Digitizing the Workplace using Stellar Internal Comms Tools

Speaker A: All right, everyone, thank you for joining us for our Monkey Business webinar series with Contact Monkey. So today I'm really excited to have Janine from WorkGrid with us. She's going to talk about tons of really great stuff. Today we're going to— our topic is digitizing the workplace using stellar internal communication tools, and we've partnered with WorkGrid for this. Janine is from Workgrid. And Janine, I'm going to hand it over to you to introduce yourself to everyone.

Speaker B: Great. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here for this webinar. A little bit about me and a little bit about Workgrid to kick things off. I'm currently the head of marketing at Workgrid Software. And this topic on the webinar, communications and digital tools, this is actually a really exciting topic for me. I've been leading marketing and communication strategies for over 12 years. And so I really look forward today to looking at how some of those same best practices that we use in the consumer world, if you will, as marketers, are now starting to become more prevalent in the employee experience space. For those of you who are unfamiliar with WorkGrid, WorkGrid software is actually a wholly owned company of Liberty Mutual Insurance. So what started as an internal employee experience initiative has now become an industry-leading intelligent workplace platform known as the WorkGrid Assistant. And what WorkGrid has done is we've set out to solve for the inefficiencies and fragmented experience impacting employee engagement and productivity in today's workforce. So, if you think about all the systems in today's environment, it's overwhelming for employees. Employees are overloaded with information, communications, spending hours trying to find information, all things that are taking away from what we hired our employees to do. And if you think about it from a communication standpoint, This is what you as internal communication managers are fighting against each and every day. And so what we offer is an intelligent employee experience platform that actually integrates across all the common systems and tools employees use in the workplace to deliver personalized and contextual experiences to employees in a modern unified experience. So eliminating the productivity burdens employees face to log into multiple systems, read communications, find information, and really creating an engaging employee experience that aligns to those consumer-like experiences we're used to in our personal lives.

Speaker A: Sounds great. And for those of you who don't know who I am, my name is Filza. I'm the webinar host for all of our Monkey Business webinar series. I'm also a content marketing specialist at Contact Monkey, writing blogs and lots of great content for you guys. Would love to get any feedback on that. So we're going to get started though for this webinar. Just a bit— just a little bit of a note on the format. You can ask questions throughout the webinar. We will have time at the end as well for a Q&A. So you can definitely save your questions towards the end as well if that's what you prefer. So let's get started with our tip number 1. So we're going to talk about customizing the employee experience. So what do I mean by customizing the employee experience? I essentially want to talk about personalization. In today's age of digitization with AI, VR, and mobile apps, personalization has become a must-have experience. This means you need to start thinking about personalizing the employee experience as well, because employees are, after all, your biggest brand advocates. You'll see over here I have a visual of The Coca-Cola Share a Coke campaign from 2014. And the reason I have this here is because it was the most successful campaign in Coca-Cola's history. And the reason for that was that it was a campaign that strived to create a personalized experience for customers. It was massively successful primarily because of this. And it's not the only example out there. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some other companies that have successfully utilized personalization when it comes to catering to the end user, and the end user is usually customers in most cases. But if you approach internal communications from an internal marketing perspective, you'll realize that a lot of the strategies that apply to marketing can be applied to your employees as well. Segmentation is another great way that a lot of marketers are creating content. So What this essentially means, especially if your primary mode of communications is email, what this essentially means is that you are creating different employee lists within Outlook or whichever— whatever you use, whether it's Gmail or Outlook, you're creating different contact groups or different employee lists and then you're sending different content to each of those lists. So for example, you could create lists according to different departments. Create a marketing department list, you could create a sales department list, or you could create different lists according to different regions. So for example, if you're dealing with employees all over the world and you have offices all over the world, you could have a different list for your Tokyo office, a different list for a New York office. And then the idea is to send different content that actually appeals to each of those regions or each of those departments. Instead of sending mass emails that are very generic in nature. Segmentation lists can help you create content that actually resonates with employees. So that's something to look into. I want to talk a little bit about Starbucks over here. So many of you may know about the rewards program that they have. And it's not the only company out there that is using apps to personalize the experience for their customers. You know, you have loyalty programs, you have programs from tons of companies out there. And Starbucks claims that their rewards program has actually resulted in huge sales growth for them. So it's massively successful. And the reason for this is that you can just— employees, if you're choosing to use an employee app and choosing to simulate this kind of example from marketing, the employee will be able to see all of their information, within the app, and if you have a rewards-based program like this external marketing example over here, you will be able— the employee will be able to see, you know, what they can do next to achieve a reward status, which is immensely useful. Something like this can definitely help increase employee engagement. Another example from external marketing is Macy's. So they're using their app to show people what kind of discounts that they can— what kind of discounts they can avail. And this is primarily based on their past shopping habits rather than just showing them generic discounts. So it's very successful this way because again, they're bringing personalization into the picture. Spotify is another great example. Netflix as well. So if you've used Spotify or Netflix, you'll see that they always show you content Based on your past habits. So if you've looked up certain songs before, Spotify is going to show you songs that are more in line with your preferences. So again, if you think about how you can bring this to employees in the workplace with an employee app, for example, this can be amazingly helpful and useful because you're not only showing employees content that is generic. You're showing them content that they actually care about. Emails is another example. So personalizing emails can be extremely useful, and internal communicators are a little behind when it comes to personalizing emails, but marketing has been personalizing and segmenting emails, and marketing studies show that personalized email messages improve click-through rates by an average of 14% and increase conversions by 10%. Marketers have also noted that a 760% increase in ROI can often be found if you're using personalization within your email campaigns. So the question here is, you know, why not try applying some of these strategies to internal comms so that you can personalize the employee experience? Here are some ways that you can do that. So if you decide to use an employee app, sending push notifications, And sending personalized push notifications to different employee lists, for example, different departments, is immensely helpful and useful. You can also use distribution lists when sending emails, and you can ensure that you're personalizing the subject line of your email as well as the body of your email by using certain tools. If you're using an external marketing tool, you can easily do this. You can also do this if you're using a tool like ContactMonkey that allows you to send to mass distribution lists and at the same time personalize the subject line as well as the body of your email. So just something to really think about and start thinking, how can we start bringing this into internal communications and increase employee engagement and completely redefine the employee experience? And on to tip number 2. So Janine, I'll hand it over to you.

Speaker B: Great, thanks. Firstly, I want to say I love the example that you shared about personalization and how Macy's was able to leverage consumers' preferences And that reversed a 3-year sales decline. I think that really shows how brands that used to be very strong, right, can't just use the same old practices to engage their audience. They need to start thinking about how the actual shopping experience can be changed and make it stand out. And I think as we talk through this webinar today, we're going to see a lot of correlations as relates to the consumer experience, which is a great segue because the first thing I'd like to talk about today is how we can use technology to align your internal communication strategies to those consumer-like experiences that we're used to in our personal lives. And I think what we're going to need to do is, is take a step back for a minute and really look at how content consumption has actually changed over the years, right? I think if we look at how we consume traditional media, we consume it in new ways, and it's well beyond your favorite newspaper or your favorite magazine being, being digitized. And so we're actually going to run a poll. So I want to understand from the audience, what is your top source for obtaining news and information today?

Speaker A: All right, I can see the votes coming in. So people are voting. Just going to give them a minute.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker A: So I'm curious to know, Janine, what is your top preference for obtaining news?

Speaker B: Great. So glad you asked. So my top preference is actually Facebook, because it's an aggregated source of everything that I'm interested in. So I follow my favorite global news stations, local news stations. I am part of groups that are, you know, part of the town I live in actually has a Facebook community group. So I see posts about happenings in the town. I can follow my favorite restaurants. I even get alerts about, you know, I follow the sports groups that my kids are in, and then I even receive birthday invitations for my kids. So for me, that's almost like my management center. So as of today, social media is my main source for news and just everything kind of I need to know. I know I'm never going to miss anything there. How about yourself?

Speaker A: I would say the same, and I think the audience would agree. So I've just shared the results with—

Speaker B: oh, great.

Speaker A: Just going to share the results with everyone. As you can see over here, 50% say that social media is their primary source. And then apps are pretty high as well. So are news websites. And TV, it seems like TV is at 19%. Podcasts are 6%. Email subscriptions are 19%. So very interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's great to see. And I think we'll see that our audience is pretty in line with what the studies show out there for third-party research. Oops, I skipped ahead too far. So I'm trying to skip back to the previous slide. We have some research by Pew Research Group that shows social media is the number one source for today's news consumption, with Facebook at 43%. YouTube actually at 21%. And the top reason for, you know, why do, why do people go to Facebook? I think it's quite obvious, right? But it's really about, it's about the convenience. And I think we can see as well that it's not just about, you know, mobile devices as well is where people are consuming a lot of content. And when you're on the mobile device, it's about that app experience more so than the web experience. And so I think, you know, as we look at these changes in how we consume content, we can identify— there's, I think, really 5 changes really stand out. So I think what makes us like Facebook so much, or something like YouTube, or email subscriptions where you have everything aggregated together, is number one, we're getting more and more used to a consolidated stream of news, right? Where we have everything pulled together that is based on our preferences, and our interests. So if you look at popular news email subscriptions such as The Daily Skimm or The Brew, these services are aggregating together news that is personalized to our interests and preferences. So whether it's leveraging a combination of algorithms and artificial intelligence, we're only seeing information that's relevant to us. Number 2, I think the way we consume content is also changing. When you look at social media, sometimes you're only reading headlines or short blurbs on Twitter, right? A certain amount of character restrictions. And so I've seen this called called information snacking across the web. And so I think that's actually changing our behaviors in how we obtain content. So we're accustomed to— we're accustomed to that. And it's not just, I think, on mobile devices either. So as you're getting up to speed on the news and local happenings quickly, you know, doing it in a quickly manner is now becoming the norm. So we as internal communication managers need to find ways to provide bite-sized content and allow for that information snacking. As well, you know, it's regardless of location. Employees in their personal lives can get news and information when and where they want it. So really, why would we settle for anything less at work? So I think, and I think as well, when you, you know, mobile needs to go beyond BYOD, right? We need to think more about, well, our employees have access to email on their devices. So we saw in the previous slide that 80% of news was consumed in a mobile app. And so, employees aren't in email all day, right? If they're on their mobile device, they're in apps. Furthermore, you know, I think employees that don't— there's employees in the workforce that don't have access to email, but would largely benefit from communication. So, we need to start thinking about how we can provide those employees as well the same level of engagement. On-demand content. This is an interesting one. I think this is another shift in the way we consume content, is we can view content when we want to. In our personal lives, we don't consume content on a specific date and time, right? If you think about probably the way you watch your favorite TV shows or movies, you most likely watch them on demand, or maybe you binge-watch, you know, certain episodes as you want, when you want. So again, I think we need to be able to offer the ability for time-shift consumption. So depending on the type of content, whether it's video content or traditional-style communications, we need to look for a way for employees to view content, you know, when it's relevant for them. And number 5 is integration. So we're now consuming a mix of content from a variety of sources, but for the end user, it's completely seamless. So if you think about the last time you used Google to do a search for, say, a restaurant, right, you were probably presented with much more than just the URL. You were probably also presented with the hours of operation, the menu, the phone number. And so here you're getting a mix of content based on your intent. So, Google is actually trying to anticipate your needs. And again, this is— these are the types of experiences we're getting accustomed to. So, when we do a search, we, you know, we're going to start anticipating in the workforce the same level of content being presented through us. So, whether it's through an employee app, you know, a great use case for this would be an employee app or an employee digital assistant. These are the types of experiences we need to start incorporating into our internal communication strategies.

Speaker A: Absolutely. All right. So we're going to move on to another tip, which is gamification. So I'm going to talk here about how you can use certain tactics, gamification being one of them, as an internal communications tool to increase employee engagement. And in case you don't know what gamification is, it's essentially the process of using game-based elements such as scoring, rewards, or competition in workplace settings to motivate employees or to engage your workforce. And studies show that 90% of employees are more productive if gamification is introduced in the workplace, and 72% of employees believe that gamification inspires them to work harder. So it's definitely something that internal communicators should also start looking into and trying to leverage. Because, you know, it's such a powerful and useful tool. And it doesn't have to be very complicated. You could make it as simple as introducing game-based elements at work, such as Trivia Tuesdays, where you could quiz employees or even new employees who've joined the company on the company's policies and procedures. Or if you have a completely new company policy due to restructuring, You could introduce a trivia evening on any day of the week to kind of get employees to understand why the changes are happening and what the new policy is all about in a fun way. It's an excellent tool for training employees. Gamification is also great for enhancing job performance and amplifying communication with employees. But the key when it comes to gamification, and especially when it comes to to successful implementation of gamification is to understand what drives people. Because every company culture is different. Some employees may be motivated by cash rewards while other employees may be motivated more by recognition. So it's really important to understand what kind of company culture you have and what really drives your specific workforce. And I'm going to share an example from Salesforce. Salesforce used gamification when it wanted to introduce its new CRM system, and it found— Salesforce found that employees were not very keen on learning the new features because they appeared to be quite complicated. So they decided to gamify the entire process and turned the CRM implementation into a big game hunter program where sales staff started off as hunters, specifically as chicken hunters, that they gradually worked their way towards more rewarding statuses. So they would get the status of big hunter eventually, the more they became familiar with more and more features of the CRM. And this was massively successful because sales employees loved playing this game and getting to know new features, and compliance actually increased by 40%. So imagine if you want to introduce something super boring like a restructuring policy or some kind of new company policy, and imagine if you gamify the entire process. How much more motivated would employees be to get to know the changes, right? A lot of the time some of these things can be so boring to communicate. So gamifying the process can really help. This is another example. This was actually done by Sarah Yates. Communications manager in the UK. She decided to showcase her communication strategy in a creative way, in a snakes and ladders style, so that other people in the company would become familiar with why communication strategy matters and what are some of the things that you need to know in order to create a successful communication strategy. So you can see it over here. I'll also be happy to share a link of this really awesome and creative strategy with you in an email after the webinar. Just some things to keep in mind if you do decide to implement gamification into your company. So the first thing you need to know is that you need to be very clear about identifying your goals before introducing gamification. What is your end goal? Are you trying only to increase employee engagement? Or are you trying to get people familiar with a new company policy or some kind of restructuring or change communications that has happened within your organization? The second thing you need to keep in mind is you need to understand what drives your employees. Are they the type of employees who are going to be motivated by cash incentives? Are they going to be motivated by more recognition, for example? And then you also need to clearly communicate the purpose of the gamification activity to your employees. So this is something that needs to be done no matter what. A lot of the times companies are not very clear with communicating the end goal to employees, and that's why gamification projects fail. And then test and adjust accordingly. So if you've launched a gamification project and it wasn't successful, be sure to analyze and think about what you could do differently the next time you launch it. A lot of the times it's all about testing. And that's when gamification actually succeeds, when you test and keep trying. And we're going to move on to tip number 4, chatbots.

Speaker B: Great, thank you. So I want to talk a little bit about how chatbots can play a role in internal communications. And there's probably lots of different definitions out there, but I think in the simplest form, right, a chatbot is a computer program that's powered by either rules or artificial intelligence, and it's designed to simulate a conversation via some type of chat interface. And you've probably used a bot somewhere, you know, in your consumer world experience or even at work, right? Whether it was to order a pizza, submit a customer service ticket, order shoes online. But really, bots are everywhere. And there's studies showing that, you know, chatbots are on the rise so much they're actually surpassing how many users compared to social networks. So this study here is showing there's over 5 billion users on chatbots. And so I think there's a real opportunity for leveraging chatbots within your organization, even within internal communications. So I found a great example from CNN News, just something to relate to in your personal lives. CNN on their website has a chatbot specific to getting news. And I think when we talk about, you know, one of the content changes is that employees are used to being able to view content, right, whenever they want. And chatbots certainly could provide that level of instant on-demand experience. So with a chatbot, employees could request communications or news or information, right, on demand by entering a simple command like news, news please, or however they might say it. And this slide here is actually showing— so I also went to CNN's Facebook page and they had a Facebook Messenger chatbot with the CNN chatbot. And you can see here there's a few different options. So it actually allows end users to say something generic like get the news, but then it also allows users to pick something that's relevant to their preferences, right? So I could type in healthcare, and the bot would respond with related information and stories on healthcare, whatever the top news is. And they actually offer 3 options as well. And I think that's part of, you know, being able to provide a better experience. So you kind of want to preface the chatbot with giving employees or consumers something to start with. You know, these are the things you can ask about. And so again, I think chatbots really align to those consumption changes we were talking about. You can pull content on demand. It increases the consumption of condensed content. So you actually may be able to get out more content in a condensed format. Chatbots don't allow for long-winded conversations, right? The UX or the UI for that just wouldn't support it. Chatbots can also integrate with existing channels. So today we may most commonly see chatbots built within existing mobile applications or websites or our favorite Facebook pages that we already visit. So in the enterprise, you know, chatbots could work existing with your internet or maybe an employee portal or the messaging platforms and collaboration platforms that you already use each and every day, whether it's something like Slack or Microsoft Teams. And due to the fact that the chatbots are using natural language, right, conversation, there's no training for users. So what are some tips if you're looking to integrate chatbots inside your organization or for your internal communication strategy? So I think, you know, you may see if you do some research on chatbots that it's really actually simple to build a rule-based simple bot that can answer, you know, 1 or 2 questions that has a specific function. But I think the real way to add value and to make it sticky within your organization is to make sure you have a system in place that actually can understand your users. So again, going back to that Macy's example, right? Macy's was able to deliver a better shopping experience because it was leveraging the consumer's preferences and their experiences. So you wanna make sure the chatbot's able to deliver information that is personalized in reference. If I ask for the news, I would want the news to be relevant, maybe based on my location or my role. Versus just a flood of information that's not relevant to me. We also talked in the previous slide about integration. I think this is going to be key, right? We want to create simplified experiences for our employee. Built-in analytics. This is something that's going to be really, really important. You need to make sure you have analytics behind your chatbot, especially in the beginning as you pilot the chatbot. You're not going to know necessarily what types of questions, or what are the words that employees are going to type into the chatbot. So you want to make sure you're able to monitor it, see what employees are asking, and respond and update the chatbot. And I also think that's why it's going to be important that you have those employee-driven feedback loops and actually involve the employees from the start. You want to make sure whatever you're delivering is what the employees expect. So do your research, start small, make sure you involve employees from the start of the process.

Speaker A: All right. So I think that's a nice segue into our tip number 5, because we've been talking about chatbots as a means of communication. And now we're going to talk about how you can facilitate 2-way employee communication. I'm going to touch upon some tools that are actually a bit more traditional. I'd love to know if you guys are currently using any specific tools such as Slack or employee apps or any kind of AI technology. Instant messaging tools such as Slack and then a number of employee apps are all excellent tools to communicate with your employees. But today I'm going to touch upon employee engagement surveys and some traditional tools such as newsletters because they are so cost-effective and you can quickly, very quickly implement them within your organization without having to go through tons of tedious approval processes. And I'm going to talk a little bit about our product and how it really helps facilitate employee feedback. So we have pulse surveys and social reactions, and these are embedded within your employee newsletters. So if you're sending a newsletter, you'll have social reactions giving your employees the ability to love, like, and laugh at any content you send them through email. A great way to facilitate quick employee feedback. We have pulse surveys where you can get actionable data on your email communications in seconds and see all responses live in real time on your ContactMonkey dashboard. You also have like buttons within the newsletter, and by adding these buttons to internal emails, you can engage employees and learn what they like. And this is an example of what that looks like. So as you can see over here, you can plug in emojis on any part of your content, and then employees can click on these emojis to tell you exactly how they feel about your specific content. So it's really quick and easy, and instead of sending a very lengthy employee engagement survey asking people tons of different questions to kind of get a sense of what the employees are feeling, these are very quick and easy ways for you to get feedback and, and for employees to tell you exactly how they feel. About your content so that you can improve and change it or investigate further. And then there's some other more traditional ways of kind of gathering data and gathering two-way communication from employees. So you can conduct group interviews. You could do focus groups where you interview a number of different employees and get their feedback. You could circulate surveys, so traditional employee engagement surveys where you ask where you ask a bunch of different questions. You can identify internal influencers. So these are essentially those employees in your organization who have a lot of influence with other colleagues. People go to them for advice regarding work problems or just even general advice. And these people tend to have a lot of knowledge about how people feel within the company. So it's really good to, to have a relationship with these internal influencers. Influencers, because it gives you a sense of what your employees are feeling within the company. You could also create a way for employees to give you feedback anonymously, because not everyone is very open to talking about specific work problems. And if you allow anonymous feedback, that may really help you get a sense of, you know, what people are not happy about within your company and what can you change. So we're going to talk about harnessing intelligence next.

Speaker B: Great. Thank you. Yeah, I think, you know, today the business world, right, where it's buzzing with terms like artificial intelligence, machine learning, intelligent automation. But how do these technologies fit? How can they fit into internal communication strategies? And I think really, you know, breaking it down, what we'll learn is by leveraging intelligence, we'll be able to improve how information is delivered, when it's delivered, and what is actually delivered. So I think, you know, why— if you look at the largest challenges in internal communications, this was a study I had found. The largest challenge for communication managers is the amount of communications that are in the enterprise at 64%. And I think this is because of the sheer volume of communications flowing and, you know, communications and information flowing through the organization. And so when you combine the number of communication challenges, as well as the volume of systems we have in the enterprise, right, generating communications, alerts, notifications, you're ending up with a large amount of data. But all this data that we're generating across the enterprise, it's not going away. We're not going to be able to just turn down the dial on information. And so really what it is, is it's filter failure. We need a better way to filter the information and the data and the communications that are being delivered to our employees. And so this is where intelligence can come in. We need a better system to manage this information so that we're able to engage our employees. So the real opportunity here for intelligence is to make our communications smarter. So we talked about a filter to better manage that information overload. And if you look across the enterprise, you know, a lot of— we talked about leveraging data. A lot of the data we can use actually sits across the systems that we have in the enterprise. And so we don't currently actually leverage that data in meaningful ways today. So I think there's systems out there that can do that. We'll go into some examples in a few minutes. And but it's really about sending the right information to the right employee at the right time. So really trying to search for those moments when we can actually delight our employees. So we need to stop guessing what employees like, right, and start delivering what they've asked for. Or by understanding their preferences, their likes, their behaviors, we can actually leverage patterns and preferences to deliver content that employees are actually interested in. Can you go back a slide for me?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Thank you. I'm over-clicking here. So what I want to do is look at a couple of use cases. And so these are actually use cases from the WorkGrid Digital Assistant. And I think when you start looking at artificial intelligence and automation, you can really kind of— we like to break it down. You have simple automation, intelligent automation, and artificial intelligence. And so simple automation is really just using basic rules. So when X happens, do this. So for the example I have here is a work anniversary. You know, that is something so simple that, you know, we have employees' start date, right? That's in a system somewhere and we know who's in your department. And so something like being able to send a communication to an employee on their 1-year or 5-year anniversary and as well maybe sending to people individuals in his or her department to congratulate that employee. That's all the information we actually have in the system. So if you start thinking about ways we can actually leverage the data to automate and program some of these notifications, we can actually provide more of those moments that I talked about to delight employees. Then you kind of move forward with intelligent automation. So this is where there's going to be a few more rules. They may be more complex, and it often will be where you have multiple events in multiple systems. Where they need to equal true to execute an action. So maybe you're running a campaign where there's a new leadership forum in your Texas office and you want to send an invitation to anyone located in that office. But what about maybe if that's an office that has a lot of people traveling to it? Would it be interesting to invite those employees as well that are traveling to that office? You know, we know when in the systems we have when an employee is traveling and we know when events are from other systems. So again, really about those systems being able to talk to each other and leverage that data. Then you have artificial intelligence. And this is really when you're going to be using algorithms and large amounts of data to make predictions or recommendations to employees. So you can think similarly to how you may get recommendations on restaurants when you visit a new state or a new town from Yelp or similar service. And the next example I want to show you, this as well is from the WorkGrid digital assistant, which sends personalized communications and notifications to employees. And we're leveraging algorithms to actually control the order that notifications are displayed to employees, ensuring that the most important notification is always at the top, for example. And furthermore, the notifications are actually smart, right? So the idea behind this was we wanted to be able to have notifications actually self-manage themselves. And so have notifications or alerts expire when they were no longer relevant. So this is one thing, you know, that we all know calendar reminders and emails don't quite do yet today, right? If you're out of the office and you come back, you have reminders that are still popping up at you when they're 60 hours overdue, which, which seems totally irrelevant. So the example we have here is showcased on the on the left, maybe you have an all-hands meeting, you want to alert all employees about this meeting. But then what happens after April 12th? That message is no longer relevant for employees. So with the WorkGrid Assistant, that message would actually automatically disappear from the employee's feed. And so instead, we would only present in their feed what is actually relevant. So in this case, maybe it would be an alert about that The on-demand recording is now available for that all-hands meeting. And so, and that's just one example of many. I'm going to kick it back over.

Speaker A: Yeah, that was a great one. All right. So talking so much about data, the next thing we're going to talk about is how to use measurement as a powerful tool within your internal communications. A lot of the times people are very confused as to how they can use this. So I think the simplest way to start is that if you're using any kind of tool already, whether it's a tool for social media, whether it's a tool, a newsletter tool like ContactMonkey, or whether it's an employee app, the best thing you can do to get started on measurement is to look at the analytics dashboard that is inbuilt within your tool to evaluate the success of your employee communications. It's a great way to get a handle on the pulse of your company and improve performance, and it's also a great way for getting a seat at the table with the C-suite because the executive team loves numbers. So if you can show them good numbers, if you can show them that employee engagement has been consistently increasing because of a certain initiative or an email campaign that you sent. That's the best way to kind of gain their trust and let them know that you're doing your job and you're doing it really well. A lot of the times internal comms professionals are not sure, you know, exactly what they should be looking at, you know, what kind of things they need to keep in mind before they decide to invest in a tool. So the, the most important thing before you decide to invest in any kind of tool or even decide to start properly measuring is to have a kind of map or a communications plan or strategy that guides you. And some of the questions that you need to be asking are in this visual over here. This is a really good one that I got from CIPR Insight. I'll send you a link to this as well. It's super useful because it really helps you kind of question, you know, how— what kind of communication channels do we already have in the company? Are they working? Are they not? What kind of channels do employees prefer? How are employees getting the content that they want and they need? And asking yourself, are people in the organization communicating effectively with employees? Are managers communicating effectively with employees? Can this be improved? Do people have a voice at the company? And then sentiment is another thing that you need to really look into and think about how you're going to measure this. As I talked about Contact Monkey, our pulse surveys and our social reactions are a handy tool that can allow you to measure sentiment. What do employees think and feel about the organization? What do employees think and feel about the content that you send them? And behavior is another important thing you could look into. Has employee behavior been influenced by communication? Has employee behavior changed after the introduction of a certain tool or an initiative? And then return on investment is also important. Before the introduction of a new tool, what were employees— what was employee engagement like? Were people engaging with your content? And how is employee engagement now? If you can clearly demonstrate that there has been an increase in employee engagement through analytics to the C-suite, then you're well on your way to proving that ROI is also going to increase because increased An increase in employee engagement is automatically going to make them more productive at work, helping your company's bottom line and ROI. And some of the ways that you can start getting the answers to these questions is by circulating questionnaires or surveys and talking one-on-one with employees, getting to know people and having real conversations, you know, what we call water cooler talk. That's a really good way of kind of gauging you know, how employees are feeling and get a sense of the— get a pulse on the company culture and on what employees are thinking. So those are some ways that you could start thinking about measurement before you decide to invest in a tool. And I'm going to talk about email just because ContactMonkey is an email tool, in case you're wondering what do I measure if I'm sending out newsletters or if I'm sending out emails. The best thing to do is to look at your dashboard, whether it's an external marketing software you're using to send your newsletter, whether it's ContactMonkey. Start looking at the opens you're getting on your emails, the link clicks if you've included any links in your emails. Look at the location. You know, are people in your New York office more engaged with your emails, or are people in your Tokyo office more engaged? Look at device. You know, are employees viewing your emails on mobile devices. Janine here touched upon how mobile has become so predominant and people are more likely consuming content on mobile devices. If that's the case, is your newsletter responsive and does it cater to mobile devices? Social reactions are also great. With ContactMonkey, you can just allow employees to click on a certain social reaction and they can indicate how they feel about your content or about a certain announcement within your company. And just a quick look at the dashboard analytics within ContactMonkey. It shows you how many opens you got, the percentage of people who clicked on your links. It shows you the various employees who opened your emails or who clicked on your links. It also shows you the device as we go down. So people— were people looking at your emails only on desktop, or were they looking on a tablet or mobile? It shows you best performing links. So people in Canada are more engaged with your content, or are people in US more engaged with your content? It shows you the breakdown of cities. It shows you your best performing links if you've included more than one link, and then shows you the social reactions results. as well. So it's a really good way of kind of getting a sense of what people are thinking and feeling, and also to show the C-suite whether your employee engagement strategy is working. Some tips to keep in mind for successful measurement. So before you decide to go and measure something, outline your strategy and set clear objectives that are in alignment with your company's overall business objectives. So that is super important. And then experiment with different tools to find the right fit. Most tools have free trials, so try out different tools, see which one is a good fit. Also ask your employees which tools they prefer. And paint the before and after picture to outline results. So for example, if you launched a health and safety campaign, before launching the campaign, look into, you know, how many health and safety incidents were reported. And then after the launch of the campaign, was there where there are fewer incidents that were reported. So that's a very good way of kind of showing you whether your initiatives are working or not. And I think that's it from my end on measurement. And we're going to open up— we're going to open the floor for any questions that people may have regarding any of the stuff that we went over. I'd also love to know what kind of tools everyone here is using within their organization to communicate. And Janine, I actually had a question for you. I was wondering with regards to the chatbots, you mentioned that they don't require a lot of training. I was actually on a Twitter comms chat yesterday and a lot of people were suggesting that with regards to some of these tools, you know, you need to have a proper training plan implemented. So that people can learn how to use this technology, especially chatbots.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good point. And so I think— I guess training can be a little ambiguous. So I agree that— so I think when you think about systems, if you're introducing a new system into the enterprise, that usually involves training, right? Because each system that you have in the enterprise has a different user interface. Everyone understands natural language and conversation. So there's no training if you're introducing a chatbot to help automate tasks or answer questions for employees. Certainly, you do need to probably put a communication strategy behind launching a chatbot because you want to make sure employees know what are the questions you can ask the chatbot, right? The worst thing that you could do is roll out a chatbot, not give details on what it can do and what it can't do, and have employees disappointed with the experience. You wanna make sure that they find the experience engaging, right, and come back for more value. So you don't want them to have a bad first impression, so.

Speaker A: Good point. So we have a number of different questions. So someone's asked, we've talked a lot about AI today. Can you share any examples of virtual reality used by companies? So I believe I've read a few examples on that. Janine, do you know of any companies that have specifically used virtual reality?

Speaker B: I'd love to hear you. I'm drawing a blank off the top of my head. I know there's a— I have read some. I'd probably mix up the 2 different examples with company, but that's a great question. You can go ahead.

Speaker A: So I actually did a webinar, I think a couple of months ago, where I did talk about virtual reality and how some companies have implemented that very successfully. So L'Oréal has done a really good job of using virtual reality to communicate any new products that are coming They're actually going to go to the end user, and before it even goes into their department stores, they show it to— they show it internally, and they showcase how the products are going to look, how the entire storefront is going to look, and they all do it through virtual reality. We also had an internal communications specialist on one of our webinars last year who talked about how she specifically We used VR to communicate a change to employees. She had to introduce a change. The parking lot that she would— that their company was using, it was being moved to another location. So she had to communicate why this location— why this relocation was necessary. And so she used VR goggles to introduce people to, you know, what the new location is going to look like and how and why is it it's so much better than the older location. So it's definitely something that is a lot more newer, but it's emerging and I can see how it's going to completely change internal communications in the future.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I think it's going to be really interesting when it starts hitting the, you know, the workforce mainstream. I know I've used it more on the consumer level, trying on eyeglasses, right, and those types of experiences. So I'm looking forward to seeing it in the enterprise.

Speaker A: We have another question. Someone's asking, I'm not sure I understand who internal influencers are and how do companies use internal influencers? So for this one, internal influencers are essentially just your regular employees. It's just those people who may know a lot more about, about the company and about the employees within your company because they are usually people that other employees trust and they go to them for advice. The best way to identify internal influencers is to just, you know, have more conversations with people. You know, what kind of names do people keep bringing up? If a certain employee's name comes over and over again, it's more than likely that that person is an internal influencer and may not even know it. So that's one of the ways you can identify them. You could also do focus groups and run employee engagement surveys. where you actually ask employees, you know, who do they turn to for advice when they have a work problem? Who do they go to regularly to talk? And more than likely you'll see one or two names that keep cropping up. And that way you'll know these are the internal influencers within the organization and I should really leverage their help when communicating any kind of change within the organization.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think internal influencers are really important. I don't remember the statistic, but you know, we as humans trust our fellow employees, right? Even more so than over the brand. So I think it's really powerful when you can find influencers and advocates within the organization to help spread messages.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And another question, is it appropriate to segment by age? I ask because as an external marketer, I would do this. I work for a company with a large baby boomer demographic, and we're going through a digital transformation. So I honestly— depends on your company. I don't think there is any harm in segmenting by age. You could definitely do that, especially if you want to adopt a different tone of voice when catering to the millennial employees in your organization. You can make your writing more catchy, more snappier, and then maybe change the tone a little bit to make it more formal for the older demographic. I would have to say that you should test this and see, you know, see what works, whether the age division would work or not. Janine, do you have any thoughts on that?

Speaker B: Yeah, I definitely think that if those age groups responded differently to different types of messaging or even different channels or devices, then you want to leverage whatever is the most engaging for each one of those audiences. So I think you need to run tests. You need to have analytics and then when you run your analytics, if there's a way that you can sort it by age group and see if you see any of those trends. And then that way, certainly, if different messages or different ways to communicate resonate with different age groups, then I think, I think you should cater your messages that way.

Speaker A: Sounds great. And then we have a question on, on how do you make a case for getting one of these tools? How do you get the C-suite to give you the budget? So that's a really good question. Janine, would you like to take a stab at this one?

Speaker B: Sure. I think obviously depends on how your organization is structured. But in terms of making the case, I think if you think about both tools, right, ContactMonkey and WorkGrid, talk a lot about the experience for the employee. So whether it's increasing engagement, increasing productivity, So I think if you look at how many employees are across your organization and you can run the numbers for, you know, this tool would save, you know, me just 5 minutes a week or whatever it may be, or engage employees. You need to think about those numbers and what they look like. It could just be a couple minutes a week, but at a large organization, that's going to be a lot of productivity savings throughout the year. And as well, you need to look at it on the flip side. What happens if If you don't do any of these changes, if you're not engaging your employees, what's going to happen to your talent numbers? And we see the studies from Gallup on how many employees are disengaged and what those numbers do to the business's bottom line. So I think you need to look at those numbers and really you do need to probably get buy-in from the top. But I think it's definitely something that's top of mind for a lot of organizations and a lot of organizations that had— have already invested so much money in the consumer experience are now starting to see, okay, we need to do the same for the employee experience. You can't have a good, you know, customer experience without a great employee experience.

Speaker A: Absolutely. And I would also suggest that another way of doing this is to try out some of the free trials that a lot of these products offer and then have a before and after picture. So just, you know, have If you're trying to create a new campaign and you have a tool to track the campaign, you can show the analytics and the numbers to the C-suite and you can show them that now I have a system and a way of tracking this and this is how it's going to help us increase our employee engagement. So those are just some ways, some basic ways that you can try to convince them to invest in a tool like that.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: If they actually see dashboard analytics and numbers from the tool itself, they're more than likely to want to invest in that tool.

Speaker B: Right. And I will say, I'm sure I can probably speak to Contact Monkey, but feel free to chime in. But any vendor you work with outside of WorkGrid and Contact Monkey, if you approach them with that question, they're going to help you look across your organization, see how the product fits your needs, and be able to help you put those numbers together for For your C-suite or whoever may be the decision maker.

Speaker A: Absolutely. All right. So thank you so much, everyone, for joining us for this webinar today. And I'm just going to have a quick look at the chat. Oh, somebody is commenting on what they use to get news. But Janine, I would like to thank you as well for taking the time out to join us and collaborate with us on this webinar. And just gonna talk, talk, tell you guys about this free guide that we have up on our website. You can go to our resources page on our website and you'll be able to access this ebook, How to Handle Internal Emails: A Successful Internal Communicator. It talks to you about all the latest trends within email communications and specifically how can you make your employee communications more attractive, more engaging. And help your workforce become more motivated.

Speaker B: Great. Thank you so much for having me. It was great.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: Joining you today.

Speaker A: All right. Thank you, everyone, and have a great day.