Communicating within your agency
A government agency needs to signal, throughout the agency, its intentions to establish good relationships with the community and voluntary sector. Commitment at senior management level is critical to maintaining momentum in the work to improve community-government relationships. Part of this involves good internal communications.
Communicating within your agency
To ensure your agency really supports public participation:
- Model appropriate participatory approaches within your agency, for instance, by involving staff in the development of human resources policies.
- Create opportunities for staff to discuss their work informally, eg, at tea breaks or other informal meetings.
- Use agency intranet for bulletins and exchanges of information between staff
- Develop strategic planning processes that involve interested parties, both internal and external.
- Introduce internal reporting systems whereby service delivery staff, policy staff and management routinely communicate with one another about issues identified through community relationships.
- Develop reporting systems to feed information gained through active relationships with communities through to senior staff and government ministers.
- Provide media training for key staff involved in community initiatives.
- Provide ‘plain English’ courses for staff writing proposals, reports and evaluations.
- Respond to community enquiries promptly and courteously.
- Ensure effective links between communications and policy staff to allow prompt responses to media enquiries.
