Nissan’s global comms restructure uses a centralized center of excellence and follow-the-sun model to speed response times, reduce duplication and give regional teams access to specialized support.
For global communications teams, there’s one challenge that never gets easier: how do you operate as one organization when your people, leaders and stakeholders are spread across multiple continents?
At Nissan, the answer was to stop organizing communications around geography and start organizing around expertise.
The automaker recently launched a new global communications structure designed to connect teams across regions, eliminate duplication and give communicators access to specialized teams regardless of where they’re located.
“Everything that happens locally has global implications and everything that is global has local significance,” said Lavanya Wadgaonkar, chief communications officer at Nissan. “So it’s a borderless world. If it’s a borderless world, why are we operating with borders?”
The plan was executed through two main changes over nearly two years. It included a centralized center of excellence and a “follow-the-sun” communications model.
Why did Nissan change Its comms structure?
Nissan was pushing for greater efficiency following an economic downturn, and when Wadgaonkar’s team convinced the organization’s chief performance officer a new comms plan would directly help, it created more urgency around the redesign, she said.
But cost savings were only part of the benefit, she said.
“The most important reason for me was talent,” Wadgaonkar said.
Communications teams around the world often have different strengths based on their local markets, she said. At the same time, the profession has become increasingly specialized, making it harder for any one market to have every skillset in-house.
“If we cannot gather all skills at one location, what’s wrong in going where the skillsets are?” she said.
Rather than hiring duplicate roles in every market, Nissan decided to make those capabilities available globally, through one location.
One team serving all regions
One of the biggest changes was the creation of a global communications center of excellence based in India. The center of excellence functions as an internal agency. Teams submit requests, project managers assign work and specialists create content for different regions.
The team includes graphic designers, video editors and content specialists who support communicators across Nissan’s global markets. They even hired their own editorial team to help with consistency in brand voice and better storytelling.
“What we looked at is how can we create this center of excellence, a team that can be at the ready, with a consistent approach that can be connected to all the different teams around the world?” said Brian Brockman, senior director of strategy and creative communications at Nissan.
According to Brockman, the approximately 20-person team can usually turn projects around within a day or two, where it used to take weeks to coordinate.
“It really makes it easy for people within the team to get the content they need quickly,” he said.
He said the goal is consistency without sacrificing local relevance. Markets still have their own relationships with stakeholders, but they now have access to specialized support that many smaller teams could never afford on their own, he said.
A ‘follow-the-sun’ strategy
The second major piece of Nissan’s model is what leaders call a “follow the sun” approach.
Instead of waiting for headquarters to wake up and respond to issues, comms leaders in different regions stay connected around the clock.
Wadgaonkar said this method works especially well for media inquiries and crisis communications.
“If (a reporter) in London needs to call Nissan, they’ll call someone in London,” she said. “Because London doesn’t have the information, they have to wait for Japan to wake up.”
The delay slows responses and creates frustration for journalists on a deadline, she said.
Under the new model, comms leaders in Japan, Europe and North America stay connected on major issues. As one region ends its workday, another picks up responsibility after being briefed. Each region is led by a comms executive. Those leaders report to Wadgaonkar.
As she described it, the goal was to fix the company’s “nervous system” so information moved more quickly through the organization instead of getting stuck waiting for one office to come online.
Internal challenges
Creating the organizational flow and assigning roles was the easy part, Wadgaonkar said.
The harder challenge was helping employees understand what the change meant for them.
Nissan spent more than eight months discussing the new model before making any moves, she said. This included discussions, presentations and Q&As.
“What we didn’t want was enforcement,” she said. “It should be acceptance.”
Leaders also asked employees to help shape the structure, identify inefficiencies and suggest ways the model could work better.
A major focus was helping to remove fears about job security, Wadgaonkar said.
“The first reason why a team would reject something like this is if they think their job is at stake,” she said. Her team made sure to reiterate in each discussion that the reorganization didn’t mean layoffs.
Explaining the change also required adapting communication styles across cultures, she said. For example, French teams wanted to understand the philosophy behind the change, so they needed to share the value it would add and the “why.” Japanese teams wanted to understand what the process looked like, so they needed a step-by-step resource, or the “how.”
“This cultural difference was something we had to balance,” she said.
Where’s the focus now?
Nissan’s transformation is still relatively new, being publicly announced at the end of March, but leaders say early feedback has been positive, though they’re tracking other KPIs and business outcomes too.
The biggest win today is that global teams can now provide centralized support at any given time, while local teams can stay more focused on their own regional markets, improving the flow of operations, building consistency and greater trust, Wadgaonkar said.
“We fixed our nervous system, I would say,” she said.
The post Pulling back the curtain on Nissan’s ’follow the sun’ global comms structure appeared first on PR Daily.
