Two years of remote quarterly earnings - what I've learned, what I miss

Today marks two years since the last time I was together with my team in person to do our quarterly financial earnings. We would meet every quarter – usually in Hong Kong or Beijing, sometimes New York, depending on where our board meeting was taking place – and work together side by side for a week on one of the most key and visible things we do as a team. The last time we were together it was in November 2019 when I got to fly into the amazing new Beijing airport for the first time and enjoy the stunning Autumn colours – definitely my favourite season in the city!

When we had to pivot to doing earnings remotely, I really had no idea how we’d manage. It seemed an impossible task for us to be in three different timezones around the world (UK, east coast of the US, Beijing/Hong Kong) collaborating with multiple teams (executive leadership, strategy, investor relations, finance, company secretary) and be able to get it done - without the ability to simply turn around to the person next to you to update them on a key message or data point that had evolved or changed, or have the time to discuss or debate something in person which is infinitely more natural and productive.

To be honest, the first quarter we did it I felt sick. Was convinced we would put a decimal in the wrong place, use millions instead of billions, or have the technology for our webcast fail….but it was fine. As we repeated it each quarter, again I was convinced we’d mess something up somewhere. Not that I doubt the team in any way – it's more that like most people in comms the nearer you get to a deadline/launch/crunch point the more the paranoia about making a mistake grows. It’s part of the job and what makes us good at it I think – nothing like a healthy bit of fear and adrenalin to focus the mind.

What’s become clear to me is that we can do it remotely/virtually very well – but it’s bloody hard. Those of us not residing in the market/timezone where we are listed (Hong Kong) work through the night for several days working out when it’s the most appropriate time to sleep. Email traffic goes up exponentially as things are being finessed. We forget things – because we’re human and don’t have the natural prompt of colleagues around us – but they rarely matter or when they do, we fix them, very quickly. But the three key things I’ve learned are these:

Divide and conquer – this seems obvious, but when working in isolation from each other it needs to be clear who is doing what. We work a 24-hour cycle, so things may be being worked on by one person and then handed off to someone else for review or taking to the next stage during their working day. There are what seems like 100s of things that need to be done, and while we have a core team that does 80% of the work, there are many additional team members who have a specific remit to help on a particular thing that makes up the other 20%. All critical work, but the only way we get it done is by dividing and conquering and having clear roles and responsibilities – including who is accountable for the oversight of everything and connecting the dots.

The devil is in the detail – a much underappreciated and undervalued skill for comms people is attention to detail. Check, check, and check again. Full transparency – most quarters we spot something that needs fixing in the minutes before we hit ‘publish’ on all our many documents and assets. This is never a surprise and it rotates each quarter as to who spots it – I am sure I’m not alone amongst industry peers in this. But it’s an important reminder about needing different types of people in your team with different skill sets who can bring this robust critical eye to work when it really matters. We all have each other’s back – any mistake is our mistake, not one person’s – no blame culture here.

Don’t let complexity stifle creativity – it’s easy when the process is complex (and even more so remotely) to simply do things as you’ve always done them. But that’s boring ??. I’ve been leading our comms for earnings for the last four years, given two of those have been during Covid times we’ve not held back on the way we have transformed things. From how we create more social assets for our employees to amplify our story, to the use of video content to bring our success and performance alive with the stories behind the numbers. And everything else in between. Change doesn’t have to be wholesale; it can be iterative – and sometimes it’s that iterative change added up over time that can be the most powerful. It might feel hard in big corporations with complex processes and multiple stakeholders to dramatically change things overnight, but you can use nudge theory and gently change quarter-on-quarter to drive to the change needed to communicate the story we are trying to tell. That’s certainly what’s been done over the last four years – how we do things now is unrecognisable, and that's easy to forget sometimes when we work so often in the moment - but I’ve very proud of how we’ve transformed our work.

But I really do miss those quarterly trips to work on earnings SO MUCH. The 12+ hour flight to gather my thoughts and get my sh*t together ahead of a busy week; the efficiency that comes with sitting next to the team, and the ‘safety in numbers’ of being together and facing any challenges/opportunities together. But most of all I miss the camaraderie of being together - able to de-compress with a great dinner in the evening, to laugh and joke as a team, to reflect on the work and think about what to do better next time – but most importantly to remind ourselves that it’s the people around us that keep us going.

Here’s to hopefully being in Hong Kong in February 2022 for our Q3 earnings, or maybe more realistically May for full-year earnings. To all the team who play a role in this particular quarterly drumbeat of work – no matter how big or small – every cog in the wheel that is earnings comms matters. Thank you.