Simply-Blogging

Does the business partner model work?

Out last night for a drink at the ICA with my newest and bestest friend - and we got talking about how comms teams are organised these days (we did gossip a bit as well - we're not THAT dull).

In particular we were talking about the model where you have a business partner who feeds work to a separate delivery team.

It seems to be a growing trend - separate out the delivery work from the strategic partnering conversations and has some obvious advantages.  It breaks the link in the minds of internal customers between IC and 'doing stuff' and it enables the delivery team to get on with what they are great at and find synergies.

It looks a bit like the model that HR have been following in many organisations - as they move towards enabling managers rather than hand-holding.

But I keep hearing stories about HR teams abandoning the model after a few years.  So I think there must be some lessons in there for IC people - what is it that makes the model work or fail for HR and are there any pitfalls for us to avoid....?

I feel a bit of Christmas research coming on...

Liam

Working in head office...

What's the difference between working at Head Office versus working in an operating division or subsidiary?  Why are some people so desperate to work at the very top of an organisation?

I only ask because I've been chatting to a couple of people recently where it has struck me that there isn't a hierarchy of importance and in fact there can be much more fun to be had out in a division than trying to make sense of things at the centre - particularly in a complex conglomerate.

Think about this.

At the Centre, many of the things you are working on don't have relevance to many people on the front line.  The concerns of a corporate centre are often about governance or controls, the agenda is often driven by the reporting cycle and messages are often difficult to distill out of dry strategic statements of intent.

If you are lucky there might be a HQ HSE function or maybe something semi-operational to get your teeth into.

The result is that comms from the centre is often about 'Tell' - all the asking, involving or debate may well happen out in the divisions.

And you have the added problem that the politics are more complicated.  You don't just have to work with the senior guys - there are the divisional directors to convince.  And they have 101 reasons why your plan won't work for them or why your clever strategy could upset their key customers/stakeholders/local management team.

By contrast, in a division you own the audience, you know what they are thinking, you have a daily impact on how the business works.  Of course you have corporate guidelines to subvert and maybe get stopped doing something because it clashes with some corporate announcement.  And you own the network of local contacts...

Best of all you probably control the channels that matter - group centre often has to come crawling to get you to cover something.

Clearly every organisation is very different.  Size, complexity and the diversity of the business portfolio play a part in deciding the rules of engagement.

So what's a Group Head of IC to do?

Well for a start there's the essential delivery challenge to meet.  If you are running a decent news and information operation it's a start.  Managing a few essential channels well not only buys you space, it builds your credibility.

Then you need to decide which audiences you own - how about the top 100 leaders for starters?  Because that speaks to your role as a coordinator across the business.

But what do you need to do to fulfill your role as an enabler?

I'd say that there is real scope for Centre people to be the driver of better skills out in the business.  Helping define the competencies and organise the training that no one else can afford individually (yes yes I do have an interest there!) and providing a forum for best practice sharing are all things that represent incredible value.

I've also been impressed by people who manage a team of 'consultants' who can help with trouble-shooting or heavy lifting when its needed.  You don't need to dish out budget, but being on hand to help when colleagues out in the business need it also ensures that the businesses are better enabled to do what they do best - deliver for the group.

There are quite a few things more that people do - but how much of this post can you bear to read?

Essentially, my point is that the 'senior' job isn't necessarily senior - but it does require a different set of skills to running a division's comms.  Seeing the relationship as hierarchical doesn't give much of a clue to what really is needed.

Liam

Now is a good time to be at HQ

I was emailing a chum the other day and discussing the current business situation and I asked if he was worried.

Of course not he said, there is so much happening at head office he wouldn’t want to miss it for the world.

Which takes me back to the last crash when I was working for a ‘troubled’ company. Based at Head Office life was anything but boring.  Long hours and stressful weekends went alongside being part of the action.  I still have dreams of the atmosphere as day to day we struggled to complete negotiations with the people we owed £3bn to whilst maintaining business performance in the post dotcom downturn.

And best of all was the absence of politics.

OK there were one or two people I could have cheerfully strangled, but we were all working to the same goal.  Departmental agenda and local scheming just didn’t happen.

Sometimes ‘Head Office’ can be a pretty poor posting for an internal communicator. 

The real fun is happening out in the business.  Often HQ work is all about financial calendar work or ‘special projects’ whilst divisional IC’s get their hands on pressing issues like performance or service delivery.

I know more than a few Global Heads of IC who discovered that they are not really in charge of very much and plenty of divisional IC managers who are doing much more interesting work and having loads more fun.

But right now…a crisis is one of the times when a Head Office IC role comes into its own….

Liam

Remind me what are we meant to be doing

It's been a funny old week.

Because this is the week when I officially started with Simply Good Advice I kept finding myself having to articulate again and again what we do (perhaps going to a conference is asking for trouble).

But I've been with two clients this week and talking to an old colleague about plans and I keep coming back in my mind to the question of what should employee communications people be doing.

I guess what starts it all off in my mind is the experience of meeting so many frustrated communicators who claim to be strategically minded but who are trapped producing newsletters.  I'm not talking about the sort of people who still get a buzz from opening a box that's just arrived from the printers (because that's most of us). No, I think I mean the people who month in and year out are driven mad by the stupidity of their organisations but, like a character in a Dr Suess book can't get listened to.

Yet it does work the other way around.

An old friend was telling me that he'd joined a comms team with the remit to build relationships at the highest level but was finding that everyone else in the team thought they were senior business partners as well.  He's thinking of leaving because as the new boy he's being pushed towards making sure the basics work - and there's going to be no time to do the strategic stuff.

But my feeling is that there is real opportunity for him to shine here and he shouldn't be so quick to start firing off his CV.

Like any service department (HR, legal, IT) Internal Comms can adopt one of three roles (Download three_roles.pdf ).  It can be a process manager, a business enabler or a senior partner.  I think a lot of nonsense is talked about the senior partner or consultant role - in recent years a range of people have gone out of their way to imply that anything apart from being a trusted advisor to the chief executive is an unworthy aspiration for anyone in internal communications.

The truth is that if you run a rubbish operation and/or don't know how to help other business areas achieve their goals you will never be asked your opinion on issues apart from communications. The next time you're at an internal communications conference it's worth asking one of those amazing strategists about their basic operations.  Frankly if they don't have a solid machine for producing news, gathering intellingence or handling day to day comms they are either spinning a line or have been very lucky to get away with it!

So what do I say to my old friend and ex-colleague?  Think long and hard about the operations role that he resents being pushed into.  There are certainly frustrations but there are also medals to be won here.  In many ways getting a basic machine working well is the first thing that gets apprecaited in the business - it's not the clever strategies and long beard stroking meetings that people notice. 

I'm not for a moment suggesting that clever strategy and excellent senior coaching don't matter - they're massively important.  But the day when everyone in your team wants to be a business partner and strategist is the day when you start getting into serious trouble!

Liam

What’s the point of internal communications?

There are only four reasons for employee communications

I wonder if I should say this.

There’s a lot of rubbish talked about internal communications.  I should know – I’ve talked a fair amount of it over the years.

In the past, employee communications was just about making noise.  But as people realised it could actually have some real benefits, we started to get confused about exactly what those benefits were.

Recently I’ve heard passionate lectures on ‘engagement’, ‘bottom-up comms’, ‘implicating the workforce’ and ‘employer branding’.  All this is supplemented by the current excitement about how new social media will transform the workplace.  And all these things seem to mean completely different things depending on whatever conference you’re sleeping through.

I’ve probably said this before, but I can’t avoid the suspicion that they are attempts to dress up some basic truths as some form of mystical power.  Sadly most of the people we work with don’t want magic – they want results.

But coming up with real results is actually very simple.

There are only five reasons for employee communication.  Once you decide why you are doing it everything else becomes a technical detail.

The first reason is to make your people stay – and not run off at the first opportunity to another employer.  It costs a lot to recruit, build knowledge and skills.  And when staff disappear, the result is disrupted work, over-worked colleagues and another bill for replacing them.

Making them feel valued and proud of their employer will go a long way to making them stick around.  Knowing that they have a career path, and that they will be looked after are solid reasons for spending a little effort on communication.

Secondly, once you get them to stay you want them to work hard - on the right things.  Instead of starting the day by logging on to Face Book or planning the fantasy football league, communications has a lot of influence over whether people are excited about their work, can see how they make a difference and the satisfaction they get from a job well done.

The idea that most people only want to do their basic time, collect their pay and go home is, thankfully, dying out.  But if you don’t explain why they should care, frankly all you’ll get is an empty car park at clocking out time.

And we can do a lot to make sure that new instructions, projects or challenges are explained in ways that focus people’s efforts.  If you don’t show people what they are meant to be doing you can’t complain when they make it up for themselves.

The next reason is that you want your staff to say nice things about you outside work.  Research by MORI a couple of years ago said the most powerful individual influence on an organisation’s reputation was whether people knew someone who worked there.  Apparently knowing an employee will outweigh anything said in the media or even a direct experience of the product or service provided by the organisation.

In short, a reputation as a great employer will see you through some pretty tough times.

And almost finally, communications helps organisations change. Communications’ mission is to make sense of the what, the why and the how - together with supporting emotional commitment.

And that’s about it.  Beyond that you lapse into the realms of alchemy, soothsaying and probably crystal healing.

There, I said it.  Great employee communications are about getting people to stay, strive, advocate and change.  You can debate how effective different approaches are at achieving these goals but if you’re not supporting at least one of them you’re in trouble.

In fact, you run the risk of simply being a random noise generator.  And why would an organisation employ someone to do that?

This is a version of an article that was origninally published in Profile - the magazine of the Chartered Institure of Public Relations.

Oh - I nearly forgot - there's the law.  A great deal of what is said at work is the result of legislation.  Health and Safety, privacy, diversity and employment rights are just a few of the areas where an employer is required to say quite specific things to their staff.