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

As more companies are growing both their operations and their sales in India, supporting that growth and building a strong company brand become priorities for the global PR team.  But maintaining truly global perspective and awareness of the nuances in each of the countries where the company operates is a daunting challenge.

India may be a welcome bright spot in this landscape, as the PR in India is very much in keeping with – and in some ways ahead of – trends in the United States and Europe.  Trends Western PR professionals will find familiar:

• Empowered consumers who do their own research online and are more influenced by peers than by company messages.  Social media use in India is by some metrics higher than in the United States and United Kingdom, although its character is quite different – smart phones rather than computers.
• Breakdown of audience silos, reducing the influence of specific media outlets and making it impossible to compartmentalize messages
• Professionalization of PR, including the presence of major global PR firms in the Indian market.

Of course, the Indian PR landscape does have its unique attributes.  For example, the use of celebrity spokespeople (e.g., Bollywood stars, cricket players) is even more popular than in the West.  And public affairs / government relations is less regulated, hence often associated in consumers’ minds with corruption.

CEC Members: Check out our full Communicator’s Guide to India for recommendations on how to navigate these PR trends, as well as further resources on India.

As the Council continues to monitor global communication trends, please share your own experience navigating the Indian PR landscape in the comment box!

CEC Related Resources:

•  Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to India
• Building a Global Mindset: A Communicator’s Guide to Brazil
• Building a Global Mindset: Overview of Cultural Values
• Global Perspective & Cultural Awareness Communications Competency

 CEC Related Blogs:

• Employee Communications in China
• Lost In Translation: How Cultural Values Shape Your Communications

So it’s no wonder that the 850+ participants in the CEC Skills Maturity Assessment have indicated a real interest in improving their ability to create engaging content and – as a necessary precursor – to listen to audiences and learn what they care about.

There are many ways to learn about your target audience, all featured in a new CEC member resource center dedicated to developing this skill.  I want to call attention to a tool we’re adding to the mix, thanks to a partnership between CEC and Iconoculture, the leading syndicated provider of up-to-the-minute, segment-level insights into consumer values and trends: audience understanding in less than five minutes.  This series of one-page outlooks – grouped by industry, demographic segment, and geography – gets you quickly up to speed on key values, trends, and language.

I’ve mined these for three trends to watch in 2012, as they cut across many countries and demographic groups:

1)      Idealistic youth + social networking technologies = higher standards.Young adults expect institutions (both government and private) to do good, not just seek profit or power.  Most – especially in Asia – remain quite optimistic, despite macroeconomic challenges.  And all are quite ready to mobilize.  In many ways, this isn’t brand new – earlier generations of young people have felt the same way.  But modern social networking technology let them share information and ideas faster and wider than previous generations (think “Arab Spring”).  This means that unflattering information about your organization will be discovered in the blink of an eye and that “social responsibility” initiatives had better be more than lip service.  

2)      Health: from access to accountability. Concerns over health status are rising, and not just in the developed world.  In the past, these concerns translated into demands for greater access to affordable health care, both services and medicines.  The new trend to watch is consumer interest in accountability as well – expecting their peers to do more to keep themselves healthy and expecting institutions to help.  One manifestation: a Danish surtax on fatty foods.  Others may be on the way, and Communicators should watch out for changing public expectations.

3)      Control freaks. Economic volatility has for many families exposed an insecurity and vulnerability they had not felt in more than a decade.  Empowered consumers’ response?  Focus on what they can control.  This can translate into activism (e.g., the recent “Occupy” movements in various cities).  But it also shows up in consumer shopping behaviors, as consumers rush to options that give them flexibility, convenience, and price: JC Penney’s Findmore kiosks, free Wi-Fi at Tesco, or Monoprix’s shopping app.  And it shows up in personal saving and borrowing behavior.

That’s what struck me.  Browse these yourself (access available here – and bookmark the page so you can catch updates as they are posted) and tell me what trend you are going to watch!

CEC Related Resources:

• Audience Understanding Overview
• Stakeholder Engagement Topic Center
• Tools to Help Others Engage Stakeholders

CEC Related Blogs:

• CEC’s Top 4 External Communications Tools
• 3 Tips for Customizing Global Messages
• Can You Trust Managers with Stakeholder Relations?

Three observations stand out in particular:

1. After a sharp decline in 2009, Communications budgets as a percent of company revenue are largely back to pre-recession levels.  This suggests long-term stability in terms of Communications’ role.  Survey respondents in 2011 were less optimistic about next year’s budget level than in prior years, likely due to concerns about near-term company growth.
2. Over the last several years, Communications executives have shifted resources away from marketing, advertising, and investor communications and towards other external activities such as public affairs, media relations, and the corporate Web site.  Given a related trend of decoupling Marketing and Communications budgets, this suggests more specialization of roles within the company: Marketing owning advertising, Finance owning investor communications.  A by-product of this trend is that more of the total Communications budget goes to staff rather than agencies or suppliers.
3. Communications departments are slowly but surely becoming more centralized.  As with all organizational trends, it is difficult to say whether this trend will be enduring or whether the pendulum will swing back at some point.  But CEC members articulate a growing need for consistency as information spreads so easily around the globe, which suggests that at least some level of centralization is more than just a fad.  Check out our latest toolkit for managing Communications activities in a global organization.

Have you seen any of these trends at play in your organization?  Please share!

CEC members can access our 2011 budget and organization benchmarks.

These include not only a summary of our 2011 survey results but also:

• A *brand new* tool to let you query our database directly
• Helpful resources for addressing specific budget line items and issues

CEC Related Blogs:

• Comms and Marketing Budgets – Combine or Separate?
• 2011 Comms Budget Trends: Spending Up on Staff
• 3 Key Trends in 2011 Communication Budgets

• Be transparent?  Insufficient.
• Build buy-in?  Misses the mark in a high-change environment. 
• Give clear direction?  May actually do more harm than good.

But this doesn’t mean that leaders don’t matter or can’t communicate in ways that motivate employees and boost their productivity.  It’s just that we need leaders to play a different role – to empower:

• Seek employee feedback and input.  I don’t mean a “suggestion box,” which puts the burden to act back onto the leader.  Empowering leaders ask employees questions that they can answer to take action within the scope of their day-to-day work.
• Coach, don’t tell.  Empowering leaders – when possible – guide staff to figure out what to do rather than tell them what to do.
• Provide opportunities to experiment. Empowering leaders point out learning opportunities and help staff seize them and other employees share in what is learned.
• Connect employees to helpful people and tools.  Empowering leaders’ broad reach within the organization lets them make staff more productive by making smarter connections. 

This sounds great on paper – to most leaders, too – but is easier said than done.  Leaders may fear losing control (confusing empowerment with delegation) or not appearing to lead (confusing leadership with commanding).  We’ve seen progressive communicators partner with HR to surface these objections and help leaders overcome them.  For an example, see what GlaxoSmithKline did.

I’ve experienced some of these concerns first hand.  At an earlier stage in my career, for example, I was a consultant counseling clients through post-merger integration.  Employees of both companies wanted answers to questions like whether there would be layoffs, consolidation of facilities, changes to IT systems, and changes to job responsibilities.  Following supposed change management best practice, I helped client executives be transparent about what they knew and how they were going to figure out – and communicate – what they didn’t yet know.  In retrospect, even better would have been to create opportunities for staff to learn about the other company: understand where their counterparts work, what they do, and how they do it.  This may have prompted earlier adoption of “best of both” solutions, and at a minimum would have provided better context for the changes to come. 

I’d be very interested in hearing your reflections – either examples where you’ve helped leaders take a more empowering approach or situations you now realize could have been handled better. 

CEC members can access our updated topic center on coaching senior leaders here:

CEC Related Resources:

• Leadership Coaching Topic Center
• Webinar: Leadership Communication that Empowers: GSK CPSE’s Empowerment Workshop for Leaders
• Line Manager Communications Topic Center
• Dialogue Workshop for Leaders

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• Why Your Leadership Communications Support Misses the Mark
• Coaching Leaders: 10 Tips for Effective Presenations
• Harness the Power of EmPOWERment

With most of these sources of advantage grounded in corporate identity and culture, it’s no wonder communications professionals work so hard at strengthening the corporate brand.  But what brand attributes matter?  Should all companies try to be known as green, responsible, and customer focused?

In collaboration with our members, the Council has looked at this issue in depth.  Our conclusion: these attributes are very likely good ones, but defining your brand around them is just as likely a losing brand strategy. 

How is this possible?  Allow me a few lines to explain:

• A corporate brand is valuable to the extent it drives an advantage, that is to say a preference for the company from some valuable stakeholder group (e.g., customers, employees, suppliers, regulators). 
• Qualities like sustainability, ethics, and customer focus likely do drive company performance, but as brand attributes, they rarely drive stakeholder preference.  CEC members can read the research behind this controversial conclusion here. 
• This is primarily because these attributes are so widely touted that stakeholders cannot perceive any meaningful difference between your organization and its competitors. 
• Differentiated brands have 61% more impact on stakeholder preference than non-differentiated brands. 

I’d love to know what you think of this.  How does it fit with your experience?

I like to think of this as actually quite liberating for communicators.  It is in all likelihood easier to stake out a unique position within your industry than to compete with every other company in the world for the top spot on an index for sustainability / ethics / reputation.  How can you do this?

• Identify attributes that are meaningful to the stakeholders you care about and where your organization’s strategy lets you make a credible claim of distinctive performance.  CEC members can read our how-to advice and learn from leaders like Diageo, RBC, and Philips here. 
• Equip others to bring those brand attributes to life.  Many companies successfully engage their employees as stewards of the organization’s brand.  We have more recently profiled a number of leaders’ techniques for using online tools to magnify the benefits of employees’ and other stakeholders’ advocacy. 

So what are we supposed to communicate to employees and their managers?  The big lesson from the Council’s most recent look at communication in high-change environments like this one is to resist the temptation to focus on building buy-in to the company’s current strategy.  It’s not that we don’t want employees to understand it or believe in it – of course, we do – but that communicating to build buy-in has two undesirable side effects:

• Lulling employees into waiting for leaders and managers to decide
• Setting them up for disappointment or cynicism when unforeseen events require a change in strategy

We should want employees to be agile, ready for change.  So in turbulent times, we’d like them listening to cues from customers and suppliers, finding ways to do their jobs better, and driving positive change that makes the company better able to succeed regardless of which way the macroeconomic winds blow. 

Sounds great, right?  But as a practical matter, what can a communicator do?  It turns out, quite a lot.  My three top suggestions:

1. Connect employees to information that helps them solve problems. 
   Two questions you can ask any business partner who has a message for an internal audience: What types of decisions do you see employees needing to make?  What information will they need to spot problems / opportunities and respond appropriately?  That will help you craft a better plan.  CEC members can see these questions in action and the resulting communication plan in ConAgra Foods’ Information Needs Assessment Process. 
2. Support employees in learning from each other.  Agile employees actively leverage their networks for opportunities to learn. Communications can help employees build stronger and more diverse networks across the organization through its management of the corporate intranet and live events.  CEC members can learn more with our internal social media resource center or our latest examples of building peer sharing and learning into live events.
3. Help leaders resist the temptation to get prescriptive.  When employees are asking for direction, it’s only natural for leaders and managers to tell them what to do.  But in a high-change environment, it is critical for employees to learn to solve more problems on their own.  Communicators can’t “do” this, but in our role as communication coach, we can guide leaders to more productive dialogue even when employees seem to ask for command and control.  CEC members can hear from Jason Sloan of GSK how his group helped leaders learn to empower staff. 

I’d love very much to hear other ways communicators are building change-readiness in their organizations – please share!

CEC Related Resources:

Building a Change-Ready Organization

ConAgra’s Assessment Process

Implement Internal Social Media

Peer Sharing & Learning

Empowerment Workshop for Leaders: GSK

CEC Related Blogs:

Not the Summer We’d Hoped For

Meanwhile, as many of you know, the CEC research team has been hard at work studying what it takes to build a change ready organization, and specifically what Communications can do to enable agility across the enterprise.  It is impossible to consider a subject like building change readiness without revisiting the subject of cross-functional collaboration; this endeavor is, without question, a team sport.

So, let me suppose that you are a communicator, totally bought into the idea that it would be great for employees to be agile, ready for change. And you see how communication within the organization can help employees be more agile. But now, you confront the ugly truth: you can’t make this communication happen on your own.

Maybe this truth is not so ugly. What if other functions have their own good reasons to want to hear from you and to help you? This isn’t just a pipe dream. I’ve been talking to my peers within the Corporate Executive Board who work with other functions, and several of them – including the ones communicators need most, like HR and IT – have very good reasons to want to help. When I hear members’ frustrations about poor working relationships or resistance to these approaches, I can’t help but think that communicators are not explaining their needs and wants in ways that resonate with these potential partners.

So we’ve put together a Cross-Functional View of Roles for Driving Enterprise Agility, a guide to these partner functions’ priorities.  They fall into two groups: those who will want to help drive agility across the organization and those who need to drive agility within their own teams.

HR and Strategy are in the first group.

• HR leaders are looking to drive workforce engagement and performance.
• Strategists are looking for sustainable growth.
• Increasing employee agility is a natural way to accomplish both goals.

IT and Operations are in the second group.

• Structural changes in the technology landscape require radical shifts in the corporate IT function’s role.
• Operational leaders find many of their efficiency improvements undone when customer demands or business strategies change.
• Their teams need to lean into very significant changes – in other words, to be agile.  Improved communication can be a key enabler.

I’m optimistic that a savvy communicator, armed with this understanding, can successfully make the case for vital cooperation (e.g., HR’s training infrastructure, IT’s choice of intranet technology) and budgetary resources. Please share your war stories! For more information, CEC members click here.

At the end of the day, we asked these leaders for their top takeaways from the meeting. I personally find their responses incredibly insightful in terms of where the communications profession needs to go next.  Drum roll, please!

Top Takeaways

5. Better communications = quantifiable impact on the bottom line. There is a measurable – and large! – link between (a) what communications can do to drive employees’ agility and (b) company performance. For the average large organization, a 10% improvement in three aspects of the communication environment drives over $16 million in incremental profit per $1 billion in revenue. A 10% improvement isn’t unreasonable: it’s essentially moving up one quartile in relative performance from wherever you are today.

4. How to use your seat at the table. The key to creating this measurable value lies not so much in better writing or other traditional communication skills, but in enabling more effective communication within the organization.  What are the new skills and how can you get them?  Check out the Council’s resources here.

3. What’s really hard about empowerment.  Extolling the virtues of empowerment to senior executives won’t translate into action deeper in the organization.  But you can guide executives and managers alike to discover for themselves how they (often inadvertently) stifle their staff’s problem solving and to help each other find ways to empower employees in complete harmony with other business priorities.  Council member GlaxoSmithKline shared a workshop others were eager to replicate; stay tuned for more detail.

2. In times of change, you need agility, not buy-in. Buy-in helps employees recover from productivity-sapping emotional responses to change, like loss, doubt, confusion, and disorientation. But when change happens more than once every 2-3 years, you never recover fast enough. Wouldn’t it be better if change weren’t so disruptive – if it weren’t something you had to “recover” from? Agile employees actually “lean in” to change and increase their performance and productivity. The highest-leverage actions an organization can take to increase employees’ agility are all about communication: (a) share information employees need to solve problems and execute strategy; (b) create better platforms for peer sharing and learning; and (c) empower employees to solve more problems on their own.

And now the number 1 takeaway on the day – a very actionable message to communicators:

1. It’s actually what you say, not (just) how you say it. A skilled communicator already does a great job finding the most effective way to get a message through to employees by selecting the right channels(s) and making complex ideas clear and simple.  But to make employees more agile, it matters a lot what information you share.  The rationale behind strategy and clear next steps get you buy-in.  Leading communicators guide business partners to share information employees can use to solve problems while executing strategy and to understand (and personally relate to) what matters in the organization’s market environment.

If you’re interested in learning more, don’t miss the chance to share ideas with and learn from your peers at one of our Executive Retreats (reserved for the head of corporate communications) or Regional Briefings .

Related CEC Resources:

Building a Change-Ready Organization

The Modern Communicator’s Skill Set

1. Change fatigue.  According to our recent survey, 79% of employees in large enterprises experienced a major change (such as M&A, layoffs, or reorganization) in the last 2 years; 60% experienced two or more such changes.  No wonder so many of you have told me about the “change fatigue” that you sense from staff – before they can recover from one major change, they confront another!  Communications can help make employees “change ready,” so that recovery is less of an issue.
2. Your CEO wants a more agile organization.  More than 60% of CEOs surveyed by IBM see their economic environment becoming more volatile, less predictable, and more complex.  This explains, in part, why 67% of Chief Strategy Officers report that becoming more agile is a top priority at their organization.  Not all leaders realize it, but communication accounts for about 20% of an organization’s agility – its ability to anticipate, embrace, and “lean into” change.
3. Employee engagement and performance.  Our sister program, the Corporate Leadership Council, has recently quantified the impact of change on engagement: typically a 2-6% reduction that lasts anywhere from 17 to 81 months, depending on the nature of the change.  As a recovering post-merger integration professional, I wasn’t surprised to see that “merger or acquisition” is the type of change with the longest recovery time!  In a changing environment, the greatest driver of employee performance is agility.

We will be sharing best practices we have uncovered and fostering round table discussion among participants on communication strategies that drive organizational agility:

• Give employees the context they need to anticipate and manage change for themselves, not just understand decisions after the fact
• Remove communication barriers that suppress employees’ natural agility
• Build a culture of open communication and empowerment
• Collaborate with HR and other functions to build a strategy for agility that goes beyond messaging and process

Intrigued?  I sincerely hope to see you at one of our Executive Retreats (reserved for the head of corporate communications) or Regional Briefings.

CEC Related Resources:

• Building a Change-Ready Organization Latest Hypotheses
  

CEC Related Blog Posts:

• A Tale of Three Takeovers
• 3 Ways to Build a Change-Ready Organization
• Radical New Idea In Comms Planning: DON’T PLAN!

But there are two kinds of collaboration: (1) using our expertise to help someone else achieve that person’s goals, and (2) working with someone else to achieve our goals (or a mutual goal).  For most of the communicators I talk to, it’s that latter form of collaboration that often proves challenging.  For example, many of our members, especially those reporting directly to the CEO, are working to build a more agile organization – one that “leans into” and embraces change.  This goal cannot be achieved without HR, and perhaps IT as well.

I’d love your help understanding why this collaboration can be so difficult.  Here are some of the specific challenges I’ve heard most frequently:

• HR. Many communicators share an “engagement” objective with partners in HR.  We also share an interest in leadership training, specifically around helping leaders communicate more effectively.  And we are often co-responsible for shaping and preserving company culture.Many communicators work well with HR, but I also hear frustration with a very process-heavy approach to solving problems and with a poor understanding of what it takes to influence large groups.

• IT. The typical division of responsibility we’ve seen is that IT supplies the software for electronic communication (e.g., the intranet, company web site, newsroom, collaboration tools like Sharepoint) and then Comms manages the content.Conflict can arise over the selection and implementation of the software platform, where communicators may favor features (or event specific providers) that IT finds difficult to implement or maintain.  I’ve also heard communicators frustrated in the process of defining “business requirements” and making a “business case” for capabilities they want.   CEC members can read our advice on partnering with IT on the intranet.

• Legal. The challenge we hear most frequently relates to company use of social media.  In regulated industries, this can present a hurdle to effective social media use, even in lower-risk areas like internal social media and external monitoring.  Some report that crafting a baseline “do no harm” policy enables productive collaboration between Legal and Comms, at least in social media.

• Marketing. In many organizations, Communications and Marketing collaborate very effectively, especially around major events like a product launch.  Marcomm and PR executives have long understood the benefit of “earned” media; some have more formally integrated in order to achieve better business results.  That said, I also hear concerns about how the short-term focus of many brand managers and other product-level marketers can undermine longer-term efforts to build the company brand and relationships with external stakeholders.

I’m eager to hear your war stories – successful or not – from working with other functions, and any insight you have into why the relationship isn’t smoother.

Related CEC Insider posts:

• Communications & HR—Friends, Foes, or Frenemies?
• Don’t Hate. Collaborate!

Related CEC content (members only):

• Integrating PR and Marketing for Better Business Results
• Collaborate with Peer Functions