Think International

Thirty-five marketing and communications professionals gathered at Eye for Image's Think International seminar on 5 November to hear about global communication best practices from three of Denmark’s leading companies, FLSmidth, Carlsberg and Coloplast.

In the next issues of WordSpin, we report on the insights of these three powerful Danish brands. First up is FLSmidth. Marketing manager Anders Godiksen talks about the language strategy and its importance to FLSmidth's international communications.

Even though English has always been the official language, FLSmidth has only just begun work on its first language policy, strategy and mission statement. And now the organization’s aims are clear: to strengthen communications, promote a best-practice culture, and boost customer confidence.

Since its beginnings in 1882, FLSmidth has been active on a global scale. And in the early 1980s, English was adopted as FLSmidth’s global business language. Fuelled by the IT revolution, English became the official company language for all written materials, both internally and externally.

Today the organization has 3 centers: in India, Denmark and the USA, and the English in all three centers is usually easy to understand. But many jobs take place outside these three countries. In Russia, for example, FLSmidth needed as many translators as sales people to manage its eight contracts throughout 2008. From translating contracts to directing building work onsite, effective communication needed a lot of resources.

The FLSmidth language strategy
FLSmidth is happy with its output of brochures, ads and corporate films – Eye for Image makes sure the quality is always high. But 90 percent of its business communication is through emails – and it is a little harder to keep an eye on the quality.

According to Anders Godiksen, in the absence of a strategy, FLSmidth employees adopted an attitude something like, “They’ll understand what I’m trying to say…”

Anders explains: “This is the general attitude we’re up against. But you can’t blame our employees. They had very little support.” Anders showed us an email from an FLSmidth specialist to a customer to illustrate his point.

“Please recieve attached drawings regarding the technical solutions for the repair work at la couronne. The scobe of work is descibed at the drawings we marked up together at the plant. The materials for the job is ordered”

Even though this was to a native French speaker, the result looks far from professional.

FLSmidth’s language strategy aims to demonstrate the importance of language. “We have to improve the quality of all our language production,” explains Anders. “Especially those everyday business emails. We really want people to think before they release a document.”

But it’s not just about accuracy. There are other issues to think about such as cultural differences and how much the recipients know about FLSmidth’s business – will they understand all the insider terms?

Strategy and tools
The first step was to produce a mission statement for the FLSmidth language strategy. Anders says, “Simply establishing some statements on language itself is a step toward raising the standard of communication throughout our organization.”

The next step was to work out how to help FLSmidth employees put the strategy into practice. They need tools that are easy to find and available at all times. And they need constant support from FLSmidth’s language department.

Anders introduces the tools they use: “Aside from ordinary dictionaries, we use a battery of administrative tools and language services, such as a translation tool, which stores every translation we do in a database. The same phrase for contracts, job ads, or legal disclaimers can be reused throughout our organization. This kind of knowledge-sharing leads to very efficient communication, at least in theory. It’s still early days.”

Another key tool is “FLS Term”. This is also a database – this time for key technical terms in five different languages: Danish, German, French, Portuguese, and of course, English. At the moment FLS Term contains 150,000 words that have really helped FLSmidth establish uniformity in the way employees talk about products and processes.

“The most important part of a cement factory is a rotary kiln, but you’d be amazed to find out how many variations of ‘oven’ we used to get,” says Anders. “This tool as successfully put an end to all that.”

Anders rounded off his entertaining talk with a sneak preview of FLSmidth’s forthcoming corporate film. Anders introduced it: “It has a bold, confident style – an ‘American’ style. We needed help to realize this style because it’s hard for Danes to do nail it. Luckily, Eye for Image was at hand to help out.”

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Industry best practices
Keep an eye on WordSpin to find out about other international communications best practices. We’ll be sharing with you the thoughts of Michael Kreutzfeldt of Carlsberg Group and Jacob Barnes of Coloplast.

Read more about the Think International seminar...