At the end of April I travelled to Croatia and the beautiful Island of Krk on the Adriatic to speak at the 2015 PRO PR conference.
This is an annual event held over three days which attracts communications professionals from across the Balkan region and speakers from across Europe and further afield. The majority of the 180 delegates were senior administrators in government with a good representation from across the private sector.
This was my second time speaking at this event. It is clear that the people in this part of the world look to the United Kingdom as a ‘gold standard’ in public administration. I consider it a great honour to be asked out there to address some very senior people who are keen to hear about both the practices we employ and challenges we face.
This year I was asked to chair a discussion panel on challenges faced by communications teams in government departments. On my panel were two senior civil servants from Croatia and Montenegro and a senior local government officer from Serbia.
Before the panel I spoke about the key communications challenges faced by UK local government. Before I travelled I polled heads of communication from different parts of our country and from different types of local authority to see what their big challenges were.
The following list of issues is exhaustive, but it summarises everything I was told in my poll and provided the backdrop to a talk where I attempted to summarise and focus on the big strategic challenges we face in the UK.
There were 12 key challenges identified:
• Expectation/demand management
• Business transformation
• improve professional standards
• improve digital communication
• need to innovate
• need to embrace change staff engagement
• community engagement
• better campaigns
• how to do better with less
• moving from broadcast to two-way communication and;
• getting to grips with the new science of behaviour change.
To begin with I reiterated that the single greatest challenge we all face is to build trust among staff and local people.
I began by saying, as I had said last June in Manchester at Communications Academy 2014, that effective communication must begin with better staff engagement. If our own employees don’t trust us, and in to many organisations they do not, we will never sufficiently win the trust of our local people.
I then set out the need for greater commitment to professional development among our communications people. As in central government in many local authorities we have a challenge to attain parity with the other professions we work alongside. But we must do this if we are to have credibility required in order that we can bring to bear the full value of well-planned strategic communication.
My third absolute priority, now as a year ago, is that we must properly embrace and master digital technology so that it is integrated into every aspect of our communication. And there are very few places where we are even close to doing this.
While our propensity to communicate digitally is increasing, too many councils persist with practice that is dominated by broadcast-only and paper based channels. If we don’t get our act together the public will leave us behind.
I then spoke about what I believe is the fundamental change we all need to embrace. Increasingly if local government is to communicate and win trust successfully, our job moves from one of communicating for our organisations to one where we support our organisations to communicate.
We must find other authentic voices and champions; it begins with our managers and staff, our job is increasingly to set strategy and provide sound advice – remember, good staff engagement must be our foundation.
My talk was well received but I found the session oddly disjointed. Having spoken on the real strategic challenges we face in the UK and not mentioning the media once we then debated nothing but the media for over an hour!
Now, the Balkan states are no doubt on very different points of the communications journey to the UK – but it is nevertheless the same journey. The media are perceived variously as corrupt, imbalanced and over-representative of sectional interests.
I have now visited this region three times. Good people there face challenges around legitimacy and press freedom that dwarf our challenges. But they are working hard to increase democratic function in their countries nevertheless.
Finally, and I hope with due humility, I posed a challenge to all of them; they need to obsess less about the media and concentrate more on developing their own channels of communication.
Over three days in this most beautiful of countries, as on my two previous visits to this part of the world I was received with warmth, appreciation and a hospitality that was second to none.
I will be back.
Cormac Smith is chairman of LG Communications