Comms pros are used to doing more with less. But that can only work when a small team has a carefully structured workflow. That means using repeatable systems and templates that reduce the back-and-forth that’s inevitable as part of a communicator’s job. If you don’t have that foundation, even simple tasks can eat up your valuable time.
At Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference, Jenna Greco, vice president of culture and communications at Power Design, said her team needs this kind of work infrastructure to keep up with demand across the company. With a team of seven people that’s running internal communications for an organization with nearly 3,000 employees, Greco has established carefully placed systems so she and her team can keep comms functions moving.
“If you don’t have structure in place, the work just comes at you from every direction,” she told Ragan. People are stopping by your desk, sending quick messages and asking for things without any real context. And a lot of times you end up spending more time chasing clarity than actually doing the work.”
To fix this problem, her team rebuilt its workflows to accommodate competing priorities.
“For us, that meant putting systems in place to set us up for success,” Greco said. “There are intake forms, standardized communications plans and clear expectations of what we need before we start. It forces better thinking upfront and eliminates a lot of the rework that eats up your time.”
Put up guardrails on your team’s time with a service-level agreement
Greco said her team uses a service-level agreement with other departments to define how work gets prioritized. For example, they set clear thresholds around audience size and scope to determine what work requires comms involvement.
“That agreement outlines what services we provide, who we provide them to and what the expectations are on both sides,” Greco told Ragan. “That includes how requests get submitted, what information we need upfront and what timelines and feedback loops look like.”
She added that these rules also help eliminate ambiguity around what work is on the top of the pile and who’s responsible for what.
“This system naturally filters out lower-level requests because we’ve set guardrails,” Greco said. “If it’s below a certain audience size, it doesn’t need to come through us. So there’s built-in prioritization happening without us having to constantly make those judgment calls.”
Ensure that work can move seamlessly among team members
Once expectations are clear, the next challenge for small comms teams is figuring out how to ensure work flows easily. Greco said that her team documents all of its processes so anyone can pick up the slack when needed.
“We document everything as standard operating procedures,” Greco told Ragan. “They’re step-by-step instructions for any process we execute, whether it’s frequent or not. That’s critical for cross-training and for sharing work. People go on PTO, workloads change and sometimes you have to jump into tools you don’t use every day. Those SOPs let anyone step in and get up to speed quickly.”
However, documentation alone isn’t enough. Teams also need shared access to the work itself.
Greco said that her team has a centralized hub for all of its relevant work files to ensure that everyone knows where the relevant material lives.
“File management is one of those things that’s not flashy, but it’s essential,” she said. “Everything lives in one shared place. No files are sitting on someone’s desktop. That way, anyone can jump in at any time and support a project without having to track things down. It makes the team more self-sufficient and keeps work moving. Those small operational habits are what actually make a team scalable.”
Get buy-in by speaking the language of the business
Even the best comms infrastructure systems won’t work if you other teams don’t use them. Greco told Ragan her team needed to shift the way it talked about its function to leaders in other departments to drive buy-in.
“We really have to work hard to educate our leaders and ownership about what communications does and how long it takes to do something,” Greco said. “They don’t always have that visibility, so we have to be the ones to provide it.”
To make that case, Greco’s team tracked their time and output to quantify their work.
“We did a study on our deliverables, including how long it takes to create an email, write an article, develop a text message or write a video script,” she said. “Then we tracked how many of those we were producing,” she said. “That gave us a clear picture of the volume of work and made it much easier to justify additional resources.”
By providing the details instead of just explaining what comms does, Greco’s team earned the necessary trust with leaders and other business functions.
“You have to put your business hat on and think about how revenue-generating teams talk about their work,” Greco said. “Leaders don’t speak the language of communications, so we have to translate it into something that resonates with them.”
Click here to register for Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference.
Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications.
