Managing Your Comms Workload Webinar with Joanna Parsons

As internal communicators, our to-do lists can get absolutely out of control. With tighter budgets and smaller teams, a lot of us are gaming out how to cut through huge swathes of tasks alone. Luckily, Joanna Parsons partnered with WorkVivo to do just that in her webinar about Managing Your Comms Workload last week.

Current situation for communicators

As the CEO of The Curious Route, you’ve likely seen Joanna pop up on LinkedIn sharing her wisdom (and sympathy) for internal communications. More than this, she was basically clairvoyant. After asking the chat what one word best described their current workload, she revealed her slides predicting exactly what they were going to say:

Overwhelming. Distressing. Unrealistic. Intense.

Joanna used this to emphasise the reality of so many small communication teams, where competing responsibilities just can’t be met. She then shared this great quote from Eisenhower, a leader with prodigious productivity and ruthless prioritisation:

“What is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.”

The Eisenhower Matrix

This was the basis or Joanna’s version of the Eisenhower Matrix and one developed specifically around the needs of comms professionals. Essentially you have a:

• Y axis: Important to Not Important
• X axis: Urgent to Not Urgent.

Applied to your schedule?

Step 1:

Get granular about your workload. Go through calendars and inboxes and brain dump everything you have to do to get it into one place.

Step 2:

Consider each task individually and ask

• Is it important?: Is this task aligned to the overall objectives of your communication strategy?
• Is it urgent?: Does it require immediate attention to ensure success?

Step 3:

Assign all your tasks into one of the four boxes in the Eisenhower Matrix, namely:

Important but not urgent

• Reviewing measurement dashboard
• Reviewing campaigns
• Running focus groups, shadowing frontline workers.
• Strategic planning

Important and urgent – drop everything you’re doing and complete this(!)

• Emergency closure comms.
• CEO departure news

Not important but urgent

• Proofreading noncritical documents
• Deck creation for last minute events

Not important and not urgent - the bin category as Joanna put it, ready to be delegated to someone else.

• Recurring meetings with no purpose
• Reports that no one reads.

In this way, you can visualise exactly where you’re spending most of your time. Joanna believed strategic communicators should be spending most of their time in the important but not urgent section, as often it’s the place where long term success is assured. Above all, it’s about looking at your tasks with intention and being honest about where your work can be better placed.

Applying this inhouse

Joanna shared how communicators can use this method, as importance of tasks is often dictated rather than self-managed. In this scenario, you have to use this as a data point. You can show your findings as percentiles and demonstrate new active plans with stakeholders to deliver on important tasks and reach set objectives.

By making it a collaborative effort, backed by your own research, you can make the case of maximising efficiency and keeping aligned to strategy. Even small steps can reduce huge workloads into manageable aspects.

Q&A

What if management dictates what is regarded as important?

In this case, you need to get on the same page as to your purpose. Is it culture building or is it productivity? Once you know this you can determine importance along these lines and also generate greater buy-in by establishing your functionality. Alongside this, it’s important to determine who key stakeholders are and which stakeholders are more or less just making life more difficult for their own means.

Who should you delegate to if a one-person team?

The Eisenhower Matrix isn’t necessarily about delegation so much as it is understanding your own capacity and what you can reasonably get done.

How to set boundaries with over demanding stakeholders?

Joanna took the time to say how much this was part of growing and developing in a comms role, regardless of how long you might have been in the sector. The best means of arguing the business case of what you do is being more vocal and showing what is on your plate in these discussions. Greater transparency about what comms do, showing what you’re working on etc. shows your usefulness.

Does outsourcing design and other content undermine me?

There was no issue with outsourcing. Trying to do everything yourself only served to exhaust you and offer no real business benefits. If the output fits the brief, outsourcing can keep workflow professional and manageable and, as Joanna said, if you’ve got the budget then spend spend spend.