David Radcliffe's neck: IABC Europe Excel Award winner talks about engaging employees and reaching out to other cultures

Communication World, March-April, 2005 by Silvia Cambie

To understand the secret behind Excel Award winner David Radcliffe's passion for employee communication, we have to go back to his childhood and a busy street in London. On their way home from school, David and his brother regularly met Mr. Joseph, the elderly Jewish owner of a bookstore. Not only would he help them to get into their building, but he would also check what they had learned in school. One day, a big black car came speeding down the road, nearly hitting Radcliffe. Mr. Joseph, who caught the boy in time, remarked: "You know, young David, one day you'll have a big black car like that. Always stop for people!"

Radcliffe has not forgotten his old friend's precious advice. He is now the chief executive of the U.K.-based Hogg Robinson. With 7,500 employees and 3,000 offices in 200 countries, Hogg Robinson is a leading provider of corporate and employee services, as well as Europe's third-largest international travel management company. Its businesses offer outsourced pension payments, employee benefits consulting, corporate event management and e-commerce. And it was Radcliffe's interest in his employees' needs and his dedication to internal communication that landed him the first IABC Europe Excel (Excellence in Communication Leadership) Award, presented in early December in Brussels, Belgium. His ease with people was clearly evident at the awards dinner, joking at being in a room full of communicators: "It is like meeting a hangman. He looks at you and says that you've got a really nice neck."

Asked what the award means to him, Radcliffe does not hesitate to put it in perspective. "What really pleases me is that the award should go to the company," he says. "I have stolen all the ideas from the people who work for me. I may have added one or two myself. But all I have done is make it happen." Radcliffe believes that a company gets free ideas from every employee. And when an organization succeeds in harnessing those ideas, it not only gets a lot of free advice, but also creates a culture of exchange.

Creating powerful platforms

Radcliffe digs for those ideas in both formal and informal discussion platforms. He spends two days every six weeks meeting with employees in their offices around the world. "Rather than going around one of our buildings with 200 people, I am better to get 20 of them for an hour and say, 'Ask me questions,'" he says, explaining that those 20 will then relate their conversations to the 200.

He also meets regularly with 12 people from throughout the company. They fly in for a few hours to discuss different matters with him and other senior directors. The participants are guaranteed confidentiality. When Radcliffe became chief executive in 1997 and launched this initiative, most of the questions were about local issues and tended to focus on the individual, such as "Why is my manager never talking to me?" "Why am I never given a chance to talk about my career?" or "Why are you being unfair to that person?" Today, the comfort level has improved so that people's concerns are now more about the company and its acquisition plans and growth prospects. "This happened because the local issues have already been dealt with," says Radcliffe, citing yearly staff appraisals, Internet-based feedback programs and internal publications that cover these areas.

Radcliffe attended the IABC award dinner in Brussels on a stopover to Australia. "Next week, I will see three locations in Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. I will be having lunches, breakfasts and dinners with everyone to make sure that they have time to talk to me. It is a week of my life--wasted or well spent?" he muses, but he already knows the answer. When he leaves, he says, those employees will say, "The chief executive actually listens to what I have to say."

Cross-cultural communication

Another program Radcliffe is proud of is interchange. "No matter where I went, I used to hear, 'Why aren't there more chances to work abroad?'" he says. That was when Hogg Robinson came up with the idea of inviting employees to apply for a "job" in another country. They usually stay for a month, experiencing a different culture and learning to work in it. (For more about Interchange, see "Communicating with the Chief Executive," right.)

Radcliffe also leads Business Travel International (BTI), a corporate travel management company that is partially owned and managed by Hogg Robinson. BTI recently set up majority-controlled joint ventures in China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. BTI Jin Jiang is the only corporate travel management company to have obtained licenses to do business in China's major cities--a vast advantage in a country whose corporate travel market has experienced double-digit growth in recent years as a result of both direct foreign investment and the expanding domestic economy.

As CEO, Radcliffe made sure he learned about China's culture as well as its business prospects. "China's culture is much older than any other, so they've got to have something right," he says. "Go and find out what that is, and then blend it with what you want.... When you go into a different country, with all the best technology in the world, you still encounter a huge history, and that means that different people have different needs." Radcliffe's mantra, he adds, is "never assume you have the right answer."