Key Findings from the Global State of Internal Communications Survey

Speaker A: Welcome everyone to today's webinar by Regan Communications in partnership with Contact Monkey that will explore key findings from the Global State of Internal Communications Survey. My name is Amanda Jorgensen, Strategic Program Manager at Regan Communications, and I'll be your host today. On behalf of Regan Communications, I'm excited to welcome you to today's virtual event. Over the next 60 minutes, we'll be hearing key trends shaping internal communications in 2021 and real-life examples and anecdotes from a fellow internal comms professional. All of you in the audience will be able to ask our presenters questions through the Q&A box found at the bottom of your screen. Please type your questions in as they come to you, as I'll read them off to our speakers after their presentation. During this event, you're in listen-only mode. That means that your line is muted so that you cannot hear the other participants or any background noise. You may be listening to the event today on your computer speakers or on your phone line. Depending on the speed of your internet connection, you may experience breaks in your audio broadcast over the computer. If you experience any audio trouble on the computer, we recommend dialing in on the phone line for the best and most reliable audio connection. I encourage you to submit your questions during the presentation so that way we can get started with the Q&A session immediately following the session for the webinar. To do so, again, please put them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. If you have any technical questions, please enter those into the chat box and we'll do our best to help you. So once again, please use the Q&A box for presenter questions and the chat box for technical questions. Now that everyone knows how and where to place their questions, I'd like to introduce you to our presenters for the day. We have Matili Jha, the Senior Digital Manager marketing manager at ContactMonkey, and Tammy Dodson, the senior manager of corporate communications at Adtran. Maithili, I'm handing things over to you.

Speaker B: Hi, thanks, Amanda. So I'm just gonna share my screen real quick. Yeah, so hi everybody. I'm Maithili Ja, as Tammy mentioned, and I'll be walking you through the key findings that we discovered through our global survey that we conduct annually among internal communicators. So Tammy's already, I mean, Amanda's already done the introduction, so I'll gloss over this slide and quickly go over the format. So basically I'll be walking you through the key findings of our survey and also having a chat with Tammy, who is an internal communicator and who's been using different channels to optimize her internal communications. And we'll just get some great anecdotes from her on how she's leveraged these channels to improve our internal communications. So going over the table of contents, we'll be talking about who the survey was conducted among. So who were our respondents? What were the trends that were interesting them in 2021? We'll also be talking about what kind of content appeals to and adds value to internal communicators, as well as their goals and challenges. We'll then go into what are the channels they're using and how are they leveraging them? As well as the strategy and culture at their organizations, the software and tools that they use, and also we'll get a little bit of insight into how internal communicators have been managing remote work and preparing for going back to the office. So going over who are the respondents, we had participation from across the globe, including countries like USA, Canada, Africa, India, United Kingdom, and many more. So it's quite a widespread spread across the world. And then in terms of sizes, we had people who participated from smaller companies with 1 to 50 employees all the way up to more than 10,000 employees. So I'm sure you'll have your organization represented in the responses that we have. And then when it comes to the departments that these respondents were from, it was primarily internal communications, human resources, marketing, and others. But it just— regardless of which departments they reported into, all of our respondents were basically responsible for the corporate communications that goes out to their employees. So going over what are the top internal communication trends that are interesting communicators this year, we saw that the top trends of 2021 are employee experience. So this makes a lot of sense because employee experience is essentially a person's experience with their organization from the first touchpoint to the very last one. And research suggests that 80% of leaders do consider this one of the key facets to a successful company. Followed by remote work, I think we can all understand why this was a leading trend over the past year, and also the future of work. So future of work has been a top trend even since 2020, but what we noticed was that the definition of future of work has evolved over the last year, and now it focuses a lot more on virtual recruitment and also engaging a remote or hybrid workforce. So, Tammy, when you look at these trends, which ones stand out to you or align with your organizational goals?

Speaker C: They all really play a part, but the one that really comes out to me is the remote work. At Adtrend, we had previously been a company that really frowned upon folks working remotely unless they were in our sales organization and, you know, were distributed throughout the world. But we, you know, we sent the majority of our workforce virtual during the pandemic. And now coming back from the pandemic, the bulk of our workforce will either be work from home or hybrid. So definitely that's a major trend for us here at Atria.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And that also adds to what the other trends that were highlighted were, which was new blended workforce, 'cause most organizations are now, if not going completely remote, at least considering a hybrid workforce. And that's definitely going to be a defining thing that drives internal communication strategy going forward. So when we looked at what was the content that internal communicators use, great to know that they found webinars the most useful. Obviously everyone working from home, this is one of the best ways to get information, especially because we don't have in-person events as much anymore. So they did find webinars most useful, followed by blogs, templates, and then email as well. Is— do any of these resources stand out to you, Tammy?

Speaker C: Yes, email was our main line of communication with our workforce. Once we went remote, we did it very quickly, and using our ContactMonkey platform, we are able to put communications together very quickly. We segment our internal audiences much like you would an external audience, so we can, you know, target specific groups of people. So Those who were on site, who we called on-site mission critical, if we needed to communicate with them, we didn't send those same messages to everybody who was working from home and vice versa. And the template that you noted there, that, that's a big part to me of what helps because we already have pre-established templates in our system and that helps us put communications together extremely quickly. And it also helps our employees be able to simply look at the template and automatically know if that applies to them. So it's really helpful there.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And then we also wanted to know, because of course, like you said, lots of emails and templates are being used. So we wanted to know what kind of communication internal communicators are primarily focusing on when they send newsletters to their workforce. So important updates came out on top, followed by company events, and top 3 would be important updates, company events, and CEO announcements. I think these make a lot of sense because when your workforce is dispersed, you really want to make them feel connected to your organization. Hearing from the leadership makes a huge difference, knowing that they care and they want to talk to you and they want to keep you updated. Is— do any of these stand out to you in terms of which you send out?

Speaker C: We actually use all of these at some point during the year. So anything from communications from our CEO down to those, you know, annual type messages, holiday messages, but really those important updates, you know, having just come through the pandemic, that was really important for us in making sure that our employees were on top of how things were. Being a global company, we were able to provide them updates about multiple locations and how things differ between them. And now, as we are returning to work, we actually have special communications just for that. So I think all of these are very important, but especially those updates now as we see the transition in the workforce.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And then we wanted to know what were the goals that internal communicators were working toward this year, and the top goal is employee satisfaction. So employee satisfaction essentially translates to higher employee engagement, more productivity, and lower attrition. So if, if we see that most people are choosing that as their priority, it almost feeds into the rest of the goals, which is improved productivity, lowered attrition, increased participation, And then of course culture change is coming next because as we discussed, everybody is thinking about transitioning back to work or managing a new format for a workforce. So this will be really critical for internal communicators. What is it like at Adtran?

Speaker C: Very much the same. Employee satisfaction is of course at the top. The best thing you can do to help your employees have a positive attitude about the workplace is to make them informed. Keep them in the loop, let them know what's going on. And that is really one of the things that has driven our communications over the last year and a half and continues to drive it. We're also in there with a culture change and the increased participation. And you're right, all of these come together and contribute toward that lower attrition because Happy employees tend to stay, where those who are not satisfied, you know, typically will eventually leave. So we're trying to use that communication to keep our employees happy, keep them informed, and help them to understand the business that they're contributing to on a daily basis.

Speaker B: Yeah, and, and somebody who's been in remote working for the past year, I can say that it Honestly, it doesn't impact how engaged you feel with the company as long as you're communicating regularly with the people that you work with. The only thing we probably miss out on is that in-person interaction, but having that regular communication can really just make sure that all these goals are met. And then when we looked at what are the challenges that internal communicators are facing, the one that came out on top was lower employee feedback and responsiveness. So we know that employee feedback is a key metric for internal communicators, but we have received this feedback even from customers that how are we going to get not only feedback but get that genuine feedback, and that's something that, that's a challenge that internal communicators seem to be working toward in 2021, followed by tracking and measuring. So the interesting thing that we found from the 2021 research was that while tracking and measurement was still a top challenge for internal communicators, it's now less of a challenge than it was the previous year. So we saw that 72% of our respondents struggled with measurement in 2020 and now only 56% do. So it's good to see that over the year internal communicators have probably invested in more resources and more softwares that can help them measure their communication, especially as the internal communication function became so much more critical over the pandemic. And in terms of feedback I know that a Gallup study said that 3 out of 10 employees, only 3 out of 10 employees feel that their opinions are valued by their company. So I think a key aspect of ensuring high levels of feedback is also to make your employees know through communication that you're listening to them and actually acting on what they have to say. What do you think, Tammy?

Speaker C: Well, these have been some major topics here at ADTRAN over the past several years. When we first formalized our internal communications program, we had members of senior management go, well, does anybody even read their emails? And I quickly came back and said, yes, they do, and I can prove it. And we're able to produce those stats on open and click-through rates to show how everything performs. We actually use some of the other reports that are available to see how we compare to our counterparts in our industry to make sure that we're at or above those levels. And that has actually sped our approval process and made it quite easy to get funding for platforms that allow us to provide that measurement. And we actually share this information back with other groups within the company when we're sending for instance, maybe an internal webinar invite or an internal event invite, we can tell them exactly how that particular email performed and then make adjustments. So as we're doing a resend later on, that we can, you know, actually help to drive those statistics upward. But it has been critical for us to be able to show these type of metrics And the segmentation that we mentioned earlier also come into this because we've been able to create specific templates for different groups within the company and segment our audiences. It has helped to drive our open and click-through rates up significantly. We don't have folks setting rules to send their corporate emails to the trash anymore. Instead, we have people who will come back and say, well, wait, I didn't get that. And we'll go, well, let's figure out why you didn't get that. And I'm glad you want to get that now. So it's really the tracking and measurement has been a key factor to the success of the program overall.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I know that when it comes to email, one of the fears is always email overload. And like you mentioned, if you're able to track and if you're able to go deeper into it, you're also able to have more targeted communication. And then when employees are not not getting inundated with your communication, they automatically want to hear more because they see value in it. So even though majority of the respondents said tracking and measuring and low employee feedback are their biggest challenges, we still had a good percentage that found engaging remote employees, interdepartmental communication, and getting budget and approval also a huge challenge. And engaging remote employees makes sense. It was a very sudden shift that most workforces had to face, and internal communicators suddenly to come to the forefront and really just carry the weight of keeping employees engaged. And then when it comes to interdepartmental communication, maybe some organizations struggled with that at the start, but like you said, as you figure out the best ways to communicate with your employees, the more you're able to impact that and foster a more communicative culture. And then finally, yes, if you use tools like Tammy uses email, those metrics can really get you— help you build that case for ROI and then get budget and approval and overcome that challenge that understandably many internal communicators face. So when it comes to the usage of channels for internal communications, yeah, we wanted to know which channels internal communicators have relied on the most in the past year, and email newsletters have come out on top. We'll hear a little more from Tammy on this, but like she said, it does have a lot of value in terms of how you can target your communication and also how you can measure and track That's followed by instant messaging tools. I know a lot of us use Slack at our workplaces, followed by company intranet and then collaboration tools. Most companies, I think, use a combination of these, which is important because they all have their role to play. But for internal communication specifically, it seems that email newsletters do add the most value. How do you use these channels, Tammy?

Speaker C: We are across the board in those first 4. Ours would look a little bit different. Email is definitely number one, but then we would probably flip to the collaboration tools. Our company had just implemented Microsoft Teams about 6 months before the pandemic hit, and where our adoption rate had been kind of waning, it suddenly went up to 100%. And we'll never go backward now. That was really a key tool to allowing productivity to continue because we could still have meetings, we could still see each other, and everything wasn't based off of just an email between 2 individuals. So those collaboration tools were great. And as you know, there is an instant messaging or chat feature within that. So that has really caught on, and it's, you know, quick and easy to just send somebody a note, even if they're in a meeting. A lot of times you can still get your answer and not have to wait till their 3-hour meeting ends. The intranet for us was also a big resource, especially during the pandemic. But really, those 4 tools were really the crux of our toolbox and were very much utilized throughout the pandemic and continue to be now, even though we're on the— forefront of returning to work.

Speaker B: Yeah, couldn't agree more. And then in terms of which tools internal communicators found most valuable during the pandemic, 66% of respondents said video conferencing, followed by collaborative apps, followed by email. So those were the top 3, and then I suppose a small percentage relied on phone and then survey tools. So these responses do make complete sense. Video conferencing is the closest thing we have to face-to-face communication communication, and that really makes all the difference. So we can all relate to why that came out on top. And then, like Tammy just mentioned, it's honestly just a good mix of all of them and leveraging them in the right way that will bring you the best results. So we wanted to dive a little deeper into what is the strategy and culture at the organization of our respondents. And to begin with, we wanted to know, do their organizations have a long-term strategy in place for internal communications. It was almost 50/50, but majority still said no, they don't. What do you think of this, Tammy?

Speaker C: I'm happy to see that it's almost that even split, at least, but really that yes number should be higher because I think you have to have a goal to really be successful and to use those ongoing measurements to see how you're performing, because you can do a lot of tasks, but if you don't know what the results of that— those tasks are, it's hard to understand if you're successful or not. So just like we talked about with the email metrics there, that helps us to see what's successful and what isn't, because we have something to measure against. And I think the same thing here. happens with your strategy. If you don't have a long-term strategy, I would recommend that you put one into place and then see how that drives your internal communications efforts going forward.

Speaker B: Yeah, and that's tied back to the challenges that were highlighted, which is, you know, employee feedback or even measurement or getting that budget. It would be so much easier to do with a strategy in place where you can have clear, defined goals and targets and therefore a clear roadmap on how to achieve them. That makes everything a lot more strategic and less tactical, because without that strategy, it's just going to be activity after activity and then figuring it out as you go along. So building that out is key to overcoming a lot of the challenges that were highlighted earlier. We also wanted to get an idea of what kind of budgets internal communicators are working with. Okay, so this was a mix of responses, but definitely the largest percentage don't have a fixed budget. I know, Tammy, we discussed, and it is a little hard to set a fixed budget. So why do you think that is?

Speaker C: Well, I don't— I think your average manager looks at it and says, communication, oh, that's free. We have— we already have email, just use Outlook. Or, you know, we can, you know, print a sign on a piece of paper and just stick it up on the wall. And they don't realize that Those are not effective in the way that they're talking about. That you, again, you have to have a professional look and feel. You have to have those metrics to be able to go back to because you're, you're, you're really having to do that two-way communication. You're sending that message, but you need some feedback to see how well it's being received and what action the individual is taking from it. So, you know, I'm— I've been in this boat at other employers myself, and my budget is still relatively slim. My budget consists of what I pay for my email platform and what I pay for my digital signage platform. So, and those were both hard sells at first, but now that we have those things implemented and in place and can show the value of them, that's become an easy sign-off year after year.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker C: Yeah, agreed.

Speaker B: And it's good to see that, it's good to see that there is still a lot of them playing with big budgets and small budgets, and it does depend also on the size of your organization and what the priorities are. But like we've been seeing that internal communications has become more critical to organizations over the past year, a lot of new things have been tried and tested. So as it becomes a more defined strategy and as it becomes a more metric-driven function, this budget will surely increase. Then we wanted to know what activities take up the most time for internal communicators. Most internal communication teams are still pretty small or even a one-man army and there's so much that needs to be done. So we know that internal communicators are strapped for time and when we asked them, they said that most of their time goes into creating content and templates. templates, followed by 15%, you said, measurement and reporting. I think that's also because not everybody is measuring in the first place, but I guess those who are do spend time on that and then gathering feedback. But clearly creating content and building templates is like a big one. So do you think that's a big one for you all as well?

Speaker C: Oh, it definitely is. You know, I— there are some days where all I do is build corporate emails for different things. And different audiences. So that is definitely top on the list. But I can say that having a platform that makes it easy so that you could already have pre-formatted templates that really all you're looking at is how you're, you know, putting text in and adding a little formatting to speeds that up by volumes. It probably takes me— oh golly, I'm just trying to think here. It's really only a fraction of the time of what it used to for me to pull an announcement together from anyone, whether I'm starting from scratch, someone has sent me content to put in. On average, I would say I could turn the average corporate communication around if there's preexisting content, less than 5 minutes. And if I'm creating the content, typically it's less than a half hour. So that has sped that up tremendously, making me more efficient because I'm one of those teams of one that you mentioned. So in addition to emails, I've got 1,000 other tasks on the list. But being able to turn things quickly is essential. It was just a couple of days ago, I get an email from IT and we've had an outage of a particular system and they're like, how long will it take you to get something out? And I said, give me 5 minutes. And literally within 5 minutes, we had notified the whole company about the system outage and that we would be updating them along the way. So the other departments in your company will start to realize your value and turn to you more often when you can speed that turnaround time up. And our platform has definitely allowed us to do that.

Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. And then I keep going back to the challenges that were mentioned because it's all kind of interconnected. It's when most of your time is going into building templates or building content, you're not able to invest in creating that strategy that you probably need to eventually measure and then get a bigger budget and do more things and therefore get a better ROI out of all your efforts. So yeah, reducing, focusing on reducing time and increasing efficiency so that you can spend less time on tactical things is definitely key. And then we were curious to see what leadership thinks of internal communications in 2021, and we're happy to see that the difference from 2020 is that more— 83% versus 74% of leadership strongly believes in the value of internal communications, and the percentage of internal communicators that disagree with this statement has definitely come down. I think we can all understand why. It's because companies have had to solely rely on communication to keep their culture going, keep their new hires engaged, keep their existing employees productive and connected. And so communications has become really vital, and it's great to see that leadership is recognizing that. We also wanted to learn about how internal communicators are proving their impact, because as we've seen over the years, measurement has been a big challenge, but at the same time, you need— you're doing a lot for for the organization and you're in a way the backbone of the company. So how are you proving what you do? And most internal communicators rely on employee engagement scores. So employee engagement is the overarching goal for most internal communicators. In the end, everything you're doing is to drive up engagement and therefore add to all the other goals that you have, which is employee satisfaction, increased productivity. Lower attrition, all of that is addressed when you improve your employee engagement scores. So that makes total sense. And then that's followed by employee feedback, which definitely could be considered even the most valuable measure of your internal communications because at the end of the day, it's how your employees feel about the organization that really matters. And then that's followed by employee satisfaction scores. So I guess that's another metric that internal communicators really rely on. And then those who, because so many of them use email newsletters for their communication. Open and click rates are really telling in how your communication is doing, how effective it is, are you reaching the right audience at the right time, and are you sending them the right content. And then finally, the retention rate, because that's a huge thing in the US. It apparently costs around $4,000 to replace an employee. So reducing attrition and improving your retention rate is obviously extremely important. How do you prove the impact, Dami?

Speaker C: Well, of course, as I've mentioned, we do the— look at the open and click rate. That is our first, you know, baseline to measure success by. But employee feedback, something that we've noticed is our employees are not shy at all about you know, hitting reply back to whichever of the corporate email boxes sent the message, because a lot of them know they come directly back to me now. And, you know, giving us their very candid feedback on whatever the topic may be. So, and we've encouraged that two-way dialogue, whether it's something that they're excited about, they're glad to see happening, or whether it's something that they think we've missed the mark on. Getting that feedback, like you said, that is really the most valuable feedback. And overall, looking at that employment employee engagement, you know how satisfied are the employees? Has the communication helped award that, and what can we do better to continually improve that?

Speaker B: Yeah, and employee engagement is usually an annual thing that people measure, and there's value in that. But what we've also seen is that at the end of the year, when employees are responding to a survey, it may not represent how they felt. Felt throughout the year as different things have occurred. And like you said, your employees have been very vocal about their feedback, but a lot of companies, they struggle to collect that feedback or they don't feel like they're getting genuine feedback. And there's many reasons for that. Employees often feel like it may not be anonymous, it may affect their performance if they say something negative. So encouraging anonymous feedback that helps them feel safe enough to be candid is also really important. And that's again where email news newsletters make it a lot easier. So for example, at ContactMonkey, our newsletter allows you to embed pulse surveys, and those are really good to test how employees are feeling about a certain change or a certain organizational decision at a given point in time, because you're getting a real-time pulse on what your employees are feeling. And then we also have the option of ENPS scores, which is an employee net promoter score. It's a really quick way to find out how happy your employees are at a given point. And then we also have anonymous comments and star ratings. So these are ways in which employees can anonymously give feedback in real time. It's much shorter and less of a time commitment for them, and it tends to garner a lot more genuine responses as well. So those are some solutions. And then we wanted to look at what were the KPIs that internal communicators work toward, and again, employee feedback is one of the key— top key performance indicators, followed by employee engagement, followed by open and click rates and surveys. Some said integration with Slack, so I guess that was a platform that a lot of internal communicators were adopting, and then ENPS, which is the Employee Net Promoter Score, which is basically how likely is your employee to recommend your organization to somebody else, and that's really telling about how satisfied they are working at your organization. We also wanted to know how internal communicators are using softwares and tools to support their strategy, and we saw that 70% of internal communicators don't use any internal communication solution or software. That's a pretty large number, and that could also explain why measurement is such a challenge, or even feedback is such a challenge, because there's no better way to do it than to use a solution that can help you get that feedback or track your performance. That being said, 30% do use a third-party solution. As we know, Tami does use ContactMonkey and there is a lot of value to that. We also wanted to know what they consider the greatest value add from the different email features. So you could have the email template designs, which is 49% found that the most valuable, and that makes sense considering that creating templates and content takes the most time. So if you have some solution that helps you tackle that challenge, it is going to add the most value, followed by pulse surveys, emoji reactions, comments. So again, these are feedback tools that can help you get that feedback, which is a goal and a challenge and a KPI for internal communicators, followed by event management. So I guess a lot of companies have been having virtual events, And adding events to your newsletters to not only invite employees but to track RSVPs is a great way to drive event engagement and also measure event engagement, followed by eNPS. Tammy, do you use all of these features, one or two of them, or how do you use them?

Speaker C: We've used all of them at some point. Probably our heaviest use is The template designs, like I said, that has done wonders for increasing productivity. You know, we've spent the time, set the templates up, up front, and now it's just a matter of providing new content, which makes the turnaround time a fraction of what it was previously. But all of these features that you mentioned all work very well and are very seamless into the platform. One thing I will say that I've been very impressed with, with the Contact Monkey platform, is the rate at which new features have become available. Most— a lot of the things that you mentioned here have, you know, come out within the last year or so, and that really, to see the continual development of the tool, also helps me as a communicator to think about how I could be doing things differently. And how can I better utilize my tool to reach my particular goals?

Speaker B: That's great to hear because I know at ContactMonkey we're just always taking feedback from customers and then working on features that would either address their challenges or give them something that they're looking for. Um, and then going into internal communications in a post-pandemic world, we wanted to know what the— what it's been like being an internal communicator during a pandemic and also now as we emerge from it. So what were the biggest barriers that they faced when adapting to remote work? And majority of our respondents said lack of human interaction. I think we can all vouch for that. That's definitely been an adjustment for organizations. And then that's followed by overworking. It's also just because every day kind of blurs into the next and there's no real concept of time at this point when you're working from home. So eventually, like a lot of companies worried that productivity would drop, but it was that employees just ended up working a lot more than they would if they were going to the office because you also save a lot of time not commuting. You don't have a defined end to your workday and that definitely adds to that. Followed by communication issues. So this might have even been more early on, which was companies were just so used to interacting in person on a daily basis, and there was a structure to which which just kind of fell apart. And then adopting technologies and identifying the channels that worked worked for you and working with different time zones, all of that definitely created communication barriers. And then 30% did have disengagement from employees. This could be definitely because of that lack of contact, maybe just feeling disconnected, but also probably the fact that everybody was dealing with their own mental health and transitioning to this new lifestyle. That was followed by prioritizing work. So again, I think when you meet every day and when you're having conversations every day, there's a lot more clarity on what you need to focus on. But once you're working from home, there's a lot more left up to you. And maybe that prioritization was a bit of a challenge. And then followed by resource constraint. I think internal communicators really felt that burden of the resource constraint because their responsibility increased tenfold, but their team necessarily did not to match up to the amount of work that they had to do. Which of these did you find the biggest challenge when transitioning?

Speaker C: I would definitely think the first 2, the lack of human interaction. We all missed, you know, really getting to see people face-to-face and have those incidental hallway conversations. But overworking was a big one for us as well. We did actually show increase in productivity that was, you know, pretty substantial. And it was part of that because people didn't find the barrier, you know, at 5 o'clock they weren't leaving to go home. They were at home, and there for the longest we didn't have a lot of other activities, so people would just continue to work. And we actually had to caution our employees to be careful not to overwork, to take some time away, make barriers, get up, walk around, those type of things, because it's just very easy to do that when you're in that constant work-from-home situation, especially when we were in lockdowns and those types of things. type of things.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: And who are definitely at the top.

Speaker B: Great. And then we wanted to know how COVID affected employee engagement. I think a Gallup study in the beginning of the pandemic saw a steep decline in employee engagement rates, especially across the US. But it's good to see that a majority of them either stayed the same or increased. And 30% did see a decrease in employee engagement. But how were the employee engagement levels at your organization?

Speaker C: Our employment engagement levels actually went up in some ways because we were able to get a more refined focus on communications with those employees since we basically were their lifeline to make them feel part of the organization. So we actually saw things go up.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, 26% saw that, and that might seem surprising, but also when you think about the fact that companies really amped up their communication strategy and really focused in on using it to drive up engagement, it makes sense that it would have had a positive impact. We also wanted to know if— I mean, the sense is that internal communications became more critical to organizations over the past year, but we wanted to know, did internal communicators agree with that? that, and it's good to see that 80% did feel like internal communications has been elevated to a more critical position over 2020. So I'm sure you can agree to that, Tammy.

Speaker C: Most definitely. Even here at my company, where the internal communications were seen as important previously, we were elevated to new heights here because we had, we had the opportunity to have the seat at the table to help direct the strategies of how we attacked things from an overall corporate perspective. And that really made a difference in our ability to meet our employees' needs and to get them information quickly and accurately.

Speaker B: Yeah. And how do you feel business has— business or leadership has responded to or planned for returning to work? So I'd love to hear from you. But it's good to see that majority of respondents found their leadership very helpful or extremely helpful, and only a very small 2% said not helpful at all. How do you feel the support has been at ADTRAN?

Speaker C: I think we would definitely be in that very helpful category, if not some would say extremely, because there have been meetings going on for really over a year now. Planning the return to work strategy and what work would look like once we did flip the switch to say we were returning to work. And that involved lots of employee feedback and communication to really see what our employees wanted this program to look like. And now that we're moving from a, you know, 40-hour-a-week on campus to most people being in a hybrid situation and some even being fully work from home. That employee feedback was extremely helpful, and I think management really listened, and we've really done a 180 on our approach to work because we, you know, we did use the pandemic to prove that people can be productive from home and don't require that continual oversight, and that, you know, the tools that we have now have made it very easy to continue to work from another location, whether it be home or, you know, somewhere away from home. It can be done now.

Speaker B: Yeah, and it could actually lead to a lot more, like, a much happier workforce for them to have that flexibility and work in an environment that now everyone's clearly adapted to and is very comfortable with.

Speaker C: Exactly.

Speaker B: And then we were curious to know how many internal communicators have a back-to-work action plan when offices open. I know everybody probably has different timelines for opening, but it's clear that this year we'll see a lot of that. You had mentioned that you all have already opened up offices. We had 65% of respondents who said that they do have an action plan, which is awesome, and 35% not yet. Did you Do you guys have a clear action plan, or is it that you guys are figuring as you go along?

Speaker C: We have a pretty clear action plan, everything from building signage to, you know, helping people figure out, you know, if they're in one of our hotel spaces, where they go, how do they find them, and what computer do they use. So we've been working through all that for quite some time and are rolling all of those pieces out now. So there's some under continual evolution, but the basics of the plan were put together before we ever had the first employee come back.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's really important. And I think this is our last question, but it's great to see how internal communicators have just done such a great job with whatever resources they have at their disposal over the past year, and that despite all this adversity, there have been good employee engagement scores. A lot of the challenges from last year, we've seen an improvement on those fronts like measurement. There's been a quick adoption of new technologies, and it's also great to see that leadership is recognizing that. And although the pandemic called for internal communications and that really elevated its position, I don't expect that to change going forward. I think once the importance has been recognized, it's going to always maintain that critical position. especially now that it's going to be a new kind of workforce. Even if we go back to work, it's never going to go back to the same. So yeah, thank you so much for sharing all your examples with us, Tammy. I'm sure everybody found those really valuable. And for those of you who are interested in going through the entire report, we do have it up for download on our website on this link. And I believe you will be receiving a link to the resources post the webinar along with the recording as well. And then if anybody is curious to see how ContactMonkey can help you drive employee engagement and learn a little more about all the features that Tammy uses and has shared, feel free to book a demo. The link is here. It can also be found on our website and you will receive a follow-up link to that as well. And we have 15 minutes to open it up for questions. So, Amanda, you can take it away.

Speaker A: All right, and we've got a lot of questions, so I'm going to try to get to as many as possible. And obviously, any ones that we are not able to get to today, we'll try our best to make sure we can send them off to our presenters for them to be able to get back to you and answer them afterwards. One quick question I know that someone had asked was, Tammy, how many employees does your organization have? How big is your communications team?

Speaker C: We have about 1,500 employees around the globe, and my employee communications team consists of me.

Speaker A: Okay, well, that's—

Speaker C: So, yes, so, yes, so that's why productivity is key.

Speaker A: Understand, and that's a lot on your plate for sure. Well, now I guess with that, I guess a couple people said that they want to come and work with you because they think you sound great. So you may, you may be able to build your team. You never know. As far as additional questions that we've got coming in, one individual had mentioned that they didn't see that video was listed as an option. Was that presented as an option in the survey?

Speaker B: For which question would that be?

Speaker A: I think it was one of the first questions when we were talking about like webinars being like number one, and then they noticed that there was no video that was listed.

Speaker B: Yeah, that question was more like what kind of content they like to consume. So do they like to consume blogs or webinars? But we did mention video in which of these softwares or tools that they find more useful, and video conferencing had come out on top as one of the most valuable during Okay, great.

Speaker A: And then one of the questions, Gwen, was the fact that webinars did show up as number one. Was there any specific type of— type, like in terms of audience, content length, or anything like that that proved to be more popular that you had heard in your research?

Speaker B: We had not asked specifically the topics. We were just more like, which format would you like to consume content?

Speaker A: Okay. A couple questions that came in around the ENPS scores. Can you expand a little bit in terms of what they are and how you can use them? And somebody said that they've used them for the first time, but were interested in, you know, why 0 to 6 were considered detractors. So could you give— enlighten everybody a little bit more on those ENPS scores?

Speaker B: Yeah, so it's basically based off the net promoter score, which usually is run among customers to be like, how likely are they to recommend your product? So it's basically to know how many have something positive to say about your product. An employee net promoter score is basically just how likely are they to recommend your organization. I don't really recall the exact scoring system, but basically there is the detractors and then there's the promoters. And I can share a link later on for you to include in the resources that explain how the scoring is done. But for ContactMonkey, it's essentially something that you can easily embed into your templates. And then based on the questionnaire employees answer and you get your responses within the analytics to know how engaged your employees are or how satisfied your employees are.

Speaker A: Okay, thank you. And Tammy, you had mentioned about a digital signage platform. Could you tell us a little bit about the digital signage platform that you use and, you know, what exactly it does for you?

Speaker C: We actually use a platform called X2O, and what it does— we have digital signage in the lobby of each floor. Of our 3 headquarters buildings here in Huntsville. And that platform allows me to push PowerPoint content to each of those monitors. And I can, I can do it all the same, or I can put different content on each one, and I can change it by hour of day, day of week. However, it's fully customizable. But what this allows us to do is provide constant communication to our employees Some things, a sample of the kind of content we use would be, you'll find anything from days of remembrance, knowing that, you know, 4th of July or Memorial Day are coming up, or that we just celebrated Juneteenth. You'll see this day in history is pointing out something notary from the, you know, industrial world that we think our engineers might be interested in knowing, that, you know, the day the semiconductor was developed, those type of things. Upcoming meetings or events. We publicize every person's work anniversary during the week in which their anniversary happens. So rather than just getting formal recognition at 5, 10, or 20 years, every year when it's the week of your anniversary, you get noticed throughout our buildings, and that's been a big hit with employees. So really, you know, looking for things like benefits enrollment, when we're having special guests, those type things, it has just really become a good quick medium because it's right there in the lobbies where our elevators are. So as you're waiting on the elevator, you turn around, you watch the digital signage, and you get a good nutshell of what's going on at ADTRAN for that particular week. So it really has been helpful from that situation. You can run video through the system, although we found that when you've got it going on every floor, it can be a little loud and distracting, and video without words is not always the best. So we don't do a lot of video production on those, but we do also have things like the time, the day, recent press releases that we've released. News headlines are also there, as well as our stock price. So it's really, if you think about your computer dashboard, it's really Adrian's dashboard on each of those monitors.

Speaker A: Okay, thank you. A couple questions going back into the email side of things. So tell it— a couple questions with regards to, you know, the tools and systems that you're using to collect data and be able to track the email metrics. How exactly are you doing that?

Speaker C: Well, and I do use ContactMonkey. So the tools that are provided with the end automatically, I can track my campaigns. I can look by individual email, and I can see automatically click-through rates, open rates, and even see how many, you know, clicks a particular link within that email receives. So what it allows me to do is look, because we segment our emails in a couple of different ways. One, there are different templates templates for different areas of the company. So if you're getting a benefits announcement, it looks different than a facilities announcement or an IT announcement, and it helps you to quickly know which ones are more relevant to you rather than just getting everything that says, you know, AddTrend News across the top of it. And then we also segment the populations that we send certain announcements to. So some things will go Only to our Huntsville campus. Some things go only to our Germany campus. Some things I want to go all US. Sometimes I want to send just to a particular department within the company. Say if I'm advertising their town hall that's coming up, everybody in the company doesn't need to know R&D is having a town hall meeting next week, but R&D really wants to know that. So I can also tell by looking at those statistics that it brings in for me, how those particular announcements perform on average. So for instance, I can tell you we have a team within the company called Team Advent. That's our volunteer arm out into the community. My Team Advent announcements are going to average about 68 to 70% open rate because there's just going to be a population within the company company who's, who's not interested in that, and I know that. Whereas if I'm doing a benefits announcement, those will usually end up in the 80 to 95% or higher open rate. If it's during benefits enrollment season, those will hit right in the 100% rate. So it helps me to set expectations. So if we do an announcement and it doesn't perform you know, really well, then I could go back and try to decipher why. Was it just lack of interest, or did we not do something correctly, or could we have done something better? Could I have used a different subject line? Should we have sent on a different day of the week, a different time of the week? And those are all things that you can get from those statistics and actually see. I mean, I was surprised when we first started looking at things to know that actually if I send emails at about 6 o'clock in the evening, they get a really high open rate. And most people, I would have been surprised because I would have thought with it being an engineering population that most people went home, you know, they closed their computer at 5 and didn't open it up again to the next morning. But that's where their mobile devices come in. Also, another surprising fact that we found out through Contact Monkey, that even as advanced as things are and as dependent as we are on our phones, phones, about, about 92% of our employees still primarily read their email on their computer.

Speaker A: Interesting. That actually brings to another question is that, you know, do you have ways that you can, or that you're doing that for employees who don't, maybe don't have access on a daily or regular basis to their computers or email compared to those who do? Are you doing anything that's different to be able to engage with those, those people?

Speaker C: It's funny that that's mentioned because we do have 2 different segments of workforce here. We have what I'm going to label as professional, your engineers, accountants, that type thing. And then we do have 200 to 300 people in our manufacturing organization that are actually over there building product. And they have to access email through a kiosk. They don't have email on their phone, so they have to go to a common kiosk and log into their accounts to see email. We have changed our behavior somewhat. They will still receive the same communications, but we may change the time of day and days of week we send them. For instance, we have a regular weekday shift that works 4/10 Monday through Thursday, and then we have a weekend shift. Well, if we're sending everything during the weekday shift, the weekend shift's seeing it a week late. So we might have to shift when we actually announce something. And we also look at events and scheduling events on campus so that those employees can participate. So we may have to add an extra timeframe of a function for like employee benefits, or if we're having ice cream day or popcorn day, those kind of things, we set up a separate segment for that element. But try not to give them things that are going to pertain to them in the same, you know, we don't want them to be receiving something that's going to happen within an hour and then not see it for 3 or 4 hours. So really trying to pay attention to that work schedule and the timeframe to make sure everybody is included that should be included.

Speaker A: Okay, we've got 1 minute left. And one other question I know that came up was that People would be interested in knowing how your organization decided what they're doing in terms of— I know you mentioned with the idea of like some people are going to be staying remote forever, some people are going to be hybrid, some people are remote, coming back to the work, you know, workplace. Can you talk a little bit about what percentage are going to be remote, and you know how that was actually decided?

Speaker C: I can't give you exact numbers on the remote. I am guessing somewhere around a third. I think a third is probably a pretty good swag that are going to be— excuse me— about a third in that hybrid mode.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker C: So, you know, because we do have manufacturing, those people have to be here and those Those people have been here throughout the pandemic. They've been our onsite mission critical. And then we have others, probably another 25-30%, that are going to be strictly work from home. What the pandemic taught us is that some functions can be performed at home just as easily, and we have some workers who actually work better in that environment because they don't have the distractions. And so in those cases, you know, we're letting those people go forth and prosper in that environment. Others of us, you know, have the personality, we need that interaction, and we need to work with other groups. And not that Teams isn't great, but sometimes you just need to sit down and put some things on a whiteboard and work through things. And that's the best of both worlds to me with the hybrid situation. I can touch base with all my other departments that I work with in the company and use the days I come into the office to work out those finite details that are a little bit harder to do over Teams. And then there are— there is a population that, you know, like I said, with manufacturing that will be here all the time, and those are going to be some of our engineers that are involved in testing and other things where they just really need to be on site. site.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker C: And so, but they basically looked across the organization by work function and made those determinations at the management level. And management consulted with most of the employees to say, okay, how do you think you work best? You know, do you work best in the work from home, or do you work best— do you want to come back into office? And use that feedback to help build those constructs across Awesome.

Speaker A: And such a— it's so great to hear that your organization is doing that. Um, well, we're actually over time, um, so I can't get to any of the other questions. We'll definitely, like I said, I'll try to bring those, um, and send those to, um, the presenters and make sure that they have the opportunity to try to answer those back to some— back to some of you. Um, I'd love to thank Tammy from AdTrend and Matili from Contact Monkey and the entire Contact Monkey team for making this webinar possible, especially thanks to all of you in the audience for all the great questions. We're so glad to have you, have you join us for this important conversation. Our goal at Regan is to be a resource for insights and change in our industry, hoping to improve their efforts. Today, specifically, to gain some insights on the most valuable tools for employee communications and the top goals and challenges facing the industry today. Over the next 24 hours, 24 to 48 hours, you'll receive a survey. In that survey, you'll be able to— it'll direct you to the post-event link with the speaker presentations, the recording of today's events, as well as some of the bonus materials. So please watch out for that over the next 24 to 48 hours. On behalf of Reagan, I say thank you very much. This concludes our webinar, and have a great rest of your day. Thanks.