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.

2. Compensation, and the opportunity for increases in future compensation, matter most:
The average Chinese employee rates compensation as the number 1 attribute in the EVP—nearly double any other attribute. Development opportunities and future career opportunities are critical retention drivers for Chinese employees.

3. Top-Down Is Not Dead:
In general, hierarchical business relationships are expected and accepted. Employees look to senior leaders for direction and are accustomed to certain levels of formality.

Implications for Communications:

• Emphasize your companies’ stability and long-term commitment to expanding in China
• Promote local development opportunities and career paths (limit requirements to be relocated abroad to advance)
• Deploy senior staff members to make general announcements to employees in China, but emphasize team dialogue and the ability to speak up to drive employee ownership of strategy

CEC Members: Check out A Communicator’s Guide to China for additional recommendations on how to manage your employee communications, as well as PR, CSR, and consumer communications in China.

CEC Related Resources:

• Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to China
• Building a Global Mindset: An Overview of Cultural Values That Shape Interpersonal Communications
• Global Perspective/Cultural Awareness Resource Center
• Managing Communications Across Global and/or Virtual Teams

CEC Related Blogs:

• 3 PR Trends in China
• Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications
• Managing a Truly GLOBAL Communications Function
• Posts from the Road: China

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.

3)      SEO Optimization Tools: Get the messages you spend so much time crafting actually seen by the readers we care about online. Fine tune text for the web by using online tools which improve optimization.

• Click here to review the top 50 search engine optimization companies

4)      Vocal translator: Overcome writers block and quickly capture your thoughts to get more done faster with a vocal translator that turns spoken words into simple emails or documents.

• Check out Dragon Naturally Speaking speech recognition software

5)      Pocket Camera: Save thousands of dollars on high-end video footage with a simple, portable cameras which can provide engaging, cutting-room-floor content to share with

• Create your own unique design on a flip camera

6)      Coffee: Keep the energy up for what will be a busy and exciting 2012!

• Recommendations from my hometown of San Francisco (known for our epic coffee house rivalries): Blue Bottle Coffee and Four Barrel Coffee

Wishing you a happy holidays from the CEC!

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.

Here are the 5 simple steps to National Instrument’s “Conversation Match Making” System:

1.       Listen for “actionable” conversations

Goal: Find opportunities to add value where stakeholder conversations are naturally happening.

How: Use social media monitoring tools; also consider creating an “organizational listening system” where employees who find conversations relating to the company can alert communications.

 2.       Filter by potential to add value:

Goal: Narrow the set of opportunities to those of highest potential value

How: Communications should work with monitoring vendors to filter for opportunities in highly networked sites, where there might be a historical relationship, and a valuable SEO strategy; most importantly, all opportunities should be filtered for alignment with business objectives (i.e., customer service, product development, strategic relationship development, brand awareness)

 3.       Post opportunities to an employee community:

Goal: Scale the organizations’ ability to respond and add maximum value by leveraging employee experts

How: Create an online forum where participating employees are able to share ideas on the most valuable response; dedicated employees own response based on their area of expertise

 4.       Domain experts respond on the original site:

Goal: Add value on stakeholders terms by providing them with relevant information in adequate timing for the conversations they are actively participating in

How: Provide interested employees with social media training to ensure effective and appropriate conversations. Training should include concepts including how to introduce themselves, language and tone to use, what not to write.

5.       Link back to value- adding information on the company site:

Goal: Lure stakeholders to relevant, additional information on company websites, social media pages, or community sites.

How: Provide a clear link on the original site to relevant information from the company.

Things to consider:

• Narrow the scope of employee participation so it is easy for them to see how to contribute
• Motivate employee involvement not through campaigns or incentives but through tapping their natural motivators to help others, look smart, feel cool, or have a sense of belonging
• Enabling peer recognition for employees’ contribution acts as another, ongoing motivator

Question for you: Has your team tried something similar? What has worked to engage your employees as advocates for the company within a lens that Legal is comfortable with?

Related CEC Resources:

• Tips for Employee Engagement in Online Conversations
• National Instrument’s Blog College Materials
• Conversation Match Making System Case Study
• Enabling Employee-to-Stakeholder Communications

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• Ambassadors: The Power of Passionate Employees
• Get Happy Advocates
• Equipping the Front Line for Difficult Customer Conversations

…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:

1. Think of them as business partners—not clients.  Have you heard of the A+/C- phenomenon in communications? Often communicators get an A+ in service scores and a C- when it comes to value added to the business.  We have to break this perception of communications!

It is critical to view contacts in other functions as our business partners that we are working side-by-side with to achieve business goals. At times we may help our partners self-serve and at times we may own a communications activity that closely links to business goals.  In either case, both parties own activities and metrics to signify progress against goals.

2. Negotiate—in their language.
Influence and negotiation stand out as two of the most critical skills in the modern communicators skill set—but they are often the skills teams look to improve upon. Can you confidently say that you “lead and stand strong to business partners, even when you do not have positional authority, to find ‘win-win’ communications solutions?”

Often business partners approach us for support only once they’ve determined the cause of a problem and the communications solution they think will solve it. To effectively negotiate we must not speak in the language of communications solutions, but in the language of business goals and their root causes. Process-oriented planning that is done with our partners together and well-documented helps get us this ‘win-win’ every time.

3. Provide the platform. Don’t fill the platform. 
As you’re well familiar, the speed, noise, and opportunities to connect with others online have greatly shifted information consumption. Most importantly people are interested in hearing from people—not from BIG companies, BIG media, or BIG government.

For a small team, this is great news! It should be a more occasional night that we’re editing a long press release at midnight and an disproportionate amount of our time should go to creating opportunities for others to contribute to the company story, for peers to recognize one another, for managers to carry the message more effectively than our newsletters, for employees to carry the brand, and for employees to engage directly with our stakeholders. Even more than our ‘big’ peers, a small communications team must commit to today’s role of enabling.

What is one thing your team has done recently to act bigger than you may seem?

Top CEC Resources for Small Shop Communicators:

• Principled Service-Level Tiering
• 2011 Resource Allocation Benchmarks
• Building an Outcomes-Focused Plan
• Enable Others to Engage Stakeholders

Related CEC Insider Posts:

• 2011 Comms Budget Trends: Spending Up on Staff
• 3 Ways to be More Assertive with Clients
• Are you limiting your communications potential?

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?

Consider this: both functions have traditionally focused on improving the “manager” as a critical channel to relay messages and drive engagement. While the manager may be critical for present engagement, over 50% of employees have experienced a change in manager in the past year. Communications and HR are both discussing tactics for scaling the impact of the broader organization on an individual employee to improve past and future engagement and reduce reliance on the single manager.

Compare these two models below (on the left Communications’ model of agility and on the Right HR’s model of diversified agents):

The goal and approach of communications and HR is more aligned than it may ever have been in the past—and more and more communicators have been asking about how to work better with their HR counterparts. Communicators: check out these 7 HR focus areas and the agents most important for building this type of engagement capital:

Peer-to-peer support across the organization is hands down the most critical agent in driving these HR priorities as well as critical to communications’ goals of improving personal connection and alignment to strategy.

Jump start your conversation with your HR partners by posing these 5 questions:

1. How could we incorporate more peer learning into our corporate intranet and HR sites?  (Read more)
2. How could we scale opportunities for peer recognition employees’ immediate team? (Read more)
3. How can we enable our employees to define and protect the values of our organization? (Read more)
4. How can we reinforce the importance of proactive learning and a problem-solving posture with new employees? As well as stress these values in development conversations? (Read more)
5. How can we partner to build leaders’ comfort with empowering their employees (Read more)

CEC Related Resources:

• Cross Functional View of Roles on Driving Enterprise Agility
• Change Management Topic Center
• Principles for Peer Sharing and Learning
• Peer Learning Platform (MITRE)
• Building a Change-Ready Organization

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Why is Cross-Functional Collaboration So Hard?
• Disappointed by Internal Social Media? You’re Not Alone
• Peeking Down the Hallway: What’s HR Doing?

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!

1. Start with Confidence, Purpose & Content. The audience should know you’re in charge right away, and that they will learn something very quickly.
2. Half as Long, Twice as Good. Commit to every point you make. Never half-say anything: say it confidently or don’t say it at all. If you can’t decide whether to say something, don’t—everything is premeditated and focused.
3. You’re Happy to be Here. Don’t just smile. Be excited to be here and let it show.
4. Silence is Power. Be comfortable with silence. Use it to own the room throughout the presentation.
5. Believe it. Show us that you truly believe your message.
6. Prioritize. You are here to tell the audience what is most important. Which information matters most? Where should they focus their attention? Tell then what to do, what matters, and why.
7. Don’t Talk What. Talk Why. Why are we talking about this? Why should we care? Why is this hard? Why do we believe we should change? Why are we showing you this information? Always be answering why—that makes for a much more fascinating presentation.
8. Don’t Address Slides. Address the Audience, Using the Slides. You are here to teach and engage people in the room. Use the slides to do that, but make sure you address the people, not the slides.
9. Transition with Purpose. Never say “page 9” as your transition. Tell me why we’re leaving page 8. All transitions are about why.
10. Manage the Clock—Openly. Managing time from the very beginning. Once you have a time problem, it’s too late to solve it.

CEC Related Resources:

• The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set/ Skills Maturity Assessment
• Communication Coaching and Teaching Skill Development
• Enabling Leader-Employee Communications

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Why Your Leadership Communications Support Misses the Mark
• Strongest and Weakest Skills for the Communications Profession

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.

We know we have an effective engagement idea if 1) it centers on what audiences care most about in regards to this issue; 2) it reveals differentiation from other companies or messages on other issues from your company; and 3) it clarifies why someone would want to take action.

Steps for developing a key engagement idea:

Understand the audience:

• Ensure a comprehensive understanding of audience motivators
• Identify an audience-centric rational for the message

Breakdown key messages:

• List all of the key messages as individual components
• Answer why the audience will care about each motivation

Identify common thread:

• Look for common elements among the individual rationales
• Articulate a single, common motivating thread

Center message on engagement ideas:

• Lead your writing with a concerted articulation of that common thread
• Consider how the “one key engagement idea” can inform the channel and style for your writing

Examples of Key Engagement Ideas:

• Staples was looking to expand their offering to small businesses and understands how busy this audience is. They worked to break down their key messages such as selection, simple ordering, low price, and ease of delivery to identify one common thread to motivate stakeholder action—“that was easy.” This simple idea was the center of press releases, corporate communications and spilled over into marketing and other channels (e.g., The Staples Button)
• In a recent webinar focused on how communications can drive a culture of safety, communicators in the energy/utility/manufacturing space described the various channels and campaigns they have used to get employee alignment with organizational safety goals. Southern California Edison shared how they simplified and centered their message based on an understanding that employees we more motivated by the safety of those they most deeply care about. Where they landed—“safe enough for our families.”

Where have you seen examples of “one key engagement idea” be successful in simplifying a message and prompting action?

Related CEC Resources:

• Write in a More Engaging Way Topic Center
• Dialogue Provoking Message Tool
• Create Content for Flow
• 7 Freshest Ways to Engage your Audience
• Available Soon: Writing for Impact Workshop. Email me if you’re interested.

• 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.

Internally, communicators can drive higher levels of agility by:

1. arming employees with the information they need to solve problems (learn more), and
2. enabling employees to build stronger networks of support to share and learn.

I was in a conversation today with an HR staff member at Google who explained how Google challenges their employees to create their own processes where they see potential for increased efficiency and to share theses ideas with their peers (true, this is not an abnormal cocktail party conversation topic in the SF bay area). Google, like many of today’s tech leaders, is promoting agility within their workforce and creating a company culture that is optimized towards it.

Externally, many communicators are partnering with their recruiting peers to more clearly articulate the company’s unique employment value proposition. The EVP shared on many company Web sites, however, still discusses things like co-worker quality, impact of the job, development opportunities, or the quality of benefits/work-life balance.

If agility is what we are striving for internally, can you picture a way to incorporate the expectation and exciting challenge of agility into your company’s unique employment value proposition externally too? What are you doing to recruit top talent in today’s competitive high tech marketplace?

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.

Through a large quantitative study, the CEC identified the two main factors that mobilize employee behind company goals: their level of personal connection and their feeling of peer-to-peer support.

1. Personal Connection: The best way to drive employees’ personal connection with safety priorities is through improved dialogue between line managers and employees to drive an understanding of how these priorities impact employees’ daily role.

The Communications team at ITT supported front-line manager/team conversations around company goals (e.g., safety and quality) by engaging employees and managers in more interactive communication. Through an audit of the current barriers to success against these goals, they realized that a communications breakdown was getting in the way of their success. This simple addition of dialogue helped realign their plant culture around performance goals that included both safety and efficiency. CEC members: read the full best practice here.

Also, see how Nordea uses this simple “workshop in a box” as a prep session to help mangers see the benefit of and feel comfortable discussing safety goals with their teams.

2. Peer-to-peer support: One key driver of engagement with goals stems from a sense of support from direct colleagues.

Peer recognition can be a strong driver of employee-to-employee engagement. See how the Communications team at TD Bank created social norms around peer support by creating a simple but high profile way for employees to celebrate one another’s contributions on the company intranet. Visible recognition of employees encourages other employees to also align their behaviors and support one another toward company goals (like safety).

Alternatively, internal ambassadors of safety goals can act as champions of these priorities and spread awareness of them at a grassroots level through the organization. Allstate created an Ambassador Movement based on the idea that every company has a set of supporters around specific initiatives, who, when given the opportunity, will be more vocal about their support.

For your organization, this may be creating a safety team to equip a select group of employees to act as champions in favor of these goals.

What are you doing in your organization to drive a culture of safety?

Related CEC Resources:

• Driving Behavior Change Topic Center
• Mobilizing the Workforce Key Findings
• Help Leaders Learn to Dialogue Trainings and Tools

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.

A frequent conversation we have with CEC members is around how to drive employee usage of intranet tools and participation in internal social media conversations. Two key principles of participation include:

• Simplifying what is required to contribute, and
• Increasing the personal relevance of the conversations and available resources

Providing quick access to work-related information and tools is critical if we in Communications are effectively supporting our organization’s ability to be adaptive and driving the levels of engagement we need from our workforce.

Will the high tech companies pull ahead in this space? How critical do you think this investment will be for your organization in the next year?  What have you tried and what’s worked/not worked?

Check out related resources available from the CEC:

• Create a user-centric intranet
• Work with IT
• Principles of participation in the intranet and internal social media
• Intranets & Internal Social Media Topic Center