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 »

CEOs are gearing up to share their 2012 strategy with employees through live and virtual town halls, blog posts, and Q&A sessions. While no one underestimates the importance of company leaders’ plan for the year ahead, employees often leave strategy sessions unsure of what, exactly, they should do with the insight and how they will be expected to contribute.

One of the best tools to think about engaging employees in strategy conversations is your employment value proposition (EVP). Your EVP is the set of attributes that employees value about working at a company. Attributes like compensation, future career and development opportunities, and work-life balance are usually at the top of the list. Understanding what employees value and feeding these insights into leadership communications and business unit discussions about the implications of company strategy.

EVP, or employment brand, is usually the purview of Human Resources because of its importance in recruiting and retaining employees. But Communications can play an important role by supporting HR in crafting and communicating about the EVP, and taking the lead on driving employee engagement through organizational alignment with the EVP.

Learn how you can support HR in creating a successful EVP and engage employees through your EVP. By breaking the EVP realignment process into two stages, it’s easy to see just how big a role Communications can play: Read More »

Today’s the day that CEC has been counting down to all year… No, it’s not the renewal date of your CEC membership – it’s our Christmas party (at least, it is in our European HQ, where I’m based). I must say, I’m looking forward to it, and most of the CEC crew assures me that they are as well. However, in speaking to several of my friends from other companies, I’ve been struck by their negativity, cynicism, and trepidation at the prospect of navigating an event that one of them described to me as “the most socially awkward of the year”.

Of course, for CEC’s audience of loquacious communicators, “social awkwardness” isn’t an issue – we’re good socially! But remember – not everyone else is. What happens at one of these parties when you’re stuck between the weird lady from the IT help desk who’s pushed past you at the coffee machine all year, the social recluse  from Finance who prefers spreadsheets to his own family, and the spotty graduate whose name no one can remember, but is irritatingly keen to impress?

This, of course, leaves you with two options. One is to politely excuse yourself and head for the bathroom, the bar, or – if things have got really bad – home. The other is to use your skills as a communicator to enable some social interaction between your colleagues.

Building Social Connections

And funnily enough, this is something that CEC can really help with. One of the things we often get asked is how communicators can encourage peer sharing among employees. As companies become more complex, organizational barriers increasingly prevent employees from connecting, sharing and learning with each other. And, interestingly, the same principles that will help a couple of socially inept guys from IT to open up at a Christmas party will also apply to creating an organization in which peers open up and share their expertise with each other. Read More »

Whether it’s the sites we check when we first get to work in the morning or what time we run out for coffee, routines can be hard to break. But choices like these aren’t usually worth doing a critical analysis each time we make them.

The real problems arise when we start to rely on similar tactics for making more important decisions, like internal communication channel selection. Rather than ask yourself, “What is the best way for employees to be informed about this leadership change?” it’s easier to jump to, “I’ll just write a quick post on the intranet.”

Falling into bad habits like this prevent you from strategically selecting channels to make your communication more effective. Luckily, we have a cheat sheet to help you stay out of a channel selection rut.

This channel selection guide will help you choose the optimal channel based on what you want to achieve with your target audience. By considering what information is most effectively communicated through different channels and weighing the pros and cons of each, you’ll be able to quickly choose the best channel for your objective. Read More »

Can leaders do anything right?  A lot of our work over the last few years – especially on Mobilizing the Workforce and Building a Change-Ready Organization – has challenged conventional wisdom around leadership communication:

• 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.  Read More »

I can teach you how to swim. It can be any stroke you want. You probably know some freestyle and you’ve heard butterfly is hard, right? Butterfly it is. You probably won’t be as good as Michael Phelps or win any gold medals but you can swim butterfly. Because I’ll tell you a secret; butterfly is easy. Sure, it’s probably the most tiring way to swim from one side of the pool to the other, but there isn’t anything mechanically difficult about it.

As with learning any new skill, it might sound impossibly daunting at first. But then I’ll show you how to kick like your legs are stuck together and use your arms to pull in tandem. We’ll put it together in a full-body rhythm that will probably feel like you’re trying to do the snake in Jell-O — except less graceful. And that will be it. A little practice, some gentle reminders to breathe when it’s most natural to the stroke and you’re done. You can swim butterfly.

Learning most things is a matter of willingness, aptitude, and finding a competent teacher. As we talk about the importance of Communicators as enablers, it’s clear that this coaching function is more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’.

Breaking down a communications strategy to make it more accessible is the first step in teaching a new communications skill to noncommunicators. The soft skills — a.k.a. interpersonal skills — that communicators deal in can be intimidating because they aren’t often thought of as something that can be taught. More often than not, people have developed a static perception of their own soft skills and will get anxious if they think they are being pushed beyond their comfort zone. If Communicators are going to help them improve, the first step is to convince them that it’s easy.

Professional communicators can help demystify these skills by breaking them down into easily actionable components. Though basic guidelines may seem overly simple to the pros, they can overcome the greatest hurdle for many to unlocking their soft skills — the perception that they can’t improve. Read More »

Long-term, rock solid strategic plans may be relics of the past, but future scenario planning is in vogue. One of Communications most critical tasks is to communicate strategy so that employees work in alignment with the company’s key priorities.

Today, as priorities shift frequently and employees are overwhelmed with information, it’s harder than ever to not only communicate the company strategy, but fully enable it to be implemented through good communication.

If you really want your strategy to stick, we think that you need to create a forum for conversation with and among employees that focuses on what’s behind the strategy; that is, the market context and assumptions that underpin it. After all, employee understanding of this important, but little discussed information is a top-three driver of employee agility.

To consider the difference, let’s explore two alternative communication approaches to strategy kickoffs—a common vehicle used to “share strategy”. In the first, the strategy is communicated at a large town hall. In the second, the assumptions or influences on the strategy are used to generate conversation among employees and enable them to make decisions daily in line with strategy.

The Straightforward Approach

At Company A, the Communications team organizes a major strategy kickoff session at the beginning of each year. Employees at headquarters crowd into an auditorium while those at regional offices dial-in to listen to the standard hour-long teleconference. The CEO and his cadre of senior leaders run through the company’s top four or five priorities for the year. In sparse PowerPoint slides, they explain the “why” behind the strategy and paint a picture of what success will look like. Bold, energizing statements like “In five years, we will be the number one retailer of socks in Brazil!” flow freely.

As the hour draws to a close, the CEO asks employees if they have any questions. Rare, however, is the organization where an employee questions and challenges a strategy in a room with peers and her manager. And so, the strategy effectively communicated, employees race back to their desks and full Outlook inboxes, and pick up where they left off, the new strategy already a vague memory. Read More »

Safety communications has received a lot of interest from CEC members in recent months as more organizations look to Communications to aid in (re)engaging employees around safety.  Unfortunately, it is often a tragic event or disturbing trend in employee accidents that leads business partners to approach Communications for help.  Regardless of initial spark for these campaigns, one thing is clear: organizations are seriously concerned about safety and want to know what they can do to help prevent accidents, injuries, and unsafe behavior.

Through my conversations with communicators who’ve recently worked on safety campaigns, I’ve found that their first step is often to build awareness of safety policies and procedures.  In the more effective campaigns, communicators help employees to build personal, often emotional, connections to safety issues.  For example, several companies have seen significant reductions in accidents by helping employees consider how an injury could affect their families and friends, often through victim storytelling and subsequent dialogue sessions.

While effective in some situations, this tactic is best used when the safety challenge can be solved by awareness alone.  A common challenge cited by communicators is complacency.  In these situations it’s often not that employees don’t know how to work safely, but rather that they’ve performed the same tasks over and over, without incident, and have developed bad habits or have lost appreciation for the dangers of cutting corners.

But what if there is a more complicated challenge to address – say, between productivity and safety — where an awareness campaign alone won’t work?  Here are a couple communications tactics that will help: Read More »

Kathy Gersch, CMO at Kotter International

Last week our post, Where Kotter’s 8 Steps Gets it Wrong, generated lots of great discussion in the comments section about leading change at organizations. In this post we interview Kathy Gersch, the Chief Marketing Officer at Kotter International, Dr. John Kotter’s change company that seeks to build leaders’ capability to drive transformation in their organizations.

Change Management v. Change Communication v. Change Leadership

The CEC (Kayleigh): People often conflate “change management” with “change communication”. What is the difference between these two concepts and what is the danger of combining them?

Kathy Gersch, CMO Kotter International: I think it’s important to first differentiate between “change management,” which is what almost everyone thinks of when they think of organizational change, and “change leadership,” which is what Dr. Kotter advocates and what we do at Kotter International.

• Change management is often focused on incremental improvements with a goal of minimizing the impact a change has on an organization.
• Change leadership is disruptive by design. It gives people the freedom to change in a way that propels an organization forward in leaps and bounds.
• Change communication is too often focused on the communication about the change that has already been determined by leadership or a small committee.

Communication plays an essential role in any change process, but the quality of leadership is what determines success. Relegating communication to a reporting function (which is generally the case in change management) is problematic because it does not drive engagement.  The concepts of “leading” and “communicating” are much more complementary, as the act of leading (establishing direction, aligning people, motivating and inspiring) is inherently centered on good communication.

CEC Members: Help build “change leadership” at your company with an empowerment workshop by GlaxoSmithKline’s CPSE.

Determining What’s Urgent

The CEC: At some organizations Kotter’s first step, “Create a Sense of Urgency,” is taken too seriously, that is, every initiative is thought of as urgent! In today’s environment of constant change, it’s impossible for employees to contribute to the number of “urgent changes” required by the business. What can a communicator do to diagnose and push back against “false urgency” created by the business?

Read More »

By Kirsten Robinson

If you often feel like a “one man island”—you’re not alone. Communications teams dispersed globally often struggle to interact, share information, and collaborate across time zones and geographic locations.

One way that CEC member Novo Nordisk has overcome this challenge is by launching a simple, yet sophisticated suite of online networking tools to facilitate communicator-to-communicator peer learning across their global team.  It may seem obvious, but the reality is that despite the amount of effort that we in Communications put into creating communications tools for other departments in the company, we ourselves aren’t always the best users of this technology.

Of course, just because internal collaboration tools exist, doesn’t mean that they are in use or make life easier! However, there are some fundamental pieces of advice to consider to make an online network work for your team. We had the chance to speak with Tanya Wymer, Strategy Director at Novo Nordisk, who shared the secrets behind the company’s corporate communicator network. Elements of their network include tools that:

• Help communicators find peers in other countries with shared challenges or projects
• Facilitate discussion boards that help communicators get quick help on specific questions
• Formalize peer collaboration through structured mentoring programs Read More »