The EuroComm Blog 2008

by Hanna Kalla

“Cultures are storehouses of cultural tools to which people have different levels of access and usage. A truly versatile person can make use of tools from quite a variety of storehouses, others would be somewhat more limited.” (Scollon, 1997)

I would like to think that I am a global citizen of the world having spent most of my life hopping across the continents. When I am asked where I am from though, I find it a little difficult. I was born in Finland but left when I was nine. I was brought up in Africa, and then continued my schooling in Switzerland followed by the US. Wanting to see more of the world, I moved to Asia to discover the secrets of tea ceremony. I have now found my way back to Europe and call England home. But where am I from? The short answer is that I am Finnish but not from Finland. My outlook on life is culturally mixed but if you ask my friends and colleagues, they can still see some Finnish cultural traits in me. So, although my cultural heritage does not define me, it is a part of me. Just because many of us work for global businesses, travel extensively, and have access to the same international news sites, does not erase our cultural backgrounds which impact on our behaviour. If we are lucky though, we are better at accessing those cultural storehouses and using the tools we find within them.

Culture can be a really powerful tool that enables you to form connections. And here it is worth clarifying that culture can be based on your nationality, professional identity, organisational values or another common association. Culture goes much beyond the easily observable dress, ethnicity and language to penetrate all the way to our basic assumptions and beliefs. However, cultural differences can also cause obstacles when people hold different expectations of normal behaviour without allowing for alternate styles of communication. Even simple words can have many interpretations based on different cultural contexts. For example, in Europe we use ‘yes’ to mean “I agree”, whereas in Japan it means “I am listening”. You can just imagine the kind of miscommunication that can lead to.

Looking at tools such as Geert Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions is a great starting point to discovering some of those cultural differences that can be found between different nationalities. I have also carried out research in this field and discovered some very interesting things about micro-cultures and diversity in the workplace. So, is diversity good or bad? That really depends on what you are trying to accomplish… But, I think we can say that despite equalisers such as McDonalds, Starbucks and Nike, culture is still a very important ingredient of today’s global world.

Hanna Kalla (U.K.) is Senior Consultant, Change and Internal Communications at Hill & Knowlton. She joined Hill & Knowlton from Nokia, where she managed internal communications globally for a leading business programme. Prior to that she worked for Nokia Japan where she advised senior managers on intercultural issues affecting multi-site operations. During her time at Nokia, Hanna also studied the strategic role of internal communications in relation to social networks, knowledge sharing, and diversity. Hanna’s background also includes working in account management for Young & Rubicam in New York, and several short projects at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Geneva.

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Hanna will be speaking at the EuroComm conference with her colleague Sam Berrisford.

Sam Berrisford (U.K.) is Senior Consultant, Change and Internal Communications at Hill & Knowlton. Before joining Hill & Knowlton, he
worked at Royal Mail Group and more recently at the BBC. Here he helped develop and implement a range of strategic, culture change and internal marketing initiatives. As well as the media sector Sam has worked in the logistics, financial services, petrochemical, utility and public sectors. Sam has a background in broadcast journalism. He is a performance coach and creative facilitator and has published articles on many aspects of business and stakeholder communications.

Hanna and Sam will be presenting on:

Differences, Similarities and the Cultural Question

This session explores various issues related to cross-cultural communication and their relevance for both internal and external ommunications. With the help of academic research and case studies, the presenters will discuss the roots of culture and its influence on the way people work together joined by a common purpose, both within and across organisations. They will look
at the process of ‘acculturation’ and examine the willingness to accept change as well as organisational flexibility and adaptability.
Against the background of brand globalisation and the internet, the presenters will examine the influence of culture on mergers and acquisitions. They will also discuss the techniques used by major global corporations that have to manage across diverse geographies.

by Ian Andersen

All of us working in communications on an international level dream of the Holy Grail of campaigning: the one-size-fits-all messaging that plays equally well in Karlstad and Kuala Lumpur, the universal slogan that will bring in the punters from Shannon to Chamonix – and yet we are all stumped by culture, by habits, by mores and meaning, by ways of life. And so we adapt, we localise… The products as well as the selling.

I work in a slightly different context – at the coal-face of European politics, in the interpreting service. The European Union, in its essence, can be seen as one long, on-going, intense political and technical conference. For 50 years, the Member States have been negotiating day in and day out on the basis of proposals from the Commission. The Regulations and Directives that make up EU legislation begin around the conference table.

The Commission’s interpreting service has as its chief objective to make sure that all those people – politicans, officials, technicians, union representatives, young farmers, employers – you name it – that they can all understand each other and that the organisations or bodies they represent can safely send their best experts to meet the other Europeans, they don’t have to send the colleague who is best at speaking foreign languages. With now 23 official and working languages to deal with, the interpreters of the European Commission are probably the busiest in the world.

The big headline above all this activity is “Unity in Diversity”. We work together but we respect our cultural peculiarities and languages across the board. For a long time the press service of the Commission thought that it could just focus on briefing the journalists from big newspapers stationed in Brussels and that it did not have to worry too much about local news and smaller papers – and that journalists anyway would dig out anything particularly relevant to their particular readership. But it is now more widely understood that audiences have become even more local, have atomised and are quickly moving away from dead tree editions of most things and are increasingly plugged-in, wired, digitized or at least broadcast.

Websites and pictures and the future fusion of web- and audiovisual services is clearly the way things are moving. We can discuss the speed but there is little doubt about the direction. Is it 3 years? 5 years? 12 years? Whichever it is, the lead-time for a complete change of the current media picture is remarkably short.

This is the horizon from which the European Commission is looking forward today, reflecting on how not only to get in touch with its more and more localised audience but also to engage the citizens in a genuine political discussion. Engagement is a key word in democratic development in the future – and it must happen across borders and language barriers if it is to be truly European. There are technical legal reasons why this is a must, but there is also a more traditional feeling that we are only really a European Union if we are all able to debate the same things – with each other.

It’s all very well that the Lithuanians discuss banking regulations or consumer protection in Lithuanian – with themselves, and that the Italians or the Finns do the same – with themselves, but that is not what we really think we need. How can we be one political entity if we are not able to say: we have one audience? And if we do not have that one audience, how can we go about creating it? And in what language? Do we have to accept that the true European language is what former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene dubbed “Le Bad English”? Or is there another solution – and I am not talking about Esperanto!

This month, the Commission will propose a new strategy for its Internet site – the EUROPA server. We are looking at better regulation of languages, more interactivity, more involvement. And we are looking at how to create that ONE audience… I would ask you to be part of that reflection. I shall speak in Barcelona on the Commission’s new strategy and on a number of the communication initiatives we are working on in partnership with the Member States and the other institutions in Brussels – where clearly agencies will have an important role to play since most of the practical work is outsourced. Join in the discussion, help make sure Europe Be Heard!

Ian Andersen (Belgium) is Head of the Communication and Information Unit at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Interpretation. He is an active member of a number of inter-service working groups on the Commission’s internal and external communication strategy. Prior to his current focus on communication, Ian Andersen worked for 15 years as a conference interpreter and a trainer of Chinese interpreters. He holds an MA in Chinese studies and a BA in political science from the niversity of Copenhagen and has worked for Danish National Television and as a business consultant before joining the European Commission in 1986. He is a member of IABC Belgium and of the National Press Club of Denmark.

Photos: top - Ian Andersen; middle - European Commission press room seen from interpreter’s booth
Thanks to Ian Andersen

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Ian will be speaking at the EuroComm Conference. His session details are below.

Communicating Europe: Is it at all possible to create one European audience?

The European Commission is moving from stakeholder-oriented communication to direct interactive communication with European citizens at a moment when traditional forms of media are being supplanted, modified by, or merged with electronic media. This underscores the challenge of going local and communicating in a language the citizens can understand. The political decision-making in meetings now takes place in 23 languages without any particular difficulties. The European Commission has recently published a general reflection on its communication policy and a more specific document setting out its Internet strategy for the next few years. What are the practical consequences of these strategy papers? How can European issues be
communicated from Brussels in collaboration with the Member States?

Multilingual and multi-cultural communication across a large number of languages is complex, and although not impossible, nor prohibitively expensive, does require careful preparation. But the question remains whether all European citizens need to be part of a European public sphere in order to feel involved in the democratic process and be sufficiently well-informed. Even if the exercise of democratic rights across the continent might call for one single information marketplace, the question remains: Is it at all possible to create one European audience?