How communications departments are structured

Where comms fits in an organization is of paramount

importance, as communicators strive to influence

top-level strategy. Here’s a look at how communicators

at six organizations fit into flow charts—and

what might work best at your organization.

By Russell Working

How communications departments are structured

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Taylor Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Yale University . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Manulife Canada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Cargill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

ADM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .12

Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15

Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17

Contents

How communications departments are structured1

Just last year, marketing and communications were separate units at the homebuilding company Taylor Morrison.

This meant there was little coordination between the two organizational cousins responsible for messaging in the nationwide organization, says Jaclyn Rygg, senior manager of corporate communications.

“We found that everyone was just kind of running around making content and editorial strategies for different audiences,” Rygg says. “We wanted to have one story and one narrative that goes across all of our audiences.”

Time to overhaul the org chart. The company merged the two teams, better positioning communications and marketing to tell stories on behalf of the company.

The question of how communicators should fit into the flow chart is one every organization must answer. How best to structure comms to champion suc-cess and drive key messages? Should communications and marketing be combined into one department? Are internal comms and PR closely allied, or at arm’s length?

In Ragan Communications’ 2019-2020 benchmark survey, over 700 respon-dents report a variety of organizational structures. Thirty-seven percent say their department oversees centralized communications for the entire

INTRODUCTION

How communications departments are structured2

enterprise. Some 15% are decentralized, in which one team handles enter-prise-wide communications, with individual units operating their own commu-nications. A plurality, 44%, operate a matrixed system, or a combination of the two.

Shared strategies among internal and external comms is the norm. A land-slide 55% say they have integrated responsibilities, as internal, external and other functions meet regularly and coordinate strategy and content. Another 41% percent have siloed internal, external and other functions, operating separately for the most part. The remainder report other alignments.

Whether they are reorganizing or content with their current structure, perhaps every communicator is looking to influence top-level strategy.

“Having a seat at the table makes it easier to have dream projects that see the light of day,” Rygg says.

Following is a look at how six organizations have structured their communica-tion departments.

How communications departments are structured3

In the new, combined department at Taylor Morrison, 12 people work on the marketing and communication team, five of them on the comms side. They work for a rapidly growing company whose workforce has increased by a third since 2018.

They report to the chief marketing and communications officer, who formerly was chief communications officer. She in turn reports to the CEO, affording her the ability to influence strategic decisions.

That brings a creative synergy to marketing and comms, Rygg says.

“We all get in a room and do a great brainstorm of stories we want to tell for the upcoming months,” Rygg says. “And everyone feels really energized by that. I think we have eliminated silos, and we’ve made our brand look a little bit better.”

The combined team has tackled a new project: the company’s first-ever na-tional campaign. Homebuilding has traditionally been a local business with just-around-the-corner marketing. Drive down the road, and you’ll see signs that read NEW MODEL HOMES THIS WAY. Together, the combined teams produced the new “Make Moves” campaign, including three videos for Taylor Morrison’s websites and its YouTube channel.

“I don’t think we ever would have been able to pull off anything like that had we not joined as a team,” Rygg says.

TAYLOR MORRISON

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Lalani Perry, assistant vice president of internal communications at Yale University, came on board five years ago as director of HR communication. Her team built a branding campaign with an externally facing website called “It’s Your Yale.”

YALE UNIVERSITY

They marketed to employees the value of working for the storied university, which offered advantages such as Yale’s culture, the financial and medical benefits, and wellness programs, she says. The campaign had legs. Indeed, it was so successful that university leaders asked Perry to restructure and unite the various communications departments across different divisions.

What she built was a unified department along an agency model, with com-munications, staff engagement, recognition, digital strategy and design

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teams. This allows a degree of specialization, rather than having everyone be expected to master the entire range of skills from design to writing. (Perry herself reports to the VP of human resources and administration.)

“When I was in corporate, that’s how primarily it had been structured,” says Perry, who formerly worked at Aetna and other organizations. “So it was help-ful to kind of lift and load that model, versus having a generalist who would try to do everything from soup to nuts.”

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Not long ago Manulife Canada—one of the maple leaf nation’s oldest and largest financial services groups—faced a communication problem wrapped in a business challenge.

Formerly, the company’s five lines of business operated independently, with minimal messaging coordination, says Nicole Welbanks, executive vice presi-dent of communication. Scattered communicators tended to be order-takers, writing up emails or intranet articles on request, rather than pursuing a com-mon strategic vision.

Yet the company has been undergoing “a mega-transformation” to digitize the business and take it into the 21st century, Welbanks says. The goal is to bet-ter address the threat of nimble competitors. That called not only for strategic realignments in the way business is done, but also for a new communication structure.

Among the problems at Manulife, “orphaned communicators” were scattered across business units—and no one seemed to know how many there were, Welbanks says. Furthermore, certain executives, including the president and CEO, urgently required more support.

What’s more, the company’s engagement scores were poor. Alarmingly, these scores were the worst of all in the 200-officer senior leadership team, which reports to the executive leadership team. Because of the company’s siloed model, Manulife senior leaders often had little advance notice of coming changes in other business units.

MANULIFE CANADA

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To address these issues and align comms with the strategic vision, Welbanks has led a centralization of communications, corralling those “orphaned com-municators” across the business into one team to pursue the larger vision of strategic transformation.

Welbanks reorganized communications so that each of the 14 senior execu-tive team members has dedicated communications support—a subject matter expert familiar with their business. “You could almost put our Canadian lead-ership team on top of this [org chart], and you would have alignment to that,” Welbanks says.

“We got really focused on engagement overall, on customer experience, on what we were trying to do to transform that part of our organization,” she says.

As for those unhappy senior leaders, Manulife made sure they knew about new developments early. Communications began bringing them together quarterly on a call with the CEO, who reveals quarterly results and tells them what they should know about as officers in the company.

“We wrapped our arms around that group in a more dedicated way,” Welbanks says.

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An impressive array of metrics proved the success of the new approach. Nine-ty-five percent of comms survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the communication they receive from leadership is helping them learn about strategy, transformation, values, wins and the culture the company is building, Welbanks says.

The company gained 11 points in strategic alignment, and 7 points in “cus-tomer obsession.” Engagement went up by 4 points overall. And those disen-gaged members of the senior leadership team? Their engagement numbers shot up by 15 points.

“I don’t think even I could have said a year ago that it would work as well as it has,” Welbanks says. “It’s been amazing.”

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Professionals know that marketing and communications sometimes work at cross-purposes, leading to misunderstandings and wasted effort on both sides.

“In many organizations marketing and communications are very separate,” says Cargill’s Jennifer Patel. “They must work together, but it’s almost a ‘frenemy’ relationship sometimes, where there’s overlap. There can be difficult ‘Whose turf is it?’ questions, so to speak, between marketing and communications.”

CARGILL

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That’s why Cargill reorganized to combine the two departments under one leader. As global communications lead and global marketing lead, Patel oversees those teams for Cargill’s Bioindustrial Group.

The key question, Patel says, was, “How does this work if we have marketing and communications actually part of the same team?”

Despite the differences, the two disciplines overlap in ways that can be used for common purposes, Patel says. That requires closer alignment. Consider a new product launch—and the marketing team does the strategic marketing and pricing analysis. They look at trends and branding around the launch.

Yet many times the communicator is the one aware of all the product lines and the entire business, Patel says. When marketing and communications are under the same roof, they can unify the message not just about the product, but within the portfolio of products and the global environment.

“As we begin to work more closely, it becomes a much easier platform for us to tell our stories internally,” Patel says.

Marketers tend to think about customers—an external perspective—even as communicators weigh internal and external audiences. Simply by having the new relationship, it becomes easier to amplify marketing stories through communication channels, Patel says.

The success of the model can be seen anecdotally, she says. A year ago, marketing was pitching the story to media outlets, and comms didn’t know about it. Now, the relationship is smoother with the two units aligned. In addition, comms can amplify marketing stories through internal channels, “which has a huge impact in our organization because we are so large and so diverse,” she says.

This helps the team mine for stories for the internal newsletters and leader-ship updates. The new structure even improves town halls, helping surface success stories for leaders to share. And externally, Cargill can better social-ize stories than previously.

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The process hasn’t instantly been smooth, but there have been good wins in joining forces to tell stories through marketing, PR and internal channels, Patel says. Going forward, another opportunity is combining forces for trade shows, such as an important one coming up in Italy.

“Are we connecting with trade media when we are in Milan for a power generation show?” Patel says. “Do we have a strong comms plan supporting the trade show strategy and vice versa? And is our messaging aligned?”

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At ADM (Archer Daniels Midland Co.), Brett Lutz, vice president of global com-munications, heads both internal and external messaging, reporting to the chief strategy and growth officer. (Also reporting to this officer is Lutz’s peer, the head of the global marketing department.)

ADM’S goals are to promote and protect its global reputation and purpose and to generate measurable business value through internal and external communications. ADM seeks to reach stakeholders such as employees (current and future), business leaders, journalists, investors and local communities.

ADM

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Lutz’s 20-person team has responsibility for four areas:

• Business and regional communications seeks to serve as “the trust-ed advisors to our business leadership,” Lutz says. These team mem-bers do strategy planning, and they advise and support regional and global communications. This section handles employee, executive and change communications.

• Corporate reputation and proactive storytelling. This includes brand reputation and what would be traditionally considered external com-munications, Lutz says. They are position ADM reputationally, and the group includes proactive media relations newsroom, as well as content strategy for digital properties (such as social media and the website), crisis response, executive visibility, and investor communi-cations.

Lutz says this team deals with the questions, “Where do we perceive a gap between where we’d like to be perceived and where we might be perceived? And how do we close that gap through the communi-cation activities that we take on?”

• Brand and digital engagement. This six-person team supports brand identity and advocacy. Its interest areas include corporate brand, data analytics and insights, digital property management (such as the ADM.com website and social media), and graphic design, along with photo and video.

This group gathers insights “that might help us think about what’s around the corner so that we can begin preparing ourselves for what’s next,” Lutz says.

• Communications planning and performance accelerates commu-nications innovation, elevates performance, and sets comms stan-dards and processes. It is also in charge of comms team skill devel-opment, collaboration, engagement and metrics.

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Paralleling this group, ADM has a separate team in charge of governmental relations and related external communications. He works collaboratively with this team, but it reports to a different structure.

“I’d say the other thing that’s really been helpful to us is the creation of a newsroom type of concept, which allows really the full set of the communica-tions team—whether they’re business communications or they’re the reputa-tion team—to come to the table with ideas about how they can help generate outcomes through communication efforts.”

Although Lutz doesn’t sit on the executive council, he participates in most of its meetings. “I provide pretty frequent updates on how we’re driving the strategy of the organization, especially from the communications landscape,” he says.

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ALYESKA PIPELINE SERVICE CO.At Alaska-based Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., Chief Communications Officer Michelle Egan heads a team of seven, communicating for the 800-employee company. Alyeska operates and maintains Trans Alaska Pipeline System, which has employees in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Valdez and field locations along the 800-mile pipeline.

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In addition to herself, her team includes directors of federal government rela-tions and stakeholder relations, along with managers of communications and public relations, a communications lead and a communications coordinator.

Egan reports directly to the CEO, though this was not always the case. “The way that I made that work,” she says, “was to make sure that I had relation-ships with my VPs and with the other leaders in the company that built that credibility.”

A far-flung pipeline company presents challenges for communications. Her audience ranges from analysts working in an urban office environment to workers along the pipeline route.

“A big part of my job is shaping the culture of the organization,” she says.

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CONCLUSIONAny number of communications models can work for an organization, and innumerable factors enter into the organizational chart. Company size, diver-sified business units, geography and history can all play a role.

Clearly, though, organizations are rethinking the old structures. Comms and marketing are finding common ground as the internet and social media blur the line between PR and advertising campaigns. In an era when news from distant locales can go international in a flash, organizations are unifying com-municators once siloed by geography.

Finally, the understanding that “everything internal is external” is knocking down the walls between internal comms and PR. After all, any all-hands email is just a click away from being forwarded to a reporter.

“The people who truly partner with the business can’t focus only on internal communications,” says Lutz. “They think about business strategy from a per-spective of, ‘How do I achieve the results the business is looking for across the entire pool of resources our communications team has at its disposal, both internally and externally focused?’”

It is this question that is leading communications into a new creative era of common effort and business success.