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.
Caitlin Hayden of BAE Systems, Inc. shares her thoughts below. For the past three years, she served as the senior vice president of communications at BAE Systems, Inc.⏤ the company’s U.S. subsidiary ⏤ and transitioned recently to serve as the group communications director in the company’s London headquarters.
What were you and your team heavily focused on this year?
No question: It’s talent and culture. We’ve always been focused on our employees and future employees as an audience, but I’d say that there is more emphasis than ever on making sure our storytelling is more personal and visible to them.
It has been a difficult past few years between COVID-19, racial reckoning, and now, inflation and supply chain challenges. We know our employees are under pressure at home and in the workplace. Communications is on the frontlines of listening to our colleagues, understanding what’s going on in the world around us and communicating our company’s values, mission, objectives and culture.
It’s our job to help leaders explain decisions and business considerations in a way that is clear, timely, accessible and empathetic. And it’s our job to showcase the innovation, technology, customer focus and culture that make us all proud to come to work at BAE Systems every day.
More than ever, we are engaged in helping the enterprise recruit and support a diverse workforce, to include providing better resources for our people managers as the most important and influential ambassadors for our values.
The communications function can’t help others if we’re burned out ourselves, so we’re likewise focused on the development and well-being of our amazing communicators. The business doesn’t succeed without them.
What were some of you/your team’s lessons learned as you addressed the pandemic?
Wow, there are so many things we learned through the pandemic. I started in my role several months before the pandemic hit, and in some ways, I’m just beginning to learn what “a normal year” looks like for the company.
I’m not sure we’d be the close-knit team we are today if not for what we learned through the pandemic. If I had to narrow it down, I’d say that we learned: the power of being personal, the importance of acknowledging mental health, the critical nature of consistent messaging in a big enterprise and the potency of giving people trust and flexibility. These were true across the company and within our team.
No one had all the answers, and we had a broader range of voices at the table providing input from more perspectives than ever. I’m convinced it led to better decisions. Letting our colleagues into our homes and our lives virtually also leveled the playing field and created an intimacy within our team that we love.
Are you/your team spearheading any major media and communications initiatives at the moment? If so, can you explain?
We are always working on how to do things better, and I’m excited about any number of strategic new initiatives, from expanding our use of video to refreshing our digital approach and using smarter measurement.
I think the highest stakes new effort for our team this year is the launch of our BAE Systems, Inc. employee app. When you think about the workplace culture we’re trying to strengthen and evolve to attract and retain talent and drive innovation, it requires meaningful two-way connection with each and every employee. Real inclusion relies on inviting everyone into the conversation, no matter where they work in the business.
We have many thousands of employees across the company who don’t have regular access to our intranet or even company email addresses or devices. Folks on the manufacturing floor, in our shipyards and on classified government sites often can’t access the communications we produce. So, we’ve launched a new app you can use on a company or personal device to try to level the playing field and give every employee an opportunity to receive company announcements and information, learn more about their colleagues, and provide feedback.
We spent a solid year working to build this app with our vendor, and now that it’s launched, we’re focused on ensuring its success, including campaigns to increase adoption and refining our content strategy.
How do you hope current or ongoing media and communications initiatives positively impact the organization and its workforce?
We hope we’re having an impact, and we measure to make sure we are. In the real world of resource constraints, we’ve got to be sure that what we’re doing is having an effect. When I think about the things that are having a positive impact, of course, it’s important that we are telling a clear story to our customers and shareholders about the performance and governance of our business.
That’s table stakes, especially in a world where ESG is increasingly a priority, and I think we’re doing it well. But I’d also point back to some of what I talked about earlier around strengthening an inclusive, mission-focused culture.
Examples include the work we in communications do to support managers in explaining company decisions, helping our leaders show up more often and more authentically and providing the tools for employees to access news and engage with us and each other.
This work has a very real impact on the employee experience. We can’t innovate in a culture where people don’t feel connected to our company purpose and each other, or where they don’t feel like they belong.
What are you most passionate about enhancing communications-wide in your organization going forward?
This is a big question because I’ve just recently taken on a new position in the company as the group communications director working at our global headquarters in London. A big part of that job will be working to leverage the best of what we’re doing in the U.S. market and the best of what we’re doing in the U.K. and elsewhere in the world to tell our story. We’re lucky because our story is a rich one ⏤ about talented people, next-generation technology and global security impact.
I’m just a few weeks in, so I have a lot of listening and learning to do before I am clear on my immediate priorities. But I do know that we’ll be focused on holding on to the agility and authenticity we gained through the pandemic, and strengthening our ability to plan and execute together across markets using integrated planning and metrics. That includes developing more ways for our teams to share great work and building an even stronger sense of community in the global communications function.