Hayslett Group recently attended an IABC/Atlanta Be Heard Luncheon on the topic of “Communicating in a Decentralized World: What are the effects of teleworking, global business and multi-location businesses?”
The speakers - Andrea Proser, Director of Leadership Communications at Cox Communications; Greg Guthrie, International Communications Manager at the American Cancer Society; Patrick Foarde, Vice President Group Manager at Ketchum; and moderator Jim Zook, a principal in Mercer's Communication practice - shared tips, insights and creative approaches for communicating effectively with audiences spanning different geographies, languages, and incentive structures.
While Hayslett Group operates predominately within the state of Georgia, we gleaned insights from the discussion that can also be applied to smaller scale communications. Director of Creative Services, Michelle Clark, makes the following observations post-luncheon:
Your invisible personality
Often, groups comprised of multiple players at multiple sites never, or rarely, meet in person. Since you can’t express your personality through face-to-face interactions, your work quality and responsiveness become your personality. Team members will form their trust in you through these qualities alone, and it is necessary to shine brightly through both.
The same is true of support team members working at an agency. Frequently, account managers are the only ones with face-to-face interaction with a client, but other members of the team must still work with the client. It’s important for “behind the scenes” team members to keep in mind their invisible personality because the “behind the scenes” work impacts the trust each client has in his or her agency.
Technology – a love/hate relationship
Technology can be a blessing, for example, when you are trying to hold a collaborative meeting with attendees in three different locations. Webcasts, live conferencing and feeds make sharing information so much easier. At the same time, communicators often feel pressured to use every single new gadget to its utmost capabilities as soon as it is available, resulting in tech overload. We often spend more time “responding” to our tech inputs, then to actually doing our jobs. Uggh. How to fix it?
Two great examples of this (and HUGE pet peeves of mine) are:
Email overload
Email overload happens when everyone in every department wants to share all of their news – with everyone else.
One new solution is to establish corporate email guidelines that help people think twice before typing 20 addresses into the CC: field. Another idea is to utilize the “Monday Morning Company News” email...all organizations, regardless of size, can do this and keep abreast of news and announcements with less email. This one email is sent once a week by a designated person who has compiled news from everyone else in the company.
The wing ding web site
The wing ding web site is really supercool. It has graphics, flash, interactive whatzits and whazooz, video, and is visually very stimulating. However, viewers can get easily distracted by all this and have a difficult time finding needed information. Or worse, the darn thing takes forever to load and the visitor leaves. Technology should be tailored for the audience and its technological capabilities. Greg Guthrie of the American Cancer Society, noted that his organization consciously chose to develop a simple, easy-to-use Web site that would be easily accessible to visitors with varying levels of Internet savviness and locally available technology in different parts of the world.
Technology is wonderful. We just have to regard it as we would any other communications tool and consider how best it can best be used to get our messages to our target audience.
Tailoring the message
It seems like this should be old hat. This is what we do for a living after all, but as the panelists discussed how they tailored messages to different cultures and languages on a global scale, it occurred to me that the same also applies at home. The main idea is to create a broad message and then tailor the delivery of that core message to your varying constituents.
At Hayslett Group, we don’t have to communicate the same message to shareholders in Holland and shareholders in Saudi Arabia, but we do have to communicate messages to physicians and patients, legislators and the public, blue collar and white, English speaking, Spanish speaking and the list goes on, all in our own state.
I admit when I first committed to attending this luncheon I wasn’t sure if I could take anything away from a “global” themed communications panel, but in retrospect that was silly. The world is so much smaller now; global communications can apply to a single city.
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