Communications in Russia are increasingly moving beyond the 'tell your story' function and becoming a tool of strategic business resilience — and protection. Oleg Poletaev, First Vice-President of the Russian Public Relations Association (RASO — Rossiyskaya Assotsiatsiya po Svyazyam s Obshchestvennostyu) and Managing Director of the communications agency Gruppa Diskurs, spoke to Evrazimut about why it matters for companies to engage with society and the state through the lens of national agendas, how social architecture helps build trust in local communities, why likes and reach figures no longer reflect the real impact of communications, and why businesses need to conduct honest reputation audits if they want not merely a good public image but effective business processes.
— Today, business communications are increasingly discussed not as a support function but as part of strategic management. In your view, when will Russia complete this shift — from 'telling your story' to actively shaping the long-term environment around a company?
— In my view, the shift from a service function to a strategic management function has been under way for at least the past 15 years. It is an evolutionary transition: communications directors are increasingly involved not only in tactical but also in strategic decision-making.
A major boost came in the late 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, during the investment boom, when many companies listed on stock exchanges, encountered the demands of public disclosure, and realised just how much depended on corporate reputation.
Communications as a function has travelled a long and largely successful road. Over the past three to four years, with growing scrutiny of companies' public stance, Russian business’s responsibility to society, its social role, and its contribution to national goals, communications have moved to the forefront.
Business resilience now depends significantly on communications effectiveness: the ability to grow through turbulence, minimise external resistance, find common ground with stakeholders, and deliver the business results a company needs.
— You propose viewing communications through the lens of the state’s 'major agendas'. What does that change for business in practice — its priorities, the language it uses with society, its very understanding of what communications is for?
— Major agendas are essentially a list of state priorities framed as national goals through 2030 and on the horizon to 2036. These goals address economic development and quality of life: demography, longevity, citizens' wellbeing, environmental quality and ecological welfare.
Large businesses contribute to these goals one way or another. It is important to understand that national goals are goals for the whole country — not just for the state apparatus. For example, longevity is influenced not only by the healthcare system but also by voluntary health insurance (VHI) programmes that companies provide for the employees, and by corporate initiatives promoting sport and fitness — not by government effort alone.
That is why, in recent years, it has become important for businesses to explain to their stakeholders that they are not only about 'taxes and jobs'. Business is about societal development, quality of environment, education, domestic tourism, demography. The largest Russian companies today participate in these national agendas, including by introducing programmes that support birth rates and large families. This reflects a new level of self-awareness among big business about its role.
This awareness brings their languages closer together. If, roughly speaking, ten to fifteen years ago business spoke in the pointedly 'corporate' language of investors and clients while the state used formal official language, today that Babylon is largely over. In this sense, national goals and major agendas are becoming a shared communicative foundation for business, civil society organisations, and the state. Companies that have understood they are not only employers and taxpayers but also institutions of territorial development gain advantages in employee loyalty, the goodwill of local communities, and the perception of government bodies. The language of national goals becomes a unifying force across different groups: civil society, business, and the state alike.
— How, then, can a company tell which public or governmental agenda it genuinely fits into, and where an attempt to join a particular topic would look contrived and fail to inspire trust?
— To understand whether a company contributes to national goals, one needs to study the Presidential Decree on National Development Goals, the target indicators for each goal, and the instruments designed to achieve them.
Two years ago, the National Alliance for Sustainable Development developed a dedicated methodology for assessing business contributions to national goals. It contains several dozen indicators that help translate social expenditures and investments into metrics linked to the implementation of the Presidential Decree.
This methodological work has already been done. The alliance’s member companies — more than 20 industry leaders — have already positioned themselves as part of a broader movement toward national goals and have verified that their corporate social investments align with those goals.
At SPIEF (St. Petersburg International Economic Forum) in 2024 we discussed the opportunities that major agendas offer business in terms of dialogue with the state and society. At the time the approach was still relatively new. Today this model of public conduct has taken hold and is understood by at least the core group of the country’s largest companies.
— You also speak extensively in RASO about social architecture. How does it fundamentally differ from conventional corporate social responsibility (CSR) or a simple set of a company’s social projects?
— Social architecture is not a tool for re-packaging corporate social investments. It is a set of management technologies that organises three-way collaboration among business, local communities, and government authorities for the joint resolution of socially significant issues.
Those issues can vary. One of the most critical for Russian regions is depopulation — a declining resident population. For business, this poses a risk to strategic stability: being left without factory and plant workers within a decade. To retain residents, it is necessary to change the social environment, to make the social fabric denser, to strengthen social ties and communities.
From a methodological standpoint, a social architecture project has one further defining indicator beyond the involvement of the government-business-society triangle: it either creates an entirely new social practice or scales an existing one.
In broad terms, the mission of social architecture is to identify the latent but genuine needs of residents in regions and cities, and to focus the combined efforts of business, the state, and local communities precisely on those needs. For some regions, this means improving public spaces; for others, organising children’s leisure, sports and activities; and for yet others, creating an environment for, say, working-age residents.
Classical diagnostic methods often surface consequences rather than root causes. Root causes can be identified through in-depth sociological research and by engaging citizens in joint design processes.
In this sense, social architecture practices represent an investment of financial resources, time, and human resources in addressing problems defined jointly with local communities — problems in the resolution of which the residents themselves are prepared to participate personally.
— At what point, in your view, does communication cease to be mere project support and begin to genuinely change social practice, people’s behaviour, attitudes toward a problem, and the level of trust in a given area?
— Communication is not simply a tool that creates communities or brings together groups of volunteers. Communications make it possible to align values, synchronise goals, and change attitudes toward what is happening around us. For example, city residents who may not personally engage in volunteering will nonetheless know that caring, engaged people live alongside them, and will at least be able to empathise with them or offer some form of support.
Furthermore, communication is a tool for binding communities through aligned goal-setting. A common language makes it possible to agree on common goals, and common goals become possible once higher-level values have been harmonised.
If people dream of a better quality of life in their hometown — and therefore their beloved city — it becomes possible to agree on specific measurable goals that need to be achieved to improve life qualitatively. In other words, our description of the goal largely determines the goal itself. How we invite people to participate in achieving it affects the level of involvement and quality of engagement.
— And yet in the business-government-society triangle, the most difficult point today is usually trust. Where should a company begin if it is operating in an area where there is already some wariness, scepticism, or a background of conflict?
— The best starting point when working in an area and with local communities is sociological research: surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews with local opinion leaders.
Sociology reveals what stereotypes exist in society regarding the problem or the company’s activities, how deeply entrenched they are, and offers solutions: what can form the basis for compromise, and how to remove a negative trigger.
After that, following the logic of social architecture, the identified problems and possible solutions should be discussed with representatives of local communities, drawing them into the conversation and inviting them to become participants in creating a new positive practice.
Even if part of the public does not become engaged, they will at least form an accurate understanding that the goals of business, the state, or the agreed goals of the company and government bodies correspond to the interests of the territory’s development and the needs of its communities.
The most important task of communication in business is reducing external resistance. If part of the public will not actively support a company’s project — building a new plant, for example — understanding the goals and benefits for the territory’s development, they will at least not resist something unknown and incomprehensible. It is only through informational openness and dialogue that the foundations for trust are built.
Here, business — especially large business — is far more flexible than local government authorities. It has grant competitions, corporate volunteering, physical infrastructure, and the ability to form durable project-based alliances. Such network models are more resilient, and collaborations between two or more companies win dramatically in terms of public trust.
— You also raise the topic of traditional values as a practical framework for business. How can a company work with this framework so that it does not look like a mere declaration but genuinely influences corporate culture, the HR brand, and relationships with people?
— The Presidential Decree on the Preservation of Traditional Values contains nothing that could provoke genuine controversy. These are ideas familiar to us: civic identity, opportunities for self-fulfilment, the value of human life, patriotism, and so on.
For a company seeking to build dialogue with its employees — Russian citizens — there is no need to invent a unique corporate communication code. Today it is both useful and productive to use the values decree as a practical working framework.
At a 2025 RASO session held at RSPP (Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs — Rossiysky Soyuz Promyshlennikov i Predprinimateley, Russia’s main business association) we discussed how the largest Russian companies apply the values listed in the decree in practice — often without even thinking about it consciously. It turned out that large business already supports family values, patriotism, and so on.
The decree is therefore a convenient instrument — one that, had it appeared 25 years earlier, would have helped to avoid the wholesale borrowing of North Atlantic templates for corporate culture. The set of values enshrined in the decree derives from Russian culture and is far closer to the natural way of thinking of a person raised within the Russian linguistic and cultural environment.
— You have said before that old PR metrics do not answer the key question: how do communications influence people’s opinions and behaviour? What, in your view, should business measure first and foremost today, if it wants to understand the real impact of its communication?
— For many years, PR professionals were oriented toward effectiveness metrics that even within the professional community attracted scepticism, and among business clients — bewilderment.
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of a communications or social project by the number of publications, likes, views, and social media reactions produces quasi-metrics. They are as useful as the tachometer in a car — but they do not answer the main question: where did we actually get to? What did it give us, and what changed as a result?
That is why in 2025 we formulated a working framework called 'evidence-based communications'. This refers to communications whose goal is to change the opinions and behaviour of target audiences: buyers, investors, business partners, local communities — any groups whose disposition matters to the project.
What is meaningful for us are outcomes that answer the question of what changed after a project was implemented. Using sociological tools — from focus groups and in-depth interviews to large-scale online surveys — we record in near real-time whether people’s thinking about a company, individual, or issue has shifted; what exactly they now think; and whether they are ready to change their view, or have already changed it from negative to positive.
The next indicator for us is readiness to change behaviour. For example, people were 'categorically opposed' to the construction of a plant, and after a communications project they moved to 'more or less not opposed', abandoned their intention to protest, and are now waiting for the facility to be built, to create jobs, and to improve the surrounding area.
Evidence-based communications, therefore, means measuring trust, readiness to act, and in some cases willingness to support the delivery of a project. That is why, in conversations with the top executives of Russian business, we distance ourselves as much as possible from instrumental and intermediate metrics: reach, views, likes, reposts. These are process indicators — meaningful to professional communicators, but not to business clients.
What matters to clients is not reach and likes, but the disposition and goodwill of the target groups whose interests the project serves or affects. This is why a communicator’s work is understood as a set of technologies for influencing opinion, attitude, and behaviour.
— Can we say that today’s communications director is an internal integrator — someone who helps a business understand the gap between its words, its actions, society’s expectations, and its own reputation?
— I believe that is precisely the case. No other corporate function has the task of being an integrator and simultaneously a tool of internal development. Except communications.
PR professionals, drawing on external feedback and the reactions of the environment, pick up signals that something is not right within a business. These signals may surface in the media or social networks, heard at industry conferences, and in their informal conversations.
PR professionals bring this feedback back into their companies and use it not only as a diagnostic tool but also as a development instrument. They register the dissatisfaction of partners, clients, counterparties, local residents, and journalists, and seek out its cause. The cause, as a rule, lies within the company and may be connected to an error in business processes.
For example, counterparties complain that the company takes a long time to process payments or it is impossible to conclude an agreement because lawyers have drafted a 350‑page document. It probably covers all risks, but no one else in any other company has the strength to read and sign it. As a result, the business suffers.
In such a situation, the PR professional will seek a balance between risk protection and the interests of the other party, who is declining to cooperate because of an unacceptably complex contract.
In other words, the PR professional becomes an accelerator of development. Taking external demand as a starting point, he fine-tunes business processes. In this sense, reputation becomes a tool for internal development: to fix it, you first have to fix business processes.
— Let us look a few years ahead. What single change in the mindset of Russian business would most improve the quality of its communication with society and make it a genuinely strategic function?
— Business often sees itself as a thing-in-itself: there is a company, its products or services, suppliers, and customers. And there is a goal — the extraction of maximum profit. This understanding limits development opportunities and does not contribute to long-term resilience. It is easier to grow when your activities are in harmony with the interests of the country, the sector, and society.
For that, it is necessary to regularly find out what all your stakeholders genuinely think of you, and to conduct an independent reputation audit in order to know the truth about yourself. Accurate knowledge of your own reputation’s strengths and weaknesses allows you to identify areas for development and increased efficiency.
By aligning your interests with those of residents in the regions where you operate, you earn their support. By aligning the company’s interests with those of the state, you secure support and, in a sense, immunity from problems. If the state understands that a company is not merely earning money but is helping to achieve national goals, its attitude towards that company will be far more loyal.
Therefore, the key change is the willingness of business to honestly audit its reputation and to understand how the company as a whole, its business processes, and practices affect the interests of its stakeholders. And what can be done better, so that everyone’s situation improves. When those around you are comfortable, you ultimately become comfortable too. This reduces resistance from the environment and, in some cases, turns part of that environment into your allies.
— In my view, the shift from a service function to a strategic management function has been under way for at least the past 15 years. It is an evolutionary transition: communications directors are increasingly involved not only in tactical but also in strategic decision-making.
A major boost came in the late 2000s and the first half of the 2010s, during the investment boom, when many companies listed on stock exchanges, encountered the demands of public disclosure, and realised just how much depended on corporate reputation.
Communications as a function has travelled a long and largely successful road. Over the past three to four years, with growing scrutiny of companies' public stance, Russian business’s responsibility to society, its social role, and its contribution to national goals, communications have moved to the forefront.
Business resilience now depends significantly on communications effectiveness: the ability to grow through turbulence, minimise external resistance, find common ground with stakeholders, and deliver the business results a company needs.
— You propose viewing communications through the lens of the state’s 'major agendas'. What does that change for business in practice — its priorities, the language it uses with society, its very understanding of what communications is for?
— Major agendas are essentially a list of state priorities framed as national goals through 2030 and on the horizon to 2036. These goals address economic development and quality of life: demography, longevity, citizens' wellbeing, environmental quality and ecological welfare.
Large businesses contribute to these goals one way or another. It is important to understand that national goals are goals for the whole country — not just for the state apparatus. For example, longevity is influenced not only by the healthcare system but also by voluntary health insurance (VHI) programmes that companies provide for the employees, and by corporate initiatives promoting sport and fitness — not by government effort alone.
That is why, in recent years, it has become important for businesses to explain to their stakeholders that they are not only about 'taxes and jobs'. Business is about societal development, quality of environment, education, domestic tourism, demography. The largest Russian companies today participate in these national agendas, including by introducing programmes that support birth rates and large families. This reflects a new level of self-awareness among big business about its role.
This awareness brings their languages closer together. If, roughly speaking, ten to fifteen years ago business spoke in the pointedly 'corporate' language of investors and clients while the state used formal official language, today that Babylon is largely over. In this sense, national goals and major agendas are becoming a shared communicative foundation for business, civil society organisations, and the state. Companies that have understood they are not only employers and taxpayers but also institutions of territorial development gain advantages in employee loyalty, the goodwill of local communities, and the perception of government bodies. The language of national goals becomes a unifying force across different groups: civil society, business, and the state alike.
— How, then, can a company tell which public or governmental agenda it genuinely fits into, and where an attempt to join a particular topic would look contrived and fail to inspire trust?
— To understand whether a company contributes to national goals, one needs to study the Presidential Decree on National Development Goals, the target indicators for each goal, and the instruments designed to achieve them.
Two years ago, the National Alliance for Sustainable Development developed a dedicated methodology for assessing business contributions to national goals. It contains several dozen indicators that help translate social expenditures and investments into metrics linked to the implementation of the Presidential Decree.
This methodological work has already been done. The alliance’s member companies — more than 20 industry leaders — have already positioned themselves as part of a broader movement toward national goals and have verified that their corporate social investments align with those goals.
At SPIEF (St. Petersburg International Economic Forum) in 2024 we discussed the opportunities that major agendas offer business in terms of dialogue with the state and society. At the time the approach was still relatively new. Today this model of public conduct has taken hold and is understood by at least the core group of the country’s largest companies.
— You also speak extensively in RASO about social architecture. How does it fundamentally differ from conventional corporate social responsibility (CSR) or a simple set of a company’s social projects?
— Social architecture is not a tool for re-packaging corporate social investments. It is a set of management technologies that organises three-way collaboration among business, local communities, and government authorities for the joint resolution of socially significant issues.
Those issues can vary. One of the most critical for Russian regions is depopulation — a declining resident population. For business, this poses a risk to strategic stability: being left without factory and plant workers within a decade. To retain residents, it is necessary to change the social environment, to make the social fabric denser, to strengthen social ties and communities.
From a methodological standpoint, a social architecture project has one further defining indicator beyond the involvement of the government-business-society triangle: it either creates an entirely new social practice or scales an existing one.
In broad terms, the mission of social architecture is to identify the latent but genuine needs of residents in regions and cities, and to focus the combined efforts of business, the state, and local communities precisely on those needs. For some regions, this means improving public spaces; for others, organising children’s leisure, sports and activities; and for yet others, creating an environment for, say, working-age residents.
Classical diagnostic methods often surface consequences rather than root causes. Root causes can be identified through in-depth sociological research and by engaging citizens in joint design processes.
In this sense, social architecture practices represent an investment of financial resources, time, and human resources in addressing problems defined jointly with local communities — problems in the resolution of which the residents themselves are prepared to participate personally.
— At what point, in your view, does communication cease to be mere project support and begin to genuinely change social practice, people’s behaviour, attitudes toward a problem, and the level of trust in a given area?
— Communication is not simply a tool that creates communities or brings together groups of volunteers. Communications make it possible to align values, synchronise goals, and change attitudes toward what is happening around us. For example, city residents who may not personally engage in volunteering will nonetheless know that caring, engaged people live alongside them, and will at least be able to empathise with them or offer some form of support.
Furthermore, communication is a tool for binding communities through aligned goal-setting. A common language makes it possible to agree on common goals, and common goals become possible once higher-level values have been harmonised.
If people dream of a better quality of life in their hometown — and therefore their beloved city — it becomes possible to agree on specific measurable goals that need to be achieved to improve life qualitatively. In other words, our description of the goal largely determines the goal itself. How we invite people to participate in achieving it affects the level of involvement and quality of engagement.
— And yet in the business-government-society triangle, the most difficult point today is usually trust. Where should a company begin if it is operating in an area where there is already some wariness, scepticism, or a background of conflict?
— The best starting point when working in an area and with local communities is sociological research: surveys, focus groups, and in-depth interviews with local opinion leaders.
Sociology reveals what stereotypes exist in society regarding the problem or the company’s activities, how deeply entrenched they are, and offers solutions: what can form the basis for compromise, and how to remove a negative trigger.
After that, following the logic of social architecture, the identified problems and possible solutions should be discussed with representatives of local communities, drawing them into the conversation and inviting them to become participants in creating a new positive practice.
Even if part of the public does not become engaged, they will at least form an accurate understanding that the goals of business, the state, or the agreed goals of the company and government bodies correspond to the interests of the territory’s development and the needs of its communities.
The most important task of communication in business is reducing external resistance. If part of the public will not actively support a company’s project — building a new plant, for example — understanding the goals and benefits for the territory’s development, they will at least not resist something unknown and incomprehensible. It is only through informational openness and dialogue that the foundations for trust are built.
Here, business — especially large business — is far more flexible than local government authorities. It has grant competitions, corporate volunteering, physical infrastructure, and the ability to form durable project-based alliances. Such network models are more resilient, and collaborations between two or more companies win dramatically in terms of public trust.
— You also raise the topic of traditional values as a practical framework for business. How can a company work with this framework so that it does not look like a mere declaration but genuinely influences corporate culture, the HR brand, and relationships with people?
— The Presidential Decree on the Preservation of Traditional Values contains nothing that could provoke genuine controversy. These are ideas familiar to us: civic identity, opportunities for self-fulfilment, the value of human life, patriotism, and so on.
For a company seeking to build dialogue with its employees — Russian citizens — there is no need to invent a unique corporate communication code. Today it is both useful and productive to use the values decree as a practical working framework.
At a 2025 RASO session held at RSPP (Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs — Rossiysky Soyuz Promyshlennikov i Predprinimateley, Russia’s main business association) we discussed how the largest Russian companies apply the values listed in the decree in practice — often without even thinking about it consciously. It turned out that large business already supports family values, patriotism, and so on.
The decree is therefore a convenient instrument — one that, had it appeared 25 years earlier, would have helped to avoid the wholesale borrowing of North Atlantic templates for corporate culture. The set of values enshrined in the decree derives from Russian culture and is far closer to the natural way of thinking of a person raised within the Russian linguistic and cultural environment.
— You have said before that old PR metrics do not answer the key question: how do communications influence people’s opinions and behaviour? What, in your view, should business measure first and foremost today, if it wants to understand the real impact of its communication?
— For many years, PR professionals were oriented toward effectiveness metrics that even within the professional community attracted scepticism, and among business clients — bewilderment.
Attempting to measure the effectiveness of a communications or social project by the number of publications, likes, views, and social media reactions produces quasi-metrics. They are as useful as the tachometer in a car — but they do not answer the main question: where did we actually get to? What did it give us, and what changed as a result?
That is why in 2025 we formulated a working framework called 'evidence-based communications'. This refers to communications whose goal is to change the opinions and behaviour of target audiences: buyers, investors, business partners, local communities — any groups whose disposition matters to the project.
What is meaningful for us are outcomes that answer the question of what changed after a project was implemented. Using sociological tools — from focus groups and in-depth interviews to large-scale online surveys — we record in near real-time whether people’s thinking about a company, individual, or issue has shifted; what exactly they now think; and whether they are ready to change their view, or have already changed it from negative to positive.
The next indicator for us is readiness to change behaviour. For example, people were 'categorically opposed' to the construction of a plant, and after a communications project they moved to 'more or less not opposed', abandoned their intention to protest, and are now waiting for the facility to be built, to create jobs, and to improve the surrounding area.
Evidence-based communications, therefore, means measuring trust, readiness to act, and in some cases willingness to support the delivery of a project. That is why, in conversations with the top executives of Russian business, we distance ourselves as much as possible from instrumental and intermediate metrics: reach, views, likes, reposts. These are process indicators — meaningful to professional communicators, but not to business clients.
What matters to clients is not reach and likes, but the disposition and goodwill of the target groups whose interests the project serves or affects. This is why a communicator’s work is understood as a set of technologies for influencing opinion, attitude, and behaviour.
— Can we say that today’s communications director is an internal integrator — someone who helps a business understand the gap between its words, its actions, society’s expectations, and its own reputation?
— I believe that is precisely the case. No other corporate function has the task of being an integrator and simultaneously a tool of internal development. Except communications.
PR professionals, drawing on external feedback and the reactions of the environment, pick up signals that something is not right within a business. These signals may surface in the media or social networks, heard at industry conferences, and in their informal conversations.
PR professionals bring this feedback back into their companies and use it not only as a diagnostic tool but also as a development instrument. They register the dissatisfaction of partners, clients, counterparties, local residents, and journalists, and seek out its cause. The cause, as a rule, lies within the company and may be connected to an error in business processes.
For example, counterparties complain that the company takes a long time to process payments or it is impossible to conclude an agreement because lawyers have drafted a 350‑page document. It probably covers all risks, but no one else in any other company has the strength to read and sign it. As a result, the business suffers.
In such a situation, the PR professional will seek a balance between risk protection and the interests of the other party, who is declining to cooperate because of an unacceptably complex contract.
In other words, the PR professional becomes an accelerator of development. Taking external demand as a starting point, he fine-tunes business processes. In this sense, reputation becomes a tool for internal development: to fix it, you first have to fix business processes.
— Let us look a few years ahead. What single change in the mindset of Russian business would most improve the quality of its communication with society and make it a genuinely strategic function?
— Business often sees itself as a thing-in-itself: there is a company, its products or services, suppliers, and customers. And there is a goal — the extraction of maximum profit. This understanding limits development opportunities and does not contribute to long-term resilience. It is easier to grow when your activities are in harmony with the interests of the country, the sector, and society.
For that, it is necessary to regularly find out what all your stakeholders genuinely think of you, and to conduct an independent reputation audit in order to know the truth about yourself. Accurate knowledge of your own reputation’s strengths and weaknesses allows you to identify areas for development and increased efficiency.
By aligning your interests with those of residents in the regions where you operate, you earn their support. By aligning the company’s interests with those of the state, you secure support and, in a sense, immunity from problems. If the state understands that a company is not merely earning money but is helping to achieve national goals, its attitude towards that company will be far more loyal.
Therefore, the key change is the willingness of business to honestly audit its reputation and to understand how the company as a whole, its business processes, and practices affect the interests of its stakeholders. And what can be done better, so that everyone’s situation improves. When those around you are comfortable, you ultimately become comfortable too. This reduces resistance from the environment and, in some cases, turns part of that environment into your allies.