This blog is part of our Building a Global Mindset series to help communicators increase their own cultural awareness and global perspective.

As the world’s most populous country, fastest growing economy, and stereotypically hard working culture, it’s no wonder that so many companies are focused on expanding their footprint within China. That said, it can be a great challenge for multinational companies to effectively recruit top Chinese talent and build engagement with their current employees.  This is due to paradoxes in the Chinese culture including values of traditionalist versus advanced practices, material success versus relationship-driven business exchanges, and socialism versus capitalism.

This environment leads communicators to ask questions like “will our internal social media investments be effective with our Chinese employees?” “How should we prepare leaders and managers to drive dialogue in an environment where employees may naturally be inclined to let their boss do the talking?” “What values matter most to potential employees in this market?”

We would love to hear your experience with employee communications in China and thoughts on these questions (comment below.)

In the meantime, based on conversations with numerous MNCs and working closely with our peers in the HR space, we’re tracking some of the key trends in employee communication specific to working in China, including:

3 Trends about Employee Communications in China:

1. Chinese Employees Increasingly Choose Chinese Firms over MNCs:
While a higher number of Chinese work for multi-national corporations, in the past 4 years there has been a 19% increase in employees’ preferences to work for Chinese firms. For many, this stems from a fear that recession-hit Western companies lack growth opportunities and have a glass ceiling. Read More »

Hopefully by now we have all escaped the craze of crowded malls for the last time in 2011. We’re down to the wire—the holidays are here! That said, it’s never too late for a last minute gift for your fellow communicators.

So a year ago we were asking ourselves the same question: what are the top things on a communicators’ wish list. It’s been a year full of hard work but for many communicators, the wish list in 2010 looks pretty similar to the one today—check it out! As technology has gotten smarter, and our stakeholders’ expectations have changed, there are a few things I would add:

1)      Internal Collaboration Vendors: Technology has moved us beyond discussion forums or internal “Facebook”-like sites and enabled our intranets to act as business collaboration tools with social activity streams that put relevant content and people in front of our employees.

• Check out this best practice from MITRE and explore vendors with collaboration capabilities

2)      Message Planning Support: Now, the dream gift for most communicators and marketers would be access to NeuroFocus—access to neurological research which maps the emotional connections and associations that stakeholders have with certain products, messages, or experience to scientifically plan messages and campaigns. Teams like Frito-Lay have seen the monetary returns on this type of information.

For those communicators who are unable to strap an EEG to your stakeholders’ heads, the CEC has developed a close second—a new Writing for Impact Workshop. This half day session digs into tactics for deep stakeholder understanding to help you reflect stakeholders’ interest, values, and language as well as how to prompt action through the way we write or package messages. Really, it’s a gift for the whole team.

• Learn more of schedule a session for your team here. Read More »

Since 2007, communicators have increased the percent of their budget spent on measurement and monitoring by 119%. And today, over 80% of communicators are actively using social media to listen to, talk to, or energize their stakeholders.

For many teams, there has been great focus on improving the corporate Facebook page or becoming more outcomes-focused with the information shared on Twitter. While we may have connected with our employees or our strongest supporters through social channels, we know from our peers in Marketing that the value of a general consumer as a follower may not be what we’d hoped.  In fact, the average consumer follows 8.9 organizations on Facebook and looks to these channels mostly for deals as opposed to general updates about the organization.

What we do know is that social media has been created to give people an environment that provides them with information where they want it, when they want it. Unfortunately, if your current social media approach focuses on communicating on channels in your control, you may be missing the mark of stakeholders’ expectations.

That said, with trillions of sites to monitor the countless conversations that may be going on about your industry, your company, or your products, it is an impossible task for Communications to take on alone. Essentially, we need some help creating tentacles of information in the places where our stakeholders are communicating to lure them back to our site for more information.

Let me share with you a notable approach to this challenge from National Instruments (NI)–a hardware and software engineering company with no more than 15% of its business in one industry alone (imagine the volume of various social sites that could house relevant conversations for them!) With only one communicator dedicated to social media, they were able to put the stakeholders’ information needs first while keeping a lens to their own business objectives. Read More »

“Honestly, Dana, we’re such a small team. There aren’t even 10 of us so:

…we can barely keep up with the requests that come from our business partners.

… demonstrating our impact comes more from getting stuff done than specific measurement strategies.

…it is probably less important that we have a planning template as it is easy for us all to be looped in.

…we don’t have the time or money to invest in staff development.”

Believe me, I hear you! While we all wish it weren’t so, the typical company between $1-5 Billion in revenue has only 10 communicators. We’re talking a median of only 2.1 communicators for every 1,000 company employees who need to understand their role in strategy, who needs more valuable information from the intranet, newsletters or events, and who needs a manager and senior leadership team who is comfortable communicating with them. And we can’t even quantify the number of external stakeholders we’re trying to influence!

All of that said, when you’re in a small communications team, you may actually be in a uniquely positive position. Imagine trying to coordinate the projects, channels, agency relationships or budgets of 50 or even 100 different communicators working on simultaneous activities.

No–when we’re few in number, we can be a lean, mean, and highly effective communications team. We just have to learn to think like our “big” peers and come to work every day with the same drive as a team of 3, 5, or 10!

Here are 3 ways to think and act BIG, even when you’re small: Read More »

If someone asked you today how you feel about your job you might say all positive things—you’re on a roll on your current project, you’ve gotten some good feedback recently from your manager, and right now you’re contributing to the organization in a way that you might not get to do elsewhere. But how did you feel about your job six months ago? And do you think you’ll still be at your company in a year?

The various changes and related stress that employees have faced over the past few years may not impact engagement today but it does have a great impact on their engagement capital—a look into engagement that includes employee perceptions of the past, present, and future.  Creating an organization with high engagement capital is a top priority of both Communications and Human Resources team.  How aligned are your current efforts? Read More »

They may be experts at setting strategy and managing a leading organization, but unfortunately not all of our CEOs can walk up to a podium with confidence and truly engage their employees, investors, or stakeholder audience.  How about your CFO? CIO? Are they able to lead a presentation that captures and keeps the audiences’ attention and teaches them something?

Coaching the leaders of the organization to be better communicators with their respective stakeholders is a critical skill of today’s communicators—and one that our skills maturity assessment highlights as a common development area for today’s communicators. Our goal here at the CEC is to help you be a better coach, and thus enable better communication across your organization.

Recently, the oh-so-talented team of executive advisors at the Corporate Executive Board gathered for a few days of training (yep–we’re trying to make our presentations more engaging and effective for our members as well!). Below are 10 of the top tips from CEB’s masters of effective presentations. Share them with your leaders in your next coaching session! Read More »

As is smart, today’s communicators are increasingly focused less on crafting messages and more on enabling communication across the organization. Core activities include coaching leaders to communicate more effectively, enabling employees to participate in social media, inviting stories and testimonials customers, and looking for opportunities to more closely align  with the needs of the business. While the function evolves dramatically, one core still remains ever critical: writing.

Good writing, however, is no longer about perfect grammar or storytelling—good writing today is about prompting audience action.

As the CEC looks to support its members’ continued development across the core 16 communications competencies, we have explored what proficiency in writing looks like in today’s environment. Last week, we had the opportunity to preview a new Writing for Impact Workshop with the Communications team at W.W. Grainger. Our session focused on clarifying the one key engagement idea that solidifies for readers why they should care and would want to take action.

Our peers in Marketing believe that a simple, memorable advertising slogan can drive a campaign’s success. In Communications, however, a simple, catchy, and consistent message won’t do the trick–we aren’t typically talking about the coolest new consumer product. Our aim then must be to create messages that emphasize our shared values with our audience and clarify the desired action of our audiences.

Read More »

When you think of that quintessential “start-up” guy or gal, or that cutting-edge talent that can bring the right level of innovation and creativity to your company, you may picture someone who:

• identifies unique opportunities in the market
• is driven by ideas and the possibility of having disproportionate impact, or
• is going to be proactive and smart about getting the resources and knowledge they need to make an idea a reality.

These are all concepts any growing and successful company in today’s marketplace, especially in the leading edge tech industry, would desire in their employees.

The idea of us being “corporate” (vs. creativity being more free and independent), however, can get in the way of our companies’ success in recruiting this type of top talent. Indeed, we see in CEC’s new study on Building a Change-Ready Organization that while 41% of employees are highly agile* in their personal lives, that number drops to 23% when we look at how agile people are in the confines of the work environment.    *FYI, by “agile,” we mean proactively adapting to changes and new opportunities with a constant learning and sensing stance.

As we look at the speed of new product development, the high frequency of M&A, and continually maturing organizational processes that many high tech companies face, these major changes demand more than high levels of employee effort, but high levels of employee agility to ensure your company gets the performance it needs. Read More »

Despite the “DO NOT RUN” sign on the pool deck, every kid at the pool ran until being whistled at by the lifeguard, being yelled at by Mom, or experiencing their first good scrape from the cement. And how many times were we reminded to put on a helmet, wear our seat belts, make sure our laces were tied tightly, or stop running with scissors? While we often test the limits, safety has been instilled in us all from a young age.

That said, safety often comes at the cost of efficiency (and sometimes a little bit of fun). In parts of our lives there is still someone there to demand a certain level of safety from us—be it a traffic cop, a TSA security guard, or a Mom (yep–she’s still around!). But at work, even if it is a small part of a manager’s role description, no one can be a full-time “safety cop.”

Many companies, particularly those in the energy/utility, manufacturing, and other heavy industries have been asking us about how to increase awareness of safety goals within their organizations. What is most critical for communicators, however, is to understand our role in helping employees align their everyday behavior to these safety goals—independent of a manager being there to remind them to use the handrail, drive more carefully, wear a helmet, etc. Read More »

Outside of access to hiking, skiing, amazing food, and CEC’s awesome West coast members, one of my favorite aspects of my new home in SF is the presence and energy of the cutting-edge Tech world. I spent this past weekend face-timing, checking out the iPad 2, and getting caught up on the buzz from South by Southwest by friends who work at Facebook, Linked In, Google, and the MLC.

Influencers. Gaming. Digital Wallets. The Cloud. What does the interactive nature of communications really bring for us all? In marketing and external communications we’re looking at immediacy, relevancy, and accessibility. Our employees demand these things in their external lives. In their professional lives they are quietly (or not so quietly) demanding these things as well—they want access to the tools they need when they need them.

To achieve this, Communicators in many high tech companies are expanding to mobile access to their intranets. Today’s intranets house company news, directories, business applications, internal discussion forums, business applications, or even the menus to the onsite cafeteria. Whether your staff spends its time on the road, puts in a few work hours in their evenings, or spends the majority of the day in meetings away from their desks, adapting internal channels to provide “always on” access is a critical step to making this channel as user centric as possible. Read More »