A conference system for the entire communications department

A conference system for the entire communications department

Jonathan Pflanzer on Annual, Quarterly, and Monthly Conferences as Management Tools

Corporate communications has been strongly aligned with a corporate newsroom model and has become significantly larger and more structured as a result of the company’s growth. Strategically, it focuses on key areas such as network expansion, network stability, and people & culture, supplemented by cross-cutting topics such as politics, regulation, sustainability, digitalization, and crisis communication.

Clear Roles in the Corporate Newsroom

The organization is clearly divided into functions and roles: channel and format managers (e.g., press, social media, C-level), brand and creative management, and a (not yet fully established) strategy team. The Editor-in-Chief handles coordination and facilitation, though this workload is now partially alleviated by an additional coordinator role.

A key component is a tiered conference system:

• Annual Conference for a Review and Strategic Outlook
• Quarterly meeting for strategic prioritization (“Big Rocks”)
• Monthly meeting for detailed content planning and ideation
• Weekly stand-ups for operational management and approval processes
• Supplementary topic-specific and channel-specific coordination meetings

A Planning Tool as a Single Source of Truth

A central planning tool serves asthe “single source of truth”for content, decisions, and tasks. Topics are planned, coordinated, and tracked there; as a rule, only content entered there is discussed. Supplementary documents remain in SharePoint/Teams and are linked.

The rollout of the tool was greatly improved by involving the teams early on and establishing clear rules for its use, and it is now widely accepted.

In addition, there are plans to further develop the control and management views, as a concise overview is still lacking, particularly for leadership levels.

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