| Deirdre |
Hi, I’m Deirdre Cleere, Senior Program Manager at RWS Moravia. I stumbled into localization right out of college when a small translation agency hired me as a project coordinator because, despite having no experience whatsoever, I was multilingual. I joined RWS Moravia in 2014. After 20-plus years in localization, I enjoy my role in the onboarding team collaborating with our newest customers and across teams to build localization and globalization programs.
Today, I’ll be talking with Ray Walsh, who helps multinational organizations with their internal corporate communications. Ray tells us in this podcast how corporate communications from the home office don’t always resonate with global employees. They don’t benefit from the key message when it doesn’t take their culture and language into account. Ray, would you go ahead and introduce yourself? |
| Ray |
Thanks for having me. My name is Ray Walsh. For the last 20 years, I’ve been in corporate communications. I’ve specialized over the last few years in internal or employee communications. And, I spent about three to four years working on a book called Localizing Employee Communications. It’s published by Content Wrangler and XML Press.
I got interested in that topic because when I was an English teacher, I remember the look on my students’ faces when it seemed like they were confident that they understood me; sometimes the look of uncertainty when they weren’t sure of that, though. And now that I’m in corporate communications in Europe, in conference rooms, it’s normally in a region office or a local office, and the global headquarters might be somewhere in the US. And sometimes on those conference calls, I get the feeling that either they misunderstood or they think they understood, but they didn’t. I think there’s a lot of nuance that isn’t being caught. I think there’s still a gap in comprehension even if their English is at [a] super high level.
So, I’m interested in what we can do as a profession in internal communications to close that gap. |
| Deirdre |
What problems are your clients coming to you to help them solve? |
| Ray |
Mostly when businesspeople talk about what they need, they say they need more engagement, regardless of what function they come from. You know, so, “People don’t care about our stuff. They need to care more. They need to be more engaged.” Whether it’s HR or operations or communications or executives, they all say they need more engagement. That word is starting to inflate and mean different things to different people.
So, when they come to somebody like me who comes from a communications background, they may be thinking about, you know, “We need more engagement, so therefore, we need more engaging content.” Which I take to mean, you know, something like delightful content. But I think what they really need is more effective content. Content that reaches people, it’s relevant to them, that’s been interpreted for their, you know, level of work, their area of work. I think if they make the content more effective for people, I think it will also be more engaging. |
| Deirdre |
Exactly. What’s the point of putting content out there if it isn’t engaging or effective? So, can you explain to us what the purpose of global communication is? |
| Ray |
What we do in internal communications isn’t that different from what other fields of communications do. We’re trying to persuade people. We’re trying to win hearts and minds. We’re trying to get them to convert.
You know, a couple of examples: maybe the sales group is selling to the wrong types of customers, maybe accidents are on the rise or maybe employees are leaving for competitors. So, those are the kind of problems that we might be able to focus on with communications work. But I think we need to think less about creating content and how we can enable communications globally. |
| Deirdre |
Again, so much effort goes into creating corporate content. If it doesn’t enable and improve global communications, then it’s not really meeting its purpose. The premise of your research is that global employees tend to ignore corporate content. Can you comment on this? |
| Ray |
I’d say that it’s that employees don’t think that the content is relevant to their experience. And I know first-hand here in Europe region offices, when I’ve spoken with some employees, some of these employees honestly believed that the corporate intranet was only for US employees. And even if they understand that it’s intended for them, they’re not particularly interested in it. I think that’s because they’re finding that the global content is just so abstract. They don’t know what’s this content supposed to mean to me? What’s it supposed to mean to my team?
There’s a lot of research that shows we’re deep in an age of skepticism and at its worst, I think corporate content has the feel of propaganda. And if that’s outside of my language and culture, I think, you know, I as a user, I might be even more skeptical about that content.
Now, in practical terms, corporate communications can’t possibly fine tune a thousand different versions for a thousand different teams. And that’s why we need some local stake in communicating the story, and I think that can be better accomplished with localization. |
| Deirdre |
So there are local team members who would clearly benefit greatly from connecting with the corporate strategy, for example. |
| Ray |
Yeah. I’d say corporate has the big picture and the long-term view, but they tend to talk in generalities and abstractions because they’re trying to reach everyone around the world. Local teams know the work at the ground level, but they don’t always connect that to the larger strategy. And we need to find a way to combine the big picture with the local details. And again, I think that’s something we can accomplish through localization. To make the big picture culturally appropriate and relevant to people’s experience.
Now, I have to say, when I was researching this book, I started about four years ago, and I was thinking originally about what we in internal communications could learn from the localization industry. And I was thinking at that time about language and culture, but now, a few years later, I’m thinking that operational details may be even more important.
So, for example, to help those local teams with those priorities, I think we need to give them number one, some kind of messaging framework. What do we as a company want to be talking about this year, this quarter, this month?
Second thing we can give them are visual assets, and this is huge—visuals that are easy to use and culturally appropriate. If we don’t do that, they’re going to go out and find their own and then you have possibly legal problems.
And number three, some kind of calendar that we’re all using for major global events like important trade shows that we’re going to be at, or maybe what’s the publication date for the annual sustainability report.
And then I would add one last thing we need to give them and that’s best practice advice. And here I would tread carefully. They know their local culture; they know their local language and they know what businesses they’re targeting and all of that. So, it’s a balance. We don’t want to take over. We want them to take the lead on communicating. Nevertheless, a lot of them are people that don’t have communications background and they don’t know best practice. So, they may not know, for example, how to use hashtags or maybe they just forget to put in a clear call-to-action on a piece. So, there needs to be that dialogue about, you know, what are the communication best practices, but then we have to trust them to execute. |
| Deirdre |
So there’s a lot to it and localization is at the core. But are there cases where the corporate communications can remain in English? |
| Ray |
I do think that there is a place for English. So, the question is, you know, yes—the organization speaks English pretty well—where can we use English? For that, I would think about what is the communication’s purpose?
All communications can fit into two categories: they’re either to inform or to persuade. And if it’s to inform, it’s just facts, here’s the information, here’s where you go to get it, and probably people are going to be able to understand that. Persuading somebody to care, that’s where you’re going to use more emotion, more storytelling, and that’s where culture and language are going to play a huge role.
So how would that play out practically? Let’s say you’re rolling out some kind of collaboration portal and you need me to go in and create a user profile in order to get started. Well, the first part of the message might be to persuade me to care about it. You’re going to tell me how it’s good for the company or how it’s good for me individually, and that part might be in my local language. That might be localized to my team level. Once I’m bought in, okay, now how do I create my username and where do I put the picture and all of that? Those details, the instructions, are factual, informative—maybe that part can be in English. |
| Deirdre |
So considering that content that’s intended to be persuasive that so much is related to culture, I imagine that ethics and compliance training would be tricky for companies to manage internationally because employees may not view the issues the same way or they just may not be convinced of the importance of the training. So how can companies approach this? |
| Ray |
It depends on what the company’s goal is. And let’s be perfectly honest, I think a lot of times the goal is, you know, we have this training on harassment or we have this training on corruption and our goal is to get 100% of employees to take it. Maybe they’re trying to persuade shareholders or regulators that they take the issue seriously and all they want is the number. And if that’s the case, then you just go for the number. But that means the communications and compliance and HR are going to be chasing people and badgering them, “Please take the training. Please take the training.” And in my view, that’s a kind of a lose-lose. And unfortunately, it’s quite common. I think that, you know, it’s a lose-lose because some people are going to resent it, they’re going to see it as a waste of time.
But I think that if you really address, if you’re really trying to change behavior, if you’re really trying to solve the problem or, you know, prevent the underlying problems, then I think you would want to take some kind of localizing view. I think you do need to address the culture of the people that you are trying to train. So, for example, in European countries, in a lot of industries that are male-dominated, the issue of sexual harassment just isn’t seen as a big problem.
So, if you’re concerned with the outcome, actually reducing cases of harassment, you should design a training that’s relevant to each culture. If your goal is changing behaviors, then I think it has to be much more localized in order to be effective. |
| Deirdre |
That makes sense. So, once you have engaged with local managers and you’ve managed to make that messaging relevant, then how do you measure success? Is it simply with clicks and likes? |
| Ray |
Yeah, well, localized content will get viewed more. I don’t think there’s any question in that. I would hope that the goal isn’t just clicks and likes. I hope the organization is interested in outcomes. You know, did we actually reduce instances of harassment? Did we actually reduce the accident rate?
It’s not just effective content, it’s making for a more effective organization. So, in that case, if they’re measuring outcomes, it depends on who’s driving the localization. You know, HR might be more interested in lowering employee turnover or getting more employees to take trainings. Or operations might be interested in reducing the accident rate or maybe reducing the amount of supervision that’s needed.
But these measures should be specific. You know, did they actually lower accidents? Are there fewer incidents of harassment? And if the localization is effective, it’s actually making for a more effective organization. |
| Deirdre |
It sounds like it’s a bit tricky to measure but clearly, it’s worth figuring out how to do it. So, say that I don’t have a big budget for localizing corporate communications. Do you have any recommendations for me? |
| Ray |
Yes. I would say the number one recommendation is to start building a network, and by that, I mean the people network who do the communications, who execute communications locally. That might be a fully dedicated resource in your major markets and you may already be working with them. But then there are smaller markets or they may be less known to you, and the person who actually distributes communications might be, I don’t know, an HR specialist. Maybe it’s the executive assistant in that country, but you need to find out who those people are and what their capabilities are.
And then I would start having, you know, Scrum meetings and just talk about how communications can go better. But if they’re doing it only part-time for us, it’s not going to seem as urgent to them. So, I think it’s a negotiation. We need their help in order to reach people locally. They’re going to put the human face on our message, so that may mean that we have to persuade them of how they’re going to benefit in this and it may be a long-term prospect. |
| Deirdre |
Doesn’t it always come down to the people and the relationships? And what can you say to a client who believes they don’t have time to localize internal communications? |
| Ray |
If you’re really putting time pressure on things, what happens is people will just put it out the door. They’ll just like, “Okay, I sent it out, fine, we’re done.” They tick the box and they haven’t actually delivered the communication to people face-to-face. They haven’t taken the time to get any feedback. They haven’t engaged with people on any level. So, the value of that exercise I think is fairly low. And I think that to your point, I think most communications directors would say, “It’s too complex. It’s too expensive. We just can’t do that.”
I guess where I’d push back on that is to think about how much they’re actually spending today and notice how much traction you’re getting internationally. And if you’re not measuring, you know, you really should because in my experience, the global readership can be close to zero.
If you spend a little more and you spend a little more time, you’re going to have so much more effectiveness in those global markets. And I see that as a great investment in the capabilities that you’ve already built. |
| Deirdre |
Again, as you said, it might be hard to quantify traction, but you really have to prove it’s effective in order to convince people to invest. It’s back to measurement. Onto another topic, would you say that there is room for machine translation in internal corporate communications? |
| Ray |
I think people’s acceptance of machine translation is getting better generally. The quality of machine translation is getting better. But I think what you have to do is state it for what it is. “This is a machine translation. It’s meant to help with communication understanding. It’s not 100% and here’s the original source content,” so that they can see it for themselves.
Machine translation may never be there for that kind of emotional, storytelling, persuasive speech. So again, if you’re going to use machine translation, I would limit it to the factual, informational stuff and then I would clearly label it as machine translation. |
| Deirdre |
Yes. When there is a lot of content to translate, MT can be a huge help. But getting it wrong in these persuasive, strategic materials is a big problem. So, what final thoughts do you want to share with our listeners on improving global internal communications? |
| Ray |
The world is changing, but it’s changing so rapidly and everything’s becoming so much more granular and complex and local. And I think we need to evolve our approach to communications and think about what that looks like for our organization. The tools are going to be there. The question is, are we? |
