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Whenever economic crises take place, negative statements about how badly budget shortages affect an organization’s day-to-day activities frequently dominate the dialogue.
Throughout my career, though, difficult times have brought out the best in me. During these times, creativity is required more than ever. Communicators are asked to do more with the same budgets (or even worse, with smaller budgets) and it provides us with the opportunity to demonstrate how valuable communication is to the organization.
In the last few months, many communicators have lost their jobs. Even large companies have cut entire communication departments because they are thought of as “nice to have” rather than a necessity. But internal communication plans and activities should never be cut during difficult times, though they can be reviewed and adjusted in order to get the best out of them.
During hard times, communicators must keep employee engagement at the highest level. Discuss the current situation outside and inside the company with employees. Consider strategic communication plans aimed at motivating people to make employees aware of the value of their work as well as the importance of their role in achieving organizational goals. They need to feel they are not alone and that they can count on the company during tough times just as the company can rely on them to face challenges.
One area you may want to review is the internal magazine. My organization published a nearly 50-page bimonthly publication, printed in a very sophisticated format and on high-quality paper. We also had separate publications for the operations people and the sales force.
We restructured the format and turned it into a publication that comes out every five weeks. Now, instead of a thick magazine, we have an internal newsletter that also includes the sales and operations publications as fixed sections of the publication. The format looks like a regular newspaper, with attractive sections for each topic.
We prepared a launch campaign for the newsletter so employees would not perceive the changes in format (from producing a very nice magazine to a simple newsletter) as a step backward.
We presented the new publication as the evolution of our magazine. The newsletter would now provide information in a more timely fashion, with a more agile format that invites people to read shorter articles instead of longer magazine pieces. By including content on sales and operations, everyone in the organization can now be aware of what other departments are doing.
The newsletter was a success. Employees were happy with the new format, which included larger photos, shorter articles and was much thinner than the former magazine.
With this initiative, we succeeded in reducing publishing costs by 50 percent and repositioned our internal publication during a time when employees needed something new and attractive.
The reformatting of the publication also offered the opportunity to redistribute responsibilities. Instead of having just one person responsible for the magazine, there are now three people who share the responsibility, one for each of the sections in the publication. This provided professional development for those employees who formerly just supported the publication, while still working on a reduced budget.
This is just one example of how a little creativity can help you do more with less and ensure a high level of employee motivation and engagement, even in difficult economic times.
Erika Ruiz has been corporate communication manager for the pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim in Mexico for the past 12 years. She heads internal communication, PR, corporate image, online communication, donation programs and crisis management. She is currently a member-at-large of IABC’s executive board and blogs at Getting Really Global. |
