In many organisations, communications doesn’t begin as a function. It begins as a responsibility shared by capable people.
The CEO handles important announcements. Marketing manages external messaging. People and Culture communicates with employees. Operations talks to sites and service teams. Quality handles regulatory information. Someone else manages the website, another person sends newsletters, and individual managers fill the gaps when something needs explaining quickly.
For a while, this can work surprisingly well.
Then the organisation becomes more complex.
There are more employees, more locations, more systems, more stakeholders and more decisions moving through the organisation at the same time. Regulatory expectations increase. Change becomes more frequent. Customers and families expect answers faster. Employees have more channels through which they can receive information, but not necessarily more certainty about which information to trust.
At that point, communications being everybody’s responsibility can start to mean that nobody truly owns it.
This is an important distinction.
Most organisations experiencing communication problems are not suffering from a lack of people trying to communicate. Quite often, the opposite is true.
There is a lot of communication.
The issue is that different parts of the organisation are communicating from different perspectives, with different priorities and different levels of information.
An operational leader is focused on implementation. A People leader is thinking about employees. Marketing is protecting the brand. Quality is concerned with compliance. Legal is considering exposure. The CEO is thinking about the organisation as a whole.
All of those perspectives are legitimate.
The difficulty is that someone needs to see across them.
Without that view, an announcement can be technically accurate but poorly understood. A decision can make operational sense but create an unexpected stakeholder reaction. Employees can receive information before managers are prepared to answer questions. Customers can hear one explanation while frontline teams are working from another.
Those are not simply writing problems. They are communications leadership problems.
For aged care and disability providers, this matters particularly because the stakeholder environment is unusually complex.
A single organisational decision may affect employees, residents, participants, clients, families, carers, regulators, funding bodies, community organisations, unions, government and the media.
They will not all view the decision in the same way.
They may not even define the issue in the same way.
That is why communications becomes more important as the environment becomes more complicated. The organisation needs someone thinking beyond the immediate message and asking what the decision means for the people who will experience it.
What do employees need to understand before an announcement is made?
What will families reasonably want to know?
Could a decision that appears operational internally be interpreted differently outside the organisation?
Are managers equipped to explain it?
Does what we are saying match what people will actually experience?
Where could confusion become mistrust?
These questions sit much closer to corporate affairs than content production.
One of the most valuable contributions a senior communications leader can make is getting involved before somebody says, “We need to communicate this.”
By then, some of the most important decisions may already have been made.
Good communications counsel can help leadership understand how a decision may travel through the organisation and beyond it before the organisation commits to a particular course.
That does not mean communications should dictate operational, clinical or commercial decisions.
It means those decisions should be made with a clear understanding of their communication and stakeholder consequences.
Sometimes the advice will be about language.
Sometimes it will be about timing.
Sometimes it will be about who needs to hear something first.
And sometimes the most important advice will be that the underlying decision itself is likely to create a problem no statement can fix.
That is where communications becomes an executive discipline rather than a production function.
There is also a practical reality.
Not every aged care or disability provider needs, or can justify, a full senior corporate affairs function.
Some organisations have capable marketing or communications teams but need additional senior judgement during reform, organisational change or a sensitive issue. Others have communications distributed across several executives and functional teams. Some simply reach a point where the communication demands of the organisation have outgrown the informal structure that previously worked.
The answer is not necessarily another permanent executive position.
But the work still needs ownership.
Someone needs to see the whole picture, connect leadership decisions with stakeholder expectations, establish clearer ways of working and make sure important communication does not become another responsibility squeezed between everybody’s primary job.
Because as organisations grow more complex, communication rarely becomes less important.
Eventually, it becomes too important to remain everyone’s side responsibility.
Sterling Volk provides communications and corporate affairs counsel to aged care and disability providers navigating reform, growth, change and public scrutiny.