By Manager of Strategic Communications, Clarissa Perkins

Introduction

Achieving effective, consistent, and on-brand communications can be a significant challenge for government agencies with offices worldwide, numerous contractors, and diverse audience cultures. Often, remote offices lack access to up-to-date communications resources, such as templates or brand guides, resulting in off-brand communications products, longer production times, increased errors, and failure to successfully meet critical objectives. 

These five key strategies can unite dispersed staff and enhance collaboration towards creating sustainable and high-quality communication products. Implementing these strategies requires effort and dedication, but they are simple and can transform an agency’s communications practice from disconnected and inefficient to streamlined and impactful.

When executed successfully, these strategies can advance an agency’s mission, improve trust, and help secure increased funding. Conversely, ineffective communication can confuse audiences, deteriorate trust, and cost needless amounts of taxpayer funds. 

By consistently applying these five proven strategies, an agency can ensure successful communications outcomes.

1. Provide Regular Trainings

In federal agency communications, proper training is fundamental. Effective training ensures consistent, impactful messaging for dispersed staff and stakeholders across diverse cultures. Effective training is far more than just onboarding courses or annual refreshers; it requires a comprehensive, ongoing approach that adapts to the distinct communication challenges of different geographical locations and cultures.

Innovative Training Methods for Dispersed Teams

Effective training programs go beyond teaching basic skills; they foster cross-cultural understanding, trust, and tools for managing complex stakeholder relationships. Bixal’s tailored learning journeys prioritize continuity, rather than one-off training sessions, ensuring knowledge and skills are imparted effectively to achieve critical objectives.

These comprehensive programs blend methods such as:

• Virtual workshops drawing together dispersed team members from different regions.
• Culturally sensitive e-learning modules.
• Mentorship programs.
• Multilingual job aids for on-the-job support.
• Interactive exercises simulating real-world challenges.

Building Core Communication Competencies

In an adaptive learning ecosystem teams should be equipped with essential communication skills. Through this journey, they master cultural nuances, develop crisis response strategies, craft compelling narratives, and tailor complex data to diverse audiences. These skills enable confident interactions, ultimately ensuring the impact and overall success of both local and global initiatives.

2. Foster Partnerships Between Remote and Headquarters Communicators

Building a Strong Support Network

Remote offices often rely on a single communications officer to oversee their messaging, with no official connection to the organization’s headquarters. Establishing partnerships with central communications managers provides a vital support network for remote communicators. Central managers can guide remote workers, ensuring familiarity with essential resources, tools, and processes. This level of support is not only critical to efficiently onboarding staff but also plays a significant role in their job satisfaction. In fact, surveys on workplace happiness indicate that staff are significantly happier at work when they have dedicated support and mentors. 

Quality Assurance

Often overlooked as unnecessary, quality assurance reviews are vital and are a key area where central managers can provide support. Recognizing that even the most adept professionals make mistakes, having a second pair of eyes is essential for producing error-free, high-quality work. Effective quality assurance should seamlessly integrate into the project management cycle from the start, and reviewers should be notified of cultural nuances so they can be preserved during the review process. Properly executed quality control helps maintain brand consistency while saving time and money spent on revisions.

Ensuring Consistency Across Campaigns

Central office communications leaders possess valuable insights into other agency campaigns. Their oversight ensures that communications strategies and products across the agency align with and strengthen each other. Without a central office review, local offices may unintentionally send conflicting messages, rather than communicating as a unified agency. Leveraging campaign insights, central office staff can amplify messages and products, connect staff working on similar initiatives, and harness central office channels to promote campaigns. 

3. Set Clear Strategies, Goals, and Timelines

The Risks of Undefined Communications Strategies

Crafting communications products without a clear strategy, goals, and timeline can waste resources and lead to audience confusion, internal tension, and failure to achieve objectives. Conversely, well-defined strategies serve as a roadmap for reaching goals through evidence-based practices and contextual insights. They define target audiences and outline steps to achieve objectives by identifying the most effective channels, messaging, tactics, cadence, and formats. Incorporating these research-backed elements increases the likelihood of achieving broader objectives. 

Aligning Plans with Agency Objectives

Effective plans align with agency goals, integrating messaging to prevent audience confusion and avoid duplicating efforts. This alignment improves message retention, projects agency unity, and reduces the need for new channels that could introduce conflicting messages. These tactics play a significant role in subtly influencing audiences toward achieving overarching goals and lowering the risk of conflicting messaging. 

Establishing Core Goals in Communication Strategies

Strategies are integral in goal setting, as teams often prioritize flashy communications products, like videos or infographics, over clear outcomes or behavior changes. Goals, however, should be central to the communications process, clearly stating what the team hopes to achieve and why, and should dictate the strategy’s guiding elements. By transparently integrating goals within the strategy and sharing them with stakeholders, teams ensure alignment and accountability and reduce the risk of confusion and disagreement. 

Transforming Goals into Actionable Steps

Clear timelines and defined roles transform goals into practical and actionable steps. Breaking tasks down and assigning them to the right individuals makes complex goals achievable. Agreed-upon timeframes, reviews, and expectations ensure that each team member understands their role and which stage the project is in. This transparency reduces internal friction, anxiety, and time spent reviewing and making revisions. 

4. Establish Cross-Functional Teams

As previously noted, remote offices frequently rely on a single communications staff member to manage communications for the entire office. These staff members are expected to excel in various areas like managing timelines, video editing, infographic design, and blog content publishing. However, while generalists are excellent at facilitating processes, scoping, and managing projects because they understand the basics of each specialty, since they are not experts at each skill, tasks may take longer to complete, be of lower quality, and final products may not be fully thought through. 

Leveraging Expertise

Effective communications teams consist of people with diverse skillsets who collaborate to accomplish shared goals. Leveraging differing perspectives and expertise allows team members to complement each other’s strengths and introduce innovative ideas. Offices can enhance their communications by engaging central office specialists to help when needed, briefing these specialists on project objectives, and fostering a collaborative team environment. 

Agencies should ensure that communicators in dispersed offices know how to access specialists, creating an environment that allows the identified staff to fully contribute their expertise. This approach will result in the development of stronger, more professional products, completed in a timelier manner than if handled by a sole communicator.

5. Manage Brand Assets

Brand Consistency for Audience Trust

Brand consistency and high quality, error-free products play a critical role in establishing audience trust and advancing an agency’s objectives. Materials with outdated logos, inconsistent fonts, or incorrect colors, raise questions about the legitimacy of the content and the competence of the staff and agency. Maintaining brand consistency can be challenging without easily accessible, up-to-date resources, such as logos, PowerPoint templates, report templates, and video bumpers. Having 508-compliant, on-brand, and easy-to-find templates minimizes errors and streamlines the creative process for staff. 

Ensuring brand consistency requires ongoing effort. Content strategists or managers should routinely monitor brand resources to ensure they are up-to-date and maintained on an agency’s public website and internal knowledge management system. Additionally, they should prioritize providing communicators with 508-compliant, high-quality resources in various formats to support consistency, save time, and prevent costly overhauls in the future. 

Conclusion

Communicators operating in dispersed offices face similar challenges, such as a disconnection from headquarters, lack of mentorship, and limited access to support, tools, and brand resources. With a robust combination of the strategies outlined above, communicators can navigate the hurdles of distance and connectivity, ensuring that all communications products effectively support the broader mission of their agency.

Director of learning and organization development, Shawn Martell, and content manager, Ewa Beaujon, contributed to the writing of this article.