Prepare for the Great Return with Employee Recognition and Internal Communication

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Speaker A: The screen share is good, Nadira?

Speaker B: Yes.

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Speaker C: It's interesting. I've never seen that. Oh, here's everyone. Haha, found it.

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Speaker A: I'd say we can get started, Nadira.

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Speaker A: There we go.

Speaker B: All right. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for the Contact Monkey and Kudos webinar, Prepare for the Great Return. With employee recognition and internal communication. Before we get started, just a few housekeeping items. There will be a Q&A session, so feel free to type your questions into the Q&A chat box, and we will get to it at the end of the webinar. Once the webinar— let's rewind there. Also, the webinar will be recorded and available to you after the live event is over. Presenting the webinar today is Katie Liston, the Head of Marketing at Contact Monkey. Katie has 7 years of experience in marketing, 5 of which have been spent working at B2B software as a service startups in both Ireland and Canada. Joining Katie is Tom Short, Kudo's co-founder and Chief Customer Officer. Over the course of 25 years, Tom has used his passion for entrepreneurship and marketing to found several successful companies. At each organization Tom has built, employee experience has been the cornerstone to building effective teams. That covers all our housekeeping, so it's over to you, Katie.

Speaker A: Thank you, Nadira. Perfect. So just before we get started, I wanna run through the quick agenda. So just kind of did a quick introduction there, and we'll just do some short kind of elevator pitches, I suppose, about who we are and where we're coming from for Contact Monkey and Kudos, and then we'll get into everything. So we're gonna be looking at the Great Return, kind of everything that's in news at the minute that we're seeing a lot of news this week, especially with Apple and Tesla, return to work trends, kind of the hierarchy of needs and Q12, which Tom will be going through, and then just kind of how you can prepare for the great return with both internal communications and the different channels you're using and also bringing employee recognition into this as kind of things changed over the last 2 years. We know different people's values have changed in the workplace and employee recognition has come kind of at a higher value than it was before the pandemic. So just a quick intro to who Contact Monkey is. We're an internal communications email software and SMS service. So we integrate directly into your Outlook or Gmail inbox so you can track, measure, and send all your employee newsletters, maybe your message from the CEO, HR updates, return to work policies, all of that sort of thing. We have an email template builder built straight into our tool so you can design lovely templates, drag and drop builder. You don't need a designer at hand, but if you do want one, we also do have one to help you out. And you can also do kind of lots of different surveys to gauge engagement from the content you're sending out, such as ENPS, pulse surveys, emoji reactions, that sort of thing. And then also, of course, the analytics, because there's no point sending it unless you're tracking it. Tom?

Speaker C: Over to me. Thanks, Katie. Yeah, I've seen their product. It's very good, and it's a great way to improve engagement by maintaining great communication and getting feedback from your team. And that's kind of the same line that Kudos is in. You know, we approach it from a recognition and communication standpoint with a primary focus on peer-to-peer recognition, awards, top-down type of recognition, nominations, automated birthdays and anniversaries, and all the things that you need to connect, communicate, and celebrate the wonderful things that your people are doing every day. And as we go through the rest of this presentation, we're going to be highlighting how communication and recognition are cornerstones to create more engagement as we approach this new era of the Great Return, which doesn't necessarily mean returning back to the office, but it's really returning to a focus on meeting our team members' needs so that we can engage them further to retain and attract the best talent. But Katie's going to take you all through that right now.

Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you, Tom. So just before we get started, I'm going to launch a quick poll just to see kind of what kind of workplace you have at the minute. Let me know if everybody can see the poll, and I'll give it a few moments to respond. So this will help us kind of gear the webinar towards your type of workplace. It's always interesting to see where people are, what they're working with. Are they desk office, remote, hybrid, fully back to the office, which I think a lot of us aren't just yet. Perfect. Okay, I'll end that. Share results. Can everyone see the results? Okay, perfect. So we can see here 82%, which is unsurprising, um, are in a hybrid environment. That's the same for Contact Monkey. Um, I went into the office yesterday, usually going in maybe once a week. 9%, we can see as well, in the office, and then also remote as well. No deskless people on this webinar today. Perfect. So let's get into it. So we're just going to share this quick slide to get started. Kind of, there's a lot in the news at the minute. Initially it was the Great Resignation, now it's the Great Return. People are calling it the Great Reflection, kind of meeting people where they should be in the office. There's a lot of kind of— here are some key headlines we came across, and I'm sure everyone has seen in the news over the last couple of weeks. Apple announcing that by the 5th of September to go back to 3-day work week. Tesla putting out that remote work is no longer acceptable, a bit more kind of straight to the point as we would expect from Tesla versus Apple. And then on the other side of it, companies like Spotify, Airbnb launching work from anywhere. Spotify releasing kind of results from the study they did where they reduced attrition and churn by moving to a fully remote and kind of work from anywhere aspect. So there's a kind of a lot out there, people looking at it in different ways. We've noticed that employers and employees, sometimes the values are misaligned, is what's coming up a lot recently. And kind of the whole goal of this webinar is to address that, figure out how you as an employer can align more with your employees, and as an employee align more with your employers when it comes to the values you appreciate most when it comes to your work environment and kind of your home environment and that balance. And here's just a quick kind of statistic we can see about kind of what it's been like returning to the office. So this really follows the flow really of COVID in my mind. As you can see, kind of everyone was fully in the office back in January of 2020. kind of reduced to about 92% remote when kind of the pandemic hit and kind of was going full-fledged in April of 2020. And then it follows the curves of kind of everything that was happening last January. I remember people saying back to the office, and then a week later, no, don't go back to the office anymore. We'll see if that happens this January or not. And then kind of the forecasted return to kind of office environment for kind of the future and into January of 2023. And we can see here kind of like the States and the US leading this market. We'll also share this article in the email afterwards if you just kind of want to look through it yourself, see how it aligns to kind of what you're doing where you are. So we saw in that poll as well that a lot of people are hybrid, and that's also the case from our Internal Communications Global Survey that we did earlier this year. This is a survey we've been doing at Contact Monkey for about 3 or 4 years now and kind of really shifted our focus and kind of the questions we were asking since the pandemic. But kind of this webinar shows that a lot of us still hybrid, a lot of us still remote, not too many going back fully to the office. But as we can see, lots of companies are starting to, as you would say, force people back. When we looked at the kind of opening structure as well from our Global State of the Survey report, we're looking at a lot of people were already back when we did this earlier in the year, and then a lot of people focusing on the H1 of the first half of this year to get back to the office. Some of them going to be remote permanently as well. And in terms of leadership support, this is a great stat. I think it kind of shows the change and kind of the heightened elevation for internal communications and the role of internal communication in communications in the workforce since the pandemic. 44% finding their leadership very helpful in terms of responding to planning to go back to the office in the future. And then just in terms of the different plans they had, people were planning for this, so which is good to see because a lot of times it can go on the ad hoc, on the back burner. Like, you know, when we went fully remote, it was just, we have to go, there's no plan, just do it. but at least coming back and returning to the office, there is an action plan in place for many. But what comes with the Great Return? There's a lot of implications out there. The catalyst kind of COVID kind of spearheaded the Great Resignation and now the Great Return, and kind of people's values are really changing is what we're seeing. And especially when it comes back to the different types of offices you're looking to go to, if you're going back fully In person, how are you going to communicate this for this 5-day-a-week return? Will it be hot desking? Will everyone have their own desk? The same for hybrid. How are you going to keep employees motivated and productive if they're kind of going in and out? For remote, the key thing in here is communication and making sure employees feel supported, connected with the company, aligned with the values. And then for deskless workers as well, making sure kind of that there is a plan of action here because maybe they never— there was no such thing as their return to work. There was no such thing as remote working for deskless workers. A lot of these deskless workers are security guards, frontline staff at hospitals, retail staff, logistics kind of people working in kind of delivery services. And then I was looking at earlier kind of this week, this different study by Gartner talking about this as the Great Reflection as well as the Great Return. So employers need to kind of figure out, are they meeting employees where they want to be met? Is the likes of Apple announcing we have to do 3 days back to the office, is that what employees want? Nowadays we're seeing work flexibility is kind of the highest empathetic benefit that people are looking for when it's back to the office and kind of in their whole work environment, as opposed to maybe 5 years ago, maybe the gym benefit is what they wanted. It's not like that anymore, and employers need to Understand that more human-centric approach to when it's coming back to the office, making sure your employees feel valued and listened to in their work environment, that you're supporting them with when their needs change during COVID Maybe childcare is a different thing now. Maybe they moved out of the city and they're not as close to the office and kind of meeting employees there. So kind of surveying your employees, figuring out what they want next. for whether it is return to office, whether it's fully hybrid, remote, is where you need to meet them. And then I'll pass it over to Tom to talk about the hierarchy of needs under Q12.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. You know, Katie hit upon a bunch of really good points in the previous slide. So every organization is going to be different, and we are seeing the greatest trend towards a hybrid work environment other than the folks that do need to be there full-time. For their needs. But some companies are making these decisions to return full-time based on the type of business they're in, whether it's Tesla mandating it or even, you know, large accounting firms like Deloitte and others because of the collaboration and innovation that happens in person. But, you know, if you really want to, you know, take the great return, the great reflection, you know, into consideration, it is about, you know, taking your your employees' feedback and opinions into the equation. And so when you look at everything that people want in an organization, it really comes back to something as simple as the hierarchy of needs, whether you're Maslow's hierarchy of needs or this adjusted one where we've, you know, talked about what do I get, what do I give, how do I know if I belong, and how am I going to grow? Because the number one thing people want is to know that their work is seen and valued, and they want the opportunity to learn and grow, and they really want to know what's going on in the organization. So that's where things like communication and recognition come into play, you know, as a key element and a reflection that people would want to be thinking about when they are planning not just this great return. It isn't so much returning to the office, as I kind of highlighted earlier. It's kind of a return to, you know, reevaluating what you need to do to keep your best and attract the best to your organization. And that comes into taking into consideration, like, does my opinion count? Do I align with the mission, vision, and values of the organization? To having a best friend at work. But in the case of kudos, you know, it is, you know, more of like making sure that people are seen and valued and empowered to recognize others. And And it's more of not being told what to do, but to get that coaching and feedback from your supervisors, whether it comes in the form of recognition or from the organization and communication just to keep you in the know, and eventually leading to the opportunity to learn and grow. Because when people do leave their organizations, you know, with the great resignation that happened, a lot of people reevaluated everything that they were working for and reconsidering if the companies that they were working for met their needs and allowed them to achieve their goals. And that all comes down to helping people advance in their careers or to be the best version of themselves. And, you know, there are lots of things that you can do, you know, but when you get into, you know, meeting people's basic needs and their social needs and then self-esteem, which comes into recognition to self-acquisition, which is learning and developing as a person, the 2 easiest things you can do to you know, be on the right path is to communicate, communicate, and communicate, and make sure that you're recognizing your people for what they do on a regular basis so that they feel it's an inclusive environment, that it's equitable, and that they can give recognition, and that they do honestly belong and fit where you are. So these are important considerations and even a great survey that you could run. Contact Monkey. On to you, Katie.

Speaker A: Thank you, Tom. Perfect. And just when it comes to Great Return, I'm gonna just talk about kind of internal communications and what you can do here. And then Tom will talk more about how employee recognition fits in as well. And so I'm gonna be just covering these key 4 points today. I'm sure you've all seen them before, but maybe we're— we know we should be doing them, but we're not actually doing them, which is a lot of cases. for a lot of the things we should be doing in our jobs. So the first one kind of seems fairly obvious, but consistency, just like Tom mentioned, communication, communication, communication is key. It's also consistent communication and sending it frequently. And depending on what that cadence may be for you, it'll be different depending on your organization, whether you're communicating with deskless, remote, hybrid, different offices, different regions, different countries. But we always recommend sending frequent communications, no matter if it's just, if it's through your email, whether it's through your Microsoft Teams, through your SharePoint, through any type of intranet or social network you use. The key is consistency here and developing a schedule and having a content calendar and a different type of emails that people expect to get, just like the different marketing emails we sign up for. We know when to expect them if we're kind of highly engaged. The same comes when it's for your employees. If they expect an email Monday morning or Tuesday afternoon, they know what's coming and you can keep up with that consistent schedule. And depending on where you are and kind of the different industry, we've actually done kind of a huge analysis on people using Contact OneCare customers and anonymized the data for 18 different industries. So you can look at kind of maybe you're in the automotive industry, what your peers are doing, or maybe your competitors are doing when it comes to internal communications. and engaging their employees, what time works best, what are the average open rates they're getting, click-through rates, read times. So you too can do this for yourself and kind of have a benchmark goal there, because if you're going to start kind of sending these communications, it's good to have kind of goals that you want to achieve for, whether you want to hit a certain open rate, whether your eNPS score, you want to up it and figure out how to get there, whether employee survey response rates or kind of click-through rates to content on the internet to figure out what people want to see and what they don't want to see. And also with that goes hand in hand, gathering honest employee feedback. So kind of opening up your channels to 2-way communication rather than just kind of broadcasting out. We always preach the point of 2-way communication. So you're not just kind of sending what you think you should be sending, but you're also sending what's valuable. To employees. Maybe they only need an update once a quarter, maybe it's once a month, and kind of highly relevant as well. Do your marketing employees need to know the same thing as your IT employees or your implementation partners? That sort of thing. So creating that kind of culture of feedback is really important, and you can easily do this within Contact Monkey. And we have the ability— it's all anonymous feedback to drive that honesty, and you can do simple things like How did you like the last town hall? Thumbs up, thumbs down, leave an anonymous comment, and then you can kind of gather all those different qualitative data and kind of improve your communications moving forward. We also have lots of different tip sheets, blogs as well on this on our website. And then kind of, I suppose, the most important part, which is one that a lot of us forget, and a lot of kind of when I'm on calls with our clients that they know they should be kind of looking at the data, looking at the metrics, and changing their strategy accordingly. But as we know ourselves, day-to-day tactical things just come in the way, and it's always nearly put on the back burner. So that's why you kind of— I think it's good to set that benchmark at the start when it comes to whether it's your employee newsletter, whether it's employee recognition, or something else that you're kind of trying to get out there to your employees. So measuring your communications is very important. Using a software to use this, ContactMonkey is straight into Outlook and Gmail, so it's really handy rather than using an external marketing tool which IT might not like because there may be an unsubscribe there. You don't really need your employees unsubscribing. Kind of identifying as well of the different locations, maybe departments, job titles, what engagement levels are like. Are IT less engaged in marketing? Our sales as engaged as marketing and so on. And then kind of just looking at read time as well to see what content people are engaging with, what are they clicking through to. If you are pushing them to the intranet, is one article gaining a lot more traction than another, kind of, and then adjusting your strategy based off of what people want to see. And then also using complementary channels is something we always preach. Internal communications is just like internal marketing, it should just a different audience. We're not going to stop using LinkedIn for our marketing or kind of our Slack channels or anything like that just because we're sending an email. Everything needs to be done together using different channels. And this is kind of one of the reasons we did launch an SMS tool within Contact Monkey. One is to kind of complement your channels. Not everyone is going to be opening their email. And 2, it's also to help those Communicators communicating with the frontline desk staff. Maybe something is an emergency, there's a fire and it needs to get out straight away. I'm not going to check my email if that's going to happen, but I'd probably more than likely check my phone and a text message coming through. And using complementary channels, whether it is employee recognition software and intranet, they need to be all used together and kind of like a marketing stack. And over to you, Tom.

Speaker C: Thanks, Katie. So, you know, now we're looking at the other side of the equation, which is not just the, you know, communication and engagement through keeping people in the know, but, you know, looking at, you know, why do people stay? Because a lot of people will do exit interviews and ask why you left. Most people should be asking, what can I do to make you stay? And one question that was asked in this study was all about, you know, what was the most important thing your manager or company currently does that causes you to produce great work, or in this case, would encourage you to stay with the organization. And by far, just recognize me outweighed all the other elements. Now, people do, when they do leave work, it's usually for an opportunity to advance their career, more pay, but it's closely followed by not feeling respected or not feeling valued as one of the top 3 reasons. And so the easiest thing you can do is to ensure you can support your managers in being a great coach and manager to their team members is empower them to create a consistent and compelling way to coach and recognize their employees with the simple power of a thank you. Other items on this list are all very valid too, but at the same time, it comes down to what can you do that will get you the greatest impact across the greatest part of your industry or reach all of your people. Moving on to the next particular page here, you know, the stats all show it. When you compare, you know, the performance by the numbers, whether it's Gallup or any of the other major organizations, what they have found is that where there's a high degree of recognition, those departments and companies all have better outcomes at the end of the day. Even organizations that strive to become a great place to work and do all of the things that are necessary to become recognized as a great place to work have been shown in a much more provable way that they outperform the stock market. These organizations that are publicly traded, because you can see those— that detail very clearly. So there is, you know, proof on a lot of different levels that focusing on engagement, communication, and recognition as 2 core elements can lead to better business outcomes. Moving on to the next slide. And then it just comes down to the science of recognition. And we all intuitively know that being recognized feels good. And it feels good for a reason because it fires off endorphins in your brain when you're being recognized. In fact, You get a greater response when giving recognition. So not just receiving, but giving. Even the anticipation of giving recognition, verbalizing it, can actually create these changes in your brain that are chemical. It's very much like gamification in games as well, and why so many people love playing games. It's for that immediate endorphin dopamine response. So if you do want to have people feeling more positive and help their well-being and to ensure they're more resilient, again, it comes back to something as simple as giving them a little bit of recognition and praise, letting them know how they're doing and helping them achieve their goals by coaching them into the right direction can make a world of difference. And it's the gift that keeps on giving. Rewards are great and people will accept rewards, but rewards aren't what drive long-term behavioral changes. Small moments of appreciation and recognition done over time, recognizing the behaviors that lead to the outcomes that you want, is the way to go. And we have a great article on our website that really explains this well, and we can share that with you afterwards. And what we're trying to do, you know, with these various strategies of communication and recognition is focus on the entire employee lifecycle. So you can use great communication from someone's first day, from the attraction standpoint, to their last day and turn them into an evangelist. You know, we're not gonna keep people forever, but you can measure things like average tenure. Anything over 3.5 years now is actually— I don't know if a 5-year award or a 10-year award are gonna be things that are normal in the future because people do change jobs. But while they change jobs, or when they're with you, you want to make sure that you're doing all the right things to get the most from those team members by engaging them. And even the great return, in some articles, they talk about the boomerang kids, the kids that leave but come back. And even those that leave and think that they're just looking for something better, something different, a great majority of them, up to 40%, will actually regret their decision to leave. And in a lot of situations, they actually will come back, but they need to come back for the right reasons. And you have to really take those opportunities to understand why they left in the first place. And it will help you improve everything. But attraction, recruitment, great onboarding process, development, and retention are very communication-focused. But even through separation, you can turn those people into your best evangelists that could lead you to your next great great employee. And then moving on to just how to build a great culture, it is about having this partnership with your teams and listening and, you know, using that feedback to better understand them. And even in the case of a product like Kudos, you know, communicating is great, getting feedback is awesome, but also observing how people interact with one another than the things they say. It is like a 360 feedback loop where you can see how people are connected to one another, how they're supporting one another, what things they're accomplishing, and how they're helping move your company in the right direction. And that comes back to what Katie was talking about. It's no point in doing all this if you're not measuring it and getting the data to help you make better decisions going forward. That said, I would still say communicate in person, thank people in person, and work things into your regular routines and rituals. Putting in programs that can create reach and consistency and make things systematic because folks specifically in HR and marketing, you're overworked and underpaid in a lot of situations. And so any tool that can make your job better and allow you to reach your goals is a great way to do this. But you do need to have buy-in from the top. You need to be focusing on building strong connections with your team members. You know, make recognition easy for everyone in this situation. You know, and a lot of companies focus on the wrong thing, which is, you know, rewards. I'll give you this if you do that. Please stay. And they, you know, even in the old days, it was all about perks and benefits and, you know, gym memberships. And that just doesn't work anymore, especially if you're not at the office. So it's more about building strong connections with people. And most importantly, you need to be consistent. And then you can build that culture of recognition that'll take your company to the next level. And how do you send a great thank you? You know, it's, you know, you can be the star of your company if you make recognition specific. Like, don't just say thanks. Explain exactly why you're giving them the recognition. Be timely with it. You know, it doesn't mean it has to happen right after this webinar or even in the same day. in the same weeks just fine. It's just doing performance reviews every 3 months or every 6 months. It's too far removed. They won't even know why you're giving them praise in those situations. And make sure when you do give recognition, you're aligning it with core goals or your core values and recognizing those behaviors that you admired in them or saw them perform, which leads to the outcomes that you want. And then just having a system creating the ability to involve everyone. make it consistent throughout all your managers and departments, and to give you the information that you need to continually improve your process. And that'll make you a star at recognition. And if you are looking at a recognition program potentially, we have a great white paper on how you can make the case to take it up the food chain in your organization to move away from manual. And I would love to hear— we don't have a poll for this, but I would love to hear through the chat, you know, what are you currently doing for recognition? Is it, you know, just nomination top-down, or are you using any kind of system or program that is on a peer-to-peer level? Are you just doing it in a manual way that's not effective? But if you could— throw a few points in the chat on what you're currently doing, that would be greatly appreciated. And of course, if you have any questions, you know, as we start to wrap this up, we'll be happy to answer them. And of course, please feel free to link in as well with myself, and I'm sure Katie would appreciate it too, where we can carry on these conversations in a different forum.

Speaker A: Perfect. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of just to start dropping your questions in now in the chat, and I'll just go through the last few slides. But Kudos, I saw the platform myself. I think it would be a great thing to have here at Contact Monkey because as you kind of go to that remote environment, it's harder to say the thank yous and kind of recognize people. In the office, you maybe kind of went up to them in person, shouted across the room, or kind of did it in your all-hands standup, which we used to do every evening standing in a circle. So you don't kind of get the opportunity as much when you're kind of not in person. So kind of a tool like Kudos really kind of helps helps exemplify it and kind of get it into the forefront of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis. And then if anyone's interested in kind of some of the stats I went through, we have our Global State of the Communication surveys. It goes through kind of the return to work and different plans there, but also kind of key trends and KPIs and goals for internal communications as a whole, and also looking back at trends over the last 3 years. We're also offering free trial if anyone wants to try it out, ContactMonkeys tool. We have our drag-and-drop email builder, which is really easy to use. You can kind of measure your results once you get kind of consistent with your communication. So we're happy to kind of introduce anyone to a person from our sales team if you're interested, or if you want to book a demo and see it yourself, that's also an option. And now, Nadira, if you want to kind of Bring us through any questions coming through? Of course.

Speaker B: Thanks, Katie and Tom. You've both given some great tips and strategies to handle the Great Return. I know it's on a lot of people's minds. One of the questions actually came through is, have you found a specific format that's the most effective for emails? Is it like a lot of graphics? Is it HTML? How long should it be?

Speaker A: Yes, so we kind of have a lot of best practices here when it comes to them, sending them. We have kind of our designer at hand to kind of figure it out and kind of help you with it. But usually kind of that Z format, the way people's eyes naturally flow. If you're kind of putting your content, if there's a lot of content with imagery and text, it's good to do that. When it comes to the length of the email, I suppose it really depends on the content you're sending, but I always think shorter the better. Sometimes we have clients coming to us and they have like PDF magazine books that they want to put into an email, and with kind of Outlook or Gmail, it's going to cut it off at some stage. So making sure you're not kind of having too much content that will cut it off, including different things like call to action buttons to drive people to click through if that's the goal, and thinking about the goal of the actual email you're sending out before you're just saying, I want to just throw a lot of content at people. Kind of thinking of the value of the content you're sending out. What's in it for me from the recipient side? And then one thing we always recommend is kind of once you're happy with it, review your content and see if you can cut your content by 30%. Do you really need to kind of have that all in there? Because when you think about emails, what do you want? If there's one value you want to take away from it, if you have all this clutter and a lot of content that needs to get out, but maybe we do it in first fashion. Maybe it's not all in one email, maybe it's different segments, maybe it's kind of a monthly spotlight and kind of just showcasing it that way. And then always just testing different things. You can test and use compare campaigns to see which worked better and which didn't. Perfect.

Speaker B: Another question that came through is, have you found— and this one can be either Katie or Tom— have you found employee engagement dipping since moving to a hybrid work environment? And I know, Katie, you mentioned that— oh, sorry, Tom, go ahead.

Speaker C: Oh, go ahead. Say what you're gonna say, Nadira.

Speaker B: I was gonna say, I know that Katie, they do NPS score surveys through the emails. So this question is open to either of you.

Speaker C: Just more from an external experience and just looking at overall global engagement scores, engagement is still quite low, you know, not where it could be. So there's lots of things that organizations certainly can do to make improvements. Has it dipped more? I think I've seen through some of the studies that engagement has in the near term increased a little bit because of the more autonomy and flexibility that people have had, which made them happier. But right now we're starting to see in a lot of other items where The pendulum always tends to swing really far one way and then really far another way. And so, you know, disengagement is going to, you know, the novelty of working at home and having that autonomy is going to wear off a little bit. And then, you know, the other realities of work will start to come back in if you're not really getting great support from your managers. if you're not, you know, feeling like you're connected to the company, companies will be— or individuals will start to slide down the disengagement scale again. And Katie, I don't know if you've seen that in your specific studies or surveys from team members, if it's also— did it oscillate up to more engagement as people were like, wow, I love working at home, and then now they're like, wow, I'm so lonely and I don't feel connected to my company and I Might as well just go work somewhere else, who cares?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's kind of doing that. It's like a cycle at the minute. At the start, it was— it kind of dipped. A lot of people— was information overload. There's a lot of communication going out. What's happening next? No one knows. Things are changing every day. And now as we become more steady, kind of in, if you can call it, post-pandemic world, that type of thing, we feel it's kind of growing up now. And then in our global server, I'm pretty sure it's kind of— it showed did stay the same or it is slightly improved over the past couple of years. But I know internally at Contact Monkey, we do, depending on what's going on, we have to change things up. So say, for example, we in person, we used to do daily standup. Everyone kind of chat about what you did. When we went remote, it was still a daily standup through Zoom. People got sick of this, kind of got stale. There wasn't the value add there that there was previously when it was in person. So we changed this up to once a week. Now we've changed it to once a month plus a town hall. So I think it's really kind of depending on what's happening at your workforce, always gathering employee feedback and those different types of polls, putting them out there and just responding as employees kind of say what they want, meeting them where they want to be met in their work environment. If flexibility is the thing, kind of change the working hours. That's what we've done. For different employees when it comes to kind of meeting them where they are. Not everyone has to be in Toronto anymore, kind of. You can hire all over Canada. So I think that's the most important thing is just being aware of it and then kind of being on top of it will stop it dipping.

Speaker B: Awesome. Okay, another question came in. What are 3 differences of motivation? Between millennials versus older generations?

Speaker C: Is someone making fun of my age? Okay, I'll answer the old person question. Katie can answer the young person. But truth be told, there isn't a whole lot of difference. You know, the older generation of folks were more familiar with more of a top-down nomination-based traditional systems that, you know, was kind of referred to as far power. Like, you— it's very unlikely that you would engage with the CEO in your organization if you were a boomer and, you know, working in the '60s and '70s and '80s, where it was more about the 25-year watch and, you know, and just milestone awards, you know, almost, you know, congratulating people for having the staying power. Like, wow, you actually made it 25 years. Here's a watch.

Speaker B: Wow. Wow.

Speaker C: You know, kind of thing. But the times have changed mainly because communication channels have changed. Millennials and boomers alike, everyone has now been fully indoctrinated into mobile technologies. Boomers are the largest and fastest growing demographic on products like Facebook, whereas millennials, Zs, and alphas are, you know, the TikTok generation. So everyone is really connected to one another. And now it's turned to this idea of near power where there really isn't a whole lot of difference between, you know, the intern and the CEO. The intern, in fact, will likely link in with the CEO and likely send them a text message because that's the nature of what they know. And so creating and using systems that, you know, facilitate that, you know, quick communication is is engaging. And it's also a scenario where everyone is the same. It doesn't matter what age you are. Everyone appreciates being appreciated. And even from a manager standpoint, your team doesn't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And they're looking for those, you know, mentors to pass on the knowledge. And tools like our tools that we're talking about today are just the, you know, the, the ways that you can start to facilitate that. Katie, what do you think since you're the young one on the—

Speaker A: I almost look younger than I am. Um, no, yeah, I completely agree. Like, when I kind of first started off my career, it's very similar to kind of how you mentioned top-down structure working in corporate. You didn't really kind of engage too much with what you taught, you know, your phrase top-down.

Speaker C: to the CEO or they wouldn't even make eye contact.

Speaker A: Yeah, like, oh, don't look, don't look. They're like, I can't talk to them. It's like talking to like a celebrity, as some people may say. But now, as kind of work structures change and kind of everything's changing, it's a lot more flat. Definitely at Contact Monkey, and I suppose the different types of clients we work with, they're all different ones, so it depends on the industry. But flat structure is really kind of taking the forefront, uh, wherever you are. Especially when you mentioned kind of like the likes of TikTok. I wouldn't really be— I think that's a bit younger than I am, but a lot of people kind of going for that now, especially from the employer branding side of things as well, kind of really nearly taking over Instagram for employer branding and showing what work life is like, taking over from LinkedIn where you kind of would see your work life and kind of it's going that route. And I suppose the main thing is companies just need to adapt. As we kind of hire for the new workforce, kind of adapting where they want to be met with the different channels they use, kind of the different types and style of work that they're used to as well. And kind of, as you said, they're kind of the intern and the CEO. They'll all now interconnect with each other. And kind of one thing I suppose we preach here, it doesn't matter who you are at Contact Monkey. If you have an idea, we'll try it out. It doesn't matter who you are. As long as we measure it, that's the most important thing kind of we go for when we're testing and learning new things is just measuring it. If it worked, it worked great. If it didn't, at least we learned why.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And Lawrence asked or provided some insights as well in the Q&A just on, you know, how you communicate and the language that you use. I do believe that that is absolutely true in that XRs are kind of in that same area, Lawrence, where you know, boomers, when you say, you know, be a superhero, or to Xers, which tend to be a little bit more cynical, I guess. My little brothers are Xers. And, you know, they kind of grew up in tougher times where, you know, when they came out of school, it was a little tougher to get a job. And that kind of relationship of, you know, a job for life wasn't there anymore if you wanted it. And so just even the way that you phrase things and the terminology you use can be significant— that, that can be significantly different based on the audience that you're trying to talk to.

Speaker B: Awesome. Yeah, that was what I was going to say about Lawrence's message there.

Speaker C: Oh, something happened. Oh, there we go.

Speaker A: Oh, I just stopped the share.

Speaker B: Okay. And then the— there was a question that came in here. We don't have much of a budget. How can we improve our employee recognition and internal communication on a small smaller budget?

Speaker C: Yeah, this is where, you know, people conflate the idea of recognition and rewards. You don't need to have a massive budget to give people stuff. You know, a lot of our clients run our recognition program without rewards at all. That's one of the unique differentiators of our product, that points aren't required. We always say points aren't the point. You know, people will accept rewards and they love rewards. But it's not what's going to get them to stay. It's going to be the relationship you build and the recognition that they receive, you know, and it's— that's what fires those emotions in your brain to build those stronger connections. And it's been shown that if you just have a stronger connection and feel valued and appreciated, it will take a significant amount of money for someone to actually make a very difficult decision to leave. And if you go back to the Q12, you know, you look at that, nothing has to do with money on the Q12. Nothing has to do with rewards on the Q12. It's all about, you know, do you care about me? And do you— are you helping me become, you know, the best person I can be to advance my career? So to answer your question, you know, first of all, just make sure you're doing it as part of a normal ritual of showing appreciation and communicating consistently and clearly with your team. But then if you want to make it more prolific, you know, look at systems to create consistency and reach. And, you know, in products like ours, which is just a seat license, it can be as cheap as $3, $4 per person per month to have a system put in place to, you know, allow everyone to live a culture of appreciation and to show gratitude towards others. So it doesn't have to be terribly expensive. And then if you did want to still have some fun with competition contests and rewards, you can, you know, use elements like that that keep the budgets a lot tighter. A good rule of thumb, I don't know if this will, you know, you'll think it's expensive or you think it's cheap. But Conference Board did research several years ago and they found that the average money spent on casual reward programs like on-the-spot peer-to-peer, you know, and even including some team events is somewhere between $150 per person per year to $250 per person per year. Now, you could give somebody a bonus of $250 or a reward for $250 and it'll be forgotten in 30 days or be a so-what moment. But if you give them recognition all through the year and show them that you care and that you value what they do, you'll have a multiplier effect that's 100 times that value. Hope that answered your question.

Speaker A: And then just kind of from our side of things, if you wanted to get into tracking, usually email is where people start because it's the best way to get in the door to get a business case in front of leadership. Everyone's using email. Like, again, an intranet or employee app can be a long time to kind of deploy, and maybe that's down the line to get to there. But if email is the first, kind of the great thing about Contact Monkey, we sit on top of your Outlook or Gmail. We deal with a lot of one-person communication teams. We know internal communication can range from one-person teams to everyone doing everything to kind of 50-person team. So it really depends. So if you are that one-person team, we have kind of resources at hand to help you get there. The free trial, we have our email designer to help out for kind of designing the emails and then getting to start measuring. And then maybe you can build the case for a bigger budget if you need it down the line, or maybe we kind of fit in with that budget that you already have. And then also, we recently just launched actually a new blog on how to gain, get a bigger IC budget. So I can share that as well in the email after this for you.

Speaker C: Yeah, in the white paper we've listed building a business case is very helpful as well, because it's not so much as what does it cost, but what is going to be the return on your investment? What are you going to save? Because just, you know, employees leaving is terribly expensive and terribly disruptive. to your organization. And the money that we have to spend to just recruit people and to hire, you know, recruiters and other items is terribly expensive. So for every, you know, percentage you can improve in turnover, you can save thousands of dollars and have a very positive ROI. And that's basically the business case you have to make to your CFO and CEO. Everybody has a little bit different motivation. Like CEOs, CFOs care about the bottom line, driving performance, you know, making sure that it's a good return on investment. Whereas, you know, CHROs and other people want to just make sure that they're building a, you know, a really strong engaged culture with the best talent. But HR managers and other folks are just looking for ways to streamline operations. and make the process easier. But, you know, products like these are meant to do that. So we can solve the problem on, you know, simplifying things, streamlining things, getting more reach and effectiveness while driving positive business outcomes. So that's why we really refer to Kudos as performance recognition. Because it's all about, again, recognizing the little things continuously, making it teachable moments and those Recognizing the small behaviors lead to large results.

Speaker A: Yeah, and it's kind of, I think, as well to that, linking it back to those business goals, the bottom line goals that they want to see, and kind of the value there, especially with attrition. I think the cost of replacing an employee could be 6 months the salary of an employee. Rather, if you use something like kudos, you could have kept them in the first place.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker C: Uh, Lawrence is asking lots of good questions. Whoo. I'm gonna have to get you on the panel next time, Lawrence. Do we want to go through these? Are we— how much time do we have left? 7 minutes? Or like the, you know, we've had a pretty good group that's been hanging in there. Thank you all for hanging in there. Hopefully you've found this good. If you found it good, give us a thumbs up on the emoticon things. And if you have anything you want to chat about, reach out to us directly.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's the last of our questions. So, um, Katie, I'm gonna pass it to you to wrap it up.

Speaker A: Perfect. Thanks everyone for joining. Um, it's been great. Um, so we hope to do this again. Um, lots of thumbs up coming in there. Someone has 5 pages of notes, which is great to see. Uh, we'll be sharing everything afterwards as well, and a lot of different resources. But if you do want to do this again, CommConnect is a conference we have coming up in November. I know it's a couple of months out, but we'll be sharing that as well. It's Contact Monkey's virtual conference. We're going to be— hopefully Kudos will join us on it, but we'll be talking about a lot of different things from DE&I, mental health and wellness, cybersecurity, and a lot of other things around employee engagement and have a lot of different types of panels, ask me anything questions, fireside chats. So that'll be all coming up in November, but in the meantime, we'll send through the recording of this. And thanks again, everyone, for your time today.

Speaker C: Thank you, everybody. Really appreciate you showing up.

Speaker A: Thanks. Bye. Bye-bye.