Building and implementing a large scale global communications structure.

Synopsis

Standing up a global communications structure for a Fortune 10 company forced to do business differently during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Problem Statement

The Real Estate & Facilities team, known for their ability to build office skyscrapers in record time and transform neighborhoods from desolate to highly sought after, grew 4 times their size (as measured by square footage managed and number of staff) in less than 5 years. The success of the company overall contributed to the need for rapid growth. The team, comprised primarily of facilities, construction, security, and real estate experts, lacked subject matter expertise in business operations. As such, they did not have scalable and documented policies, standard operating procedures, or business tools and resources in place when the growth spurt occurred. The team of 200 full time employees managed 35,000 contractors across 400+ companies. Grouped into 20+ functions (such as Retail, Architecture, Move Management, Reception, etc.) and located in 50+ countries across the world, the team primarily communicated within their functional and regional siloes. This meant best practices could not be shared, efforts were duplicated, customers had inconsistent experiences, money was wasted, and confusion and misalignment to strategic goals was common ground.

In the midst of these issues, the global pandemic known as COVID-19, broke out. The strategy for how to manage the pandemic in terms of re-vamping corporate office buildings to account for employee safety, landed squarely on this team’s plate.

Approach

Workstreams were identified and launched to address policies that needed to be written, implemented and managed. In addition, a communication workstream was identified to ensure global synergies in terms of the company’s employee messaging and instruction.

Regions and sub-regions were identified (e.g., within the region of North America sits the sub-regions of the United States, Canada, and Mexico). Executives met daily to define the policies and direction provided to the team of 35,000+. In order to cascade information, all full-time employees on the team who did not attend daily Executive calls were identified via a report, they were then asked to identify the names of their primary impacted vendors. These individuals plus key representatives attending the Executive calls, were invited to a daily conference call where messaging was cascaded down in real time. Policies defined at the Executive level were shared via the document repository, and broad email announcement with all stakeholders. In the daily conference calls, the team completed RACIs for each policy published by Executives, liaisons attending both calls answered questions, and the meeting minutes, action items, and open question log were distributed daily and posted to the document repository for reference. Once policies were understood and ownership clarified, the objectives of the conference call shifted to focus on collecting and pushing information up and providing status back up to the Executive group. As the need to push information upstream or downstream increased or decreased, so did the meeting cadence (e.g., from daily to 3x weekly to 1x weekly).

Once policies were implemented and buildings prepared for individuals to safely return, the team turned their attention to taking the lessons learned from the COVID-19 meeting structure and using that to build a global communications structure that covered all business operational updates/ topics that affected multiple regions and service lines. Primary goals of the new series included permanently removing functional and reginal siloes, identifying and halting duplicative efforts, and disseminating information, such as strategic initiative status, for the purposes of global alignment and efficiency. The audience expanded to include key partners and additional vendor companies who had dependencies on the team. The agenda contained guest speakers, program/ project updates and spotlights, tool demos, and education on techniques to achieve operational excellence. Distribution lists were created to ensure emails and written documentation reached the intended audience and further broke down siloes. The team built a new document repository for all information and recorded meetings so they could be re-watched by team members who were unable to attend. One meeting was set-up per large region (e.g., North America) and facilitators aligned their topics and speakers to ensure the global team consistently heard the same message.

Results

• The meetings exceeded expectations, resulting in an average attendance of 75%. Requests for more meetings were made, and many provided feedback that it was the most transformative initiative of 2020/ 2021.

• Weekly agendas began to fill months in advance due to the popularity of the meetings. They became the go-to solution for rolling out information and initiatives across the organization. Executives began joining the meetings to directly cascade their key messages and strategic direction.

• Duplicity of efforts was greatly reduced. People became educated about which functions made up the team, where they had dependencies on one another, and who to engage when questions came up.

• Subsidiary representatives from the same team but of different companies owned by the parent company requested to join the meeting and learn so they could roll-out similar initiatives for their groups.

• Refine & Grow is now a trusted partner to a highly satisfied client and stakeholders, who have proven to be returning customers.