communications initiatives and campaigns
• Human capital strategy
• HR / people operations for recruitment, talent acquisition, onboarding, performance management, leadership development, succession planning, people matters, and employee experience management, HR assessment tools
• Organizational change management, reductions in force, outsourcing, mergers and acquisitions
• Compensation and benefits including executive compensation, salesforce compensation 
• Long-term campaigns as well as hypergrowth, rapid-outcome projects
• Core values, culture, ethics and inclusion and diversity
• Risk management
• Crisis management
• Structuring a global marketing and communications organization
• Communications channel strategy, intranet planning, and feedback campaigns
• Video production planning, execution and vendor management
• IT implementations and training, process and technology changes; user adoption/utilization drives

Many of these tools address key pain points in your organization, enabling you to: 

• Listen – 
  • Understand your people’s priorities through surveys. Establish ongoing feedback channels, online and through human channels.
• Target & refine efforts
  • Review your current programs and determine gaps. Identify programs that are not valued. By offering the right set of programs, employees will enjoy a more rewarding career and you will be able to attract and retain the best employees while remaining financially competitive.
• Attract, Retain & Motivate Top Talent
  • Align recruitment messages with the best of your company’s culture. Focus recruitment messages on the things that matter most to the people that your company needs. Make sure the messages are authentic. When recruits encounter your company culture, will they see evidence of what you’re selling them? 
  • Ensure employees will ‘re-choose’ your company year after year. When recruiters call, your people won’t be interested if you’ve been diligently delivering what’s important to them. Your best people want to succeed at something that improves their skills and that’s worth bragging about. They want a chance to sharpen their pencils and demonstrate their knowledge amidst respected peers.
  • Do you recognize your people publicly, online and town hall meetings? Do your leaders have a way of knowing who has recently hit a home run, or who made extraordinary efforts to ensure success? Recognition rewards employees who innovate and who won’t give up on solving a customer problem. Offer a career path: Demonstrate that great performance gets rewarded with career growth and increased responsibility. Gather real stories and make them visible among all people. Engage through community: Ensure each person has access to a valued community. From diversity networks, to parenting networks, to mentors, to social and sports networks, your people will be committed to stay when they have a community that accepts and supports them.
  • Remind people that the company invests in causes that they value. Your company is an inspiring corporate citizen. But do all your people know of the local and broad impacts the company makes? Through charity giving, employee volunteer efforts, partnerships, and philanthropic business engagements, your company is making the world a better place. Your people will be more engaged when they learn the great things they are a part of.
  • Show how an individual’s work contributes to great achievements. The results of that late-night report, a rush task, or a strenuous project mean more when you can see the larger benefit. Show a coder that her code made a fleet of airplanes fly. Show a project team how their late nights resulted in thousands of hospital patients receiving better care. And celebrate how an entire workforce’s volunteer hours benefited a cause.

Perception is a power greater than reality. Many corporate change initiatives fail because, despite positive intentions at the center of a program, buy-in at the outer rims—where many influential stakeholders lie—was not achieved.