You’re ready to tackle something that’s going to drive value to your organization: Action plans. Good call!
Driving improvements to communications that impact your business priorities will make you look good.
Let’s get started. Please listen carefully because I’m only going to say this at least three times:
YOU DO NOT OWN THE ACTION PLANS.
You can’t be held responsible for every communications activity at your company. It’s wildly unrealistic. Leadership and HR need to own the execution and accountability of implementing these important changes, so make it your top priority to include them in the conversation.
That said, Internal Communications is responsible for identifying the high-level themes and areas of improvement for your company’s communications best practices.
For example, if you learn that your employees don’t understand your company’s strategy, plan to create content that bridges that gap. If there’s a struggle with manager communication skills, it's time for a training program to improve all managers' capabilities.
You have critical actions to improve communications. That’s great and probably necessary, but YOU DO NOT OWN THE ACTION PLANS.
When action planning, you can use the buzzworthy mnemonic SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Based) to work through the final commitments. Don’t leave things to chance. Develop specific actions that will impact key metrics while ensuring they are realistic within a reasonable timeframe.
As you start to understand what needs to be done to drive meaningful change, some of your stakeholders will dive right in and agree to a dozen actions. Others will hesitate and only accept a few. Your conversations and understanding of how the team is performing against your communications best practices should have revealed the group’s key headwinds that could impact their willingness or ability to deliver. And that’s OK. It will move the needle eventually. Any step forward is a step in the right direction.
The goal is to come to a full agreement on what will happen next, who is responsible and when it will be completed.
Group Leader & Human Resources Commitments
Add and execute agreed targeted actions to the overarching strategy
Make these commitments visible to employees to prioritize
Provide regular feedback on progress
Assist in developing additional best practices across the company
Corporate Communications Commitments
Follow up regularly
Deliver tools and enablers to improve consistent gaps across the company
Assist as needed to help the group execute the plan and reach its goals
Make connections to other areas of your business experiencing similar issues for peer-to-peer guidance
There are many factors that go into an employee’s experience AND you can impact your company’s bottom line by understanding and benchmarking communications and developing targeted action plans to improve key metrics.
We love transforming the way companies communicate. Contact us to discuss how we can help you!
I almost forgot… YOU DO NOT OWN THE ACTION PLANS.