Let the corporate culture drive quality - international public relations training

Communication World, June-July, 1991 by Cliff McGoon

What's different, however, is that htis college campus is part of the work place -- created, organized and underwritten by the students' employer. This new incubator of ideas and homogenizer of cultures grew in response to changes in world business.

Perhaps the most dramatic change in the public relations business in recent years has been the desire for the major firms (and many smaller ones as well) to plant their flags on foreign soil. That desire has signaled possible change ahead in the working lives of more than 6,000 employees just at the world's three largest PR firms.

The big three: Burson-Marsteller, Hill and Knowlton, Inc. and Shandwick, plc, faced the future in the '80s and built global staffs of more than 2,000 employees each. The idea was that major clients would prefer to do business with a company able to offer a full complement of PR services worldwide, through its own branches and offices.

Indeed, today the concept seems to be working: Shandwick lists its international business as 60 percent of its total billings, B-M 50 percent, and H & K 40 percent, according to Jack O'Dwyer, J.R. O'Dwyer Co., Inc., New York.

Each of the three took a slightly different approach to its expansion, but they now are represented in most major and many minor areas of the world by someone with accountability to the home office.

Expansion had been put on hold even before the recession, and now the posture of these firms is simply to keep what they've built. Each has shifted its attentin to quality rather than quantity, concentrating on creating a single corporate culture and developing systems to control quality worldwide.

Training for the New Age

One of the keys to making these sprawling global structures work is to have employees in place who know the company's culture: its standards, quality expectations, ethics, and business plan. Those key employees--account handlers for the most part--must have a solid grounding not only in the company's culture, but also in the individual cultures at the divisions and offices around the world. While all these offices might fly the same flag, getting employees to behave alike is another matter.

The magic word at all three firms is training, but each is approaching the goal in its own way: Hill and Knowlton recently instituted what it calls the Hill and Knowlton College; Burson-Marsteller has broadened its basic training skills into thekey disciplines; and Shandwick has affiliated with Sterling University in Scotland to offer Shandwick employees a correspondence course leasing to an advanced degree in PR.

Training PR employees--particularly account handlers--in the '90s is more than putting someone into a classroom for a few hours, or having them look over the guy's shoulder in the next office. Today is involves exposing peoples to cultures--many cultures--to make them equally knowledgeable about the way business is done in Barcelona or Baltimore. And the goal is to do business in the same way -- at least with respect to quality -- everywhere.

Until recently, most PR people only developed awareness of another culture if their job required it. Now, and in the future, that awareness may well precede a new job, or even be prerequisite to it.

As Hill and Knowlton CEO and President Bob Dilenschneider puts it, the purpose of its new college is to "prepare and position H&K executives at all levels for the unprecedented public relations opportunities that are unfolding around the globe."

Hill and Knowlton

Goes to College

"No one is born a public relations professional; we all have to learn, and it's a process that never really ends," says Peter Rae, dean of the Hill and Knowlton College.

The college is a relatively new concept to Hill and Knowlton--the first class convened just last December in Amsterdam, Holland when 23 Hill and Knowlton junior employees from nine countries assembled to cover subjects such as account planning, managing client relations, client presentations, creativity and ethics.

The three-day session was a level I program, that is, for employees with less than four years' experience. The college also offers level II and level III programs. Level II is for professionals with more than four years' experience; level III is for managers with profit center responsibility.

The first level II session was held in New York in February with about 30 professionals from the US and Canada attending. The level II courses included: winning, managing and expanding client business; managing people; and H&K career paths.

The goal, according to Dilenschneider, is to train 1,000 people in the next three years. And, will training follow the ebb and flow of profits in the future? Dilenschneider says, "I believe it (training) has finally been given a form commensurate with the importance we attach to it. Regardless of how the business or economic climage changes, the Hill and Knowlton College is now a part of the Hill and Knowlton organizational structure and will be a permanent fixture of our Hill and Knowlton world."