Hello everyone.
Have you ever encounter a simple question being "misrepresented"due to cultural differences?
I recalled my very first trip to India whereby I was giving a presentation to a group of local colleagues. After the end of my presentation, I asked if they understood my presentation, and all of them shook their heads. So I repeated the slides and expected them to clearly understand and yet I got the same response when I asked the audience if they understood! Suddenly, it dawned upon me that my nod is the same as the locals shaking their heads.
In the instance as such has already pose such a challenge to a small group of audience, have you ever wonder how does a multinational company or conglomerate deliver key messages to their employees from around the world? What If the CEO is seated in New York, how does he/she address critical issues with his/her staff in Tokyo or Korea for that matter? How does he/she effectively put across that important message without losing the essence in the midst of translation?
During my past four years of working in Barclays Capital, I realised that my company has put in immense amount of effort in reaching out to its employees. Barclays Capital operates in 50 countries with 147,000 employees and to effectively manage its communication is not an easy task. By using the following means, Barcap relentlessly keeps in touch with its employees:
- Intranet
- Sharepoint site updates
- Quarterly town hall/village halls sessions
- Fortnightly video conferences
- Internal chat forums with moderating (of course!) and option to retain your privacy
- Broadcasting of "live" session with the management at staggered timings
- Webcast for repeated episodes
- All communications to be posted in the above-mentioned channels has to be proof-read and approved by the communications team before being published
Barcap has actively posted news, information, directory finding, phonebook directory in its intranet and employees can customize it by country and the type of information they would like to see. There is a quarterly townhall held in every country by its country management and divisional heads to keep the respective division updated on their strategies ahead. Our CIO (Chief Information Officer) also organises an annual interaction over internal chat system to allow employees of various regions to post questions to him and his management team.
You can see from the listed examples that Barclays engages strongly in technology as the firm stretches its global footprint. Even though technology is highly utilized in Barclays Capital, nothing beats a good pat on the back by your boss for a job well done.
Cheers,
Ginny Chong
14094848
Curtin Singapore
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