As head of communications for a construction company that has broken the £100 million turnover mark, Belinda Murray has gone from reporting the news to making it: Neil Gibbons met her. Additional reporting by Heather McGregor. Photographs by Sam Friedrich.

Belinda Murray’s career has seen her handle the communications response to not one, but two terrorist bombings.

Not that her current employer, UK construction group Wates, is worried: since appointing Belinda as its head of communications back in February 2008, the only big boom it has experienced has been an explosion of media coverage.

“The company previously had a reputation as the ‘shy contractor’,” says Belinda “There was a lot of good work being done but Wates lacked an external voice and hadn’t put focus into communicating with the press – on top of that, it’s in a sector that is traditionally quite conservative.”

But by instilling a newly proactive communications strategy, Belinda has effected a step change in the company’s communications output that has boosted its media presence from three or so press clipping a month to around 70.

That shift from reactive to proactive communication is almost a mirror image of her own career. Having started as a TV journalist reporting on politics and crime in her native Australia, she later managed crises in comms roles at home and abroad, and has now succeeded in recalibrating the communications of Wates and turning it into a truly proactive communicator.

An only child, raised in the Queensland countryside, Belinda went straight to university from school to undertake a degree at Queensland University of Technology – keeping her options open with a bachelor’s degree in business communication that majored in journalism. It was the journalism that ultimately won the day and, keen to try out broadcast media, Belinda found herself some unpaid work experience at Channel Seven, a Brisbane TV station where she had a friend. She took to the work much better than she or the channel expected, and agreed to stay. This was no small beer. The network was an affiliate of Sky, so some reports reached audiences both internationally and locally. In fact, the young reporter appeared on advertising billboards in and around Brisbane.

University was not abandoned, though. Sticking two fingers up to the trifling notion of ‘work-life balance’ – “as young people do” – she did both side by side. Did she ever think of abandoning her studies? “It never crossed my mind. I knew I wanted a successful career, and that would be impossible in the long term if I didn’t have a degree.”

Belinda finished her degree, studying for exams at night and at the weekends, and continued in television for several more years. Covering both politics and police meant that interviewing Pauline Hansen, then the high-profile leader of One Nation (a political party with a populist and anti-immigration platform), was as normal as reporting a dingo snatching a 7-year-old on Fraser Island. Serial killers? Par for the course. Most 20-year-olds never get the chance to do work like this so early in their career; for Belinda, it was an exciting time.

She combined all this with getting up at 4am every Saturday and Sunday to read radio news bulletins – scoffing once again at the need for rest and relaxation – so perhaps it is not surprising that by the age of 25, Belinda was looking for a change. “I had loved every minute, but I needed to get on with the next stage of my life.”

Some of her journalist peers had crossed the divide from journalism into communications, often working for the press offices of government departments. And since her news beat had encompassed politics, Belinda had developed contacts among political circles in Canberra. So it was to Canberra she went, securing a role in the press office of Centrelink, the government agency not dissimilar to the UK’s Department for Work & Pensions.

Co-ordinating 135 other media liaison officers around the country, in seven offices, this was a very different world to television journalism, but Belinda found herself enjoying her first taste of working in a truly large organisation.

As with many who cross the floor, there was a brief period of transition as she got to grips with the switch from journalism to comms. “It took me a few months to get it out of my blood,” she admits. “But I found that my background had given me the ability to turn round work very quickly and it helped me see the story and really cut to the chase.”

But then came the bombing. On 12 October 2002, while Belinda was working at Centrelink, the Bali bomb exploded, shattering the lives of hundreds of Australians – 88 of the 202 dead were Australian, the largest group by far, and they all had dependents and families back home. Belinda and her team were tasked with getting the families of the severely injured out to Bali and transporting victims with less serious injuries back to Australia. “It was crisis management at the sharp end.”

Even before the bombing, Belinda had resolved to get away for a while and do some international travel, and the events brought home to her the urgency of getting on with life. As a civil servant, she had the right to request 12 months’ unpaid leave with the right to her job back at the end, and when Belinda packed up her belongings at the end of 2002 and put her beloved black BMW into storage, she fully expected to be returning.

After three months in Asia, Belinda arrived in the UK. She had been here before, on holiday, and loved it – and so she found a temporary job in the press office of the Highways Agency – a role familiar enough for her to hit the ground running. The agency wasn’t too unlike Centrelink and her experience of crisis management had instilled in her the importance of agility and empathy, while teaching her how to plan for and handle unexpected events. She found a lot of opportunity to add value at the Highways Agency, putting in place a fully functioning on-call system for the press office in the aftermath of ‘White Friday’ in January 2003 where road closures and gridlocked traffic from heavy snowfalls and floods had caused chaos. She recalls briefing Alistair Darling, then the Minister for Transport, and thinking to herself what a fulfilling and interesting role she had taken on.

Belinda was also enjoying life in London, sharing a flat with two other friends in the heart of Chelsea. Even the black BMW in storage in Canberra couldn’t tempt her back to Australia at the end of her 12 months away. She sold it and settled in London, finally being lured away from the Highways Agency at the end of 2004 to join Transport for London, working in London Underground’s press office. The Tube? For an outdoor girl from Brisbane? “It’s an iconic brand, the Tube, and it is all about issues. It was amazing place to work, and really fast paced.”

“I like the feeling of being part of a team that builds something that shapes communities and is there for generations. Fluffy PR isn’t for me.”

It was also somewhere where Belinda would get her ultimate crisis experience with the 7/7 London bombings in 2005. The day that would lead to Belinda’s team winning the 2006 award for Crisis Communication from the Chartered Institute of PR (CIPR) started innocuously enough, with Belinda travelling (on the Underground, of course) to meet a film crew in Hammersmith. Just past South Kensington she received a text alert sent to all key staff to let her know that there was a system malfunction; she turned round and went back immediately, helping to hold the fort and manage the information flow which at the start was very challenging. “My mother called from Brisbane at one point very early on to make sure I was ok and I remember being shocked at how quickly the news had travelled and how much she knew about the incidents - it was a global news event.”

Belinda saw her task in simple, human terms. “It was about getting families to understand that everything that could be done down there was being done,” she says. “If my family had been involved, I’d want to know that someone had held my sister’s hand while she was waiting for treatment. And that’s how we approached it. It wasn’t about making the Tube look good or getting too tied up with reputation. We wanted the public to know that the staff that day did everything possible.”

The day itself was bad enough but the demands on the press office continued long after. “The international media, especially the US media, were very difficult and insensitive. To them it was just another terrorist event. The UK media, by contrast, were very respectful.” All the memorial services for the victims ad to be covered, and no less than 12 requests for documentaries were received: an indication of the demands on the press office at the time.

Belinda eventually decided that it was time to move on to the private sector and she became the media and communications manager for Bovis Lend Lease. She found herself enjoying the construction sector: “I like the feeling of being part of a team that builds something that shapes communities and is there for generations. Fluffy PR isn’t for me.”

However, she was no longer the Belinda that had once snubbed the work-life balance. There was more to life. (More so now – she recently married Jamie Murray, an account director with Broadgate PR and together, they have an 18-month old bundle of joy, Rosie, a badly behaved Staffordshire bull terrier.) This Belinda found it hard to tolerate a commute that was two hours each way between her home in East Dulwich and the office in South Harrow. This eventually led to her deciding to leave.

Now at Wates in Leatherhead, Belinda remains with the construction sector that she has come to know and like so much. She immediately set about transforming the communications culture of the firm, and was pleased to find an organisation ready for change.

“Wates knew it what it wanted to achieve and turned to me to chart that direction,” she says. “Its press contact until then had been ad hoc and it had no ongoing media presence. I wanted share the great stories that existed internally and show the organisation that ongoing dialogue has an effect.”

And the effect is there for all to see. As well as the 20-fold increase in press clippings, the boost in profile led to Building magazine naming Wates Major Contractor of the Year in February 2009 and CEO Paul Dreschler was named Chief Executive of the Year.

No wonder he’s impressed. Describing her as “fun to work with”, Paul says that her influence has been keenly felt at the firm: “Since she’s been with Wates, I’ve seen many changes and that’s meant a stronger external and internal profile. Wates is very focused on providing value for customers and differentiating ourselves in the market place during these tough times – comms is an essential part of that.”

The private company has also experienced significant growth, hitting the £1 billion turnover watermark for the first time last year.

“Hitting the £1 billion mark is a huge deal for a construction company,” she says. “But, given the wider economic situation, we spent a lot of time on tone. Of course, we’re very proud. But 2009 is looking tough so we made sure we showed an awareness of the challenges ahead.”

She’s not finished yet, though. After completing a rebranding project in November 2008, she is now overhauling the website and setting her sights on an internal comms revamp, moving away from printed communications to online tools like e-zines and video – in effect, reverting back to the medium that launched her career.

“In some ways,” she concedes, “I’ve come full circle.”

Curriculum Vitae: Belinda Murray
2008 – present Head of communications, Wates
2006 – 2008 Media and communications manager, Bovis Lend Lease UK
2004 – 2006 Media manager, London Underground
2003 – 2004 Media and public relations manager, Highways Agency
2002 – 2003 Career break to travel
2001 – 2002 National media manager, Centrelink
1996 – 2001 Senior reporter, Channel Seven
Education:
Bachelor of Business Communication, maj. in Journalism, Queensland
University of Technology
Brisbane Girls Grammar School
Interests: Wine tasting, architecture