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Jos Harrison’s offers tips on influencing the communications strategy in your company in this extract from a longer feature originally published in Communicators magazine - the member-only publication for CiB (now ioIC) members. Developing a clear set of key messages For me this is one of the fundamental building blocks of a good internal communication strategy. If you don’t currently have an agreed set of key messages to be fed into your communication programme that make up a compelling and engaging story, here’s what you can do. Firstly, see if you can get a slot on your leadership team’s regular meeting to discuss key messages, explaining that this is critical to ensuring a clear story and consistency of message to employees on business priorities. This is much more likely to result in them understanding the priorities and aligning their delivery accordingly. In my experience, senior leaders prefer to develop from a ‘straw man’ rather than start from scratch and this is an opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of the business. Send them a briefing note, with their meeting pack if there is one, setting out a draft set of messages under major headings such as: Strategy, Targets / Financial performance, Priorities for the year, Brand, Change, People. Segment the messages for managers / front-line as appropriate. Don’t forget to include key employee issues as a heading and draft responses to these issues – for example, if concern about potential job losses is the biggest issue for your people, draft a proposed key message in response. And practise what you preach as a communicator: make sure your draft messages are punchy, clear and create a compelling story on your organization. Ask them to come to the meeting ready to give their views on this draft. If you get the chance, before the meeting seek the views of the key players eg the CEO or your line director, so you can steer the meeting in a direction that you know he or she is going to support! Facilitate the session, inviting them to give their views on the draft. Ask for initial overall impressions and then go through each heading. Try and achieve some kind of consensus on each key message. Following the session, amend the draft to incorporate their feedback, and circulate it for hopefully final sign-off. The signed off key messages should then be fed into all communication activity, including their own communication, and then reviewed ideally on a quarterly basis but at least half-yearly. One of the major benefits of going through this process is you will reduce the potential for members of the top team to go ‘off message’ because they have discussed and rehearsed the messages themselves and reached agreement as a team. The review of employee key issues will also give them a much better awareness of views on the front-line. A final tip: make sure you and your team use these key messages – they should be your bible! Use them when planning your face-to-face events, when developing creative solutions to promote key messages eg a poster campaign, when writing CEO messages and blogs, and when drafting change communication plans (which should themselves have an agreed set of key messages relating to the change). This is an extract from a longer feature that was published in the April 2010 edition of Communicators magazine, which was only available to CiB members (now superceded by Inside Out). Find out more about IoIC. |
