Episode Summary

We welcome Vera Asanin, President and Editor-in-Chief at Your Workplace to the podcast to discuss the connection between organizational culture and communications.

Corporate communicators have a key role in how culture is transmitted to the people in and around the organization. Culture defines how we expect our employees to act, and it’s what drives engagement, productivity, adaptability and retention. Recorded in the spring of 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, we look at the opportunity organizations have to take a good look at their culture and their communications.

With massive shifts in how and where we work, Fearless Communicators have a role to play in pushing leaders to take a good, hard look at their cultures and how they can support new behaviours for employees. It’s time to lose some of the old cultural norms that don’t serve employees and to figure out how to take the important cultural assets, such as rituals, artifacts and behaviours to a new, virtual place.

It’s also a great time to work with leaders on building their communication skills so they can interact with employees in a more authentic way. This includes assessing frequency, form and content with leaders and letting them work in a less scripted, more personal way.

Key Topics

  • How Vera became a corporate bad ass (1:50)
  • How terrible cultures are created (3:33)
  • Defining organizational culture (4:59)
  • How organizational communications relates to culture (7:05)
  • How leaders can create and modify culture (10:40)
  • Adapting culture to new ways of working (13:16)
  • How to communicate more authentically (21:50)
  • Changing a shi*ty culture (25:00)
  • Do leaders have the skills to be authentic? (28:54)
  • Summary (39:50)
  • What we’re liking (42:07)

Resources Highlighted in this Episode