WashingtonExec has reached out to leading govcon communications and media executives about the latest trends in a post-pandemic world. These interviews highlight success stories that resonate, discuss how organizations are navigating current challenges, and provide insight into lessons learned.
Jennifer Brooks, vice president of communications for CAES, shares her thoughts below.
What were you and your team heavily focused on this year?
Brand was top of mind for our team this year. As communicators, we’re always thinking about how to differentiate our company, a challenge that’s become even more difficult ⏤ and important ⏤ in today’s noisy landscape. Recently at CAES, we have had the added element of a companywide rebrand.
In 2021, CAES successfully launched a new name and brand after separating from parent company Cobham, no small task for a comms team with new leadership. As a $1 billion-plus company, CAES has a substantial footprint in the aerospace and defense market, but as with any rebranding effort, continuing to build recognition and identity is still a work in progress.
In 2022, we focused on elevating the brand as a partner of choice, increasing CAES’ presence at industry trade shows and creating new, differentiated content to tell the CAES story. We wanted to create content that showcased the heart of our work ⏤ our employees.
I often tell people that as a supplier, we make components that go into prominent aerospace and defense products like the F-35 or DART mission, but often our products aren’t seen or talked about. Our team created a campaign that features the products we design and manufacture with the employees responsible for their creation. CAES employees telling the CAES story. These images and videos then became a common thread on all of our collateral, both internally and externally.
Not only did we focus on the external brand in 2022, but also the internal company culture that comes with these changes.
We increased employee engagement and made substantial strides in our sustainability and DEI efforts. With over 3,500 employees in over 12 locations across the U.S. and in Mexico and Sweden, CAES strives to hire the best talent.
I am continuously reminded when I walk through CAES facilities that we have a very diverse workforce and that each person has a story to tell. The communications team spent time interviewing our employees and focusing on their accomplishments in our new blog on CAES.com. I am proud that our team can help tell these important stories.
We’ve also focused on recognizing employees for their efforts in and outside of the workplace. This year, we launched CAES Cares, which awards our employees for their volunteerism outside of work hours. We selected employees based on their efforts, and CAES contributed to their charity on their behalf. We’ve highlighted their experiences in stories shared with our employees and on our social media.
It has been so rewarding to see our employees sharing their personal stories of why they volunteer and why their organization is special to them.
What were some of this year’s biggest media and communications challenges, and how did you overcome them?
As a newer brand, it has been important for us to increase our social media footprint, creating more informative posts with videos and employee testimonials so that our customers know CAES’ capabilities. Drilling down to what we wanted our new graphics and visuals to convey, we created a new consistent look and feel for our social channels that align with the rebranding effort.
Taking a step back to highlight awareness and education campaigns about our capabilities and products has set us up with a solid foundation to build on in 2023.
Our small but mighty team has been challenged to learn new video techniques, create a genuine CAES look and feel and produce new visual content regularly that will engage our audience. We pushed our graphic designer who is a genius with video editing and photography to create more digestible content that speaks to today’s short attention spans.
Keeping an authentic voice and always coming back to our employee stories remained a guidepost for our team. We traveled across the company interviewing employees and learning about our products and people.
We’ve seen very positive results, increasing our social media following by 25% on almost every platform.
How did you/your team approach a post-pandemic world? What does that look like in your organization?
As we emerge from COVID-19, we are embracing the lessons we learned from the pandemic and establishing a new communications routine for our employees. From the pandemic came new ways of working and communicating, and we’ve looked to translate this evolution to our internal communications work. Connectivity has been a recurring theme for us. We learned through engagement efforts that CAES employees want to stay connected with the entire company, not just their local site.
As a result, we have increased the number of virtual town halls and webinars, which connect our employees all over the country. We conducted a series of webinars with employees and our new CAES leadership team, inviting our teammates to peek behind the curtain and see what company leadership is focused on. For Women in Engineering Day, we hosted a Zoom session that featured four of our female executives from different backgrounds and locations and invited our entire company to participate.
Making these opportunities available to all has helped our employees feel like part of a larger, more connected team.
How do you hope current or ongoing media and communications initiatives positively impact the organization and its workforce?
Business leaders have an interesting opportunity right now to become more involved and help create a more active company culture. Looking at the most recent Edelman Trust Barometer results, it is obvious that trust in employers is growing while trust in media and others is on a sharp decline. There’s real opportunity for the business community to step in and fill some of this void in trust ⏤ and communication and culture play a big role in this.
At CAES, our leaders have more communication tools than ever to share their perspectives and bring their employees into the conversation to grow trust. The CAES annual employee engagement survey is one way for leadership to hear directly from our employees.
The feedback we received this year indicated that our employees want to learn more about companywide activities, so our leadership asked us to overhaul the digital content on television monitors at our sites to focus more on program milestones and key initiatives. Highlighting our social activities or acknowledging program wins used to vary from facility to facility. Celebrating our successes company-wide is building trust and a stronger culture every day.
What are you most passionate about enhancing communications-wide in your organization going forward?
Throughout my career, giving back has always been a priority ⏤ and it’s something I wanted to bring to CAES as well. From the moment I walked in the door at CAES, I wanted to find a charity that the company could support that aligned with our values and provided us with volunteer opportunities across the country.
This month, we announced a partnership with Homes For Our Troops, a charitable organization that builds adapted custom homes for severely injured post-9/11 veterans so they can rebuild their lives. As an aerospace and defense supplier, our products protect our warfighters every day and this organization felt like an extension of our company mission, to give back to those who have given us so much.
I am excited to introduce this charity to our employees, our customers and our audience. This is truly an incredible organization doing amazing things, and we believe it is our obligation to promote their good work far and wide. Our team will be sharing HFOT stories with our employees monthly and inviting them to learn more. If you follow CAES on social media, we will be sharing about our commitment to HFOT as well.
As a partner, we not only will make a financial contribution, but we will coordinate our employee volunteer days with the HFOT team as we roll up our sleeves and change lives. I am excited to see our work together bloom and to share the stories of our employees volunteering alongside deserving veterans.