The leaves are turning, jumpers are out, and hot teas and coffees were essential at our latest IC Leaders’ Breakfast. Hosted at our offices in Southwark, we brought together internal communicators from across sector (and geographies!) to discuss the hot topics and pressing challenges in IC. Our theme was ‘Developing a culture for success’ – a topic that’s clearly front of mind for many as it sparked brilliant conversation and reflection in the group.

We were lucky enough to have the discussion led by Tor Goldfield from Expedia Group and Mary Jacobsen from Bird & Bird. It was really interesting to hear how the needs of their respective organisations differed, and what function internal communications has in these different contexts.

For Tor, there was a need to streamline the values to their core essentials when their new CEO took over. By and large, the values stayed the same as under her predecessor, but Tor spoke of the sea change in investment and care for their values that motivated a lot more active participation from the workforce. This led to an uptick in overall employee satisfaction as, from their own metrics, team cooperation had reached 92% with a massive increase of overall engagement to a 3-year high.

In Mary Jacobsen’s case, at Bird & Bird, they developed and grew these values in 2023 and have been working to embed them ever since. Scratch. Similarly to Tor, this was triggered by the entrance of a new CEO but combined with the launching of a new corporate brand, something that 106 was brought in to facilitate. This effort led to a multinational investigation into the shared sensibilities across continents. In an effort to avoid a London-centric narrative they were keen to move away from, a research project was launched to bring in as many different global points of view as possible to find what working for the firm meant to all their people.

These two case studies sparked an early discussion about recognising cultural differences when articulating global company values. In that same vein, how important are those values to organisations and how important should they be? Often, when companies expand and join collectives, culture can be lost as new stakeholders come in and new ways of working are developed. Henry, 106 Founder, made the point that this type of restructuring should be seen as a “stress test” for organisations; if you can’t uphold your values on your worst day then they shouldn’t be thought of as your values.

But it’s one thing to state values and another to live them. Discussion moved onto how embed values into everyday operations. Benchmarking is crucial to avoid negative interpretation of values but having clear focuses on what they looked like. As we talked further, we defined disengagement as when values aren’t truthful in how the company conducts itself, highlighting the importance of behaviour modelling.

Companies in general feel the need to be all things to all people but a good point was made about how companies can be tied by the markets they operate in. Given greater global insecurity in recent years, we came to discuss how to navigate complex issues in a truthful manner. One person shared their powerful move to offer an open forum for colleagues to discuss what the business was doing in relation to these external events or topics, in a safe internal space.

Conversation then turned to how to influence leaders and the concept of “authenticity” in communications. A great point was made that workforces don’t look for authentic leaders necessarily but more for credible leaders; they back up what they do with their actions. In light of this, the need to be a collaborative and “critical friend” when working with leaders was necessary to make real impact in communications. In the examples given, this meant that employees understood their role in the wider strategy and felt their concerns heard.

A final hot take with this great analogy that someone shared: employees think comms are like marriage while leaders think comms are like dating. Leaders want to put their best results forward and tell their people what’s great about working here whereas employees want more depth in their comms and greater honesty.

It was fantastic to have so many IC pros together, to hear about what’s going on in different organisations and share some common challenges. Thank you to everyone who came and contributed so openly, it was such an enriching morning.

Until next time!

Do you have a hankering for professional development and Ole & Steen pastries? Come along to our next breakfast! Email daniel@106comms.com with your interest, and we’ll invite you to our next event.