Frontline staff in the media

How up to date is the frontline expertise of your senior leadership team, particularly if you work in a large organisation? Can they name the newest drugs or slang or identify the emerging challenges young people need support with today? If not, then why are they your representatives commenting on these issues in the media? If the aim of media coverage is to create positive change, we must use the talents and expertise of frontline children’s services staff.

The fact is your teams know more than you – certainly when it comes to the everyday reality of what is happening in the lives of the children, young people and families we support. When we visit services, we see and hear firsthand about the skill and resilience of our teams in the face of incredible challenges. So why, when it comes to raising the profile of that work, do we still hesitate to deploy one of our biggest and most inspiring resources?

Is it because we are led by the media and a tendency to seek out sensationalist case studies or a standard talking head of an executive, reciting accurate but well-trodden lines? Do we see the media as the enemy, out to get us at every turn and sniff out a scandal? Or are we worried staff might slip up and say the wrong thing?

Ultimately, the stories we see in the media about the families we support will not change until we change our approach – until we trust our teams to represent us and those we serve.

1. Build on what is already happening. Your staff are talking publicly anyway, so harness that energy. They represent you at every multi-agency meeting and every sector forum and talk to stakeholders on a daily basis. Even with the strictest of social media policies, it is unlikely your teams completely desistfrom mentioning work online. Media training reinforces the key messages of your organisation and encourages staff to frame their conversationsand comments around these. It also helps to set boundaries for what is appropriate online. When I worked at the charity Catch22, we offered acondensed version of media training to all staff atour annual conference and discovered some avid tweeters and passionate speakers we had never spotted before.

2. Empower your staff. Media training is empowering for your staff. First off, find the people in your organisation who speak passionately, know their stuff and do well at their jobs. If they speak well at meetings, the chances are they’ll be eloquent in a media context too, given permission and the right training. If they need a confidence boost, start small by asking them to do things like be in a training video, or write something for your intranet or internal magazine. This means they won’t be coming into media training completely cold and will be less likely to be paralysed by the common fear of “saying the wrong thing”. In my first few months in my role at Redthread, I worked with youth workers on “twitter takeovers” for Youth Work Week. While they were initially nervous, a thorough briefing from the communications team coupled with the instant validating feedback of likes and retweets mean they’ll hopefully be keener for bigger opportunities in the future.

3. Take the pressure off service users. Journalists love a dynamic case study, which is understandable. But most news outlets don’t have the same rigorous safeguarding duties we do and, if we’re not meticulously careful, the process of media engagement can be damaging for those we work with. Often, what journalists want most is a relatable voice who knows the reality of the issue in question. Your press officer should be able to extol the virtues of featuring frontline spokespeople over a case study. It means your organisation can be a credible and nuanced voice on sensitive issues without compromising the safety or dignity of those you support.

4. Media training boosts engagement and morale. As a leader, you’ve probably been criticised for not listening to your team enough. By rolling out media training to a broad group of spokespeople, you’re showing you not only listen to and value the opinions of staff, but want others outside the organisation to do the same. The internal benefits extend beyond this. In my experience, it is hugely helpful in forging relationships between leadership, a central comms team, and frontline and satellite services. After we trained 60 frontline professionals at Catch22, the comms team started to receive blog pitches, ideas and photos from staff much more regularly. The teams understood what we were doing and how it related to their day-to-day work. They felt valued and rightly began seeing their extraordinary work as newsworthy.

5. Leaders still need to step up. In the face of a scandal, a bad Ofsted report or any negative story, it is, and will always be, your job as a leader to step up. A frontline professional should never be wheeled out to smooth over negative press, and this should be made explicitly clear to them in the training. This isn’t about pushing an unpleasant job off your plate or creating more work for busy staff, it’s about giving frontline staff a fresh opportunity to get credit for good work. In the event of a failure, it’s still on the senior leadership team to be accountable and weather the storm. The silver lining is that your newly media-savvy workforce will understand just how challenging a job you have on your hands and, once you’re through the crisis, your organisational reputation will be easier to rebuild with a fleet of spokespeople alongside you to help.