POV: How COVID-19 is Making Way for the Communicative Organization

The missing link between HR and Communications functions in organizations, exposed by the COVID-19 crisis, is calling out organizations to reassess the distant relationship between both functions and to transform it into a close collaboration and fast.

In the short term, the partnership between HR and Communications will be essential to navigating the enormous uncertainty and ambiguity this crisis is sprawling with while preparing to jumpstart the organization and its employees into the new world post the pandemic.

In the long term, strengthening this bond will support companies, irrespective of their size, to propagate employer brand, cement the organizational core values, align employees with shared purpose and common goals, enhance employee engagement, improve productivity, and increase organization’s readiness to manage future crises. This effort will rapidly convert into the valuable currency of employee advocacy, the ultimate reward any organization aspires for.

That’s how strategic this relationship can and must become.

The need for a communicative organization is dire

The COVID-19 crisis revealed that the challenges facing today´s organization leaders will be much more strongly related to communications going forward. It is ripe time for HR and communications to see the opportunity and join forces to build, grow, and sustain communicative organizations.

More than ever, leaders are required to lead by sustaining core values, reinforcing (and even in some companies re-building) trust with their people, creating alignment with the organization’s shared purpose, and mobilizing resources and employees towards common goals. It is no longer a differentiator of great companies or best organizational cultures. It is essential and a vital role of every leader today to build effective teams, ensure a common understanding of the company’s vision and business strategy, and promote a strong performance culture that drives towards achieving common objectives. Communicative leadership must become a core organizational competency.

Communicative organizations with communicative leadership make the new organization breed we will see dominating the scene post COVID-19. These organizations have communication embedded in their internal and external strategy. Internally, the inherent culture is that communication is a prerequisite for the organization’s existence, its ability to achieve goals, and realize success. This mindset is at the core of its philosophy and values.

This new type of organization spells a new world for HR and with it, new challenges, opportunities and responsibilities for HR leaders.

From talent attraction and acquisition to talent management and employee engagement, anything HR does or will do, strategic or tactical, communication becomes an essential ingredient of the recipe. For example, managers and employees will be recruited for communicative competence as one of the core requirements and go on to take core responsibility for communication when they become part of the organization. In this case, this will entail HR revisiting the roles in the organization and articulating the required communicative competence; putting systems in place to enable managers become communicative leaders themselves; and of course measuring for effectiveness by creating necessary linkages to performance management, employee wellness and engagement, and organizational health, This is a mammoth task by any measure and any attempt to take this bull by the horn in isolation from Communications is unrealistic.

Similarly, the communications professionals, experts, and industry analysts in the organization must become HR’s partners to drive and shape the overall organization’s internal communicational development.

How can HR and Communications create a communicative organizational culture in this crisis and beyond? 

1. The most straightforward answer to this starts with both functions realizing the criticality of an effective internal communications strategy to immediately reignite the positive spark in the hearts and minds of leaders and employees, despite the COVID-19 crisis, and keep them connected. This will create and sustain employee engagement at elevated levels and transform employees to round-the-clock ambassadors for their company.
2. Communications and HR have plenty in common, but also a lot to learn from each other. Together, they can be a strong combination to create a powerful juncture. This is where they can start shaping stellar, communicative leadership talent. By putting their heads together, they can

• Define and articulate what levels of communication competence is required at various leadership, managerial, and critical roles;
• Integrate executive coaching as a tool to enable leaders to master this skill and address areas impacting their communicative competence such as strengthening their self-esteem, working a structure which allows them to set aside more time for their employees, clarifying their role and objective as a leader where there is a need to, and becoming a better communicator; and
• Immediately, start providing people managers with the required professional remote learning. Provide them with toolkits, including the necessary digital tools, frameworks, and playbooks that enable them to become owners of communications as a core responsibility in their roles.

5. There is a great opportunity presenting itself today for both functions to increase knowledge of the importance of communications in attaining organizational goals and success. HR and communications can collaborate to institutionalize this knowledge through learning and training interventions and long-term development initiatives. Pre COVID-19, a few organizations in the UAE had already started seeing the value of instilling this knowledge within its leadership team. A particular example I like to refer to here is ADNOC launching its very own and in fact the region’s first “Communications Academy” in partnership with The Tantalus Group back in 2019. ADNOC’s Communications Academy is a strategic alliance between HR and communications with business in mind.
6. HR policies and processes can benefit from support from communications. No doubt that the COVID-19 crisis is forcing HR policies to adapt to the current situation, to focus on employee happiness and productivity in the short term, and as a long term HR strategy. Making such policies clear and understandable and relevant to everyone, be it current and future talent will undoubtedly strengthen

• the employer value proposition and the overall employer brand;
• leaders in their roles ;
• employees in their loyalty and commitment to the organization; and
• HR´s position as a strategic partner to the business.

5. By building measurement of communication effectiveness into the employee lifecycle, HR can track employee engagement and derive insights into organizational health. Data will enable a strategic approach by HR and communications to build this competitive edge in their organization.

When expert communicators join forces with specialists in human behavior, they multiply both their impact. The organization, its leadership, and the people win.