Balancing global and local comms at Flextronics

Connecting a geographically dispersed workforce, while keeping in mind local cultures and languages, is the ultimate communication challenge for any global organization, and it's one Cynthia Ee faces.

By Nishwa Ashraf, assistant editor, Melcrum Ltd.

Key points

Planning and delivering effective communication to employees who are geographically spread and/or culturally diverse is the primary challenge for Cynthia Ee and her team. The alignment of global and local messages is also extremely important.
Currently, the team is looking into how they can create engagement for both their indirect and direct labor. This includes research into the effectiveness of social media and how it can connect a global workforce that speaks multiple languages.
One way the IC function is reaching the entire workforce at Flextronics is by training their leaders, managers and supervisors to become effective communicators, through the Talk2Me program. They have also launched a social media platform called Whisper, where employees can share and comment on ideas.

For organizations that are geographically spread or culturally diverse, planning and delivering effective communication is hard to get right at the best of times. Add to that a divergent workforce of engineers, office workers, managers, operators and technicians and that difficulty is compounded.

Trying to collectively capture the hearts and minds of such a workforce is a challenge for any internal communication function, as Cynthia Ee, senior director, global employee relations and communications, and her team at Flextronics, know all too well. After all, the more stakeholders involved and the more diverse and disparate they are, the more effort must be put in to achieve effective communication.

Headquartered in Singapore, Flextronics is a leading Fortune 500 electronics manufacturing services provider, with the majority of its manufacturing capacity located in low-cost regions such as Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, and Ukraine. Because of the complexities of workforce, employee engagement is a prime focus for the organization.

In numbers...

200,000 employees operating in 30 countries spanning four continents

US$29 billion - revenue for fiscal year 2011, up from US$24 billion in 2010

Currently, the team is looking into how they can create engagement for both their indirect labor (employees who aren't immediately related to the production of goods, i.e. managers) and direct labor (those who are, i.e. operators).

"In the past, we focused our communication efforts very much on our indirect labor, as unlike direct labor, they have easy access to the intranet and email. Having channels such as intranets, CEO blogs and webinars we naturally targeted them," says Ee. "But now, we're asking ourselves 'how do we engage our direct labor?' Changing demographics, expectations, and job market dynamics have pushed the need for direct labor engagement to the forefront. To make our operations sustainable, it's critical that we engage both direct and indirect labor in our messages, values and policies."

This focus on employee engagement is further challenged by the set up of the team. Made up of two communicators, the Flextronics IC team is lean and serves a geographically-dispersed audience from its base in Malaysia. She also has counterparts who support site communication, based in Mexico, Brazil, Hungary and China, and extended team members whom she describes as HR leaders with a combined role in communication.

"We usually meet virtually through web conferences and communicate with each other via emails, depending on the need. For some of us, we have never even met each other. Also, every quarter we have a global 'coffee talk', where our senior leaders will share business and HR updates through web conferencing."

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This article was originally published in Strategic Communication Management.