Blythe Yee: VP, Employee Communications and Engagement at Freshworks
Living in Japan, Pursuing a Coaching Certificate and Teaching Employee Comms
Hello, It’s Julia, Founder of The Switchboard, a newsletter exploring the ways we communicate and connect at work and beyond. Thank you for being part of our community. I’m grateful to you for reading, reacting and commenting. If you enjoy this edition, consider sharing it with a colleague or friend.
In This Edition
Embracing investing in elevating leaders within organizations
Elevating employee communications in higher education
Blocking time to do your best work
About Blythe
Blythe Morris Yee is a communications executive with 20 + years of experience leading strategic communications at tech companies including LinkedIn, Intuit, and Sun Microsystems. She is the vice president of employee communications and engagement at Freshworks.
She was most recently the vice president of employee communications at LinkedIn. Blythe’s communication expertise is complimented by experience in HR and leadership development. She served as the chief of staff to the Chief Human Resources Officer at Sun Microsystems. Blythe is also a certified leadership coach and works with leaders at all levels, with diverse backgrounds and coaching goals.
Early in her career, Blythe taught English in rural Japan through the Japanese government. She’s been a member of the University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Public Relations advisory board and developed their first-ever employee communications course that launched in the fall of 2023.
Blythe has an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan, where she studied economics and Japanese, and a professional coaching certification through the Hudson Institute of Coaching. Outside of work she spends her time traveling, hiking and volunteering with her husband, and two teenage boys.
What inspired your career path?
Living in Japan for over five years had a huge influence on me. My first stay was through a study abroad program, and after graduation I taught English as a second language for three years. My core job was teaching in middle schools in Nagano as a part of the JET program, which is an investment by the Japanese government to help students learn conversational English. What I liked about that job was bringing people together – language is a way to do that by building bridges between differences.
Fast forward, I returned to the U.S. and worked as a document translator, but it wasn’t a fit because it was one dimensional and didn’t help people connect. So, I went back to Japan and took my first job in corporate communications. I joined IBM to work on the Nagano Olympics. It was the perfect fit, since I had the language and cultural background, and knew Nagano like a local.
What is core to your leadership philosophy?
The unique nature of employee communications gives you an inside view on how a company works. Your job is to help it work even better by driving alignment and enabling leaders to scale the business through effective, transparent communications. There are very few roles like this, where you need to understand the organization, the culture and what’s important to people. All of this is in service to helping the business be successful, and there’s a lot of nuance and influence required to do this in a way that has a lasting impact. These are hard roles to hire from the outside and be effective from day one. So when the stars align and you can grow and build talent from within the organization to be ready for that next level job, it helps reinforce the importance of learning and growth, and benefits the company by building a strong talent pipeline.
Of course, you have to consider external candidates, especially when you need to add skills or diversify your team. But when you can develop future leaders from within, you often see business impact and employee engagement accelerate. I always ask my direct reports to let me know if there’s something I’m doing today that they would like a chance to take on. This helps everyone grow and get a chance to do new things. This approach keeps the dialouge around career paths open and helps people find ways to play to their strengths. For this to work, you can’t hold onto things too tightly.
How have you worked to elevate employee communications?
When I started in this field over 20 years ago, employee communications wasn’t well understood and it wasn’t a space that attracted top talent. I spent a lot of time explaining what the work is and how it can have a significant impact on the discretionary effort people bring to their jobs. When you love your job, have business context, and feel connected to the purpose of an organization, you are going to give more to make the work successful. Transparent employee communications are one of the ways to do this. Covid really helped bring a new level of awareness about the importance of employee communications and helped us all see that employees are your first audience. When you get it right with them, everything else has a better chance of falling into place.
One of the things I’ve observed in recruiting over the years is that few people have the chance to study employee communications as a discipline. There’s limited academic exposure to this field, and I wanted to change that so students get the chance to learn about employee communications when they are just starting their careers. This is one of the most dynamic parts of the comms field and there’s lots of job growth ahead. That’s why I’m really proud to have just taught the University of Southern California’s first-ever employee communications course. I was fortunate to work with USC’s Annenberg School to develop the course that’s now offered as a part of their inaugural online Master of Science in Public Relations Innovation, Strategy and Management program.
What inspired you to pursue a coaching certificate?
Communication is an extension of leadership, so there’s naturally a lot of crossover between communication and coaching. I’ve been coaching for years and have found it to be incredibly fulfilling work, especially in building trust with a leader. Coaching requires you to hold space for someone, and to put yourself aside to truly listen. It’s important to hold back your own perspective or agenda, and not give advice or counsel. The best communicators also listen without an agenda.
I decided to get my coaching certification through the Hudson Institute, an organization that draws mid-career business professionals. I wanted to balance my experience with academic principles, and learn from those who’ve spent their careers in this space. What I’ve learned through the Hudson community has made me a better coach, and a better communicator too.
What is a personal hack or a resource that helps you work?
I think a lot about personal energy and how that affects my work. I block time when I do my best work so that I can think about the future and invest in strategy without interruptions. That uninterrupted time is make or break for innovation and anything that requires deep thought.
I’m also a big believer in saying no, so that you can invest your time in the things that matter most. One way I try to do this is by redirecting people when I’m not the right person to help. When you close a door by saying no, open a window to help them get what they need.
Every edition of The Switchboard is written by me, Julia Levy. This career profile is based on a live interview conversation. Thank you for being part of our community. I’m grateful to you for reading, reacting and commenting. If you enjoyed what you learned, please consider sharing it with a colleague or friend. Signing off for this edition. — Julia