Is it time to rethink how communications teams are organized? 

Stephanie Hart:

Imagine the following hypothetical scenario: a group of executives meet virtually to discuss a new target operating model. The meeting goes as expected until the transcript from an AI note taker is accidentally forwarded to the all-company email list. 

Panicked messages about job security immediately begin to flow into managers’ email boxes, and a particularly distressed employee anonymously sends the transcript to a journalist who has been covering the business’ contested expansion strategy. 

What begins as one person’s unfortunate mistake has, in the time it takes to send a few emails, become fodder for investors, the media, customers and prospective employees. 

Inside and outside no longer exists 

While hypothetical, this scenario highlights the fact that there isn’t a discrete boundary between what happens inside and outside a business’ walls, nor is there a solid line between internal and external audiences. Assuming otherwise is often the starting point of reputational damage, where an organization oversimplifies a multifaceted issue or overestimates its social license to operate.

Consider the fractious discourse around DEI and sustainable business practices over the past six years. Employees, investors and customers are paying attention to perceived or actual gaps between stated values and real-world actions, and they aren’t afraid to publicly challenge a business’ trustworthiness and integrity.

Despite the complex and interconnected political, social and economic issues that now shape what NYU Stern professor and author Alison Taylor defines as the 

“zero-trust economy,” communications teams are still commonly divided by fixed notions of internal and external audiences, with internal and external teams sometimes reporting to different functions altogether.  

These divisions don’t reflect the current realities of operating a business. They can also hamper the ability of communications professionals to exercise the level of systems thinking required to build trust and effectively steward an organization’s reputation.

Building stronger teams and supporting the next generation of leaders 

Dividing communications teams by broad audiences and distributing the work across different teams can remove the productive friction we need to craft cohesive narratives and effectively assess externalities—the unintended consequences of a given action or decision. 

The best communications strategies come from demanding thought, honest conversations and insight into organizational dynamics and decision-making structures. That can’t happen if we don’t have the foundational psychological safety as a team to analyze difficult issues and engage in productive disagreement. 

A lack of team cohesion and limited audience-specific mandates can also hamper career development. Communicators who want to progress into senior leadership roles must be visible and have a systems-level understanding of how the business works and how decisions are made. 

Empowering our teams to build collaborative networks across HR, legal, internal risk, finance, compliance and profit centers is essential if we want to evolve from the team that crafts messaging about final decisions to the team that plays a role in deciphering the information that triangulates into opportunities or risk.

From audiences to issues  

There will always be tradeoffs in any structure, but I’ve seen great work from teams that have integrated issues-based portfolios or newsroom-style beats. For example, an individual in this model who oversees employee communications isn’t limited to HR operational matters. Their portfolio would include:

• assessing employee sentiment across internal and public-facing channels 
• creating a cohesive cultural narrative and supporting storytelling 
• leading media relations for culture-specific matters
• advising stakeholders on workplace policy developments and trends
• shaping employee engagement messaging into broader community- and culture-building narratives

To return to my hypothetical scenario, imagine the effectiveness of a response where there is a dedicated team member with a systemic understanding of how the organization’s culture and employee experience connect to broader issues outside the business’ walls. They will be able to draw from a tested and coherent narrative, navigate a variety of channels and engage the right stakeholders to proceed with authority. 

Compare that to an organization where two or three people are tasked with crafting parts of a crisis response plan, but they lack issue-specific expertise, have limited channel access and don’t typically work as a team.      

How we organize our teams is a complex question with no perfect answer, but if we accept that building and substantiating organizational trust isn’t linear, it’s worth questioning if it still makes sense for the professionals tasked with this work to face one direction.  

+++

Stephanie Hart is a Toronto-based communications and sustainability executive.