Managing credibility – one of your company's biggest assets

By  Frida Rydén

At a time when transparency is highly valued in corporate communication, are you risking your company’s credibility by being too transparent?

If you can strike the right balance between transparency and risk, as well make sure your organization has its core values in place, then high credibility will be one of your company's assets - well worth managing carefully.

As always, if you want to keep up with today’s Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous (VUCA) world, it’s essential to have high standards regarding what you communicate.

Valuable questions worth asking when it comes to setting those standards are:

• What values do we have in our organization?
• How do we work with sustainability and how do we communicate this?

At the Nordic Financial Communication Summit, hosted by Hallvarsson & Halvarsson, we had the opportunity to dive deeper into this and into this year’s theme: Trust – in an age of transparency. Communication today is all about being transparent. Still, we want to have the right balance between transparency and risk.

Communication is crucial and might be as important as the business idea itself, especially when it comes to emerging companies.  It��s important to own your story and understand how to communicate the right amount of information at the right moment.

Pär Jörgen Pärsson (Northzone) spoke about his experiences in this sense with Johan Ramsten (CEO Hallvarsson & Halvarsson). With his experience in new emerging companies within fintech, such as Spotify and iZettle, Pär Jörgen Pärsson talked about the significance of owning the message you want to communicate. In today’s age of transparency, you need to be in charge of your story.

Sustainability as a part of the business model

At Comprend, we work with our clients to find solutions on how to implement and communicate sustainability, both on a daily basis, and in yearly sustainability reports.

How important is the financial sector in the transformation towards a more sustainable business environment? Magnus Billing (Alecta), Anna Ryott (Norrsken Foundation), Henrik Sundström (Electrolux), Hanna Brogren (Sveriges Kommunikatörer), Åse Bäckström (H&H) discussed this during one of the seminars. The financial sector can help driving the development forward by continuing to demand a standard of reporting on sustainability.

A significant point being made by Anna Ryott (Norrsken Foundation) was that, in the future, ihaving sustainability as a separate entity within the company might become obsolete – it will be a completely integrated part of the business model.

AI's influence on communication

One of the assets of successful companies today is not oil, but instead information and data. AI is, of course, the tool for harvesting and refining big data. At the Summit, we had the opportunity to gain insights from the keynote speaker of the day, Dr Pippa Malmgren. She talked about the way today’s environment can be compared with the start of the first industrial revolution. We are on the verge of a revolution of another kind, one where AI will make it possible to process huge amounts of data. A game changer with the opportunity to transform society, but how it will be regulated and who will have access to the technology is a question that is yet unanswered.

Valuable partnership in communication

Comprend can be your partner when it comes to building a reliable modern platform for communication, choosing the relevant messages, as well as creating prerequisites for working in a more data-driven way and providing facts you can base your decisions on. We know that one of the biggest assets to a company is managing data with high credibility and with the right balance between transparency and risk.

If you want to know more about Comprend’s offer, please contact us!