Communications has never been so essential to business performance. But communicators are still not trusted at the same level as other C-suite leaders. It’s time that changes.  

For several decades, the communications function has been maturing. Where once was a more straightforward playbook for connecting to key audiences – place an ad to reach customers, draft a press release to signal investors, write a memo to update employees, the 24-hour news cycle, information overload and a near-constant state of crisis has resulted in the need for a more strategic and nuanced approach. 

And communications executives have been rising to the challenge. A poll conducted by The Weber Shandwick Collective in August of 2021 – roughly a year and a half into the global pandemic – revealed that at companies where communications were prioritized, employees felt significantly more loyal to their organization than those at companies who were not prioritizing communications (87% vs. 50%). Similarly, 80% of consumers preferred to make purchases from companies who were actively communicating policies that promoted employee health and safety.  

Despite this track record of success, a lack of trust in the very leaders best equipped to manage company reputation has been stubbornly persistent. Additional research from United Minds and KRC Research shows While 77% of C-suite leaders consider communications and public relations as an area of focus for the company, behind only attracting and retaining talent (93%), managing the adoption of new technologies (90%) and addressing the impacts of inflation (91%), only 24% believe their company can deliver well in this area.  

This lack of trust is creating serious business risk. 

Communication leaders are generally very aligned to stakeholder expectations, according to insights gathered in partnership with USC Annenberg. This is especially true when it comes to perceptions of societal issues – an area where their C-suite peers are currently underestimating the importance to employees, customers and investors (even more so the Gen Z and Millennial members of these groups). What’s more, these leaders are not comfortable engaging around the issues that stakeholders believe are important. And only 27% feel comfortable addressing even one of the following topics: social inequities, climate change, geopolitical or domestic social issues.  

A misalignment that is possibly leading to missteps. 

Importance of ESG standards to stakeholder perceptions of a company 

Companies who are discounting the expert guidance of communications’ leaders to engage – thoughtfully – around some more difficult topics are not realizing the benefits of doing so. According to findings from TWSC’s most recent public perceptions poll, employee satisfaction is much higher at companies where leadership speaks up: 72% vs. 39%. And consumers are making purchasing decisions based on company positions: 36% have chosen to “buycott,” intentionally buying products or services to show support. 

This doesn’t mean that communications leaders believe that every issue should be taken on publicly and bullishly. To the contrary, these leaders recognize that over the next five years, their job will become increasingly balanced between building reputation and protecting it. 

Time spent protecting versus building reputation in the next five years 

The stakes are high.  

TWSC’s recent public perceptions poll also showed that even though 71% of U.S. adults believe companies should take action to address social issues, 45% see categorizing a company as “woke” as criticism. And 27% of employees who work at companies that have been called “woke” are fearful that their company will become the target of aggression and harassment.  

This makes it even more important to trust the experts when it comes to preserving reputation while navigating complex, multi-stakeholder issues – or increasingly, the state of business.  

So, how do communications leaders prove their value to C-suite peers and drive business success? Here are four ways: 

  1. Shared intelligence: Every business must make trade-offs when it comes to prioritizing stakeholders, but in a model where responsibility for stakeholder engagement is divided across different teams, these decisions are often made in a vacuum. An integrated communication function offers a 360-degree view of stakeholders and a single point of responsibility in coordinating engagement versus piecing together competing priorities from across the organization. 
  1. Shared narratives: A clear articulation of the business strategy, tied to company values, is critical to how a company is perceived by its stakeholders – and it requires nuances for each community. Communicators’ advanced understanding of stakeholder dynamics is critical to tailoring a narrative effectively and avoiding inconsistencies can lead to misunderstandings and frustration.  
  1. Coordinated execution: Most business priorities require support from different communities at different times. Strategic communications leaders should be empowered to pull the right lever at the right time in a coordinated fashion across shared platforms to drive advocacy at scale. 
  1. Shared accountability: Accountability shouldn’t be for the metrics of the individual function like reputation, employee engagement or policy wins. It’s for the business. Strategic alignment within communications functions means sharing the same goals while also maintaining discrete responsibility for the areas of impact necessary to achieve them. 

It’s ironic, right? Communicators – the best positioned protectors of reputation – are suffering from reputational issues. It’s time these business strategists get the full support from their executive peers. Because they’re equipped to do the job. 

The headline of Gallup’s recent State of the Global Workplace report states that “In today’s typical organisation, most employees are neither engaged nor actively disengaged.”  

This isn’t surprising given the rise of quiet quitting, extensive change fatigue and ever-changing expectations of work. Yet, it’s also critical we don’t take this at surface value. Just because our employees aren’t actively engaged or disengaged, doesn’t mean they’re not experiencing a myriad of emotions in the workplace. Emotions that could be telling us a lot more than we realise.  

According to Gallup’s study, nearly half of their respondents are stressed (and quite a few are angry). Anger is reported slightly higher in females (23%) than males (20%), and higher in South Asia (36%) and the Middle East (32%) than Europe (14%), Australia (15%) and Latin America (13%). US (18%) is fairly middling. Interestingly, intent to leave the business follows a similar pattern country by country showing serious financial implications if these emotions are not tackled and managed.  

What needs to change? 

For too long, the tendency has been to avoid, hide or even dismiss strong emotions in the workplace. Despite the shifts towards vulnerability in leadership, recognising and taking note of feelings, emotions and human reactions isn’t a widespread discipline. Even today, language around emotions is often seen as soft, unnecessary and completely disconnected from the business outcomes required.  

At United Minds, a consultancy focused on making business more human, we’re out to prove that this line of thinking needs an evolution. Now more than ever, employees are increasingly being bombarded with new programmes to get behind, messages to disseminate, and in many cases, fundamental shifts to how they work on a day-to-day basis.  

Without paying attention to the true emotions behind our workforce, how will we know if they’re truly supporting the changes that are coming down the track, how can we know how much change fatigue they’re really feeling and how can we possibly plan change management interventions that will actually work? By paying closer attention to these emotions, we can lead more effective change programmes, realise business results much faster and retain and engage more employees in the process.  

Four ways to unlock emotions to drive change 

  1. Create opportunities to share emotions – In a client workshop recently, we asked leaders to share where they were in the energy and state matrix. This useful tool acknowledges that no employee is going to be constantly in performance mode, that recovery time is needed, and that survival mode can only be sustained for so long before burnout becomes a reality. By creating a safe environment we identified that over 25% of the group were in survival or burnout mode; insight that allowed the senior leadership team to plan their transformation efforts and expectations they put on leaders more effectively.  
  1. Use emotional insights to inform change management approaches – the best change management teams in the world don’t just blindly follow change management toolkits and theories. By taking a human approach to change, they create mechanisms and forums to capture and uncover emotional reactions in real time from the outset. Approaches like applying the SCARF model or listening activities to uncover real emotional responses. Then use this insight to create change management tactics that genuinely tackle these emotions.  
  1. Train line managers and people leaders to identify and address emotional reactions – EQ remains a core skill of any business leader today. Organisations that take this seriously are hiring and training managers to be able to take this to the next level, specifically focusing on how to manage these reactions in a fast-changing environment. Approaches like displaying empathy, asking open questions and playing back what’s been heard to ensure people feel listened to then drawing on tools and techniques to manage the responses i.e. introducing frameworks like the energy matrix above. We’ve seen increases in requests for these kind of training programmes over the past year, with those participating reporting the importance and impact of investing in this area.  
  1. Build self-awareness and resilience as core competencies – When people in the organisation are aware of their feelings and recognise them at work, it is more likely that they will be able to work with them in a way that will not be harmful for their mental health and disruptive in the workplace. This personal resilience can enable employees to find better ways to address stressful situations, be more focussed and productive in times of constant change and grow as individuals and professionals. 

Try these strategies out and let us know how it goes. It may be uncomfortable at first, but we believe it’ll be worth it. For more information [email protected].   

While the concept of stakeholder capitalism has become highly politicized – synonymous with woke corporations and the culture wars gripping pre-election America – the idea that a business need concern itself with more than just profits is as old as business itself.

Long before the Business Roundtable defined the purpose of a corporation as delivering long-term value to all stakeholders, that’s how business got done. The growth of the technology industry kicked off a war for talent that empowered employees wanting to make a ‘dent in the universe,’ to quote the late Steve Jobs. Purpose statements were written, employee value propositions were drafted and employers found themselves taking a stand on issues far outside their area of expertise and comfort; all in the interests of securing and retaining talent.

Customers, investors, employees, policymakers and activist groups share the same technology platforms. The ease of information dissemination creates an information fluency between communities that exposes every action corporations make to stakeholders who engage, purchase, invest and retaliate accordingly.  A complex cacophony of competing, conflicting and often equally fact-based points of view is driving the social narrative and corporations are caught in the crossfire. Share prices have been hit and CEOs have lost their jobs, but after twenty years of competing for increasingly leveraged workforces, companies can’t back down.

At a Fortune town hall event last year, CEOs of leading global brands dismissed the backlash on corporate wokeness and ESG on the basis that it’s just good business. If the circular economy means their companies can appeal to workers and customers, reduce operating costs, AND benefit the planet, then not investing would be an act of self-sabotage. Unfortunately, different constituents have different opinions – multi-generational workforces disagree on what the company should stand for; some investors want long-term ESG growth and others want short-term profits. Inclusion is a challenging concept when a broad base of customers buy your products and those who don’t like your position are ready to activate in opposition.

All of this is the context for the rise of the corporate affairs function.

Corporate Affairs, like stakeholder capitalism is nothing new. At its base, it is the structural alignment of a company’s stakeholder engagement capabilities (comms, government relations, investor relatons, brand, etc.) into a single organization. Not, all things to all people, but dedicated specialists working side by side, aligned to the same priorities and reporting to the same leader.

Corporate Affairs has been common in heavily scrutinized industries like pharmaceuticals, aerospace and energy for years. Those industries can’t afford a misstep in government relations or communications that might put their broader business at risk. As those risks have spread to other industries, so has the practice. Many leading technology companies use a similar structure to manage rising government intervention in their affairs.

Risk mitigation is one motivating factor, but some companies are being proactive. They want to coordinate their policy agenda, investment thesis, ESG strategy and employee value proposition for impact amplification around critical business priorities.

A corporate affairs operating model can help. If all stakeholder engagement resources are organized on the basis of a shared framework of priorities, narrative and strategy then multiple levers can be pulled simultaneously to advance business goals.

Does that require structural alignment into one corporate affairs organization? No. The goal is strategic alignment. Structural integration is one way to get there – a ‘forced’ alignment that can reduce friction and waste between the units. Some organizations achieve the same objective by setting clear priorities that functions align around. It takes a firm hand from a leader actively engaged in stakeholder strategy, but it can be done with clear and effective governance.

However it’s structured, the most effective way to strategically align stakeholder functions is at four key points of intersection:

  1. Shared intelligence: every business makes trade offs between stakeholder communities, but without a single view of your multistakeholder environment, you’re hopping between those communities in a senseless balancing act. Executives report that this integrated, 360 degree view of stakeholders is one of the biggest benefits they receive from a corporate affairs leader on their Executive Committee. It means they don’t have to do the work of balancing competing priorities from across their organization and one person is accountable to coordinate the response.
  2. Shared narratives: narrative is a loaded term, but essentially it’s how you articulate your strategy and it requires nuances for each community. If its not 80 percent consistent, the inconsistencies can lead to misunderstandings and frustration, especially given the fluency of information between communities mentioned earlier.
  3. Coordinated execution: Most business priorities require support from different communities at different times. Pulling the right lever at the right time in an intentional and coordinated way is how sophisticated companies drive advocacy at scale.
  4. Shared accountability: It all starts and stops here. Accountability shouldn’t be for the metrics of the individual function like reputation, employee engagement or policy wins. It’s for the business. Strategic alignment means sharing the same goals and all being accountable for playing a part.

It’s possible over time that stakeholder dissonance will lessen. Workforce automation may reduce employee leverage and the consequent need to prioritize talent concerns against or over the concerns of shareholders or elected officials. Many companies will suffer before then. You don’t need to believe the role of a corporation is to serve employees or prioritize under-represented communities; you just need to know that in a multi-stakeholder economy, the path to profits is a minefield and everyone needs the same map.

United Minds is a Weber Shandwick consultancy dedicated to making business more human. To learn more, reach out to [email protected].

Focus, focus, focus. It’s the motto of choice for healthcare and pharmaceutical companies as former conglomerates divest to individual businesses. For pharma companies, this has created an opportunity to reaffirm their core strategic direction, moving companies like Merck, J&J and GSK away from multi-divisional and back to pure-play. Rumors abound of similar moves from other pharma giants.

For most recent examples of divestitures, it’s been the non-pharma elements of the business that received a new brand and identity: the pharma element retained the legacy brand (for regulatory reasons if nothing else). The case is clear for change management to support the new brand being spun out; less so for the resulting business which is perceived as mostly the same, at least by some audiences.  But while end-customers such as HCPs may perceive little alteration, for other stakeholders like analysts and investors – and critically, employees – the effects of removing an organizational limb require planning new adaptations if the business is to thrive.

We’re seeing three main areas of concentration as pharma companies seek to redefine or refresh their purpose post-split. All of them require some degree of mindset shift for employees as the reshaped company settles into its new formation or looks to revitalize its pipeline. These include:

All this means that the changes for employees in pharma business units post-divestment are just as great as in the spun-off units, without there being a handy new company identity for the change to hang its hat on. This can mean the pharma company risks being less immediate in its focus on managing its own organizational change, or is distracted by the operational aspects of all of the above points to address them as a true change management requirement.

Balancing employee expectations post-divestment

It’s easy for a divestment to appear as a narrowing of options rather than a refinement of business focus: even though the differing cultures often found in each segment of a conglomerate often preclude much internal migration. This is an important pillar of post-divestment messaging: what’s in it for employees as they assess their place in the new world?

Another overlooked consequence to divestment can be the loss of easy exposure to the strengths from each business. OTC is closer to FMCG in its speed, agility and customer sensitivity, particularly for divisions such as supply chain and marketing. These are all attributes that pharma companies are keen to translate to their own more measured, more heavily regulated environment: meaning they must be even more intentional on bringing in external inspiration and understanding how to apply it.

Tout the benefits, but don’t over-promise

As with all major organizational changes – regardless of the benefits to the business and the individual – employees will likely have an emotional reaction, questioning their future and allegiance. In the case of a spin, it’s a rare opportunity to re-define or re-align employees around the company purpose – but it must be done with intention.

This is the time to consider the priorities for employees and what’s in it for them as a result of the divestment. Where is the organizational focus and how is anything different from before? For example, allowing a business-as-usual mindset to continue is not only a missed opportunity to refine organizational focus; it’s a willful blindness that can constrain innovation just when the company needs it most.

An employee narrative can be helpful to setting or re-affirming a clear North Star for the business – a point around which employees can rally both practically and emotionally to re-energize commitment and pride. This should not neglect support functions who may previously have bridged across the former company, and because the operational complexity of a transition reverberates for a long time it’s important that the story is intentionally created to stay relevant for months or years.

This is the time to grasp the nettle of necessary organizational transformation and unite employees around the shared business focus with a positive mindset – embracing change for a progressive future, and not mourning the way things used to be.

Tips to build and sustain the right culture for your future

Wherever you are in the divestment cycle – planning, implementing, or post-split – it’s a long journey toward a new future as an organization.

Other steps you can take to best support employees who are living with unprecedented levels of on-the-job disruption and change:

  1. Never underestimate the power of the case for change. When articulating a divestment or the sole companies’ strategy, it needs to articulate and reinforce a compelling case for change that reflects what employees care about (e.g., improved patient care/health equity, removal of silos, greater agility/digital development, etc.).
  2. Engage people in shaping that vision. The vision needs to be congruent with the employee experience – where possible, employees should be involved to co-create a future they can see themselves in. And listen: a top complaint during transitions is that employees don’t feel heard. Set up channels and sessions for leadership to listen to employee concerns and answer questions to help reduce the resistance to change.
  3. Don’t skimp on culture. After a divestment is when the real work begins. But teams are often burnt out by the process of getting there. A re-alignment on the revised or reaffirmed culture requires consistent, long-term, sustained efforts, including ownership from key leaders and enablement of managers.
  4. Be transparent… and authentic. It will be as important to celebrate the wins and the milestones as it will be to acknowledge the setbacks. Arm and empower leaders with the information that they need to engage with their people thoughtfully and truthfully. Trust in leadership is a critical differentiator in a time of change. While they may be on-board to the rationale early, the management level a step or two below will be harder to engage and equip: and they are the critical first face to employees, so need to be authentic.
  5. Meet people where they are. In an age of increasing information overload, it’s more important than ever to understand and leverage existing rhythms and channels to ensure employee awareness and buy-in. Deliver the message where people will receive it. And repeat, repeat, repeat.

United Minds is a Weber Shandwick consultancy dedicated to making business more human. To learn more, reach out to [email protected].

[i] Source: Research and Development in the Pharmaceutical Industry https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126 and https://invivo.pharmaintelligence.informa.com/IV146733/Pharma-Innovation-Europe-Is-Being-Edged-Into-Third-Place

The best leadership legacies inspire us to think boldly about the future. They compel us to reaffirm our own commitment to the cause and to move forward with a renewed sense of mission.

Yet too often, organizations struggle — seeking to balance the procedural aspects of leadership transitions against the preferences and calendars of the individual leaders. What gets lost in the swirl is a rare opportunity to engage employees and other stakeholders in a way that is personal, energizing and lasting. You’ve just been handed the keys to a catalyst.

As you plan your next CEO or c-suite transition, you’ll want to highlight your organization’s performance and the essential strengths and qualities of your outgoing and ascending leaders. And more importantly, consider how you might capitalize on this singular moment for the benefit of your stakeholders — modernizing the value of your organization and all it stands for through an authentic leadership lens.

Three considerations when ushering in a new leader

In any leadership transition, you are in effect framing and safeguarding three leadership legacies — the outgoing CEO’s, your new CEO’s and the legacy of your organization. It’s helpful to focus the transition on a few fundamental truths that are central to your organization and those it serves.

1. Start by looking for ways to broaden the conversation beyond the transition plan and key messages. For instance, you may identify genuine connections among leadership platforms, your business strategy and employee value proposition, your ESG commitments and innovation pathways — or your organization’s mission and the unique contribution that it makes to society. Use these connections to build relevance for stakeholders.

2. A transition is also an opportune time to develop or enhance the profiles of your senior leadership team. It’s less about creating “swim lanes” — which might give the impression that your leaders are each doing their own thing — and more about building alignment and amplifying distinct yet complementary viewpoints.

3.Think about your leadership culture overall. Is there more your organization can do to develop next-generation leaders — at all levels? How might your new CEO serve as their advocate and bring their voices and perspectives into the mix?

Now for the tactical side of things…

The following recommendations are designed to rally your stakeholders with a spirit of inclusivity and shared opportunity. Here are five considerations to employ as you transition from one CEO to the next:

When a leadership transition is successful, it honors not only the unique leadership traits and capabilities of both the outgoing CEO and the ascending CEO, but also the organization’s collective accomplishments within the context of a shared, overarching vision. For stakeholder audiences, the main focus must always return to the trajectory of the organization and the people it serves. And every milestone celebrated must predict further progress, championed by all.

United Minds is a Weber Shandwick consultancy dedicated to making business more human. To learn more, reach out to [email protected].

How to determine the right approach for your business and culture

For centuries – basically since the industrial revolution – most of society has shared the common experience of what it means to work. No matter what the work is, the process of coming together at a workspace has remained central to how work gets done. Or more literally: going to work.

The past three years have upended this, most likely for good. But while the disruption to past ways of working was cemented by the pandemic, it has only sped up a much longer technology-enabled transition to more flexible work arrangements.

This is one of the main reasons why there has not yet been an en masse “return to work” as was forecast as early as April 2020. Even so, many leaders are still looking for a silver bullet and the right answer for how to best manage their workforces as we look to the future.

The truth is, there isn’t one right answer. But there are better answers for different types of cultures, businesses and organizations.

For example, if silos are holding back the business, in-office interactions can help break these down. If innovation is critical, a balance of live collaboration and protected time for individual creativity might speed the path to success.

Rather than focusing on “returning” to work or even “going” to work, leaders should be intentionally designing policies that consider how to best bring people together to work.

Because getting it right is truly important.

Research from United Minds shows that hybrid workers are the most satisfied with their jobs, with over 6 in 7 feeling both loyal and proud to work for their employer (vs. 3 in 4 who are back in the office full time and 2 in 3 working from home full time). From a recruitment standpoint, Gen Z is most likely to value workplace flexibility (58%), especially when compared to Boomers (44%). At the same time, people working from home full time are the most at risk: more than half are worried about their mental health and wellness, they are experiencing burnout and are questioning job security – rates that are 10 to 70% higher than their hybrid and in-office peers.

Knowing that every organization is unique, let’s explore some of the common “work” structures:

  1. 100% in the workplace. This structure works best when the majority of work required is regulated and/or collaborative and iterative – and is especially effective where there was already a strong pre-pandemic culture. To further the success of requiring full-time in-person engagement, consider allocating and protecting adequate time and flexibility for employees to manage personal commitments and supporting and destigmatizing mental health and wellness.

Even the above general rules are not necessarily iron-clad and there is no such thing as a “set it and forget it” structure. Getting it right requires an on-going assessment of what is – and isn’t – working.

This means surveying employees both on preferences and levels of satisfaction and engagement, taking a hard look at key performance indicators to determine where you might be falling short and if there are trends that could be linked to current work arrangements. And finally, testing, learning and being open to making adjustments accordingly.

Ultimately, it’s very likely that multiple work arrangements will be present at organizations now and into the future. To successfully navigate the complexity of these arrangements, aligning workplace practices to support the culture you need to deliver on the business strategy is critical. So are frequent communications that reinforce this connection.

United Minds is a Weber Shandwick consultancy dedicated to making business more human. To learn more, reach out to [email protected].

An open-source approach to empowering your teams

This article is part of United Minds’ MoreHuman@Work series, a closer look at the changes and trends in the world of work and what they mean for organizations.

After more than three years of constant, pandemic-fuelled change, employees have had enough. They’re fatigued. They’re burned out. And they may balk at your next initiative – or worse, lend it tepid, performative support.

Seven of ten employees (71%) are overwhelmed by the amount of change at work. Eight of ten (83%) change-fatigued employees say their employer has not provided enough tools or resources to help them adapt. As a result, 60% of employees plan to change jobs in the next few years, with ~1 in 5 – in the next year.

The question is, what are you going to do about it? Can you fairly balance the needs of your employees against increasing pressure to transform your business to drive growth or profit? How will you keep your teams at their sharpest to meet tomorrow’s challenges swiftly and effectively?

Now could be the perfect time to open-source your change strategy – involving your people to shape how change should happen.

Chances are, you’ll be surprised how quickly your employees jump in – their degree of engagement and innovation –when they are simply afforded the opportunity to co-create change and get ahead of it rather than waiting for the next wave to fall upon them.

The open-source approach requires a bit of an organizational mindset shift. If your organization is more traditionally hierarchical, it requires a bigger one: eschewing the top-down view in favor of collaboration, building inclusive leaders at all levels, and sharing accountability. Here are five steps to get you there:

An open-source change strategy will make your organization far more agile, customer-focused, and responsive, built on rapid feedback from your front lines. Leadership still has an important role – but rather than imposing change from the top, your leaders will now be seen as ‘empowering partners’ who remove barriers to progress. You’ll change faster, reap the rewards sooner. And your formerly change-weary employees, newly energized with a sense of purpose and ownership, will become your most vital change champions.

United Minds is proud to announce the expansion of its global management consultancy with a new C-suite advisory: Myriant. Focused on business resiliency, Myriant will apply a stakeholder lens to advise clients on various risks and opportunities which often arise against today’s backdrop of geopolitical fractures, social and political polarization and misinformation. Combined with United Minds’ deep expertise in organizational transformation, Myriant offers everything from holistic insights and counsel to complex business decisions and developing stakeholder management strategies.  

“Myriant applies the same rigor to the external stakeholder environment that United Minds as a culture change consultancy brings to the internal business environment,” said Ben Kalevitch, managing director, Myriant. “In both cases, we believe business decisions should integrate and align an individual company’s specific organizational objectives, resiliency considerations and the expectations of their specific stakeholders – which requires applying a multi-stakeholder lens to business strategy.”  

Myriant’s management consultants utilize a network of advisors from business, government and politics, civil society and academia, along with industry exclusive, AI-backed analytics and insights. Myriant’s advisory areas include: 

“For over a decade the United Minds team has advised hundreds of clients on the complexities of the workplace and so we have seen first-hand the myriad of business challenges facing leaders today. Where once the measure of a leadership was shareholder return, now leaders must understand and manage the needs and viewpoints of employees, investors, consumers and the communities in which they operate, to name a few. Put in the context of increasing polarization and mis- and disinformation and rapidly changing attitudes about the role of business in society, it’s clear that a new model is needed for providing counsel on maximizing impact and reducing risk,” said Kate Bullinger, CEO, United Minds.  

Myriant launches with several client engagements including supporting a Fortune 100 company in spinning off one of its key divisions, providing stakeholder insights to the Board of Directors of a logistics company surrounding an operational crisis and counseling a top consumer brand on how to address a bot-driven attack on its reputation that has had a negative impact on its valuation.  

Additionally, Myriant released a new study, featured earlier this month in Fast Company, conducted in partnership with the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. The study shows a company’s understanding and management of societal impacts has a direct effect on decision-making and behavior among employees, consumers and investors, including: 

Further illustrating challenges to keeping up with shifting expectations, Myriant research found that CEOs and C-suite recognize the importance of employee engagement to the success of the business but are not currently equipped to provided needed support.  

Myriant is built as a new single point of entry for senior counsel that understand today’s new era of leadership, at scale and with speed.  

To learn more about Myriant and its capabilities, visit: myriant.com

Adopting a “responsible marketing” approach helps companies protect against – and more quickly recover from – threats to company reputation.

Increasing polarization. Heightened demands to take a stand. Real business impacts for getting it wrong. Never has it been so important for businesses, brands and leaders to stand for something. Or more critical for potential related threats to be identified, considered and addressed. Added to the long list of growing expectations of executives are the roles of purpose champion and brand protector; positions that grow more complicated by the day.

Research shows that on average, companies that align their brand to a higher purpose achieve better business results. For example, when it comes to financial strength, brands that focus on improving quality of life outperform the stock market by 120%. Similarly, the modern workforce prioritizes culture, diversity, and high impact over financial benefits; and 63% of consumers prefer to purchase from purpose-driven brands.

But, as we are increasingly seeing, leading with purpose can also expose brands to reputational – and by extension business – risk. Watchdog organizations are tracking publicly-available information to either call out companies perceived as “woke” OR expose gaps between responsible business-focused statements and practice. Media coverage of topics considered “woke” trends negative, and companies can find themselves called out for either supporting or falling short of commitment.

While purpose-driven brands are experiencing increasing opportunities and challenges, they are not the only ones who are at risk. We are at a moment when the question is no longer if a brand will be called out but when and by whom. The most effective leaders will see this as an opportunity to prepare their organization to be strong enough to minimize and withstand threats to brand and reputation.

How? By adopting a “responsible marketing” approach and infrastructure.

For years we have helped our clients to build back reputation with employees, consumers, regulators and investors following reputational crises. More recently as pressures to engage have mounted, we’ve worked with organizations across industries, including well-known brands, multinational companies and government agencies to get ahead of these issues by assessing and strengthening marketing and communications policies, protocols and systems and defining an approach to engaging around societal issues.

Here are the steps that all organizations should be taking to maximize brand value while at the same time minimizing risk:

  1. Define “Responsible Marketing” and supportive policies aligned to your brand. At the most basic level, organizations must start by simply and clearly articulating what responsible marketing means and why it matters to the company, and who benefits. The definition should be supported by foundational policies that guide how it is activated in marketing and communications programs.

As the old adage says, the best offense is a good defense. In an environment where organizational accountability remains paramount, brands must do the hard work to define who they are and stand confidently in their values to maintain the credibility to protect against and respond to reputational threats.

United Minds is a Weber Shandwick consultancy dedicated to making business more human. To learn more, reach out to [email protected].

Attention leaders: you, and not just your board, can be held liable for brand-sabotaging behaviors at your organization. Recently in the United States a court ruling has set the precedent that C-suite leaders can be held personally accountable for allowing a toxic corporate culture that fosters bad behaviors such as sexual harassment, discrimination or other misconduct. 

It’s yet one more reminder that cutting investment in company culture is not a good idea. Research shows that a positive employee experience helps achieve the organizational resiliency you need not only to weather economic downturns, but also to capitalize on market opportunities when the economy recovers. And experience shows us that an inclusive and equitable culture is one of the surest ways to protect your organization—and you—from potentially costly reputation risk.

Avoiding bad action by diagnosing (and addressing) broken systems

Corporate officers become liable, the landmark ruling makes clear, when they fail to heed reports of misconduct or fail to have established lines of communication by which those reports can reach them. But this behavior is indicative of a deeper danger: leaders’ inclination to curry external stakeholders’ favor at the expense of internal stakeholders’ wellbeing.

Just how dangerous is demonstrated by the compounding damage—financial, reputational, operational—that Tesla and its C-suite are incurring for overlooking years of bad behavior in its factories. After being ordered to pay a contractor $137 million (later reduced to $15 million) for racial discrimination in 2021, the electric car maker was hit with a wave of law suits in 2022 alleging racial discrimination and sexual harassment.

The litigation prompted one shareholder to sue the CEO and officers for “causing financial harm and irreparable damage to the company’s reputation” by fostering a “toxic workplace culture.” Tesla’s shares plummeted 8.5 percent on the news, and the suit subsequently uncovered findings of a 2018 employee survey wherein workers depicted an intimidating work environment and expressed concerns about the CEO’s leadership.

Though the company and CEO liability may prove singularly large, the culture that gave rise to it is, in our experience, all too common. That’s because healthy cultures—places where inclusive values govern every policy, practice, interaction, and communication—don’t just happen. Their construction and maintenance require the commitment of top leadership, a data-informed strategy and targeted, ongoing investment. 

Committing to systemic, not symptomatic, investment

What might that look like? With a decade of supporting clients as they shape and protect culture, we recommend the following:

  1. A gap analysis of the variance between values and systems, processes, policies and practices. Ask and assess: Are your values evident in every transaction and interaction? Are your ways of working aligned to the outcomes you desire? Are your processes delivering equitable employee experiences? A thorough audit of your operation can reveal not just your cultural climate but precisely the policies and practices that give rise to it.
  2. A strategy that tackles root causes of inequity and the capabilities—including behavior modification—to execute on it. Too many cultural initiatives have a flavor-of-the-month quality that breeds skepticism among employees. Effective strategies seek to modify, through experiential learning, leader behaviors, as these are what dictate cultural norms.
  3. Crisis preparedness. While healthy cultures are less likely to be the target of hostile criticism, no brand is immune. That’s why preparing for a public relations crisis must be part of any culture investment strategy. It’s the best way to ensure sparks don’t find the air they need to set the brand ablaze. Implementing a fire drill that simulates a PR crisis on social media in real-time is one way to approach this. You’ll learn what you’re prepared for as an organization, where there are gaps in roles and responsibilities and the ways reputation risk can imperil financial security.

To be sure, this adds up to not a trifling investment. But the rewards for making it are a fraction of the millions of dollars you will spend on damage control, including possible litigation.

Recent research from United Minds, Weber Shandwick and KRC Research of C-suite executives across industries shows that workforce development and retention is seen as the top buffer against a recession and the top goal cited by over three out of four (76%). In fact, three of the top four areas leaders identify as areas of focus in 2023 center on employees: attracting and retaining talent; managing the adoption of new technology to advance business growth; employee engagement and activism. Finally, preparing for crises is now the C-suite’s remit. CEOs are far more likely than VPs (66% vs. 25%) to focus on crisis anticipation and mitigation.

A similar study of employee and consumer perspectives by our organizations demonstrates why these efforts are important. Regardless of the current market environment, our research shows that people want to feel supported by their employer and that their contributions are meaningful. Of 79 workplace factors we asked 2,800 workers across seven countries to rank by importance to employee experience, a positive work environment came up as number one, followed by feelings of appreciation for their contributions (number two) and motivation to do their best work (number three). What’s more, 73% of employees who report working in a positive environment are likely to stay vs. 10% who don’t, and 70% of employees who report feeling motivated are satisfied with their jobs vs. 6% who are not.

Using missteps to help you find your brand footing

In the UK, CEOs have been replaced and some taken intentional actions to improve because of toxic cultures — including the Confederation of Business Industry, Bon Appetit and Brewdog. And it extends beyond corporations into sport and law enforcement – essentially, all organizations benefit from adapting and maintaining an inclusive culture.

Shoring up your culture is just as valuable after a crisis as before one – because what stakeholders most want to see is that their activism catalyzed the internal growth necessary to prevent further harm. Indeed, a sincere mea culpa—coupled with actions underscoring its sincerity—can propel the brand forward. Whereas failure to acknowledge responsibility, let alone take action to detoxify culture, inflames and sustains public enmity.

Our work with Papa John’s, the international pizza franchise, illustrates just how much organizations can reap when they acknowledge systemic change is needed and undertake the arduous business of overhauling their culture from the inside out.

Papa John’s cultural risks were very publicly exposed in July 2018 when its founder uttered a racist slur on a conference call—behavior in keeping with his criticism of NFL kneeling protests in 2017 and the Affordable Care Act in 2012. We were engaged by the company to help make clear to all stakeholders—employees as well as customers and investors—that the founder did not represent the perspectives of the company’s 120,000 far more diverse employees. Through the “Voices” campaign, which featured employees and franchisees as spokespeople for the first time in company history, proved a turning point for the brand, driving negative social media down by 29% and boosting neutral/positive conversation by 73%. 

But to the credit of Papa John’s new leadership, crisis mitigation was their first step in culture remediation. We continued to work together, bringing a team of crisis and issues, DEI and change management experts to foster a positive employee experience by enlisting them in innovation, encouraging their dialogue via two-way communication channels, and promoting and rewarding inclusive leader behaviors. By holding leaders accountable for progress on these initiatives, our engagement strategy closed the gap between stated values and accepted practices, employee attitudes and public perceptions.

An ounce of prevention

Greater market resiliency. Less risk, both in terms of talent attrition and reputation damage.

For both reasons, culture should continue to be prioritized as an investment. A recession is no reason to cut back, but rather an opportunity to double down on systemic change.

Because a rebounding market is the absolute worst time to be held accountable for long-festering cultural failures. No matter how deep your pockets—as a brand, as an organization or as an individual—you can’t afford it.

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Eric Blankenbaker is Executive Vice President of Global Crisis for United Minds, part of The Weber Shandwick Collective, with a focus on culture and litigation communications. Executive Vice President of Culture, Equity and Inclusion Nadine Redd Blackburn spearheads the culture and strategy offerings at United Minds with a focus on behavior and systemic change.