Communications management

Communications management is the systematic planning, implementing, monitoring, and revision of all the channels of communication within an organization and between organizations. Communications management is the organization and dissemination of new communication directives connected with an organization, network, or communications technology. Aspects of communications management include developing corporative communication strategies, designing internal and external communications directives, and controlling informations flows, including on-line communication. Communications managers face ongoing challenges due to new technologies.

Effective organizational communications are an essential precondition of effective management. Organizations with more than one level of management suffer from communications problems that can interfere with almost any aspect of the organization, as well as with corrective actions.

The purpose is to ensure that both the managers and workers have access to the same information. In this way, theoretically, they will be able to agree on the tasks to improve the organization, and everyone will work together in a better coordinated way. In practice, the same incentives have to applied to managers and workers as well, or else they develop different goals, negating the effect of the shared information.

One of the simplest practical ways of implementing communications management is to provide a straightforward, hierarchical bidirectional communication method, and clear incentives.

The role of communication managers is to:
 * Design of organizational communications structures
 * Define communication principles and standards
 * Formulate the communications goals of the institution
 * Manage and monitor information flows
 * Organize crisis communications
 * Implement communications strategies
 * Research the communications context
 * Resonance analysis of team networks
 * Organize communications training for staff
 * Provide corporate presentations to the public, media and cybernetic space

The weekly reporting method
One of the simplest communication methods is to have every employee with e-mail compose a report once a week. The report has what they did last week, what they plan to do next week, what problems they have, and any information that might help a large group of people in the organization; and try to limit it to a page or two. This report goes to their manager. The manager composes a summary and sends it to his manager. At the top, the CEO supervises an overall summary that goes to the board of directors. Then, the CEO sends the board's summary down to all of his subordinates. Each subordinate appends their summary, and sends the whole thing down, etc.

Eventually, every employee with e-mail receives a long e-mail containing the summaries from every level of management. Reading it is not required. In practice, curious, ambitious employees (those most likely to innovate) read it, and task-centered employees do not.

Examples of the weekly reporting method
At Printronix (NASDAQ PTNX), a $100 manufacturing organization with five levels of management, this was applied starting in 1990. Within a week, the perennial grumbles about "bad communication" ceased. By 1994 the organization had reduced total floorspace by 40% (eventually 75%), had "found" $100m of cash, reduced backlog from 3 months to 3.5 weeks, reduced product development time (for computer printers, a complex product) from three years to six months, and doubled product service life (greatly reducing the total cost of ownership of their product). This was achieved by a series of employee-initated, management-led activities: adoption of just-in-time manufacturing, statistical process control, corrections of product weaknesses, and a cross-product "printer architecture" permitting development of "design modules" that could be mixed and matched for niche markets.

All of the programs arose via the reporting structure, which made them visible to upper management, who could then support the ones that made sense.

Another cross-hierarchical system with similar traits arose at Warburg's Bank. According to Jacques Attali's biography, Warburg used a sheet of one-to-four-line summaries of each possible new loan, on a few sheets that were copied through the entire bank each day. It spanned the entire hierarchy, and anyone with comments was asked to bring them. Warburg's grew from 16,000 pounds, to 4 billion pounds under management in less than forty years.

External sources

 * Storytelling to Manage Change
 * Commmunication Methods
 * International Association of Business Communicators (global network for communication professionals)

Komunikacijski_mened%C5%BEment