What were the difficulties you faced during the pandemic in terms of lack of physical presence and how you managed to keep the communication “alive”?
Over the past one-and-a-half year, the coronavirus pandemic has created unprecedent uncertainty, stress, emotional commotion- to name a few. It led to the development of new processes and protocols as well as to the interruption of the traditional norms of communications, marketing, and customers’ retention.
On the other hand, the need for communicating with clarity and empathy remained the same for all organizations and businesses, across the industries and the whole world.
In DNV, Communications’ mission was to help strengthen the already established trust and facilitate the adaptation to the unexampled challenges everybody faced – both internally and externally. Our priority was to connect with employees, communities, and other stakeholders, and be close to them- even from a distance.
The positive thing with DNV is that as we are a “digital first” organization, we had already invested on online channels, tools, and practices even before the emergence of the pandemic. Digital communications saved the day and became the main enabler of business operations and corporate communications all over the world, with consistency and flexibility, delivering for the new normal.
It’s now obvious that a lot have changed in the corporate communications ecosystem and things will never go back to where they were until 2019 – or at least it will take a lot of time to do things the same way we did post-Covid.
But as we go back in normality, we are more and more realizing that nothing can substitute the power of physical interaction, which is in the very core not only of the Communications function, but the humans’ existence all in all.
* Senior Communications Manager Regional Comms Hub Europe, Middle East & Africa
DNV Maritime
The answer was provided for NAFS magazine issue 143 in its special report “WOMEN in SHEPPING”