The above statement is a typical response from an angry member of the community and encapsulates one of the most important aspects of dealing with communities. The trap is in knowing what the “˜right thing’ is! In order to find this out, you need to know the community, and to know the community you must effectively engage with it. This leads to the first critical factors in community engagement – courtesy and respect.
It is important for me to emphasise that my comments in this article are written from an operating point of view and not as a specialist in community relations. This is because community relations (dealing with the general public) – like law, accounting or mergers and acquisitions – is a specialist area and as such has specialist knowledge and experts. The trick for operating people like you and I is not to know all the answers but to know when we need help, because getting it wrong is both time-consuming and expensive.
Courtesy and respect
It is important to take the time to get to know the area affected by the project, and the community involved. There is no substitute for decision-makers spending time in the affected community. Get some local advice and support so that you can accelerate your learning. There are always some people in the community who will try to help you if you are willing to be guided. This can include local suppliers and professionals.
It is important to be aware of the previous developments proposed for the area. Someone has always been there before you. Knowing about the past helps you to avoid previous errors and most importantly unfavourable comparisons, which can put you behind before you start.
It is important to call things by their proper names. Calling a stream a brook or vice versa says “˜I don’t know and I don’t care!’ Also remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder; people for the most part like where they live. Do not underestimate how you will impact that and how they will respond.
The challenge is to know the community so that you can accurately assess the likely impact your activities will have and minimise them. It is also integral to maximise the upside for the community and give them a reason to accept any negative impacts your project might pose. Most importantly it will help you to establish and keep their trust.
Nature abhors a vacuum
If you don’t provide information others will, and a lot of it will be wrong. The community communicates more rapidly and at a lower cost than you do, don’t underestimate this challenge.
Most modern communication loops – mobile phones, the internet, desktop publishing and networking sites – work as well or better for the community than they do for your business. There is always a budding web page designer who will give up their time to set up and maintain a site, and bear in mind that the internet is forever! Misinformation, bad information, irrelevant information and good information are all mixed in together. While companies are bound by the constraints of accuracy, fairness and substantiation, some in the community are not.
From the outside, it is easy to think of a community as “˜one’, when of course it is made up of many different groups, each of which must be tended to, possibly in different ways. By all means categorise the community into different groups based upon how they will be affected by the project, or in terms of how they should best be communicated with, but beware of other classifications because they can be unhelpful. This raises the issue of internal communications. These must also be managed carefully and consistently as with external communications. The tone of internal communications sets the tone for businesses dealings and it needs to be right. In addition, internal communication doesn’t always stay internal.
The other dimension to communication is the media. Working with the media in regard to community relations is different from general media communications and requires local knowledge and experience. Be proactive with the media, get to know them and let them get to know you. It is best to do this before you have a problem!
In the end, planned, well-thought out communication delivered personally will be most effective.
The basic rules of communication are:
- Provide good information and lots of it;
- Communicate early and often using methods that work well in the community;
- Be careful to manage not only “˜what is’ but also “˜what is seen to be’;
- You can safely assume it will take five to ten times the effort to correct bad information as it does to provide good information in the first place; and,
- Communicate, communicate, communicate.
As an operating manager it is easy to relate the job of communicating with communities to the job of communicating with employees. It has been said that to communicate with employees it is necessary to send the same message 30 times in order for it to be fully and effectively received. If we remember that an employee has a significant vested interest in their employer, we begin to understand how much communication is needed to be effective in a community who has had no prior involvement with the business.
Community rights
Communities know their rights and they will fight for them. Fighting about rights is where no one wants to be. The objective is to avoid this situation. It is important to note that communication does not come naturally to most corporate entities, particularly those with engineering cultures. It is also important not to think of this as a community relations problem – it’s not – it is an operational problem and in the end the operational people will need to have it front and centre in their minds. The best parallel is safety, we know this is integral to operations and as such it is managed that way. Community relations, like safety, must become part of your business. Your people on the ground, your subcontractors and your operational management, must accept a responsibility to communicate properly and manage it as part of the job.
Disputes with the community probably won’t stop the project. What they will do is:
- Cost more money in additional requirements;
- Cost time, which in turn will cost money;
- Lower tolerances (no exceptions or excuses), which costs money; and,
- Reduce access, etc, which costs money.
This is all apart from the issues of loss of reputation and brand damage.
Much of a company’s relationship with the community will be set early, so make your first moves your best moves. Engage with the community and listen hard to what they have to say.
Doing the “˜right thing’
The most common problem with community relations is to underestimate the task at hand or to see it as a separate task. When problems begin it is all too common to respond slowly or worse still, badly. We can all think of situations in which we have seen others do this and from the outside it is often obvious. It is important for operational management to recognise the issue as part of their responsibility, and to engage professionals to assist them in managing it. It is important to manage the situations from the very beginning and not to underestimate the opportunity in doing it right the first time, or for that matter, the cost of getting it wrong. In the end doing the “˜right thing’ is the lowest cost solution.