ICYMI: Visa's CCO, Security Comms, Netflix language lessons

4 comms things and one non-comm thing

Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening!

• 🐂 Lunar New Year begins Feb. 12. Here are some useful tidbits for your intranet and employee newsletter.

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In case you missed it…

1. Visa’s CCO Over-Communicates With Employees

Visa CCO Paul Cohen

In an interview with PRovoke, Visa CCO Paul Cohen discusses why over-communicating with Visa’s 20,000+ employees during this (never. ending.) covid crisis is so important.

Some excerpts:

• Over-communicate and make sure employees feel cared for and safe. And come at it from a variety of angles. Visa not only connected employees virtually with doctors who could explain health issues but also with psychologists who could provide expert insight into coping with the changes. 

• We also set up a virtual life at Visa, which was kind of a subset of the internet [sic], which allowed employees to collaborate and engage in things that are tangential to work. Maybe somebody has a recipe they want to share, or they're homeschooling their kids and getting good results, and they want to talk about that, or there's a team meeting and everybody wants to get together for some kind of a virtual coffee or virtual happy hour. All of that was done on this platform, and it created really, really strong engagement.

• …productivity either stayed the same or went up in the first few months of the work from home environment. And based on what we've seen, it's still staying very, very high.

• The feedback on communications from the executives was extraordinarily high. I think 97 percent of employees felt that the management team was communicating well, they were listening and that it wasn't just pushing communications, but that there were tools and processes so that employees could then engage in a dialogue with management.

Bottom line from Mr. Cohen:

• If calendar year 2020 didn't change the role of comms or enhance the role of comms within your organization, you may be in the wrong organization or the wrong job.

2. Security Comms Is Gonna Be Big This Year

Internal comms around the prevention of hacking and phishing have been ramping up over the past few years. But new threats are emerging for employees at big-name firms: misinformation and ransomware.

According to Security Magazine:

…one of the major trends of 2021 (and beyond) will be the rise in misinformation campaigns to help drive up the costs of ransomware payments and, in some cases, influence markets to manipulate stock prices. Large multinationals and big companies with high-profile brand reputations on the line will be hardest hit since bad actors target them as prime sources for the extortion of money.

The article suggest a few things leaders can do to mitigate the threats:

• Step up internal communications and monitoring of social media

• Plan for bad events

• Create protection strategies centered around sentiment tracking and dark web monitoring

• Back up your data

Go deeper.

3. How Comms Tools Can Fuel Burnout — and What To Do About It

75% of employees say that working from home has increased their sense of digital overload as messaging, emailing, and videoconferencing have become the primary means of communication. 

Fast Company interviewed Mary Lynn Carver, founder and CEO of MLC Strategy Advisors, to get her advice on how to manage comms overload. Among her suggestions:

• Look at what’s being used

• Get feedback

• Examine the best use for each channel

• Build a channel strategy

• Adapt your communication style

Related: Why a Channel Audit Is Important (for Mister Editorial’s paid subscribers).

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📢  Paid subscribers to Mister Editorial get access to exclusive content, such as:

• Back to Basics With Clear Writing: The Topic Sentence (riddle me this)

• Don’t Reinvent the Wheel (6 places to steal internal storytelling ideas from)

• Subscriber Exclusive: A Glimpse at IKEA’s Internal TV Show

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4. Managing Up: How to Deal With a Bad Boss During Quarantine

There are many types of bad bosses, says Mary Abbajay, author of Managing Up: How to Move Up, Win at Work and Succeed With Any Type of Boss. Among them:

• the ghost boss: someone who’s seemingly never around

• the seagull: bosses who “swoop and poop” or “swoop and scoop,” meaning they “divebomb into a project” and leave a mess behind, “or they dive into it and take it away from you”

• the incompetent: self-explanatory

Poor relations with your boss can come down to bad communication. Here’s how to manage the situation to your advantage (NYT subscription).

5. Learn a New Language by Watching Netflix

Netflix has become a very good tool for practicing a new language, according to a survey by the platform in South Korea, India, Mexico, and Turkey. On Netflix, movies and series are subtitled in 37 different languages and dubbed in 34, giving you endless opportunities to brush up on Portuguese, Japanese, German, and Hindi.

• Personal anecdote: When I was preparing to move to China for a summer I watched familiar shows like Friends dubbed in Mandarin, and watched Chinese films with English subtitles to help me learn some basic language skills. It really works!

This article gives you the URL extensions you need to browse films in specific languages.