The Impact of Language on Marketing and Workplace Culture | Building Better Cultures Podcast

Welcome to the Building Better Cultures podcast, where I talk to leaders about how internal communications, engagement, and leadership all play a key role in creating amazing and successful cultures.

There is no doubt that ESG on the long term is going to cause profit. For example, GE, General Electric, in the past 10 years, it grew from $700 million to $15 billion. Because they focus on ESG.

Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Building Better Cultures podcast with me, Scott McInnes. A little thing to ask of you first this morning, if I may. If you are on Apple Podcasts, I'd love a star rating and a review. That would be fantastic. If you're on Spotify, please follow, or whatever platform you're on, if you can do a follow or a review, I'd really appreciate it. It really does help to make sure that the podcast shows up in the various directories. That would be fantastic. Thank you. And another big thank you to our sponsor Workvivo. If as you are looking at your future work model, you're worried about how to make sure people are on the same page or they maintain a connection with each other, or if you're worried about culture, then definitely have a look at Workvivo. Their online engagement platform is fantastic, a great way to keep people together and make sure that you've got that single source of truth in your organization and an opportunity for people to come together as, as people and teams as well. So workvivo.com, and there'll be a little bit more on that later on. So today's guest I'm really excited to have a chat with is Jihan Hyde. And I wanted to chat to Jihan because she comes from a background of sustainability. And I think that's a topic that's being thrown around companies an awful lot at the moment. I think there are an awful lot of companies under pressure saying, well, what is all this sustainability stuff about? You know, what should we be doing? There are some companies doing it well and some companies maybe not doing it quite so well, but saying maybe they're doing it quite well. So I'm really pleased to welcome Jihan. Jihan is the founder and CEO of Comunique, which is a London-based social enterprise startup that specializes specifically in communications strategies for ESG and sustainability. So, Jihan, good morning.

Hello, good morning.

Lovely to have you on.

Oh, it's so nice to be on. Thank you so much for inviting me, Scott.

No, you're welcome. You're very welcome. Listen, well, I'm hoping we can get a little bit into the world of sustainability and ESG today. But before we get into that, why don't kick off by just telling us maybe a little bit about you and your background and a bit about Comunique.

So yes, with pleasure. Comunique is a startup that specializes in communicating environmental, social, and governance strategies. We have been doing so for the past 15 years without actually realizing it's called ESG, basically. No one told us that. We only knew it as sustainability. We— prior to me founding Comunique, I come from a marketing advertising background. And then finally, 10 years ago, I found my true passion, which is internal communications. I worked in 6 different countries, including Switzerland, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia. And I was very fortunate as well to work in 8 different sectors, including banking, professional services, um, fast-moving consumer goods, and retail. Oh, and lastly, oil and gas. Um, I'm very pleased to say that our work has impacted more than 150,000 clients. Or customers, to be exact, customers, and 200,000 employees. And it yielded to closing investment deals worth of £300 million.

Brilliant. So that whole idea of creating communication strategies that make organizations more appealing to investors, that's where, that's where that growth and investment came from, I guess.

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. What we do with Comunique is that We help companies who are not clear on how to start their ESG journey to introduce them to the right experts who would embed these initiatives, these strategies, these policies, and then take the— this amazing work that the ESG experts have conducted and then communicate it effectively so that it can land with the investors, with the customers, with the employees, and explain to each of them what role do they play in bringing the ESG story to life.

Brilliant. And actually, what we're going to do is hopefully during the course of this podcast is get to grips a little bit with the employee side of that and what role employees, particularly from an internal comms, an internal comms perspective, play in driving the ESG and sustainability agendas. But before we talk about that, on your website, you talk about Comunique being an ESG social enterprise communication startup. So what does that, what does that mean? Why, why are you different?

I'm always different. If you know me well, and if my friends— if you speak to my friends, they always say, yeah, Jehan is out there, she likes to be different. The reason we're slightly different is because as Jehan, my purpose in life is to help people feel valued and be heard. And one of the ways that I realize I can achieve that is by setting up Communique, whereby the experts and the associates who are helping me deliver the work to the clients are mainly from underdeveloped countries and underrepresented communities. I am myself, I am from Sudan, and if it wasn't for luck, hard work, and opportunities, I wouldn't be speaking to you now. And this is the gateway that I wanted to create through Comunique. The idea is that they come in, I introduce them to the developed world, introduce their work through Comunique, and then once they build their portfolio, they can either flock the nest and then the next cohort comes in, or they can stay with us and become part of the team. Brilliant.

I used to work for a charity and we talked about giving a hand up, not a handout. And I think that's exactly— that sounds like exactly what you're doing.

Yes, yes, I'm hoping so. Yeah. So, so far we have 8 associates dotted around the world. We have a web designer in El Salvador, for example. We have a content creator in Nigeria. We have an animator in Sudan, and the list goes on.

Brilliant. So talk to me a bit about how ESG relates to sustainability. I think, you know, there's lots of people around like me, actually, in fairness, until before we did this chat, who thought that the two are just completely, you know, you can either use 'ESG' or you can use 'sustainability,' they're both kind of the same thing. Is that the case?

No. And in fairness, I do the same as well. I am guilty of using ESG and sustainability interchangeably, even though they do mean different things. And they are not— they should not be used interchangeably. So if we look at sustainability as a word, it is literally doing well by doing good. ESG, on the other hand, are the physical factors that investors, and only investors, use when they're determining which companies they would like to invest in. As a term, ESG has only really risen above the ground, and people are now speaking about it and mentioning it nonstop. Because in 2019, Greta showed up, okay, to our beautiful world. And then Gen Z have started now explaining that they will not be working for companies that are not ESG-focused, for example. And then Corona hit. So that actually gave investors the opportunity to sit back and reflect and actually look at the data on what profits are the companies who are investing in ESG or actually living and breathing in ESG is compared to the profits of people— of companies who are not. And they found that companies who are living and breathing ESG have yielded profits equivalent to 28%, as opposed to the ones who didn't, who only yielded 14%. As a result, these investors now— 84% of the global investors are currently re— only focusing on investing in, in ESG-focused companies.

Okay, which I guess makes sense because if they're more profitable, they're going to make more, they're going to get a higher return on their investment. So that just makes sense, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And as an investor myself, it is one of the things I look into when I am investing in the small startups that I'm passionate about. Um, and it's, it's one of the reasons why I would invest.

So let's get a little more practical. Let's dig into the detail a little bit because I think that there are companies out there, organizations around the world who are probably already running some ESG-aligned initiatives, but they just perhaps aren't linking them together. They aren't linking them together and telling their people internally that this is what they are. Is that a fair assumption? And why is that?

It is an absolutely accurate assumption. And especially applicable for large organizations. So anything 5,000 and above, this is where this will be evident. And the reason why is because of the silo work. It's the nature of the beast, unfortunately. And I've witnessed it myself in all— so all of my career has been FTSE 100 companies. It's the complexity of the, of the organizations it's the lack of understanding of the topic as well. So if we break ESG, if you look at the environmental, what does that mean? The environmental is literally what and how are you impacting the environment as a company. So what green energy are you using? How much water are you retaining, for example? What is your waste management policies? So these are very dry topics. If you look at this S, which is the most understandable one and easy to relate to, is the social. And that relates to the, to the relationships between the companies, its employees, its communities, its societies, and its customers. How are they listening to them? How are they working with them? And how are they meeting their needs? If you look at the G, which again takes us back to another very dry topic, it is how the company is being governed internally. So what are the compliance policies? What are the risk policies? How are the boards managed and compiled? Is it diverse or not? So that's an example, that's examples. Because two, two of the topics are very dry as communicators, and again, I'm at fault of this, we find it overwhelming. So we don't seek to, to locate it in our companies unless we are forced to. Also, the sustainability experts within these large companies needs, don't realize that they need to communicate it. So they don't shout. They're very, very— bless them— they're so engrossed into their world and they want to save our planet that they don't realize that they need to get us on board from the beginning. And when they do so, and let's say, to give you an example, when I was in BP, I was in one of the locations and I was speaking randomly. I'm the type of person, when you— when I enter the building, I speak to everyone. Everyone.

No, really? Really?

Oh yes.

Oh yes.

That— why do you think I found my passion in internal comms? Because they actually listen to me and don't— and don't pop me off. And, um, and I was speaking to this beautiful young gentleman who, unbeknownst to me, he and his colleagues are so passionate about, about the environmental aspect that they convinced the leadership team within their building to completely get, uh, take out the use of plastic from this building. And they did it, but no one knew about it. And it's such a shame because that's not an easy case to build because they had to prove the profitability of it. They had to prove the practicality of it and the impact of it. So what I did is I highlighted it to the functional team, to the center team. And of course everyone now knows about these champions. And I think this is the reasons why it is, is done in silos, and not really put at the forefront of communications.

Yeah, brilliant. Brilliant. So what do you think is the role then for leaders and internal comms teams in that situation? How do we de-silo that information? How do we make sure that stories like that plastic-free site are able to get out and around an organization like BP with hundreds of thousands of people globally? How does that, how does that work? What can people practically do?

Internal communications, in my opinion, and this is me being a marketeer, being an advertiser, so I've been around for a while, so I know the difference. But for me, internal comms is the glue that holds the organization together. We are the ones who have access to employees that no one else has. It is up to us to help these employees live and breathe ESG. To give you an example, PG Tips, the tea manufacturer. One day, a worker in the factory came up to the man— to the factory manager. And they suggested to reduce the tips of the tea bag, the seals, to reduce the seal by 3 millimeters. 3 millimeters, just 3 millimeters. And they proved that by doing that, they are saving 15 reels of paper, which equates to 20,000 tons of paper, which saved PG Tips €47,000. And that's an employee.

Yeah, that's one employee.

One employee. This story has not come to life until internal comms was involved. It was thanks to internal comms that we all now know the story. So we are the voice of the employees, and we need to act like one. We need to go out, we need to stop sitting in our desks, and we need to start asking and encouraging people. Another example to give you: it was thanks to 6 employees in India in, again, a factory floor in Unilever, who asked the management team if they can set up a training session, a training center whereby they will call the women in their communities to come and get trained on how to use beauty products, and then they become the champions for Unilever. Guess what? And to date, 800 women have been trained. 600 of them have opened their own business and became Unilever's sole suppliers in the rural areas of India. Again, that's because employees came up with this idea and because internal comms highlighted this story to us. So that's the role of the internal communicators and the leaders. Hi, I'm Klyna from Workvivo. When working away from the office, it's easy for your people to feel isolated and disconnected from your culture and each other. That's where we come in with our quick-to-deploy employee communications platform. It's all about ensuring that your people feel informed, engaged, and connected to your company culture, values, goals, and each other wherever they work from. For more, see workvivo.com.

I would argue, and I have often argued, that the answers actually are at the very front line. The answers aren't around necessarily a boardroom table. I don't think the CEO of whoever now owns the PG Tips brand would be sitting at a big desk saying, I wonder if we just reduced the size of the seal of the teabag by 3 millimeters. I wonder what impact that would have on our paper usage and therefore on our costs. I don't think they're having that conversation. I think that has to come from the frontline because it's people looking at a situation and wondering, how can we do this better? How can we make a difference? So, I suppose that leads on to my next question, which is, how do we help employees to see the roles that they play in making that happen? How do we create more of that person from PG Tips? How do we create more of that team from that factory in India? How do we get the message out there that ESG and sustainability isn't just the role for the top table, isn't just the role for the CEO or the head of sustainability. There's a role for everybody in this. So come to us with your ideas because you know how we can do that better. For me, that starts with education about helping people to understand, well, what is— what does the E in ESG mean for employees? What does the S mean for employees? The G, I think, is super dry, and that is something that only the organization can look after. But certainly the E and the S, I think there's a role there for employees. So how do we educate them?

First of all, let me paint you a picture. I need you to think of the E, the S, the G as a cake. The first layer of the cake is the E. The second layer is the society. The third layer is the economy. Without having an impact, a positive impact on your environment, you will not have a growing and a healthy society, and you will definitely— without this society, you will not have a thriving economy. In my opinion, communications is the tray that holds this cake. Without it, we will not be able to help save our environment and protect our people. Okay, so that's a picture for you just to think of, to think of.

I'm really hungry now.

Me too. Oh yes, what also, what we need to think of as internal communications is that employees have something called personal compact, okay? And a personal compact is basically what defines our relationship as employees with our employer and what defines our— the relationship of the employers with their employees. We have— there's 3 themes to this personal compact. Number 1 is the formal theme, which is the job description, which is our contracts, which is our performance management and performance agreements. Number 2 is the psychological compact, and that means our rewards, our recognition, our expectation and our commitment as employees to the company. As human beings, we love to be rewarded, we love to be recognized, and we want to be committed if you allow us to be committed. The third theme is the social, which is the perception of the company, the culture of the company, and its values internally. As communicators, our internal comms, our role is to marry all of these themes together. How do we do that? We need to sit down and be the first people in the table where we help the leadership teams to define our purpose. Why do we exist as a company? So not just the why, but also the roots of the company. To give you an example, when Unilever issued its Sustainable Living campaign, they have decided that before they issue it, before they actually decide what it entails, they need to go back and look why Unilever was created. And they realized that it was created because the founder wanted to save the lives of the babies who died due to lack of hygiene. At that time, their purpose was, and I quote, making cleanliness commonplace. They then took that and flipped it on its head and said that from now on, because ESG is going to be at the heart of what we do, our purpose is going to be making sustainable— sorry, making sustainability commonplace. Okay, so number one, we define what is our long-term purpose. We help our leadership teams to articulate it clearly. Number 2, as internal communicators, our role is to help the leadership teams to spell out the economical case for ESG. There is no doubt that ESG on the long term is going to cause profits, it's going to yield to profit. We do not doubt that. For example, GE, General Electric, In the past 10 years, it grew from $700 million to $15 billion because they focused on ESG. Marks Spencer, when they launched their Plan A ESG initiative, their profits was £160 million. So we need to spell it out. Employees like to understand the rationale behind why are their work— working pattern changing. Another way we can do so is we can do what IBM did. IBM now has it as a habit every year before they start planning for their strategic direction for the year. They ask the head of departments and the sustainability/ESG champions to sit down and write a deep analysis of how they think IBM will be impacting positively the environment, the society, and how are they going to be governed. The leadership team then takes these analysis, determine which ones we could do at that moment of time, and that will be their planning goals and their planning agenda.

And again, that's planning, that's planning based on feedback from the frontline, which is very interesting, isn't it? Because again, it comes back to the PG Tips guy.

Yes.

It's planning from the frontline, what's going on in the frontline, what's the feedback from people in the organization. And we then take that feedback and as a leadership team, we put that together. And that's what we use for our strategy for the year.

Absolutely. And that would not have happened without the help of internal comms. So internal comms plays a huge role in everything I'm just walking you through. The third way— so in total, there's 5 ways that I personally recommend that I've utilized. The third way is to create ESG as part of your knowledge, as part of your employee experience touchpoints. ESG should always be part of your recruitment process. So encourage people. If your candidates say that they like to volunteer, do not hinder them. Actually make a point as part of the recruitment process that we encourage you to volunteer. Just tell us where you want to volunteer, we will help you, you know. Then go take it into their annual appraisal Take it into the reward system, make it a norm rather than an anomaly. Don't create— and when it comes to, okay, if we really want to talk about tactics, if we look at ESG, I mean, and unfortunately until today people use sustainability when it comes to the intranet rather than having a page on its own just dedicated to sustainability. Why? Why don't you incorporate it? Into your intranet. Why make it standalone? The messages should always have an ESG angle to it. So you're normalizing it.

Yeah, it's that whole idea of what I would term linking and labeling. It's that whole idea of saying, if we were telling the story of— the teabag guy is getting a lot of airtime on this podcast. The PG Tips, PG Tips guy, if that story is on the intranet, then for me it's about being very, very specific around this is a really good example of the environmental lens of ESG on sustainability. If we're talking about the ladies in India getting trained and going out and acting and then starting up small businesses, that's the S, that's part of the S lens, the social lens of ESG and just making it really, really obvious for people. And I think that's something that is, as internal communicators, sometimes we forget. We get so caught up in the, we understand it, therefore everybody else must understand it, that we don't make the links really, really obvious at the beginning. Over time, I think we can be a little less specific, but at the beginning, we have to be really, really specific by creating those red threads.

Absolutely. And it's our job as well to try and decipher the technicalities of these topics. We owe it to our employees to do so and the growth of the company. Yeah, yeah. And then number 4, making everyone a champion. Again, that's doable. That is absolutely doable. And it, and it should be owned by internal comms. If you look at M&S at the moment, M&S, Marks Spencer in the UK, has around 1,300 uh, stores. They have made it a point that each and every store there is a sustainability champion. That champion, their role is to highlight how M&S can be more sustainable and more ESG-focused. And that's, again, this is easily done through us. We are the conduits. We know, we have access to parts of the organization that no one else has. And last but not least, encourage healthy competition. As human beings, we do like a competition. We do like, uh, the recognition, and we definitely like the reward. For example, in BP, there was a competition globally amongst 5 countries on who would be the most sustainable office, an ESG-focused office. And but yeah, mainly was around the E, to be fair.

Yeah.

And they, and they, and the competition was, was a year long. And the end, and I have to admit, when I was sitting in the judging panel, I was blown away by these champions and how they transformed their offices and made it more environmentally friendly and impactful.

But again, the best ideas come from the frontline. The best ideas come from the people who are doing the jobs day to day, who are sitting at the desks, looking at their bin and going, why is all my litter in the same bin? Why is that? And we don't have recycling, for example. Or they're out in the car park going, why don't we have any electric car charging points? And why, if we do, does one person park their car there all day when the car only takes 4 hours to charge? We should put in place a system to recycle the cars around. You get a text on your phone to say, Jihan, your car is now finished charging. And Scott McInnes gets a text to say, Jihan's about to move her car, you can go and put your car in there. It's all these little tiny ideas. I often say about change, it's not about a leadership team or a CEO sitting at his desk saying, "We have to be 10% greener. We have to be 10% more aware or 10% more impactful in the area of the society that we live in." It's about all of those employees making a 0.1% difference through a little idea that they have. And if you have enough of those things happen, then that all rolls up into one great big change at the top of the organization. And of course, course, more profit and makes you more investable, which from a, from a top table perspective, they'd be happy about. At Inspiring Change, we help our clients to implement sustainable change and drive business performance by putting their people first. We do that through a focus on strategic internal communications, employee engagement, and leadership consultancy. If you're struggling with change or getting your people aligned behind your purpose, vision, or strategy, then get in touch. Simply visit our website at www.inspiringchange.ie for more. The one thing I wanted to pick up on was champions, and I've never been a fan of champions because I think that, and particularly when it comes to, I hear all the time in organizations, we've got, yes, we have a small core internal comms team, and then we have internal comms champions who are people out in the business with this little remit on the side of their desk that because they're not objectified against it, because they're not measured against it, it never really happens. So for me, for that champion's idea to work, and I do think it's a great idea because one sustainability person in head office is just not going to have the reach to make a real difference. For that champion idea to work, it literally needs to be somebody's, at least part of their objectives, if not their job in totality. So if there's somebody in each one of those M&S stores, a champion, then that's actually my job. That's my 9-to-5, day-to-day, 40 hours a week role. That's what I do. And I don't know about you, but that's the only way I see champions working.

I agree. Completely agree. And I can see, I could see from— so I'm a huge fan of champions. I won an award, making me the first Middle Eastern to win an award because of the champions. And if I wouldn't have done it, I would not have succeeded. And it was a very simple idea. So when I was working in Saudi Arabia, I was working in the construction sector, and I was the only female among 30,000 males.

Wow.

It was the largest infrastructure project in the world. But what made it even more interesting for me is that 70% of the workforce were illiterate, which is something that not a lot of people encounter, to be fair. So it would be an alien concept for others when I, when I walk you through the story. And one of the challenges that we had is that the level of employee engagement was extremely low. It was 10% out of the 30,000. And my job was to increase that. But then how do I do that? How do I connect with individuals who don't speak English, who don't read, don't write? And it was thanks to the champions. And, and to be honest, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it, it was also thanks to my personal relationship with these champions. I, I know it was a huge, huge, um, pressure on them because that's a job on top of their job. And that's where you come in, and your idea is brilliant that we need to make it as part of their role and their objectives to make it viable and make it work. But I depended solely in my career on personal relationships with these champions. And it was them who suggested that, okay, we can't read, so we don't understand what you're talking about or what you want to achieve. Why don't you create a game for us? And by playing a game, we would understand what impact we have on the project that we are working on. And that's how I won the award because it's never been done before. I created a snake and ladder game. For 70%, what, that would be 26,000 employees who are illiterate. So yes, no, I'm a huge fan of champions.

Yeah, yeah. And I guess it's how they are managed and how they are led. And I think that if you are doing— maybe it's different with champions in that type of area than, you know, somebody saying, well, I'm an internal comms champion, because that's the bit that falls off the bottom of their list of things to do when they're busy. I think if it's something that somebody is really passionate about, if it's something that they can see is really making a difference, that I'm really helping my colleagues who can't read or write to really understand and become part of the broader team for the good of them and the company, then that's a, that's a very motivating thing to be part of, I guess.

Oh, absolutely. And don't forget as well, that takes us back again to the personal combat. It's that psychological part. Which is the reward, the recognition, the involvement that I had to marry and I had to really highlight. And that's why I was always fortunate to get champions behind me because I always gave them the credit. I always made them known in their communities and in their teams and in the wider companies. Brilliant.

Brilliant. You're holding them up, holding them up as heroes, I guess, in many ways.

Yes.

So listen, conscious of time, tell me a little bit about where listeners can maybe go for more information on you, on Comunique, and are there any particular places that people in-house, particularly in internal communications, could perhaps go to find out more about ESG? I know it is a very complicated subject. Are there any places they could go to find out more that's maybe written in maybe easier to understand English rather than corporate ease?

Yes, there is. So if you want— if your readers are completely novice, novices when it comes to ESG, um, I am not being biased, but I'm being truthful. They should visit Comunique's blog, a blogging page, because this is where I am deciphering with my team ESG and making it extremely relatable and, and clear. We also have a newsletter that comes out, and that again, that compiles the best articles and the most easiest articles related to the topics. And, uh, so please subscribe. You can go to the website communique.global, and this is where you can subscribe to our newsletters. If you want data and if you want research, I would recommend you go to The MSCI, they are really heavily involved in research related to ESG. Also Deloitte, McKinsey, and PwC are heavily focusing now on the E, the S, the G, and what does that mean to the companies. So these are the four, these are the four aspects, well, I don't even know what you mean, what I'm trying to say. My English is failing me at the moment. Sources that your readers can go to.

Brilliant. Brilliant. Well, listen, I really enjoyed the conversation. It certainly made it a little clearer for me. I've loved the stories. And I think, you know, for me, it's always stories that bring subjects like this to life on the podcast and also for people in organizations. So I think you'd probably agree with me that that if internal communicators were to do anything else, it was just go out and tell more stories about what you're doing in the ESG space and help and use those stories to communicate with people the part that they play in driving the ESG agenda. So listen, it's been brilliant having you on, Jihan. Thank you so much for taking the time.

Thank you for having me, Scott. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks for listening. To hear from other leaders in our podcasts, to read our blogs, Or to find out more about the work that we do at Inspiring Change, please visit inspiringchange.ie.