Sometimes, there are advantages to being an independent authority. Take, for example, how the London Underground handled the firing of their popular announcer, Emma Clarke. (She’s the one who recorded the announcements for the stops):

“London Underground is sorry to have to announce that further contracts for Ms. Clarke are experiencing severe delays,” a spokesman said.

There seem to be several different reasons for her firing - one of which was the mock in-train announcements available on her personal site:

“Passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus, please accept they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers.”

Of course, the interview she gave to This is London may not have helped:

“The thought of being stuck in the Tube with strangers for minutes on end and having to listen to endless repeated messages of my own voice fills me with horror.”

Canada’s Public Service Commission prepared a back-of-the-envelope survey of labour mobility last year, and identified the civil service professions that are experiencing the most turnover and volatility. The results were reported in the Ottawa Citizen this morning.

Not surprisingly, the official category for communications specialists and public relations flacks was among the top five (of something ridiculous like 40) classification groups. Communications specialists, economists and human resources specialists seem to be able to write their own ticket in the public service - as long as they have appropriate qualifications and relevant work experience.

This means that there is a fairly fluid system of supply and demand for their services. Communications specialists can move from position to position, and department to department, unlike most other professions, which tend to be more inflexible. (After all, where are those woodlot specialists, marine engineers and toy testers going to go?)

Some of this movement is between Communications Branches, the Deputy Minister’s Office and the Minister’s Office. After all, communications specialists have specific skills as aggregators and analysts of information that are much sought after by these higher offices.

Do we have any statistics about the movement of public servants between the public service and Federal Minister’s Offices? Well, you’re in luck! The PSC just completed an audit of such movements, as undertaken between April 1990 and January 2006.

A total of 157 public servants moved between departments and Minister’s Offices in that time. The PSC decided that 99 of those staffing actions were of little risk - but that the other 58 warranted further investigation. Here are those 58 positions, broken down by movement among classification groups that require a post-secondary degree:

Okay. 19/58 for the IS group. That’s 33% of the movement. Considering that most Minister’s offices have a communications assistant, a press secretary, and a Director of Communications, that’s a strong statement. Strong enough to elicit this comment in the audit:

“Approximately 44% of the public servants included in the audit came from the IS or ES classification groups. These groups are often responsible for aspects of communications or policy advice within an organization. Because of the nature and profile of their duties, public servants in these types of positions or in higher-level positions who work in a minister’s office may present a greater risk (real or perceived) to political impartiality when returning to their home departments.”

Here’s the new strategy for communications undertaken by the European Union: a shared agenda and framework, but with an extremely local focus. The innovation? Looks like the EU may pony up the funds to underwrite some of this activity.

For too long we have blamed one another for the EU’s communication failures. It is time to work together on a shared agenda based on agreed priorities.
Cooperation and coherent communication is the way forward. Moreover, we need an agreed framework within which to cooperate. What we proposed in our recent paper is an inter-institutional agreement under which much of the communication work done by the commission, council and parliament would be based on a common annual work plan, reflecting a common set of communication priorities and linked to the annual policy strategy the three institutions have agreed on.
The commission has also proposed to establish management partnerships with individual member states. To put it simply, this means that individual governments – if they so wish – will implement specific communication plans that have been agreed with the commission and are financed by the commission. The action taken under these plans should be as decentralized as possible – with the emphasis on going local.

That’s an excerpt from an article penned by Margot Wallström, the EU Commissioner responsible for communications, in Parliament Magazine.

Remember the faux news conference put on by FEMA last month to brief about the response to the California wildfires? The “internal investigation” is complete, and some people have fallen under the bus.

Apparently, some poor decisions were taken in deciding to hold a news conference at short notice, then, when reporters could not make it in time, have agency communications staff substitute for reporters by lobbing questions at the Deputy Administrator.

“Much like in an airline crash or automobile accident that was reconstructed, there were several different points leading up to the press conference where, had a single decision been made differently, the event itself could have been averted,” [DHS spokesperson Russ] Knocke said Thursday (AP, via TPM)

FEMA’s press secretary at the time now works for a public relations agency in Utah (For those of you keeping track at home, that Washington to Utah in two weeks). The Director of Communications had been scheduled to take up a new job with Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Needless to say, that job fell through.

There’s a couple of hints in the AP story that the FEMA staffers fell victim, in part, to a predetermined PR strategy and poor communications between the press shops at FEMA and DHS:

• DHS had asked the agency to hold a press conference before the DHS Secretary and the FEMA Administrator landed in California that day; and
• FEMA’s press secretary had sent an email to his boss and the DHS official responsible for communications, asking for more time - but only 43 minutes before the scheduled start of the news conference.

There’s a swipe at the civil servants involved in the Washington Post coverage:

“[FEMA Administrator] Paulison said he did not expect additional disciplinary action but would reorganize and retrain the agency’s 90-member external affairs staff.

“Those are career people. They should have stepped up and said something, they really should have. But their bosses said ‘Do this,’ and they did it — some reluctantly, but there’s no excuses for that,” Paulison said. He called the impact on FEMA’s credibility “devastating.”

Really? Is that sort of independent action possible when the upper ranks of the administration are staffed by partisan appointees?

I’d be really interested to know.

Technorati Tags: FEMA, puppet theatre, DHS

This week, in Ottawa’s Hill Times, we can find a discussion of the centralized message control for Cabinet Ministers, Parliamentary Secretaries and Members of Parliament in Ottawa.

“Reporters who work hard and want to find a minister? Hang out by their car for an afternoon. You’ll get an interview,” the reporter said, adding that he has a database in his BlackBerry that identifies ministers by their licence plates. “It’s my secret sauce.”  (PMO Clears Media Requests, Hill Times)

Another observation, confirmed by a number of off-the-record quotes and not-for-attribution comments, is that the strategy is not media-phobic, but simply centred on media outside Ottawa.

As a communicator, I always find management retreats are a field of flowers - and landmines.

Flowers: there is never a better opportunity to take measure of the important performance markers for your organization:

A management retreat also offers the opportunity to:

Landmines: if you don’t remain alert and participate throughout the management retreat, you can end up bearing a heavy burden:

In addition, most communicators spend their every day with their head buried in operational detail: we have little time to look at the larger management priorities.

This can be a tremendous risk for communications manager, especially at a management retreat. You have to arrive prepared, and that means being aware of: