Making connections at News Corp.
How does the world's second largest media organization continue to innovate on a global scale? Tiffany LaBanca explains how she and her team enable collaboration, openness and global connections across News Corporation.
My fall trip to New York to interview Tiffany LaBanca, senior vice president, internal communications at News Corporation was originally agreed in February 2011. By July, the global media company's UK arm, News International, found itself in the middle of a scandal that was dominating news agendas and one of its best-sellinewspapers, the News of the World, was abruptly folded due to unethical journalism.
Naturally, I became even more eager to meet with LaBanca, to understand what challenges the internal communications team at News Corp. HQ faced during what really was, at that point, a media firestorm in the UK. I nervously emailed her to confirm the interview, convinced she would decline. I was wrong, she was still keen to meet and three months later, I was stepping out of a yellow NYC taxi, taking a lift up to the 25th floor of News Corp.'s Avenue of the Americas building and being welcomed into LaBanca's office.
Her workspace is less office and more psychedelic museum of LaBanca's world and experiences. Artifacts from around the globe serve as daily reminders of her expatriate days in Singapore and the traveling she did in the early stages of her career as a corporate communicator, working across 13 countries in Asia. Thank you notes from colleagues and friends, sketches, posters, quotes on the wall, photographs of friends and family, books and other gifted items, over-sized strategy maps and infographics all revamp her office into a place of inspiration and knowledge.
LaBanca's physical surroundings reflect that work and life are not mutually exclusive for her, an attitude that's demonstrative of the entrepreneurial culture at News Corp. "I need to be doing a job and working in an environment that makes it worth leaving my kids everyday - for more than 13 years, I've been able to have that here," she explains.
Employees are telling us that it's difficult to look at Twitter feeds, and that all the negativity around News Corp. is really disheartening
Communicating under a cloud
Speaking of the environment, it must be rather uncomfortable at News Corp. right now? I ask, quickly wanting to address the elephant in the room.
"Well, it's an extremely difficult time, there's more than 50,000 people that work here, passionate about what they do every day," she says. "Employees are telling us that it's difficult to look at Twitter feeds, and that all the negativity around News Corp. is really disheartening. That's because it's not the company we know and it's not what we stand for."
Considering the fact that News International remains under investigation at this time, there is understandably little that LaBanca is able to disclose. But as an evangelist of collaboration in the organization and therefore a believer in openness and transparency, she tells me as much as she can.
"We're in discovery mode about it, with the police, and we're taking it very seriously. It's taken a long time to understand the implications of what happened in the UK. What I can tell you that is things will change, they will change for the better and we are putting plans in place to ensure it never happens again. We know it will take time for us to rebuild trust and during this time we will continue to focus on making things right," she says.
Opening up the lines of communication
It's believed that during times of adversity a sense of community is what will keep spirits up. With this in mind, LaBanca's internal communication strategy of connecting the global workforce is now more relevant than ever before. "The focus for this team is to communicate as effectively as we can, to open up communication lines around the world and to look for opportunities for people to collaborate and learn from each other. That impetus has not changed for what we focus on as a team, in good times or bad," she explains.
The strategy is fairly new. Five years ago, LaBanca and the company's former chief HR officer Beryl Cook carried out extensive research into future workplace trends. The trends that were identified set the ball rolling for News Corp. to develop an enterprise social business strategy that focuses on building a more collaborative and connected workforce around the world. If the global internal communication team was to support and help drive this change successfully, it needed to rethink its own objectives, skills and areas of focus. LaBanca recalls the moment she realized that the function needed to move on to the next level.
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