Internal Communication with Ray Walsh

Ray Walsh is a communications consultant based in Prague. He has supported clients in a variety of industries on training and communications content, working in the US and from the Europe region for large global companies including UPS and DXC Technology. A native of the US, he has lived in the Czech Republic, Germany, and Belgium. His book Localizing Employee Communications - also available as an audiobook - is a practical guide to reaching employees around the world. KEY TAKEAWAYS The importance of internal communication comes into prominence when thinking about growing globally. We think that international communication is more important, however, if everyone is not on the same page in the company, you probably will not achieve the thing you want in export markets. Assuming that hiring people with similar backgrounds and values and speaking the same language brings automatically good internal communication is quite wrong. Internal communication should be worked on also considering the new digital era. BEST MOMENTS “As you expand internationally, internal communication becomes really critical. Anybody who is working with people, in any capacity, knows that staying on the same page is necessary. They know important it is and they know it is not easy. But this is especially difficult for expanding internationally because misunderstandings can easily come up, misinterprets can easily come up so if you want a consistent brand experience, if you want sales and support saying the same thing to your customers, if staying in sync with regional strategy or global strategy is important, you need to work at internal communications. That’s because communicating internally is not as automatic as you might think.” “As you scale up and expand, it is important to understand that and think through how you are going to communicate across your organization, especially across borders.” “Some people think of communications, they think of the content. They think of emails, and articles but communications can take many forms. First, start-up. You are a small team. Staying in sync may happen more naturally because you are talking regularly in person. In those early stages, those conversations may be enough but as you expand and include more people, they are not gonna automatically be in sync. You have to work at it and if you are in multiple locations, the first thing you took is really to work at it.” “The precise channel you use depends on your employee preferences.” “When you think about how our communications have changed in the digital era and we are so much more peer to peer and social media minded and I think this has to be infused into your organization.” “I do believe that brands have tone and personality but I think we need to be ready to be individually expressed and we have to do more to help people, you know, give them tools and give them skills to be able to represent the brand and the visual, verbal or face to face way.” ABOUT THE HOST Levent Yildizgoren, the author of 'Good Business in any Language', is an award-winning entrepreneur, localisation professional, and a PRINCE2 qualified project manager. CONTACT METHOD Linkedin:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/leventyildizgoren/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/yildizgoren IG: https://www.instagram.com/levent.yildizgoren/ ABOUT THE GUEST Ray Walsh is a communications consultant based in Prague. He has supported international clients from global companies. His book Localizing Employee Communications - also available as an audiobook - is a practical guide to reaching employees around the world. CONTACT METHOD https://raywalsh.net/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/raywalshwrites/ Book (available in print, Kindle, eBook, and as an audiobook): https://amzn.to/3oS74Rw VALUABLE RESOURCES Do you have any questions about translation, localization, or international growth? Visit TTC website: https://ttcwetranslate.com/ Take your business global with the 5-step LINGO modal! Purchase 'Good Business in any Language' on Amazon now: https://cutt.ly/2ORR