Communicating With Internal Publics

The City is a fairly large agency. With approximately 310 full-time employees and just about the same amount of part-time employees, the city's main forms of communicating with its employees are via memos and meetings. With the recent budget cuts, the city has had the need to cut its but by ten percent three separate times over the past eight months. It looks as if layoffs may occur in the future in order to keep vital city functions running (i.e. water, sewer, garbage, emergency services, etc.).

In order to alleviate the worries of employees and to inform them of what is going to happen, the city sent out an email stating that there would be meetings with all departments individually, sent out a memo outlining what is going to occur and then held meetings with all departments in order to give more information and answer any/all questions that employees may have.

As this is a very sensitive issue, effectively communicating as to what is going to happen is vital if there was not to be panic among city employees. The first way that the city did this was to first send out an email acknowledging the rumors that had been going around and promised to address the issues at informational meetings scheduled at a future date.

Next, a memo went out to every employee outlining the budget issues and how what is going in with the State budget affects us at the local government level. And then there were the informational meetings to discuss the budget. This meeting was to address what will happen to the employees. This is what we as employees were most interested in: our jobs, our security, our family's security. They focused on cutting back as much as they could from other areas of the budget and using employee layoffs as a last resort. This encouraged us to listen to what was actually being said rather than focusing on the negatives of what will occur.

The person that conducted the meetings was the