Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Stephanie with Staff Base Academy. Imagine one of your business units has a negative message it has to share. It could be a manager leaving, cost cutting, or a workplace accident. At the same time, one of your other departments is posting fun pictures from their last employee event. Both posts appear side-by-side on your intranet homepage. That's not the image you want to be projecting. At best, it makes you look sloppy. At worst, insensitive. Communications planning is one of the most important, yet often overlooked, challenges to internal communications. In this video, you'll learn how to understand the challenge of communications planning, establish something like air traffic control for your internal messages, and you'll learn how to enable and align your internal publishing community. So, what are some of the biggest challenges when it comes to planning communications? Well, for one, it's tough to control. Employee communicators only control a small part of the overall amount of messages that are shared inside and outside of an organization. There are independent key initiatives with their own communications agenda, service functions like HR or IT, business units, country operations, and individual locations. There's also external communication and marketing, and even harder to control, social media and broadcasting media. All of these messages and communicators effectively compete for the time, attention, and brain space of employees. Messages about key strategic topics or important operational safety guidelines might easily get lost in the noise. Communications overload is only one problem. It is even more harmful if messages are inconsistent or contradict each other. And finally, the absence of communications planning makes double work for editors because similar content is created multiple times by different editors. This is not only inefficient, but may also annoy internal partners who might receive a request one day from an editor of the employee magazine and the next day from a press spokesperson on the very same topic. In external communication, inconsistent messaging can undermine your brand and reputation. Internally, it can confuse employees and reinforce their suspicions, especially in times of change if employees are already looking for hidden signals about their leaders' real agendas. So what can you do about it? Here is an easy model to think about the solution. Imagine your company as an airspace, with all the messages flying around like planes. Communications planning is like establishing air traffic control to make sure not too many messages are landing at the mental airports of your employees at the same time, and avoid collisions. There are many ways to do that. We will focus here on three key points. First, create an overall set of rules, guidance for everyone who wants to fly in your company's messaging airspace. Second, establish a newsroom approach to ensure a frequent synchronization and prioritization of topics between internal and external communication. Finally, find a way to engage and guide the many decentral pilots that internal communications needs to deal with. Note that internal communication is an important interface function between the more controlled official messaging space and the various internal communication stakeholders. Let's look at the three areas in more detail. First up is to get everyone to agree to the overall big-picture communication strategy. The communication strategy based on the business strategy should include goals and outcomes. It should keep in mind the message and the audience it's intended for, have a high-level annual editorial calendar, and a set amount of airtime for the major initiatives. Once you have an agreed-upon strategy, organizations need an effective instrument to plan and prioritize activities on an ongoing basis. The modern and agile way to do that is through a newsroom approach. The concept of a newsroom is inspired by the media's organizational approach to keeping up with a large amount of information. While many companies also implement a physical newsroom, this concept can also be run virtually and works for organizations of all sizes. The goals of a newsroom. Tell a consistent message internally and externally. Reduce hierarchies and enable short decision-making paths. Eliminate unnecessary duplication of work. And reduce reaction time. Here is an example of a newsroom organization. The core idea behind the corporate newsroom is to think topic-centric. Topics come first. Channels come second. That means it's not the job anymore to fill channels just for the sake of filling channels. Instead, we have core topics, which are delivered on all channels in different stories, but with one core message. Meetings are the focal point of newsroom coordination. There are different meeting formats, ranging from long-term strategy meetings to daily stand-up meetings. Often agile formats or tools are adopted. In this example, we have a strategy team, including the CEO, that meets twice a year to set the overall priorities in terms of topics, messages, and expected outcomes. The monthly topic review coordinates topic management. Most core topics are developed from the corporate strategy and the company's vision. However, there might also be other sources, like bottom-up-driven topics from employees. Finally, the daily morning meeting is the stage for operational coordination, providing knowledge to all members of the newsroom on a daily basis. With an overall communication strategy and a newsroom approach, your organization's communication activities are much more aligned and integrated. But what's still missing is to align your internal communication stakeholders. That's tough, because let's face it, communicators from business units or initiatives want to serve the agendas of their immediate boss. They want to promote their topics. And what's often missing is an understanding of the bigger picture. The solution is internal publisher enablement. If we stay with our example of air traffic control, internal publisher enablement is kind of like pilot training. They get everything they need to fly safe and within the guidelines, and in turn, get to use the company's airspace. Here is a high-level overview of how internal publisher enablement works. The internal communications team provides access and training to internal publishers. These are individuals for teams from business units, initiatives, countries, and locations, or service units like HR and influencers. Access means they get the communications channels to reach employees. The access is even more powerful if they can get their message on the intranet homepage or can send push messages with important updates to their audience. As always, with power comes responsibility, so they need to get trained about guidelines, how to use the platforms, the overall messaging strategy, and how to create good content. In turn, the publishers provide relevant content, locally reinforce core messages, and help foster interaction. Of course, all of this will only work if the publishers adhere to the guidelines. Internal communication is an important interface function between the more controlled official messaging space and the various internal communication stakeholders. In this role, you should understand where your influence is coming from, especially when it comes to publishers. Make sure to keep control of your key channels that reach all employees, and make sure that Make sure to keep control of your key channels that reach all employees, because that's access only you can provide. Let's take a look at a concrete example. Modern communication tools like StaffBase allow central internal communication managers to hand over publishing rights for a specific targeted channel to a local publisher or publishing team. However, it's still possible to define certain privileges for the channel that increases visibility. One privilege would be to surface content of the channel on an intranet homepage or even promote important pieces to the main stage. For mobile devices, it's not so much the homepage that matters, but the ability to send instant push notifications. We see that these messages achieve a three times higher reach than normal news. However, you should only hand over such a feature to an internal publisher who uses this power in a responsible way. Let's sum things up here. The job of internal comms professionals is to treat employees' attention as a valuable and limited resource. Good communications planning works just like air traffic control and combines an overall comms strategy with a newsroom-like approach with internal publisher enablement. The result is less information overload, continuity of topics and stories around the key messages, and more efficient content creation. We hope you enjoyed this video, and don't forget to check out our other videos in this series. See you next time.