Are you justifying your existence as a communication professional?

The recession can surely make communicators sweat! It also seems to be making communicators revisit their purpose and justify their existence.

A mail from a fellow communicator in India pointed to just that – it read ‘we are gauging the span of the Corporate Communication and roles vis-a-vis number of employees. It’s going to hopefully help justify why me and my team mates are stretched’.

Goodness.

Incidentally, the individual had contacted India’s leading association for software organizations for benchmark numbers and met a dead-end.

My first thought was – when they hired corporate communicators, what was the organization thinking? Did they know why they wanted them in the first place?

The second point that crossed my mind – if this wasn’t a recession, would the organization really go around checking if the support functions like Corporate Communication was delivering 100%?

 

 The third – aren’t communicators supposed to be working on a formal plan which is ‘blessed’ by the senior leadership – who need to be actively driving it as one of their priorities?

And, finally, if communicators are spending quality time trying to justify their existence, how productive are they in doing what they were hired to do as professionals?

So how did we get here in the first place?

My take is that it begins with where ‘communication’ as a function sits and is valued within the organization. The closer it is to senior leadership and the frequency with which communicators play strategic advisory roles, the greater the chances of the team being taken seriously.

I can also visualize why these communicators feel stretched. They might be doing non-core communication work such as writing ‘personal memos’ for their leaders, conducting events for local connection programs which bloats their bandwidth and playing ‘gate-keeper’ for all communication that flows – upward, downward and lateral. Also, they may be repeating tasks which can either be automated or converted into self-help models to empower their employees – for example, e-mail style guides, templates for presentations, event checklists among others.

By crafting tangible measures and outcomes to the communication objectives, the communication team can have sufficient reasons to justify how their work – a) adds value to the organization b) drives change and therefore is a core need.

I foresee a need to survey their impact every year if not more often – questions such as ‘I am able to understand the organization’s vision and goals’ and ‘I receive clear, simple communication which helps me do my work better’.

I recommend teams facing such questions need to step back and revisit their goals. They need to understand how the function can align to the company’s overall plans and thereby build a comprehensive, measurable plan.

Corporate communicators – internal or external, need to be resourceful too. Therefore it is important to regularly share best practices from the industry among senior management, get internal teams to leverage each other more through interactive forums and spend time sharing knowledge as ‘subject matter experts’ on evolving media like Web 2.0 and social networking.

Do you agree? Share your point of view here.