Mel: [00:00:00] When it comes to addressing issues or solving problems in organisations, everyone has an opinion on what to do within those opinions are sometimes... maybe even often some really good ideas, but in many cases there's a lot of terrible ideas that clearly haven't been thought out or tested. When solving a problem or addressing an issue or a challenge, the bomb often gets lobbed over the fence to the comms team. Yeah, put an email out about this to make people happy about this terrible thing we've done, or something to that effect, and we all know it doesn't work that way.

Now while Comms alone won't solve everything, we can help shape the response by being the gatekeepers. What does that look like? That's what we'll talk about in today's episode. Hello friend, and welcome back to another episode of Less Chatter, More Matter at the Communications Podcast. I'm your host, Mel Loy, and I'm recording today's episode on The Lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here [00:01:00] in Brisbane, also known as Meanjin.

And today's episode is all about exploring the role of communicators as the gatekeepers of content, what it looks like and why it's important. So let's get cracking. Firstly, why is gatekeeping content important in the first place? Well, the primary reason is to protect the reputation of your business internally as well as externally.

And like I said in the intro, so many people have great ideas about how to solve a problem, but don't actually have the experience, or in some cases the nous, to understand how those ideas would actually land. So what we need to do, and one of the key ways we demonstrate our value as professional communicators.

Is, recognise the potential reputation risks, raise them and help educate people. Gatekeeping is all about, or also about protecting the integrity of your channels. I know that sounds a bit wanky, but hear me out. If your channels are [00:02:00] inundated with content from any Tom, Dick, or Harry, it's going to be a complete mess and it'll mess with your brand.

Having your brand show up consistently throughout every touch point a person has with your business is key to building trust in that brand. It's also key to delivering what your audience need. Not what people think in your business think they should hear about. So I'll say that again. It is key to delivering what your audience needs, not what people in your business think your audience should hear about.

There is a big difference there, and again, as comms pros, we're putting ourselves in the shoes of our audiences, but we're also using data to back that up. We are not making assumptions here, and that puts us in a really good position. Handing over the keys to your platforms can also dilute their effectiveness.

So for example, if multiple people are able to post your organisation's LinkedIn page and they don't have visibility of what other people are intending to post, or they just don't care fairly soon, there's multiple posts a [00:03:00] day. And this can be a challenge because they might not, uh, flow very well. Some might even not go together at all.

You think, what the hell? Why have they posted that? And then they've posted this, but also. And this isn't a hypothetical. I have seen this happen, is that when you have multiple posts a day on the same platform, a platform like LinkedIn in particular, doesn't like that at all. It thinks of this activity as spamming your audience, and so your posts become less visible overall.

And if that content is not written with the audience in mind, but is instead written from the business perspective and you haven't had a chance to review it, there is a good chance that that content is not going to land anyway. It's a waste of time and effort for everyone, and it undermines all the good work you've done to build a loyal following and build brand awareness.

So that's why gatekeeping is important. It protects the reputation of the business, it builds trust in the brand, and it maintains the effectiveness of your content and channels. So question number two, [00:04:00] what does gatekeeping actually look like? Well, the foundation of gatekeeping is your governance model, and that's basically the rules you have and the systems and processes for comms in your organisation.

Now, you might've heard me talking about this before and the importance of having a channels governance matrix, that you absolutely stick to a playbook as well, but also that you educate others, which leads to a second point here, which is education. People don't know what they don't know. Sometimes they're aware of that, sometimes they are not.

And as professional communicators, we can help stem the tide of just that crap content and crap ideas by getting on the front foot and educating people. And thirdly, everything should be tying back to supporting the business's strategic goals. If the content or the idea doesn't help you support the organisation's goals, then you have to question why you're doing it.

And finally, we also need to gatekeep when communication is not the solution. Now, again, too often in in business, people will think that an email or a [00:05:00] video is gonna fix something that's actually being caused by a poor business decision or poor leadership. And we all know that a nice email ain't gonna cut it.

Which brings us to question number three, and really the crux of this, how do we gate keep in a way that maintains relationships or challenges the hierarchy in a business? Now, let's say for example, your organisation was happily enjoying hybrid working, and then a business decision was made to force everyone back into the office, if not full-time, then, you know, four days a week.

And this might even sound familiar to some of you. This has been a pretty, uh, common situation over the last six to 12 months. Now, in this hypothetical situation, as a result of this decision, the people, they are not happy. In fact, they are pretty livid because a decision like this not only disrupts their lives, but it sends a message that the organisation doesn't trust them.

And the reality may well be that people are just as productive, if not more so working in a hybrid [00:06:00] or flexible way than an office environment. But a decision has been made from a business perspective, like, you know, um, we're paying all this rent for this... Office space, people should be using it. For example, now, let's say the leaders are hearing the discontent loud and clear.

That could be through engagement or pulse surveys. It could be an increase in staff quitting to go somewhere more flexible, or maybe they're just being really vocal and very clear. To others about how they're feeling about it. It's impossible to ignore. You might be seeing things popping up on social media, on reviews of the company, on like Glassdoor or Seek, for example.

Maybe there's some snide little comments here and there on the internal social media channels. Whatever it is, you are hearing it and it's pretty obvious. People aren't happy now. The business has options here. So they could, for example, go, okay, we're gonna stick with this for X, Y, Z reasons, but we're gonna think about how we can create more of an environment that would actually encourage people to want to come to the office more often.

They [00:07:00] could. Option number two, get more feedback from members and leaders. They could look at the data, the survey data, the exit data, uh, the productivity data, and perhaps change the rule to find a compromise position like three days a week instead of four, for example. Or they could dig their heels in and next minute.

HR has been charged with making everyone happy with four days a week, and they've come to comms. What do you think is most likely to happen? Well, friends, from what I've been hearing, option three seems to be pretty popular, and this is where some of these dumb ideas come in. Things like, let's do a video of, of vox pops of people talking about how they love being in the office four days a week.

Or why don't we write an intranet article about the benefits of being in the office. Or let's get the CEO to talk about why they like to be in the office and the benefits to the business. Let's break those down. Firstly, doing a video of the one or two people who like being in the office and who don't represent the majority, is not going to fly.

People will see through that pretty quickly. [00:08:00] Secondly, an intranet article probably won't be read and will likely just be ignored. Even if somebody does read it, they won't care or they will realise it for what it is, which is a piece of fluffy spin. And thirdly, if the CEO gets up and talks about being in the office and the benefits to the business, it's just going to come across as being out of touch and create more of this us versus them mentality between leadership and team members.

So as a professional communicator, you're in this position, you need to step in and you need to gate keep these ideas. How do you manage this? Well, I've got a few ideas for you. The first one is. Avoid going for a definitive no, like just shutting down the idea as much as we would like to instead think of it more like, we could do that or we could think about this or have you thought about this?

If you are too harsh with rejecting ideas, people will just stop offering them. And that's actually bad in general because we want to encourage environments where people, uh, raise their ideas because they're not always dumb. They're often [00:09:00] very smart ideas coming from really good experiences that we don't have eyes on.

So avoid the definitive no. And you say, what about this instead? Or we could, but; the second idea here is to help others see the audience's perspective. So for example, if you had to push back on this idea of doing a video of people talking about how apparently their love being in the office, you could say something like, look, I think we all know that while there are people who are okay with being in the office four days a week.

We've all heard that they aren't the majority. If you were someone who wasn't happy being forced to be here four days a week, and you saw a video like that, what would you think you could even say, think about yourself. What would make you feel better about being in the office? What would change your mind?

So get them to put their feet in the shoes of your audience. Idea number three, and this is a tough one. Push it back to the business and raise the reputation risks in the process. The reality is that senior leaders in an organisation like this, they often [00:10:00] won't like that. You're pushing back, you know, we have to contend with that hierarchy and that sense of status that they quite like.

So you need to speak their language, and that's a language of risk, reputation, and money. Risks in this context could be things like, you know, if you continue going down this path, you're going to increase disengagement. That in turn increases turnover, decreases productivity. It costs the business more money.

It could be that you struggle to hire more new talent and great talent as the reputation of the business as an employer just starts to crash. Maybe fewer people are willing to become customers if they think your business doesn't treat its employees well, et cetera, et cetera. Now, apart from raising the risks of this kind of comms activity, you could also use examples of other organisations where things have gone terribly wrong when they've tried to counteract poor sentiment.

Um, a example that springs to mind is a NZ bank here in Australia, one of the big four banks, uh, one of their employees last year, uh, created a parody video using a scene from a Video about [00:11:00] Hitler's last few days in his bunker, getting very angry. Some of you may have seen this, A lot of it's been pulled from the internet now because of, uh, copyright issues.

Um, but it was all about the CEO and, you know, cutting costs, et cetera, et cetera. And that went viral. Not a good look for the organisation at all. So again, these can be examples that you can bring up to go, this is the kind of thing that could happen if we're not careful about the decision that you've made.

And the fourth one is of course, provide other options that might actually work. You are the expert here and you should know your audiences really well and what could help address the issue from a comms perspective. But be careful not to take on all the responsibility for solving this problem. Comms will just be part of the equation.

There will likely be other things that need to happen, like HR involvement, maybe finance involvement it, whatever it might be. Comms is just a part of the solution. So the short story is that to be a professional communicator means [00:12:00] that you will need to gate keep. And that can be hard, and it can be uncomfortable at times.

But to protect your own reputation as a strategic advisor and a strategic thinker, sometimes you need to be uncomfortable. If you only ever behave as an order taker, that is all you will ever be treated as, and you will find it very hard to gain the respect you deserve or to take that next step in your career.

So it's time for your episode recap. Today's episode was all about the role of professional communicators as content gatekeepers. We covered number one, why it's important to Gatekeep, and it all comes down to protecting the reputation of your business internally and externally. Building trust in your brand and building and maintaining the effectiveness of your channels and your content.

We then looked at what gatekeeping actually looks like, and this is things like having a governance matrix, education systems and processes that help filter that content, making sure that we're working towards strategic goals and also understanding where comms is not the answer to a problem. [00:13:00] And number three, how we gatekeep, which can be hard when you're pushing back on senior leaders, but we can do this by accepting all ideas as contributions.

But just because their contributions doesn't mean you have to follow through on them. Offer alternatives. Help your stakeholders. See from the audience's perspective and where you need to take the discussion back to the person responsible and speak their language when having that discussion. Okay, that's all we have time for today, short and sharp.

I hope you found that useful, and if you've got other ideas or ex experiences even around this topic to share, I'd love to hear them. Please reach out if you do, and in the meantime, keep doing amazing things and bye for now.