You might recall that I blogged about the complexities of managing a global comms function a few weeks ago. I have spent the past several weeks speaking with our members who either work across global and dispersed teams, or manage communications for a specific country unit of a large international company, to better understand what kinds of challenges they face in their respective roles and what tools would be helpful to their jobs easier. These interviews, as well as a recent survey of the CEC membership, indicate three top of mind challenges for global communicators:
- Message consistency: balancing consistency in what we say with local relevance
- Governance and process: creating the right organizational structure, processes, and roles
- Coordination and collaboration: idea-sharing among communicators around the world
While you are probably nodding your heads just about now at these results, once I looked beyond just the structural questions (e.g. what should our global function look like, what are required skill sets for global communicators, should we have dedicated resources in each country, etc.), one very important common problem surfaced from my conversations: communicators struggle to get the countries to adhere to a consistent approach to global communications without hindering local empowerment and relevance. Country-level communicators often reject central, top-down communications policies because they are perceived as not applicable to the local culture. Often the lines are blurred between which activities should be managed centrally vs. locally, and in the absence of clarity, people in the countries revert back to legacy processes because that is the way they are used to doing things.
Our hypothesis is that companies can drive country-based communicators to adopt a consistent approach to communications by involving them in the process of creating common principles and guidelines for how to think through comms activities. How can you do this?
- First, take an audit of current practices and set some basic principles for which activities must follow a consistent process globally, and which ones can be owned and decided at the country level. This will help you pinpoint the areas you need to apply common processes.
- Second, as you create guidelines around managing different activities, make it a collaborative process with the people who have to roll out these communications in the various countries. Country communicators will be more likely to follow processes that they understand and were a part of creating, rather than just comply with top-down directions.
Have you ever gone through such an audit or collaborative process? Have you tried to create common filters for managing specific types of communications and met with resistance? We are now documenting effective tools and best practices, and would love to hear what you are doing! Email Arlinda to share your stories and tools with our research team. For CEC members, read up on our latest observations on the topic.
Related CEC Resources:
- Managing Communications in Global and Dispersed Organizations
- Building a Collaborative Global Function
- The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set
- Toyota’s Message Alignment Review
Related CEC Blogs:
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