If you’ve already got a great responsible business strategy, you’ll want to share it with everybody in your organisation. They should be excited about the proposition, buy into your goals and engage with activities along the way. Which means communicating effectively and authentically, so your people want to take action. And so your goals are embedded into the DNA of your organisation
Our webinar included great tips on best practice comms planning and content production, and considered how to develop narratives that keep the momentum high as you reveal your company’s responsible business story and goals. A few of the highlights are here in this blog.
We were delighted that Debra Sobel, co founder and CEO at Verity London, and Raj Nair, Verity’s Senior Account Director were joined in the discussion by Jessica Hawes, Head of Engagement and Reporting at St James’s Place, and Matthew Newton, Global Head of Sustainability Communications, Goldman Sachs.
Almost fifty attendees joined too, to listen in and take part in the live conversation.
Communication cascades are a hot topic
Most companies now are either in the process of setting their responsible business strategy – or already rolling it out. Addressing how they are looking after their people, the communities within which they operate, and the environment. Together with how this impacts governance and ethics. Communicating these effectively to a range of stakeholders – both internal and external – is now becoming increasingly important. So there was a lot to discuss.
1. Ensuring your responsible business proposition is understood and embedded with stakeholders
It’s important to ensure there’s clarity around your organisation’s unique responsible business narrative, to differentiate your approach and tie it into your core business activity. Jess Hawes from St James’s Place described a piece of work they carried out ‘codifying the culture’ within their comms activity, ensuring it reflected their organisation’s actions. They clearly communicated the behaviours and values they wanted both employees and clients to embrace.
2. The enormity of the scope of work
Matt Newton at Goldman Sachs described the complexity and breadth of the work being addressed at Goldman Sachs. The landscape is constantly changing in different part of the world, which can make it difficult to communicate. Jess described facing the scope of work ‘head on’, including re evaluating their approach to Corporate Social Responsibility; an area of purpose that still exists in many companies, but which – whilst still valuable – can often be siloed activity that doesn’t align with core business activity. Re thinking this so you can direct your resources to the areas that can have the most impact and which best reflect your organisation’s expertise and offering means you are moving the dial towards what’s most authentic to you. You can’t solve every problem! So look at doing materiality assessments to help you develop a strong, bespoke responsible business strategy that will then support your communications narrative.
3. Identifying your ‘strategic enablers’
For your comms to be authentic, they must of course reflect activity that is targeted and working. Jess described what she called ‘strategic enablers’ underpinning the things you have to get right as a responsible business. Areas such as inclusion and diversity, risk and governance. Then creating goals and KPIs that sit behind that framework that will help lead on how you tell your story.
4. Developing the role of responsible business professionals
Dedicated responsible business professionals within organisations are still a new thing. Matt Newton described how he was the first person in the position at Goldman Sachs. He’s leading an area of work that has a long history within the company, so he has to overlay a thoughtful communications approach to existing responsible business activity.
5. Aligning your organisation with its responsible business goals
Matt described organisational alignment on a broad responsible business agenda as a key area of focus. Goldman Sachs had done a lot of work on policy and framework, including embedding its ambition and targets. They had an established story around social issues, but other areas of the wider responsible business discussion needed equal attention to ensure the broad responsible business communications aligned.
6. Localising a global strategy
Global firms may face additional challenges. Although Goldman Sachs is global, its US office influences a lot of the organisation’s communications approach. Different regions may see different issues in a different light. It’s important to understand this in order to sell the strategy widely and be able to capitalise on having that global voice. Verity’s Raj Nair agreed, describing how – in some of our global cascades – there have been multiple markets with different cultural and language references, and all of their needs had to be considered.
7. Managing the day to day
Managing the day to day was also laid out as a challenge by Matt. We also discovered this when we produced Verity London’s ‘Responsible Busy-ness’ report, which included data on the pressures of responsible business professionals which you can find here. Good judgement has to be demonstrated day in and day out, and – for Goldman Sachs – the media often requests a viewpoint too. Meaning a lot to juggle.
8. Managing the narrative of content shared by employees
If you succeed in engaging your people, that too can then be a challenge! Jess described how many of the people at St James’s Place have become enthusiastic advocates for its responsible business work. This is great; but she has to ensure that what they are talking about and posting online matches up as a narrative with what’s actually going on inside the business, so everything is aligned and accurately reported. Mobilising people is amazing, but sometimes you have to pull things back a little too!
9. Keeping enthusiasm going
Keeping momentum in your comms cascades can also be challenging over a longer period of time. Raj advised on a planned, phased approach to a communication strategy as key, with clear messaging throughout. People may interpret information in different ways, which could endanger the consistency that is vital for comms to succeed in their goals.
Work hard on the strategy behind your responsible business approach, to support your communications and brand story. And do this in a collaborative way. Jess described how collaboration across St James’s Place has helped set them up for success. It will only work if it’s embedded and then embraced by everybody. This way, your communications strategy is being considered from the very start, within the context of development and delivery around responsible business goals.
Ensure your comms includes all key people, and not only your responsible business team (if you have one!). Include key senior leaders, and others who share accountability for the topics that encompass your purpose narrative and goals. St James’s Place began its engagement campaign with the key people it wanted to input into the strategy. Ambassadors and influencers across the business then offered opportunities for small ‘ins’ across the organisation, communicating to people that trust them and encouraging buy in.
Do an audience assessment to ensure messaging lands and everybody feels like they have a stake in this area of work. It shouldn’t feel imposed.
Remember that individuals won’t necessarily have had access to all the pre-work you may have done, so place your comms within a context of what each audience already knows – or not. Simple exercises such as A/B testing on headlines can work; St James’s Place also carries out AI assessment of the language used on voice channels to consider what already resonates and connects. Employee surveys and focus groups are also useful to ensure that comms being produced and cascaded will meet people’s needs. Matt described the importance of aligning communications to what’s actually going on within your environment, to ensure it remains current and relevant, no matter what changes are taking place.
Don’t forget about the power of water-cooler chat when the focus is so often set within the virtual world. Jess described how she thought this was especially true for middle-management. St James’s Place wanted leaders of all levels to become responsible business advocates. It’s managers who will ‘permit’ engagement, so equip them with how to talk about your responsible business strategy and goals. Remember your feedback loops too. Raj described how – at Verity – we often provide practical toolkits, to help managers cascade information as easily and relevantly as possible, supporting them in this task. The material and content within toolkits provides foundational information and sets up templates, which can then be tailored by individuals to meet the needs of their teams.
Communicate your own credentials as a specialist if your individual role is as a responsible business communicator. Matt felt this was an important thing for him to do when he took on his position at Goldman Sachs. It ensures others across the organisation kept up a continuous dialogue with him beyond first meetings. He did this with tasks including simply sending out articles that might be interesting, or providing opportunities for conferences. He noted how Goldman Sachs had a particular challenge around wider preconceptions, and therefore the importance of considering how views will land more broadly – and how he wanted to be seen within the company as somebody who could give a viewpoint similar to somebody viewing comms externally.
Create a top line strawman to build your comms strategy around. Matt found this helpful at Goldman Sachs, also stress-testing it within the business, aligned with internal and external goals, to focus on where the organisation can make a difference and have a voice. Debra described how sometimes companies have a mismatch between what they communicate internally and externally, so alignment of both is important.
Don’t see cascading communications around responsible business as a one off campaign. Verity’s Raj Nair described how it should be planned and achieved in multiple ways, across a long period of time.
This also allows you to give information time to resonate with audiences. Start with awareness at the top of the funnel. Then consider what it means for individuals. How does it impact them and what do they need to do to engage. Personalise comms as much as possible, so people feel included. And send secondary and supplementary information out over time to support the awareness phase.
Learn which communication channels work best for responsible business communications and discussions. This will be different for different organisations, as Raj described, reflecting on her work at Verity with multiple companies doing wide ranging comms cascades.
Jess described an inclusion and diversity campaign she led at St James’s Place. The first part encouraged anonymised disclosure of data. Ensuring that employees felt safe and couldn’t be identified was key, It was also important to be able to direct them to a system where they could input information easily. After lots of research of best practice elsewhere, St James’s Place decided to make the ‘why’ message come from the CEO to give it gravitas.
They then selected other senior leaders from across the organisation who they knew had strong levels of trust within their teams to support the message. They included push notifications to show employees where to input their data, to help overcome some barriers to action within a platform that fulfilled multiple communication needs. The result was a 75% disclosure rate – which was supported by a wider piece of work going on in the background to create broader diversity and inclusion principles for the business.
Toolkits and learning, including templates and podcasts, which catered for different learning styles, supported roll out. St James’s Place was also careful to demonstrate the collaborative and community-based impact of receiving individual D&I data; and encouraged teams to explore the topic together, brainstorming how they can bring these values into the work they do. This helped create a tangible feeling of change, with people working together to make a difference, rather than receiving a request that is imposed on them. Reinforcement was vital during comms cascades, so that requesting diversity data didn’t become a one off topic. Jess constantly looked for opportunities to reinforce the message within a variety of communications.
Consider exciting and creative ideas as part of your comms cascade. Raj described a Verity client where gamification was included as part of the mix, specifically to help build engagement around a process. Apps, Teams channels and microsites may also be great options for your brand to package information in a way that best serves your audiences, empowering individuals and building communities. Jess added how those communities are really important. Individuals may want to engage, but feel nervous about doing so. Offering them a safe space they can join to help make an impact gives them the support and encouragement they may need to get involved.
Matt described a diversity project at Goldman Sachs as an example of a top down requirement for an ambitious initiative focusing on giving capital to black women entrepreneurs in America. He described how it took lots of time, energy, strategy and thinking on how to cascade information on this successfully, and required an authoritative voice.
He compared this to a more bottom up project looking at waste in their UK building with 6,500 employees. Following engagement comms, mandated policies on issues like disposable cups were introduced, which Goldman Sachs people then accepted as the right thing to do. Weekly newsletters, announcements in lifts, and other comms channels ensured that it was activated and that people got behind building waste initiatives.
Matt described how being a clear eyed and authoritative voice, as a commercial organisation that has to balance commercial decisions, moved Goldman Sachs to an organisations that sometimes had ‘no comment’ to a place with a perspective on responsible business issues. Best data and insights are crucial to achieve this and give credibility, whilst a focus on storytelling underpins everything driving transition and actions. Debra added the importance of the bigger picture piece – the ‘why’ – being communicated, so reasoning is always addressed head on, grounded in what your organisation stands for. Matt reminded us of the importance of keeping comms on responsible business within the context of the reality of your company and activities in order to keep credibility intact.
Jess described how there are great internal communication platforms that give engagement rates. Whilst also reminding us of the qualitative actions we can take. She cautions however that we can get very caught up in reporting, and that we need to think about the data that will really help tell our stories. For example, long term transformational impact measurements for community projects – important, real information that gets to the heart of why her company is doing what it’s doing.
She also warned that measurements can’t only be disclosed as KPIs for responsible business projects in silo. We should include measurement on how how this activity impacts the success of the business overall. Responsible business metrics have to align with general growth and goals.
Don’t overcomplicate messaging. Keep it as simple as possible across your organisation
Listen and feedback to employees to create a collaborative culture and tailored messaging
Ensure you can track the flow and understanding of communications, as well as changes in behaviour and decision making
Embed responsible business comms within your organisation’s compliance process, to offer a thoughtful process and keep alignment on the policies being set
Track third party validation. Those willing to lend their reputation to your organisation’s work add credibility to your efforts and can form an important metric in measuring your success.
