My third guest post from a Grady alum comes from Amy Mengel, a 2003 graduate who worked at Lockheed Martin after graduation and is now at Latham International. Amy offered to explain how the public relations function interacts with other departments in a corporation, and I thought it was a great idea. Here's Amy's post:
Many PR students begin their careers with a PR agency and so most of their co-workers are also communications professionals. That’s not the case in a corporate communications role, and sometimes you can be the only communications person in your organization. In order to be successful, you need to develop positive working relationships with employees from a variety of other functions—and many of them will have absolutely no idea what you do or why you’re there. So you’ll need to show them how communications can be valuable. Here are just a few of the functions you’ll need to work with in a corporate communications role:
Human Resources
If you’re in an internal communications role, expect to be tied at the hip to the HR team. Not only will you be the department’s channel to employees to communicate company policies and benefits information, but you’re also likely to partner with them on internal events like employee awards banquets, new employee orientation, and professional development sessions. You’ll work especially closely with HR during tough times, like communicating to employees about layoffs or divestitures. Human Resources professionals are focused building a talented, capable workforce for your organization and equipping them with tools and resources to make them successful. That means you, too. As a communicator, make sure that you take advantage of what your organization’s HR department offers: training, feedback, support. Building close working relationships with HR professionals can make it much easier for you to not only get your job done, but also grow and advance in your career.
Legal
You’ve written a case study about your company’s new product launch. It goes to legal for review, and when it comes back it bears little or no resemblance to what you submitted. They’ve added three paragraphs of disclaimers at the end and slashed every adjective you used to describe the product’s features. Sometimes nothing can be more frustrating than working with the legal department, but they’re there for a reason. Companies can get into serious hot water based on something as simple as the wording of product claims. Corporate lawyers are looking to mitigate risk for a company, which can result in some pretty strict guidelines around branding, product claims or statements made to employees. But for the most part, lawyers are good writers and good at parsing abstract information, like legal regulations, into actionable plans.
Operations Management
The operations team of an organization is who actually gets your organization’s product or service produced, packaged and out the door. You’ll work with them to get the pulse of what’s happening in the organization. You may collaborate with them on projects to help make an operation leaner and more efficient. You’ll probably coach managers on how to improve communication, face-to-face and written, with the employees in their unit. You might work closely with management executives to write business updates that get published to a company intranet or industry trade journal. You could end up drafting talking points for managers to share with employees on a variety of issues. Operations managers can have a variety of backgrounds, everything from engineering to business to arts and humanities. You’ll need to get to know the managers within your organization to figure out how you can be most valuable to them.
Sales & Marketing
If you’re in a marketing communications role you’ll constantly be connected with the sales and marketing function, and they are often a fun and creative bunch. You’ll work with them to understand your company’s product offerings and develop a communications strategy that touches customers—be it through direct channels, media placements, or industry positioning. You’ll probably collaborate with sales and marketing on new product launches by developing creative marketing copy and case studies for sales literature. You might partner with them to design and develop an interactive trade-show booth and produce video, webinars or presentations for the show. Measurement is extremely important to the sales and marketing function, so you’ll need to make sure that you have metrics in place to judge the success of your communications efforts. The ultimate goal of this department is an increase in revenue, so make sure that your activities are designed to not only raise awareness of your organization’s product or service, but also to drive action and sales.
Finance
If you work for a public company, you’ll be working closely with the finance department to release quarterly earnings statements, develop the annual report, schedule analyst briefings and create communications plans for events like mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and spin-offs. Most finance professionals I’ve worked with are good thinkers and very analytical. They are more comfortable with numbers, spreadsheets and bar charts than words, so often you may find yourself needing to soften or spice up their message. If you don’t work directly with finance in an investor/analyst relations role, you’ll most certainly butt heads with finance when you go over budget on your trade show booth or spend too much on printed materials. In today’s economy, finance departments are keeping tighter-than-ever reigns on spending. The fastest way to create enemies in finance is to blow your budget. Make a budget before you start on an event or communications project and do everything in your power to stay within those parameters. If you might overspend, make sure it’s not a surprise to the finance team at the end of the quarter – let them know where you stand, why you’re over, and where else you can make cuts to even things out.
So that’s a quick rundown of just a few functions that you’ll need to get used to working with if you should find yourself in a corporate communications role (I won’t even get started on IT… working with them could be a post in itself!). The key thing to remember is that you’ll be representing the communications function to these co-workers – so make sure that you show them how valuable our work can be to helping each of these groups meet their goals and enhance your organization.