How The Hershey Company overhauled its communications function around the work

The reformatting of the department preserved deeper knowledge of the business while giving the team more room to move between assignments.

“We actually took more of a generalist approach,” Pollart said. “Each major function has a communications person supporting it, so there’s still deep knowledge of what’s happening in areas like supply chain, finance or the different businesses. But the people executing the work can jump across those areas and across channels, which allows us to operate much more like an agency.”

Give each comms request one place to go

One of the biggest changes Hershey made was creating a more consistent way to take on messaging requests. Pollart told Ragan that Hershey changed its tech stack and added a project management system that could bring requests into one place.

“Now we have intake forms for media and internal needs, but they all come into the same place on the back end,” she said. “From there, someone can look at the work and either assign it right away or send it to the person who manages that part of the business.”

In the new-look comms department, Pollart supports Hershey’s salty snacks business. When a request comes in from that group, she can compare it against both the business’s goals and the comms team’s priorities before deciding what the team should take on.

She added that she asks several questions when requests roll in before work begins:

• Does this support one of our current priorities?
• Does comms need to own it?
• Could a template or self-service tool handle it?
• Who should own the relationship with the requester?

The process also gives Hershey a clearer way to decline work without leaving the requester on an island.

“Because we’ve aligned on our priorities at the beginning of the year and the quarter, we have something concrete to compare new work against when it comes in,” Pollart said.

Pollart also told Ragan that having a unified workflow process has also helped Hershey employees understand how to work with the reorganized team.

“That consistency has really helped, because part of the change management was teaching people who to go to and how the new model works,” she said.

Pick the people that fit the project

Once the comms team at Hershey takes on a project, the next steps involve determining exactly what needs to get done and who needs to oversee it. Pollart said that Hershey assigns people based on what a given project might need, allowing different communicators to take on different parts of the endeavor.

“Instead of meeting as a full internal team or a full external team, we assign people to the project based on what it actually needs,” Pollart said. “One person might write the press release, work on the thought leadership and then handle the internal communications around it, too. We get really specific about who is doing what and when.”

Pollart also added that Hershey uses a RACI-style (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) model to spell out who is responsible, who approves, who contributes and who needs to stay informed. When work is assigned, the team looks at capabilities in addition to capacity and their interest in a given project.

“That interest piece comes back to our individual development plans,” she said. “If I’ve said I want to learn more about government relations, for example, there might be a project where I can work alongside people who already have that experience.”

Pollart also said that her team’s new approach has become especially useful when several projects are moving at once.

“We may be working on six projects at a time, and they could all touch six completely different things,” she told Ragan. “You have to get comfortable jumping from one thing to the next. Over time, that’s made us much more well-rounded communicators.”

After a full year operating this way, Pollart said that Hershey has moved from overhauling its comms model to figuring out where it holds up and where it still needs work.

“There’s definitely a lot of time investment into the operationalizing of it and the reminding people,” she said. “As my leader would say, it’s running water through the pipes. Where is this going to work, and where is it not going to work? Then you refine from there.”

To learn more about how The Hershey Company’s new-look comms function appears on an org chart, join Ragan’s Communications Leadership Council.

Sean Devlin is the senior internal communications editor at Ragan Communications. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.