SLAs for internal comms – the pros and cons

Four top comms leaders share their experiences and insights on why you should - or shouldn’t - put SLAs in place in your organisation to help to manage expectations and ensure resources are used on your most important priorities. 

SLAs - The key pros and cons

Sam Phillips, senior internal communications manager, Office for National Statistics:

Pros:

· Clear expectations in comms are always good, particularly when it comes to deadlines. Having things laid out in advance for people to see gives us far more control and helps encourage teams to get in touch with us earlier.

· They can help with prioritising work. Using submission forms or similar things to filter requests based on strategic objectives or corporate priorities helps focus resources where they’re needed most.

Cons:

· Having timescales in black and white means you have to stick to them. Unfortunately, the nature of our industry means our work doesn’t always conform. If you’re dealing with a crisis and your team is stretched to capacity, but your SLA says you can turn something around in a week, people can and will expect you to do so, no matter what else is going on.

· ‘How long is a piece of string?’ Writing an article can take minutes…if you’re a subject matter expert, have full control over the content, and have no other distractions. Otherwise it can take days to get things proofed, checked, signed-off, redrafted, and signed off again. And that’s not to mention the huge list of things involved in more complex content like graphics and video. It’s nearly impossible to predict exactly how long something will take.

Different outlooks, competing priorities

by Ian Curwen, communications lead, Sellafield:

I’ve just celebrated my 10-year anniversary at Sellafield Ltd. When I joined the company, I was a lone communicator working on a small project, with a dotted line into the central communications department.

I then spent eight or so years working in the central internal communications team before I moved back out to be a lone communicator in a different part of the business.

Throughout that time, I’ve tried to work strategically, for the organisation and for the teams and projects I’ve supported. It also means I’ve experienced both sides of the SLA debate. 

Strategically the difference between both roles should be minimal – after all, whatever role you’re in, the challenge is to balance competing priorities to ensure your most important messaging lands with the target audience. 

In practical terms, that’s not always quite the case. Inevitably, I know my area of the business more than those in the central team. I try to triage requests before I go to the team, so that they’re only receiving the most important requests. But they still have to go through their central team’s triage process. This can mean that updates I think are important don’t always get the coverage they deserve.

I remember this being a constant battle when I worked in the central team – people always wanted space for their messaging, which was always the most important thing we had to tell people. The communications objective was so often as SMART as raising awareness. 

I’m not sure I’ve found the solution to this conundrum, but the suggestions I have are outlined below.

If you’re working in the business:

· Get close to the central communications team. Help them understand what you’re trying to do, so that they can help you.

· Triage and be realistic with your requests.

· Understand how the central team work, how they use their channels and how you can finesse your content for these.

If you’re working in the central communications function:

· Understand how your departments work and what’s going on in their world. 

· Ensure the business knows how you use your communications channels and why that’s the case

· Then be clear and consistent in enforcing this – it’ll be easier to turn down unsuitable requests.

I am not sure that service level agreements are always the way to go. They’re inflexible and don’t always represent the world you work in. If you do go down this route, I’d suggest allowing for some flexibility and being clear on who the final arbitrator is.

One final observation would be that communicators are often people pleasers. We like to help people to get their messages out and to deliver communications that engage and spark a reaction. Sometimes, you’ll have to say no. This isn’t failing in your duties but ensuring you can deliver your organisation’s priorities most effectively. 

Options for managing demand

Hannah Warburton, communications manager, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust:

I work in a busy comms team for a large NHS trust. While we don’t have service level agreements, we’ve tried a few different approaches to managing workload and making sure we’re supporting our organisation’s priorities

When I joined planning was quite rigid. We would look at what was coming up in our annual business plan as well as asking teams with any new work to fill in a basic comms plan, including objectives, audience, key messages, timeframes and budget. Managers looked at anything trust-wide, officers did more local campaigns and service level comms. 

The comms plan approach didn’t always work. People came to us with tactics – we want a poster to let people know about our new system, we’d like a podcast to encourage people to do some training. Filling in the plan meant teams assumed we would do what they asked but, as comms pros, we would often tell them there was a better way to achieve their goal. It could feel frustrating for everyone. 

Rigid planning also meant we were saying no a lot. While we all probably need to get a bit better at this it meant that we weren’t always meeting the needs of the organisation that, especially through Covid, were constantly evolving. 

In the last few years our team has grown and so has our workload. We’ve moved to a more flexible planning approach. We continue to look at the business plan each year and track what we know will be coming up but we now manage new work requests on a case-by-case basis. 

Each week one of the comms managers goes through the requests. We look at what work should take priority and who has capacity and skills to do it. We may push back to say, we can do this but not right now. Sometimes we say no, but we always give advice on how teams can help themselves, like using templates or posting on the staff Facebook group.  

In many ways this works for us. We’re building positive relationships, sharing lots more good news and creating impactful comms. However, it can feel like we’re too reactive and sometimes it’s tricky to work out if the new request is more of a priority than what we’ve planned in already. It’s a work in progress.

Being able to push back

Donna Jordan, head of communications, Derbyshire Constabulary:

Set clear priorities which get agreed by the exec, this gives you the authority to push back on stuff that doesn't reflect them.

Target and schedule your messages. Don't compete with yourself for people's headspace, they only have a certain capacity and messages need to be simple and relevant

Communication is more than just the comms team, others have a responsibility to brief their teams, and ensure there's a clear understanding of the message. Provide the toolkits or key messages but there needs to be accountability around delivery.

This post was first published on comms2point0, the website owned by Creative Communicators founder Darren Caveney. Read the original post.