Is your communication crossing borders?

When working in an international company, one of the hardest job facing any corporate communicator is getting the message out to the whole company – no matter where they are based. These borders – either literal borders, or assumed boundaries – can act as a huge barrier to understanding, engagement, and action.

A good communications team needs to be able to work across spatial, geographical, or temporal separations. But there are issues:

• Language, culture, and differences in working habits can all lead to misunderstanding, or, worse, apathy.
• Communications partners can be lacking in the skills or power to be real strategic partners.
• Thanks to cultural differences, one message definitely doesn’t fit all.
• Sign off procedures can lead to unreactive and slow communications.
• There is little knowledge sharing between groups leading to constant reinventions of the wheel.

Why is it hard to reach employees across the world?

Global companies, as a rule, tend to adopt one business language when it comes to communicating with employees around the world. This language is used for cross-border collaboration, corporate communications, the global intranet. However, simply having one language doesn’t address the issues faced by corporate communicators when trying to overcome spatial, geographical, temporal, and cultural borders.

1. UNDERSTANDING: How can you be sure your messages are being understood by the whole workforce? While your day to day contacts may be proficient in the business language, what about the people who report to them? And what about the people who report to them?
2. INCLUSIVITY: Is your communication creating a divide in your company? Is knowledge split between the haves and have-nots? What about those employees without access to computers or phones?
3. ENGAGEMENT: Are language or cultural differences leading to a decrease in engagement and collaboration? How can you ensure feedback mechanisms account for the different ways of working across the company?

However, there are a few simple solutions available to alleviate the problems and help you deliver effective communications to all employees, no matter where they’re based.

Have a global communications plan

ONE CLEAR WAY FORWARD
Having a global corporate communications plan that is shared and agreed on by your global communications team will make it clear to everyone what their priorities should be. The team will then be aligned on what and how is to be done through the year.

ALIGNED MISSION AND VALUES
Your communications team should all know what the company’s mission, vision, and values are. After all, if they are to communicate this vision to the wider company, they need to understand it themselves. Clear mission and vision statements that are easily accessible will keep everyone on track and working towards the same goal.

REGULAR EVALUATION
Plans aren’t written to sit in a drawer somewhere. You and your team should regularly evaluate your communications plan and amend it where required.

Work with your local teams

FINDING AMBASSADORS
Employees in global affiliates can feel a little removed from the corporate headquarters. This may not be helped by different time zones or languages. Find an ambassador to act as your communications conduit between local employees and the global headquarters

USING LOCAL EXPERTISE
No matter your communications experience, you can’t be expected to know everything about everywhere. Use the local expertise available to you to find out how different teams process and receive information. Do they like a lot of detail? Are they just interested in the highlights? Are they high context or low context cultures?

SHARING IDEAS
Crowd-sourcing ideas and sharing best (and worst) practices is one of the joys of working in a team. Those communicators working as one-man-bands don’t have peers to learn and share with – help them
become part of a community. Working internationally means you have a diverse pool of knowledge available – take advantage of it!

Be targeted in your channels

WHAT’S AVAILABLE
If you haven’t already carried out a communications audit within your team (and extended teams), it’s time to get cracking. You can’t properly use your channels if you don’t know what’s available to you. What else is there besides the usual suspects?

WHAT WORKS?
Once you know what channels are available to you, it’s time to find out which ones work best for your various audiences. Use your ambassadors to give you insight on effective ways to communicate in their office. Is it reliant on technology? Do the teams prefer face to face? Are they more traditional? Formal? Informal?

WHAT ABOUT EVERYONE ELSE?
Unwired employees are often forgotten or deliberately left out of corporate communications. They’re hard to reach and it can be difficult to influence them. But they’re important. Think about how other information (such as pay or safety information) reaches these employees – what new channels can you take advantage of?

Training and tools

DEVELOPING SKILLS
Develop your partners in the skills you may take for granted. Don’t assume from someone’s job title that they’ve been trained in communications best practice and techniques.These skills need to be learnt, honed, and added to on a regular basis.

PROVIDING TOOLS
Loose guidelines – not rules – and customisable templates will help your communicators and ambassadors create and deliver your messages with minimal guidance. Give a little more flexibility and autonomy to your teams and you’ll be surprised at how much more enthusiastic they are about communicating your messages.

MAKING COMMUNICATIONS EASIER
One of the largest comms challenges global companies face is that they are burdened by process. Rounds of amendments, approvals from six people, confirmation from head office. Have a look at the route a message takes from start to finish – how can this be streamlined?

Watch your language

JARGON
Never assume knowledge. If you work in corporate headquarters, chances are, you’ve been privy to certain information for a while. You may even have an acronym already memorised. When communicating globally, keep it simple, and explain any jargony words or phrases.

SLANG & COLLOQUIALISMS
Every culture has their own slang and colloquialisms. The problem is, they rarely translate across borders. Think twice about referring to the new benefits package as “the cat’s pajamas” or the new accounts programme as “easy peasy”. One, your tone may be wrong and two, people may not understand what you’re talking about!

HUMOUR
It’s great to be able to use humour as part of your corporate communications but it doesn’t always work. Anecdotes, metaphors, and word play can all be mistranslated and may cause offense. However, use humour with skill and it may well help you achieve your objectives.

Fundamentally – if you and your team don’t know what you’re communicating (or why), you can’t expect anyone else in the organisation to know either. Have a plan.

Make sure you’re clear on what tools, channels (formal and informal), and resources you have to help you deliver on your objectives.

Don’t do it on your own. Don’t assume you have all the answers, either. Make the most of the experience of your team and use them to inform your communications.