Demonstrate the value of your communications

Diane Gayeski, Ph.D., offers a model for making the link

Diane Gayeski wants communicators to change their titles.

“Be a complexity reducer, not an information producer,” she suggested years ago at an IABC District 5 conference.

“Reframe your job to ‘manager of intangible assets’ or ‘human capital assets manager,'” she recommended at the 2006 IABC International Conference in Vancouver.

Gayeski, Ph.D., is CEO of Gayeski Analytics and associate dean and professor of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College.

She hasn’t convinced me to change my title yet. But she always gets me to change my mind.

At the Vancouver conference, she offered this model for demonstrating the value of your communications:

Focus on intangible assets

Communicators can make the biggest difference in areas like:

• Brand name
• Customer loyalty
• Employee loyalty
• Knowledge assets

These intangibles add to the company’s market value.

Use the “HICCUP” model to plan communications

HICCUP stands for:

• Hot Item. “Communicators usually cover news and announcements,” Gayeski says. Instead, work with management to identify problems, like employee turnover and wasted time finding information.
• Consequences. How does the hot item affect the organization’s performance?
• Causes. Why does the problem exist?
• Uncover opportunity. How much does the hot item cost the company? Work with management to put a dollar figure on the problem.Search the academic press to find proven-in-the-lab links between, say, employee satisfaction and reduced absenteeism. Ask: Could we do 10% better? “I always lowball it,” Gayeski says.
• Possibilities. What kind of project might we propose to solve the problem?

Report increase in shareholder value

Gayeski recommends multiplying the after-tax savings of your communication project by your stock’s price-earnings (PE) ratio.

• Say your new Intranet offering sales employees everything they need to research, create and present a proposal saved $100 in staff time.
• That might translate to $64 after taxes.
• But if your company’s stock had a PE ratio of 10, the actual increase in shareholder value would be $640.

$100 gain – 36% tax rate = $64 after-tax gain
$64 after-tax gain x 10 PE ratio = $640

Document bottom-line results

Demonstrating the financial value of your communications is the best way to gain more control in the approval process.

Get more Gayeski

Read Gayeski’s book Managing Learning and Communication Systems as Business Assets. Learn more about Gayeski Analytics.