GEA’s Jill Meiburg on the Power of Purpose-Led Comms

Jill Meiburg: You know, people used to always laugh about cat content, being, you know, the thing that drives engagement. And I have to say with GEA, it’s cow content. We have a farm technologies division, and anything we do about cows, it outperforms everything else.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Welcome back to Always On, the podcast about brand reputation and data-driven communications. I’m your host in Copenhagen Shahar Silbershatz, and I’m very happy to have with us today, Jill Meiburg. She’s the head of group communications and brand at GEA, one of the world’s largest technology suppliers for food processing and a wide range of other industries. Over 18,000 employees in over 50 countries, if I’m not mistaken. You had a long and impressive career in communications, among others, at Deutsche Telecom, Deutsche Post, and I also learned today that you are a graduate of my alma mater, which is Columbia University, so welcome to Always On, Jill.  

Jill Meiburg: Thank you so much, Shahar. It’s really nice to be here.  

Shahar Silbershatz: So, we typically start by asking people how they introduce themselves and basically what would you say if you met somebody at a cocktail party, who is Jill Meiburg? 

Jill Meiburg: Okay. I’m an American who’s been living in Germany for the past 20 years with my husband and our three sons. And yeah, I would say that makes me bilingual and bicultural at this point in time. Professionally, I’m a passionate communications leader, very much purpose-led. I am a brand builder and yeah, I really put a lot of focus on strategy, as a communication strategist and positive team culture.  

Shahar Silbershatz: That’s great. Okay. And tell us a little bit about you outside of work. What are you interested in? What gets you going?  

Jill Meiburg: Outside of work, I’m very active in my church community. I’m very active in classical music. Singing is a passion and a hobby of mine. I like that because I think it keeps the creative side of the brain active and it’s important for me. I enjoy exercise, I enjoy reading, and most of all, we’re quite an adventurous family in terms of travel, so we’ve done a lot of great trips together. Those are starting to wind down as our older children are off doing their own things now. But we’ve had some great family trips, yeah.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Okay, and there’s one question I have to ask. How is it being an American in Germany today?  

Jill Meiburg: Oh, it’s funny because a lot of people kind of tell me at this point, you’re more German than you are American. As I’ve been here for so long. 

Shahar Silbershatz: 20 years is a long time. 

Jill Meiburg: It’s a long time. It’s not an easy time.I think that it’s easy to become really discouraged about current developments, about the health of the transatlantic relationship, at this moment in time, but I also believe that we should sometimes take a step back and try to take a longer-term view on this and not get so caught up in what happened yesterday or the day before, but rather also to focus on what has been a source of strength over so many decades between Germany and the United States. I think there’s more substance there that can’t be obliterated within the space of just, you know, a couple of weeks or days. I think sometimes we lose sight of that because some of the things that have happened have been so explosive and unexpected and hard to watch and to see. But there is also, I think, real stability in the transatlantic relationship. I try to focus on that, maybe that’s just because I’m an optimist, and yeah. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I think those are very good times to be an optimist, I have to say. So let’s turn back the clock a little bit and talk about the early days of your career. What actually got you into communications? 

Jill Meiburg: I started out on a path to become a journalist and did at Columbia a lot of coursework at the journalism school, even though my degree is in international affairs and I was working as a reporter at Bloomberg News on Park Avenue, just getting my feet wet, doing some summer internship work for the Associated Press. And I really enjoyed that, but I wasn’t entirely sure that was my calling, if you will. So after graduate school I came back to Germany, on a fellowship from the Robert Bosch Foundation. And while I was in Bonn as a Bosch Fellow, I was able to try out a few other, let’s say adjacent, career areas, and one of them was corporate communication. So I went to Deutsche Telecom as a Bosch Fellow, spent time there, and discovered that I really enjoyed working in business, in the private sector. It was very different from journalism in the sense that there was much more of a team feeling, you know, as a journalist you’re sometimes a little bit out there covering your beat or your story and you have to produce the text and hand it into an editor. But there wasn’t this feeling of we are a team contributing to common goals. And I just found the pace of being inside a company very exciting. And I’ve always had a desire to work in an international context, and so there are, you know, many, many German companies that, yeah, are active internationally. So I felt like this was a great environment for me and I never looked back. Yeah, it’s been my passion ever since.  

Shahar Silbershatz: That’s interesting. So a very, very short career in journalism and actually straight into the business world. Probably still helpful to have that perspective and to have that background, right? 

Jill Meiburg: Yeah, definitely. I think that we talk a lot about how the skill profiles are changing for corporate communications and, you know, definitely there are changes there and new competencies that we need to have in our teams, but want a couple things that are timeless and so important, the ability to think and write and speak clearly, to the point, to articulate things in a way that comes across and has impact, to produce work product under time pressure. That was great. If you train as a journalist for the wire agencies, that’s invaluable. And I also got my feet wet with Bloomberg in front of a camera, which has also been really helpful, being able to feel comfortable being on a stage and doing the CEO, you know, interviews, whatever it may be. So yeah, I think that journalism to this day still provides an excellent foundation for anyone who wants to work in corporate communications. 

Shahar Silbershatz: So how do you think the field of communications, the discipline, has changed over those years that you’ve worked in it? 

Jill Meiburg: Yeah, I think it’s become recognized in most organizations as a strategic discipline that brings long-term value to the company, whether that’s through brand development, through reputation building, through many different things. I think every communications team has the responsibility also to make that contribution visible, right? And you know, for companies that get it, it’s very important because that secures your seat at the table, right, and makes you part of a wider strategic team and part of decision-making. So I think in that sense, it’s evolved from just sort of a, you know, newsletter producing, I don’t know, one-way communication shop, into something that is strategic, but also, and this is another new development, very data-driven today, right? So we all need to have that data competence in the team. That’s really important. It helps us measure our impact in a way that I think is more accessible for senior stakeholders in the company. We need to have that quantifiable aspect of our performance, but we also learn so much from the insights, from the listening, from the trends that we see. All of that has become really, really important. So I think strategy and data are really key in the profession. 

Shahar Silbershatz: ANd probably connected, no. 

Jill Meiburg: And connected, obviously connected. And I think that that’s very important to leverage the data to the maximum extent possible in your strategy building. It’s a resource that you have. If you’re lucky enough to have a robust, system, then you can absolutely and should use that in strategy building, yeah.  

Shahar Silbershatz: And so another evolution that we’re seeing in other development that we’re seeing, obviously, is that the world is becoming more complex and things are moving faster. And this is also partly why we call this podcast Always On because we find that companies today and communicators especially, communication teams, have to be “always on” because things are changing so fast and companies need to react and to make decisions very fast as well. So would you say that you and GEA as a company are also “always on”?  

Jill Meiburg: Well, I agree that the level of complexity has definitely increased, and I think there are a couple of things behind that. Obviously, geopolitics are shifting massively and the whole world order is a little bit, yeah, shifting right now and at a pace that we’ve never really seen in our lifetimes before. So that upends a lot of things and causes a lot of uncertainty. I think the other trend is just the digitalization of communications and the proliferation of multiple channels and multiple conversations happening simultaneously. All of that for me speaks to the need to have a very clear compass and core as an organization. What do I mean by that? It’s more important, I think, than ever to have a clear purpose, values, if a company has a mission statement, however a company chooses to go about that, but you need to have some elements that really sort of aggregate into that North Star for the organization, especially in these times of volatility. It’s important for all stakeholders — for employees, for your customers, for your investors. It’s a stabilizing factor in a very unstable world. So I think for GEA, definitely, being, like all companies, of course, in some sense you have to be “always on” because of the fast news cycles and the digitalization and all the pace of communications, but it doesn’t mean that you need to respond to everything all the time, yeah. And I think that you have to be very intentional and deliberate about deciding what topics you’re going to weigh in on and where it’s fine to stay out of the debate. And that in and of itself is a strategic exercise.  

Shahar Silbershatz: So how do you do that? 

Jill Meiburg: For us, it’s a process that is both bottom-up and top-down kind of defining, on the one hand, listening to feedback from our teams, from our stakeholders, from our digital pipelines that we have looking at the data. And on the other hand it’s also, obviously, taking the direction from the organization, from our corporate strategy, which is called Mission 30, and sort of synthesizing all of these inputs, let’s say, and deriving out of that key priorities and key themes that we want to use to position the company over the course of, let’s say, a year or two years. We don’t think necessarily anymore in, you know, neat one-year strategy cycles. We find that strategy often takes longer to accomplish because it’s so complex out there and you have to cut through the noise and you need to put a longer period of emphasis on certain topics if you really want them to resonate and land with stakeholders. So I think we take a longer view as far as that goes, but basically, yeah, it’s important for us to factor in all of those different input sources, and they kind of culminate for us in a content summit, where we sit down and really carefully define an editorial agenda for the coming years, let’s say, months and years. Those are really helpful, you know, cross-disciplinary exercises. It’s not just the writers in the team or, you know, the content creators, but we have multiple perspectives at the table. I think that also helps us think more creatively. And yeah, the output of that is all woven into our strategy and we try to stay true to that. And, as I said, we find more and more that it’s necessary to play this as a long game and not as a short-term opportunity. That being said, obviously, you know, part of being “always on” or “always aware”, maybe that’s a good way to say it, is that you need to opportunistically still as always hop onto certain topics, if they’re beneficial for you. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, exactly. And that’s of course where the challenge comes in. So do you have any process or a way to balance the need for rapid response, because sometimes you do need to respond pretty rapidly, but at the same time maintain accuracy, maintain loyalty to your values and your voice? How do you balance those two? 

Jill Meiburg: I think that the rapid-response type of issues are usually not highly, highly strategic ones. It’s usually sort of an immediate reaction to development X, Y, or Z. And again, I think we’re very intentional about what types of things we weigh in on, and where decide to maybe let it go. It depends a lot on the organization’s history and culture, the preferences of a CEO, on, you know, the collective views of the board. And naturally, all of that has to be aligned to the purpose and the values. And so I think for rapid response, it’s just a matter of case by case, really looking at it and determining: do we need to, do we want to, is there a reason to get into that debate and to comment on that issue, or rather not? So we handle that very flexibly. You know, mostly it’s a media relations topic, and we just try to handle those quickly on a case-by-case basis. Fortunately, and I think that’s really key, you need to have a very fast access and approval lane to your CEO to handle those types of things, and we do have those processes established, so that helps us a lot. And yeah, I think, long term, again, it’s going back to our strategic plan about the output from our content summit. And for us, as a team, it’s important to revisit what we have outlined as our plan in regular cycles, right? So we try to learn from the data. We have very deliberate data check-ins, and we have a Monday editorial call, and we have a whole sort of procedural setup behind all this that helps us stay focused and at the same time manage those pressing demands that you mentioned.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Okay. That’s interesting. Tell us a little bit about the tech stack that you have. Do you have any tools that you and your team use to help you stay “always on”? 

Jill Meiburg: So we decided to build our own, we call it “impact measurement model”, which basically helps us define a one-number impact score. So we have over 20 KPIs that are sort of mapped into, or flowing into, our data lake at GEA, and we are able to then take the data out of the data lake, visualize it and work with it via Power BI dashboards. And we developed on top of that a scoring model that weights, without going into too much detail, external communications by 50% and internal comms by 50%. And those two aggregate up to an overall impact score. So we set a range. We set a quantitative ambition for the team every year that we want to try to achieve a score in our self-defined excellence zone. And that really helps us, I think, have… it’s first of all important to have an ambition, I think, of that nature. And it’s also encouraging for us to see how we’re making progress, or to look and understand from quarter to quarter: Okay, what happened? Why aren’t we there? Is there a problem with the data? Is there, you know, a specific reason? And yeah, the way that we’ve created this impact model, we’re able to zero in quite quickly and effectively. And yeah, the Caliber data is obviously part of that. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I like very much the mix of internal and external. So you’re actually seeing the two contributing equally to your overall objectives.  

Jill Meiburg: I think that was really… if you’re going to do something like this, then you want it to speak to the whole team and not just the media relations people, right? So, you know, people have to feel like they’re contributing. And internal comms, for me, as the head of the function, is absolutely as valuable as external comms. There’s no, you know, reason to weight one differently than the other. So for me, that was, important in the model, in the design of the model. And, yeah, I think everyone recognizes that what we all do is valuable and we all have a reason and a way to contribute.  

Shahar Silbershatz: How frequently do you use the data? I know of course you set targets, as you said, and probably the targets are maybe assessed on a quarterly basis or annual, but how do you use that on a real-time basis, on a day-to-day basis? How do you use the data on a more maybe tactical level? 

Jill Meiburg: Well, I think that, first of all, bigger topics like reputation, they don’t change massively on a day-to-day basis, right? But on a more tactical level, we are looking weekly every Monday at the performance of particular KPIs. And if it’s an internal comms, for example, we can, you know, very quickly assess which Viva-engaged posts did really well. We can very quickly assess, what was the best performing LinkedIn post, those types of things. Those are more kind of day-to-day tactical things that give us hints and clues as to, okay, what topic resonates really well with which stakeholder groups, right? And I think that checking in on that level, frequently, weekly, and some of us go in the dashboards even daily, obviously, to have a look, that just helps you stay in tune with sort of the pulse of things overall, right? And it doesn’t always necessarily mean, you know, that we have to make a change or do something differently or change course. But it informs all of us in our ability to understand over time, you start to understand the patterns, right? So, you know, people used to always laugh about cat content being, you know, the thing that drives engagement. And I have to say with GEA, it’s cow content, okay? So we have a farm technologies division, and anything we do about cows, it outperforms everything else.  

Shahar Silbershatz: That’s interesting. It’s always good to have some kind of an animal perspective in your business. 

Jill Meiburg: I agree. So animals really do something amazing. So, yeah.  

Shahar Silbershatz: And it’s also impressive, I have to say, to hear that you have your own internal consolidated dashboard. I know a lot of companies try that, have tried that. We have a lot of clients who spent a lot of time and a lot of money on developing an internal consolidated dashboard. It doesn’t always work. What do you think is your secret for success? 

Jill Meiburg: Two things. Work with your IT department. Don’t try to do it without, because it’s all part of, at least in GEA, our overall Microsoft Azure infrastructure that we have here. So we need to work with the tools the company has. It’s really not a smart idea to custom-build something. So work with your IT people, work with what you have. That keeps costs down as well. And you have also people who can help you and support you when things aren’t working. And secondly, you need to have a very seasoned data scientist on the team to work with API connections, to understand, you know, Python and things like that. You really need a true data scientist, right? That has less to do with the comms piece and a lot more to do with actual heavy backend data work. I have a great person like that in my team and am very happy to have that, and I do think it’s something that, you know, people need going forward, unless you want to spend a lot of money constantly outsourcing that. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I can only say amen to that. I wish all communication teams had internal data scientists. I think that’s actually where things are going, and that’s definitely needed. Let’s shift gears a little bit. I want to talk a bit about reputational risks. What would you say are the biggest reputational risks for GEA generally as a company? 

Jill Meiburg: Well, we serve three primary industries — food, beverage, and pharmaceutical, with machinery and plants and technology. We are across all of those areas a very recognized sustainability leader. What do I mean by that? I think in the mechanical engineering space, we are by far the most advanced in terms of sustainability, with a clear strategy, science-based targets, measurable progress towards reducing our emissions across all scopes, a very clearly defined, you know, social strategy, also taking responsibility for our employees and all of these things. So we also communicate that very aggressively towards all audiences because it’s something we’re really proud of. It is an absolute proof point of our purpose, engineering for a better world. And it’s something everyone here is really proud of and really invested in, from the top down to the shop floor. So when you embrace a topic like that and position yourself as a leader and you are bringing the evidence, nonetheless of course there’s a risk that somebody might still try to, I guess, attack you for it or find the flaws or, you know, you’re kind of just setting yourself up for more scrutiny in a way because you’re outwardly really pushing that topic. But I still don’t really feel that it’s a risk because we do have very convincing proof points. We have an excellent chief sustainability officer with whom I work very closely. And I don’t really see this as a risk for us, I actually see it much more as an opportunity. But my point is, if you position yourself very, yeah… in a very prominent way with one big topic, of course there’s a risk that somebody might try to, yeah, attack you on it or, yeah, discredit you.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, you make yourself a target in a sense. So what steps do you take typically to anticipate risks, to be able to kind of scan the horizon and see if there’s any reputational risks coming your way? 

Jill Meiburg: Well, we definitely leverage the data we have from our reputation measurement with Caliber, and that’s a definitely important source for us. We try to also have a differentiated view, paying attention to what’s happening in our competitive space, but also more broadly in the DAX 40 sphere. We don’t have any particular issues monitoring or issues management that we use, but rather we leverage our internal processes, which include an exchange on external developments, what’s happening out there? We exchange on that, on a weekly basis, in the team, so that we try to pull in different perspectives there. Our content studio is always looking at CEO positioning, what’s happening on that front? Our internal comms team is looking at what employees are saying, what their conversations are revealing. Our media relations team is always looking at overall developments on the external front. So we just try to bring these perspectives together and make sure that there’s a good level of exchange going on on a weekly basis, that’s more of a qualitative way of doing it, and then we balance that out with what the data are telling us. There are probably more advanced and sophisticated ways of doing it, but we just try to stay plugged in and talk a lot. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And I guess also stay close to your stakeholders and learn from them. 

Jill Meiburg: Absolutely. Absolutely. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And so let’s talk a little bit about those stakeholders. How do you define the stakeholder universe? Who are the main stakeholder groups that you are thinking about, as you do your work?  

Jill Meiburg: There’s no right or wrong or one-size fits-all answer here. It depends on your organization, but at GEA, it’s definitely our employees, our customers, our investors. Those are among the key stakeholder groups. Obviously the opinion-leading general public is important for us, being a stock-listed company in Germany. So we’re definitely looking at, let’s say, the business professional opinion-leading space as well. Those are the key, I think, stakeholders that are important for us. Sustainability specialists as well. 

Shahar Silbershatz: And do you find at all that it’s a challenge for you to communicate — the messaging that you communicate, of course is technically more complex, the solutions that you deal with, the technology that you deal with — do you find that it’s challenge to be able to communicate that to a diverse range of audiences, stakeholders needs, cultural context as well. 

Jill Meiburg: Yeah, it can be. I mean, engineering is complex. So there’s always that task upfront of breaking that complexity down into language that is suited for the stakeholder group in the audience. So a good example of that is on our homepage, GEA.com. We have, as many companies do, kind of a hero story space, and that’s sort of the calling card or sort of the entry point for any number of stakeholders. If people just come to our website, they might be first-time visitors, they might be a customer, they might be a very advanced person with their technical knowledge looking for a spare part for their machine, who knows? It could be a person applying for a job at GEA. So we try really hard in that particular space to make it accessible, and to do storytelling that connects up to our purpose and to broader societal themes. So we want it to be in that sense, accessible and relevant for anybody who comes through. And that’s a particular challenge for, I think, the hero story space on a website. We do mix it with, it’s a carousel kind of a system, so we do mix it with more customer-focused stories because we know from our website visitor data that customers are among the top visitor group, you know, groups that we have. So we definitely tailor to that as well. But we really think it’s important, especially as we continue on our growth story, grow in visibility, people know us who are not in the B2B space, that we present ourselves as an exciting company, as a technology leader, as an attractive employer. So we try to work on that through that particular space. That’s just one example of how we do it.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah. I’m curious also about your team, the discipline. How do you structure the communication team? I know that today there’s, again, a lot of challenges with staying very agile, being able to, as we said before, be “always on”, take care of a lot of different things, also prevent burnout, which is an increasing issue in our field. What is the structure of your function? 

Jill Meiburg: We are structured in, yeah, in five teams we have. It’s a rather classical structure, but we work together very closely across those teams. So, media relations, a content studio that focuses on CEO positioning and thought leadership and content for, it’s sort of small content engine for different platforms that we have. We have classical internal communications. We have the brand stewardship team and we have our digital channels team. So we are connected as a leadership team very, very tightly. We define larger projects that get executed by cross-disciplinary task forces. So, in that sense, we stay together, I think in a very, yeah, aligned fashion. I’m a person who still believes that functional expertise is really important in communications. I’ve never met a press/media relations person who voluntarily wants to write for the intranet. Never met that person. Some people would maybe claim they’re out there, but I don’t know them. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I guess the robots will be doing that soon, so. 

Jill Meiburg: Maybe, maybe so. I think that you need both, in an agile and in a good setup, you still need deep functional knowledge, but you also need people who are able to flex across the different boundaries, and I think one thing that we are trying really hard here is to push creativity across all of the teams, both digital upskilling and creativity. Those are two of our team objectives that we’ve had last year and continuing into this year, is to really push all of us to become more upskilled in AI and using that in the best way possible, and also just, regardless if it’s for a Viva Engage post or a LinkedIn post or a CEO presentation, to really think out of the box and think creatively and that’s something that makes communications work really stand out. It’s … anyone can, you know, grind out a press release. But, you know, to do one that’s really outstanding and is a bit creative, that’s another level entirely, and I think we try really hard to have that type of ambition for the team just to, have that, yeah, top-notch quality and standout work. 

Shahar Silbershatz: It’s also what remains as a differentiator, you know, in the age of AI where everybody’s using similar tools to generate content. Creativity is getting a bit lost. 

Jill Meiburg: Well, I made this comment recently in a call with the Page Society. We were talking about AI and human authenticity or just the subject of authenticity came up. I do see that as an issue because we all know that the AI-produced product, you can almost smell it when you, you know, when you see what the AI generates and you start coming across this and you start working with the tools yourself, and you get a feel for the cadence and the phrasing and the vocabulary and, sorry, but sometimes the very clear American way of phrasing things and I look at this and I think it’s so clear that it’s being generated by AI and we’ve got to be very mindful of that. I think we might even see stakeholder preferences in the future, people explicitly asking for human-generated content because people just don’t want this anymore. Even if you can train your AI bot with the tone of voice guidelines from your company, it’s still not going to be the authentic human-generated product that I think people still want and they’re going to start to get tired of the pure AI-generated content. That’s my personal opinion. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I fully agree. I watched, by the way, the video of that, of that Page conversation, and I fully agree with you. I think there’s already a bit of a backlash to this kind of blandness of AI-generated content, but I know that many would disagree with us. But it’s interesting to see where things are gonna go. But what about leadership visibility? Let’s talk a little bit about that. Again, in an “always on” world. There’s different opinions about to what extent CEOs need to be visible, to what extent they need to be vocal. What is your take on that? 

Jill Meiburg: Well, I’m always a bit surprised that people seem to advocate for CEOs having to always weigh in all the time, right? And that you’re almost forced to communicate in this day and age. And I don’t agree with that. I think a company and a CEO always has a choice. Always, yeah? And, again, you know, to decide what topics should be commented upon, where we should maybe step back, those are decisions that are very much rooted in the history of the company, in the CEO’s preferences, in very, I think, critical questions that we need to go through in a structured way. Is this topic relevant to our business? Do we have anything to say about it? Because just talking for the sake of talking is really not a smart idea. But if there’s a reason why it’s particularly relevant to the business and to our stakeholders, then we can have a discussion about it, and then it’s a matter of determining, is there a core position already? Is this new for us? And really tailoring it. I think it’s, you know, advisable to proceed with caution, always, before you put things in the CEO’s mouth. Not that you do that in a sense, but you help shape the message maybe that comes out. But you really need to pay attention to, yeah, I think, the relevance to the business and how important it is to your stakeholders.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah, and you also said something before about the direct line to the CEO. That probably also has a lot to do with it, I imagine having a good relationship, probably an open relationship with the CEO, so that there can be a good discussion about these topics. I don’t know to what extent you feel you have that right now with GEA, but I would imagine that’s probably helpful no? 

Jill Meiburg: Yeah, it’s very helpful and definitely I have that here and I’m very grateful for that. It makes decision-making so much easier. And I think that also it’s a very fast and agile way of clarifying things and moving forward. And you need that anyway in a media relations context. But just generally speaking, it’s really good to know that you can reach out and you’re asked to provide your professional advice and opinion. That’s why we’re there. So, yeah, I think that that’s really, really key. And let’s be honest, the issues are complicated and difficult sometimes, and require a good amount of discussion. A knee-jerk response is pretty much always gonna be the wrong one.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Right. So relevance to the business is really your main criterion. 

Jill Meiburg: Yep.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Got it. So how else would you say that the role of the CCO has changed? We talked a little bit about how the function is changing, the world around us. What about the role of the CCO? 

Jill Meiburg: In many companies, it has expanded and has taken on new dimensions. For many of us, sustainability has become front and center, and if you don’t understand that area of the business, it’s a barrier, I think, to doing effective communications work. So every communicator, I think, would be well advised to really understand sustainability at its core, to understand how it’s anchored in the business, to understand it as a business driver and not as a sort of reputational overlay that has to do with philanthropy or donations. I think most people have moved past that, hopefully. But I think, at the same time, not everyone is competent in speaking fluently the language of sustainability. It also has its own particular vocabulary and to understand how environmental targets work, to understand the scopes, to understand all of these things, and how things like the EU taxonomy work and how the new corporate sustainability responsibility directive, all of these things, put a lot of new demands, I think, on the communications function. There really aren’t any companies who can just ignore that topic. And for us, as I’ve mentioned, it’s so important that I’m really happy that I brought with me to GEA a lot of knowledge on that side. I did a lot of work on sustainability at DHL. It’s really helped me a lot to position that effectively here for GEA.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Interesting. That’s an interesting development. So you’re saying that the CCO as a role has evolved in the direction of sustainability, so you actually need to have that domain knowledge in order to be a good CCO today? 

Jill Meiburg: I think you do. Especially if your company is leading or has the aspiration to lead in that area. Absolutely. 

Shahar Silbershatz: Interesting. I just want to finish off with a couple of last questions. So there’s always this perennial discussion of the seat at the table. It’s getting a little bit old that discussion, but some people in our field still don’t feel like they have it or officially don’t have it because they’re not sitting around the executive table. What advice do you give your peers when they ask you about how to get that seat at the table? And generally also have influence on decision making, even if they have the seats? 

Jill Meiburg: Yeah, I think the reporting line is really important. If the communications function is not reporting directly to the CEO, it can be tricky. I’m not saying that’s an absolute must-have or prerequisite for success. But it’s very helpful when there’s that direct relationship between the head of the function and the CEO. It just eases decision-making and allows you to move an agenda very quickly. Also having a very strong dialogue with the other board members is really, really key. So I think, you know, taking the time, investing in, building those relationships with the entire executive board is important. If you’re not being heard and you feel like you’re being undervalued, then that suggests maybe that you haven’t found the right format for demonstrating your value. So whether that in your company is a, you know, crisp five-slide PowerPoint that combines your data insights and can show some developments, or whatever it may be, I think, you have to understand what will be effective with the decision-makers, and you need to demonstrate that impact in a way that translates over to their understanding. So if you’re not being heard, yeah, it’s a matter of finding the right format and ensuring it gets to the right people and then, you know, be persistent. Be persistent. People have to appreciate what we do. It’s absolutely so important in a company to have a strong communications function, no doubt about it. And yeah, I would hope that most companies are aware of that at this point. But yeah. 

Shahar Silbershatz: I hope so too. I think, again, the trending is positive, but I think we’re not quite there yet. So my last question, we talk a lot about being always on, and I’m curious to hear how you switch off. You mentioned a couple of things already. You mentioned travel, you mentioned the church. Are there any things that help you switch off from this 24/7 world we live in? 

Jill Meiburg: Well, the best thing is my children. So we laugh so much. My boys are 22, 20 and 14. Not really boys anymore, but young men. And we love spending time together and we love talking about all kinds of things and it’s always joyful and full of laughter and that is definitely the best medicine for me to switch off. Yeah.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Yeah. That sounds pretty amazing. Jill, thank you so much for being with us today. Really appreciate your time and your input.  

Jill Meiburg: Thank you, Shahar. It was really great to be with you today and thanks for the invitation.  

Shahar Silbershatz: Many thanks for listening to this episode of Always On. If you haven’t done so already, check out some of the other episodes. They’re packed with unique insights from seasoned experts at leading companies. 

Oh, and if you have any comments or questions about anything you’ve heard on the pod, we’d love to hear from you. Just drop us a line at [email protected]. Thanks again for listening. Till next time, take care.