3. Plan and Manage Communication

Let’s say you decide to take a trip. Do you begin by jumping in the car, stepping on the gas, pulling onto the highway, and heading west just because the road takes you that way?

Probably not (unless you’re 20 years old and setting off on a cross-country road trip to find yourself). Instead, most of us don’t depart until we have a clear destination in mind. And once we know where we want to go, we usually plot our course (thanks, Google Maps) or enter the coordinates into our GPS. Since we’re busy, we usually choose the shortest route.

Why the travel metaphor? Because it’s a good way to illustrate a mistake many of us make in communication: We just start doing it without having a plan or map. How many times have you heard a colleague say, “We need to communicate this program. I’ll write an e-mail.”? Or “People need to know about this policy. I’ll create a PowerPoint presentation.”?

If you pull the trigger before taking aim, your communication can miss the mark. Or, you risk using the wrong tool for the wrong job. It can happen too soon, be over too quickly, or not provide what employees need to know to make smart choices. And, to return to our original metaphor, it probably gets lousy gas mileage.

In this chapter, we show you a more efficient way of planning HR communication. Once you put your objectives in place and plan your approach, all the steps to get there become a lot more obvious.

• Why do we need to communicate this information?

• What do we need employees to know, believe, and/or do as a result?

These are the key foundational questions that will help you set a single overarching goal for your communication as well as develop up to three specific, measurable objectives. We show you how to create goals and objectives in a moment. But in the meantime, as long as you’re on a roll, keep asking questions to learn all you can about the need the communication is meant to address. Here are more good questions:

• When do employees need information to take action?

• Does this program support broader company goals?

• How will we know our communications have been successful?

• What obstacles, if any, do we face, and how can we overcome them?

Sometimes people preface their questions by saying, “This is probably a stupid question, but....” And almost always, the response is, “That’s a great question.” In business, sometimes the best questions are so basic that they almost never get asked. One assumes, instead, and that assumption can lead to miscommunication instead of clear communication.

• Your overarching goal

• Your objectives (in most cases, aim for up to three objectives)

• How you’ll measure your success in achieving your objectives

The process of asking questions and then establishing your goal and objectives will keep you from developing objectives that are unrealistic, unreasonable, or unachievable.

For example, if a colleague wants to “make employees feel good about the fact that we’re not paying any bonuses this year,” you’ll have a hard time achieving that objective. It’s unrealistic, and it’s also highly unlikely that people will feel good about not receiving money they were probably counting on.

Suppose you change the preceding objective to “Help employees understand why we can’t pay bonuses this year—and share three steps we can all take to improve the chances we’ll receive bonuses next year.” You have a better chance of achieving that objective, because it is realistic, and you can measure it. For example, you could conduct a random online survey after you communicate.

One of the simplest ways to see if you’ve set clear objectives for your communication is to determine how you’ll measure success. If you can’t figure out how to measure the success of your objectives, try restating the objective until you can come up with a way to measure whether you’ve achieved it.

Goal: A broad statement of what you hope to accomplish. May suggest an idealistic or long-term purpose.

Objective: Often implies that the end or goal can be reached.

Here’s a useful overview for project management purposes:

The Center for Creative Leadership is an educational organization that teaches leaders to be more effective. It has determined through research that we learn most of the information that helps us succeed through on-the-job experiences—not from seminars or training courses. Therefore, it’s important to determine what you can personally achieve—or what your client can personally achieve—while you help your company or HR department reach a specific goal.

Here’s one of the simplest project plans for any HR communication, presented in just four easy steps:

1. Research

2. Plan

3. Do

4. Measure

If you have one hour—or one week—to get something done, this is a great way to organize your time. For example, suppose your boss or client needs information in one hour for an e-mail to all employees to announce a new fund in the company’s 401(k) plan. Also assume that e-mail is the best and only vehicle to communicate that employees should take advantage of the opportunity to invest immediately. You’d want to spend the first part of that hour asking questions or doing online research to learn more about the purpose of the new fund, who should be investing in it, why, and so on.

What you learn will help you plan—that is, help you decide how you want to present this information given your employee demographics. It will dictate the types of examples you present. If you spent 20 minutes doing research and planning, now spend 25 minutes writing your e-mail and editing it to keep it as brief as possible. Make sure that the subject line and boldface subheads help your readers skim and get valuable information. Finally, share your finished product with a colleague to measure whether your communication works. Does your colleague understand what you want every reader to understand? If not, make some tweaks so it’s crystal clear. Then take your e-mail to your boss or client to review.

The following sections discuss more activities you can consider doing in each of these simple steps.

• Identify what communications (media and messages) have worked well with this audience in the past—or what media and messages would logically work well with this audience at this time.

• List any obstacles or misunderstandings you need to address in your communication.

• Find out what your competitors have done in similar circumstances, if applicable.

• Find out what companies your management admires have done in similar circumstances.

If you have a board of directors, find out what your board members’ companies have done in similar circumstances. Just spending an hour or so using Google should give you a lot of useful information. Government or industry statistics can help you put information in context, for example. The research phase can take weeks, days, or merely hours or minutes. However long it lasts, make sure you spend some time on research and fact-gathering. All the great work you do in planning and implementing can’t make up for shoddy research.

• Revise your plans based on what you learn.

This is the time to invite your colleagues to help make your work better (and get them invested in your project’s success, too). As one of our colleagues wisely said, “Share your good work, and let others share in its success.” We agree.

• Include a survey in written or electronic communications.

• Share what you learn from measuring success with your management and colleagues.

With an unlimited budget, you can move mountains and get communications produced quickly by working overtime. With a less ambitious budget, experience shows you can produce good work anywhere between three weeks and three months. It depends on the topic, its complexity, and the need for multiple shareholders to agree, to name just a few variables. One of our favorite graphic designers used to quip, “If you want it fast, cheap, and high quality, pick any two.” We agree. Taking the time to do research and to test communications with focus groups is literally priceless in the value they provide. You’ll never regret an investment in time that helps you create effective communications.

Otto’s formula was simple and elegant: He used the IABC Gold Quill entry form as a project plan for each communication he produced. This helped him stay focused on what information he needed to do a good job. This strategy can work the same way for you.

If you use this structure to describe your communication plan, you’ll typically end up with a two- to three-page project overview. This is a great way to sell your idea to colleagues and management in your company or client’s company.

Here’s an overview of what the Gold Quill award entry form typically asks you to describe:

• Need/opportunity. What need or opportunity does your communication project address? Clearly describe the issues your company faces, and outline any effect these issues have on company performance, reputation, image, profits, and participation. Highlight any formal or informal research findings that support your analysis of the need or opportunity.

• Intended audience(s). Identify your primary audience and any other audiences. What is your audience’s state of mind? What key audience characteristics do you need to take into account as you develop your solution? Consider psychographic as well as demographic characteristics. Describe any audience research you plan to conduct.

• Goals and objectives. Goals describe what your communication project is designed to accomplish. Choose one or two key goals to describe in detail. These goals should be aligned with your organization’s future needs. Objectives should be realistic and measurable and should examine outcomes such as quantity, quality, time, cost, percentages, or other criteria. These measures are often financial, but not always.

• Solution overview. Outline your project’s solution and the logic that supports it. Describe why you plan to take the action you’ve outlined. The solution should demonstrate your thought process, imagination, and approach to problem solving. Discuss how you will involve stakeholders in developing the solution. Identify key messages. Present the tactics and communication vehicles you plan to use. Identify your role in the project and your level of involvement and responsibility.

• Implementation and challenges. State your project budget. Show how you plan to make efficient use of money. Discuss time frames. Describe any limitations or challenges that you face as you communicate and implement your ideas. Note any special circumstances, and discuss how they will be addressed.

• Measurement/evaluation of outcomes. How will you measure your project’s results? Every result should be linked to one or more objectives. Results must be shown to be valuable, thorough, and convincing. Measurement should demonstrate outcomes, not outputs. For example, if your media relations campaign was designed to support a product rollout, you should measure bottom-line figures about sales targets or the number of qualified sales leads, rather than just measuring the number of clips and impressions or advertising value equivalent. If your challenge was to improve employees’ understanding of an issue, you must show that their knowledge increased as a result of the communication plan you implemented.

• Who

• What

• When

• Where

• Why

• How

Here’s how that would work for several different projects:

Newspaper reporters use this technique to write the lead sentence in any news article—just identify the who, what, when, where, why, and how (the last two being the hardest to determine in some cases—especially crime stories).

Here’s a one-sentence overview of each of these projects:

• Project One. To help us cut expenses here at company headquarters, throughout the year financial experts will share advice with employees in special seminars, on our website, and in how-to kits.

• Project Two. To increase profits, a new quarterly informational campaign, including meeting-in-a-box kits, e-mails, website, and printed instructions, will provide all company managers with information they need to work with their staffs to identify and put into practice steps to help us reach our goal.

• Project Three. Bet you can tackle this one on your own.

Let’s think for a minute about the wisdom of eliminating print. It’s like saying now that we have e-mail, we’ll never need to send our customers another brochure. Maybe not. Yet, in our experience, sometimes print does the best job for your employees, so we encourage you not to limit yourself to electronic communication tools. In Chapter 7, “Use the Right Tool for the Job,” we talk about using the right tool for the right job, and you’ll see that print still performs a valuable service.

Now, back to budgeting. Here are several ways to determine budgets for HR communications projects:

• Unit cost. Come up with a “per employee” cost to inform each employee of a specific benefit (or determine the unit cost to communicate all HR benefits and services). The more employees who work at your company, the lower your unit cost will be. Compare the unit cost of communicating to the actual cost of providing all benefits/one benefit to an employee. Obviously, your unit cost to communicate should be a small percentage of the much larger cost to provide the benefit.

• Percentage of salary cost. Determine how much money your company spends on payroll, and then develop a communication budget for the year based on a percentage of your organization’s salary cost. Ideally, your communication budget won’t exceed 10% of the cost of pay.

Whatever amount you propose to spend on communicating, you can make the case that you’re spending an amount equal to X% of the cost of all employees to make sure they understand, use, and value HR products and services.

• Percentage of benefit cost. If it costs your company $200,000 a year to provide a specific benefit, isn’t it worth up to $20,000—or up to 10% of the benefit’s cost—to make sure everyone understands, uses, and values that benefit? Again, you can use this logic to build a budget for one specific benefit or all benefits as a group.

You may also want to look at the money your company spends on advertising and marketing—and then develop your HR communication budget as a derivative of the dollars spent in those areas. Some of the communications you produce are legally required, you could also see what your company’s annual legal budget is and propose your annual HR communications budget as a derivative of that number.

Depending on your industry, and your company’s ability to attract and keep needed talent, you may also want to find out what your competitors are spending on HR communications. This information might not be as useful as what we just discussed in helping you develop a budget. But it could help you make your case even more solid when you present your budget to management.

Basically, we’re suggesting that you base your budget for communications on a derivative of numbers familiar to your management team. Also propose funding that makes sense for your company’s size, competition, and revenues.

Here are some further ideas to help you supplement a weak budget:

• Get employees involved as photographers or illustrators for your HR communication materials.

• Invite a local graphic arts instructor to present his or her students with your communication needs as an assignment.

• Ask a donor (contributor) company to provide the resources of its HR communication team to help your HR communication team.

Clarify your goal and up to three objectives for your project. Specify how you’ll measure success for each objective you set.

Identify what you want to get out of the project on a personal level (such as what developmental experience you want to have).

Create a simple project plan to help organize and manage your project.

Invest in the time needed to do research up front and to get feedback on complex communications through focus group tests.

Develop a budget for your project that appropriately reflects the importance of the message and the importance of your objectives.

Summarize what you’re doing by identifying the who, what, when, where, why, and how. Then express the results in a single sentence or paragraph.