CEO Communications during COVID-19: Bring the Real You
Empathy and authenticity increases trust
Workforces around the U.S. and much of the world have begun to return to office environments — at least in modified form.
That has CEOs and other executives trying to navigate uncharted territory, grappling with how to lead in a postpandemic world and communicate answers to thorny questions.
· How do we keep employees, board members, customers, and other stakeholders informed and engaged?
· How do we ensure that our workforce is safe while still being productive?
· What can we do to level the playing field so everyone in our organization has a voice?
“We’ve all had to learn. We’ve really had to increase communications,” says Lori Ryerkerk, president, chairman and CEO of the Dallas-based Celanese Corporation.
Recently, Ryerkerk, a chemical engineer and veteran of the oil, gas, and chemicals industry, spoke to a virtual audience on the topic of leading in the wake of COVID-19 — part of a series produced by Knowledge at Wharton, the online journal of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Like many companies operating during the COVID-19 outbreak, Celanese, a materials provider to the chemicals, paint, and coating industries, has turned to technology and teamwork to ensure business continuity among its global workforce of 7,500.
Communications: The Linchpin to Surviving a Crisis
In a wide-ranging reflection on lessons learned from COVID-19 and plans for adjusting to a postpandemic workplace, Ryerkerk highlighted the central role communications play in stakeholder engagement. Her comments make clear that resilient companies view communications as an enterprise priority, not a functional capacity. In times of crisis, the need for clear, frequent, and transparent communications is paramount.
“People want to hear from the leadership,” Ryerkerk says. “They want that personal experience — they want the video, they want the virtual town halls, they want the letters, and they want to see pictures.”
But effectively adjusting to crisis mode from relative normalcy doesn’t just happen. Companies with forward-thinking leadership have experienced significant dividends from initiatives that focus on employee engagement and technological efficiency.
Preparedness Is a Strategy
Julie Sweet, CEO and former general counsel at the global consultancy Accenture, says research from her firm that began prior to COVID-19 shows that “the 10 percent of companies that had done digital transformation and adaptive technologies…were performing twice as well as the bottom 25 percent” (after COVID-19).
The hard fact: Companies that had invested in advance adjusted much more quickly to a cascade of uncertainty.
At Accenture, with 500,000 employees in 120 countries, Sweet says, a pre-COVID-19 investment in Arianna Huffington’s Thrive Global behavior-change program has helped ground employees. With its focus on mental health and wellness, Thrive offers (among other features) “how to” modules ranging from reducing stress to exercising at your desk.
Sweet explained to a virtual audience, during an Axios event on CEOs leading during economic turbulence, that Thrive became “something that people really used, not just something on a portal.” “People talked about it and I would talk about it to lead by example.” Yes, Sweet says, she really does exercise at her desk.
Organizational psychologists say that when a crisis hits, employees need to know there’s a hub they can count on for reliable information.
Informing and Engaging Your Workforce during a Calamity
Hans Vestberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications, told participants at the most recent #EmTechNext conference (sponsored by the Harvard Business Review and the MIT Technology Review) that the company’s 135,000 global employees have always been priority number one. He says an indication that the approach is resonating can be seen in the strong participation in daily virtual town halls.
At a recent town hall, he says, 90,000 employees joined in. Even he was surprised. With so many moving pieces during a crisis, the role of an effective CEO, he advises, is to “steer the team and resources.” It’s all about teamwork, he says. Build diverse teams and hire people who are more skilled than you in functional areas. If you do that before a crisis, you’ll be better positioned to emerge as a stronger company when the unimaginable hits.
Ryerkerk, of Celanese, has held wide-ranging technical and leadership roles at ExxonMobil, Shell Global, and the Hess Corporation. She lived in Hong Kong during the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s and led her team through that experience. Still, she points out, “COVID has been different. Because it is much more global than SARS.” “As a company we did start dealing with it [COVID-19] in January when it first emerged.” As of the June 2020 date of this interview, Ryerkerk says the company had no COVID-19 cases among its employees in Asia and 10 cases in Europe and the U.S. “Through better hygiene and social distancing, we’ve been able to keep our operations up and running as needed for demand.”
Despite the company’s success during COVID-19, she, like the other CEOs, is keenly aware of the need for self-reflection and continuous improvement.
“I always thought I was a good communicator,” Ryerkerk offers. “But when you go into this kind of situation where you have to do it remotely, you realize you can be a lot better communicator.” She says she learned that, during a work-from-home pandemic, “there’s no amount of communications that people think is too much communications.”
Giving Everyone a Voice
U.S.-based Celanese is based in the Dallas area and has operations in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The reality of remote work and virtual interactions has unearthed another insight Ryerkerk considers having a positive outcome for the future.
Prior to COVID-19, “we weren’t being as inclusive as possible with our leaders who weren’t sitting with us,” Ryerkerk observes. Because much of the company’s leadership is based in Texas, global teams often joined meetings virtually. That meant conversation was often weighted toward those physically in the Texas meeting room. In the current environment, with everyone joining meetings virtually, she says, there’s a level playing field. “Now that we’ve gone to everybody having to call in, we start to hear more from our leaders in Asia and our leaders in Europe.” Result: global leaders more freely share perspectives, information, and concerns.
She says this more-level playing field will continue in the post-COVID-19 environment.
“We don’t want to be a U.S. company that operates globally. We want to be a global company.”
Solving Problems Fast and Virtually
By necessity, COVID-19 has forced Celanese to streamline and automate processes and to rely more heavily on digital technology, given its dispersed remote workforce. One surprising win has been in customer and supplier service.
Teams are now empowered to use FaceTime and other apps to provide technical service to customers. Ryerkerk says the pandemic accelerated her company’s digital transformation. “I think it tells us that we can probably have better customer service and better customer relations if we do more virtually. Not that we’re going to completely get rid of seeing our customers, but maybe we’ll see them less often face-to-face but a lot more often virtually.”
CEOs during a Crisis: Be Present, Be Yourself
Ryerkerk agrees with Verizon’s Vestberg: during a crisis, all stakeholders want to hear from company leaders. Often. That includes employees, board members, customers, and suppliers.
And they don’t want “corporate speak.”
“They want leaders to be real people,” Ryerkerk says. “They want to see that side of us. They know it’s okay that we’re not always right, it’s okay that we occasionally stutter on a call. It’s all fine. All of us respond better to real people and that means a lot more communications…talking and listening in all forms.”
Wise advice to CEOs and organizational leaders of all stripes in these stormy, uncertain times.
