Top Internal Communications Trends to Know Now

Speaker A: I'm Joyce Garippa, Director of Content at Regan Communications. Thrilled to welcome all of you to the new employee experience strategy in the everywhere workplace in partnership with ContactMonkey. Before we get started with our program, some housekeeping notes. Please use the Q&A function to ask our speakers any questions. There will be plenty of time for speaker questions at the end of today's session. Please use the chat function for any technical difficulties. Within 24 to 48 hours, you will receive a survey. Once you have completed that survey, you will have access to all of the slides and bonus materials from today's session within 3 to 5 business days. So please do be on the lookout for that survey. I will remind you again later. But again, you must take the survey to get everything from today's session. So I think most would agree that our new normal in the workplace is not new anymore. It's just become normal. Today, Matili Jha, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at ContactMonkey, and JD Norton, Director of Internal Comms at Thumbtack, will be sharing findings from ContactMonkey's annual survey that addresses internal comms challenges and ongoing trends and the current state of the workplace and what that means for all of you. Matili and JD, the virtual stage is yours.

Speaker B: So yeah, really looking forward today to sharing some top internal communication trends that we've uncovered through our global survey at ContactMonkey, which I'll talk about shortly. But before I begin, just to go over the format real quick, We're just going to be presenting the findings of the survey and discussing with JD what his real-life experience is in context to those findings. And feel free, as Joyce mentioned, to keep sending your questions into the Q&A box, and we'll be addressing all of them at the end. There'll also be a recording of the webinar available, as Joyce mentioned, which will be sent to you on email, and it'll be up on the ContactMonkey website as well. And then going over the agenda, so I'll give you a brief overview of the Global State of Internal Comms study. That's where we kind of uncovered the key trends shaping internal communications in 2022. So we'll go into the trends, the key goals, challenges that internal communicators are facing, as well as some of the common channels they use, how they use software and tools, what their overall approach and strategy is. And we'll also talk a little bit about how remote work or returning to the office or working hybrid has— is looking for internal communications in the coming year. So the Global State of Internal Communication study is a study that we launched maybe 3 years ago in 2020. And in this study, we research internal communicators across the globe. So as you can see, countries from all over the world are represented, from US, Canada, Africa, India, and pretty much all over the world. When we look at company sizes, our respondents represent smaller organizations all the way up to those with 10,000 employees or more. So your company is very likely represented in this profile. And then most of the departments that engaged in the study were primarily internal communications, some from human resources and marketing, and then a few assorted ones as well. And so one of the key things that we look for in the study is to find out what are the key trends that are shaping internal communications in a given year. As you'll see, some have stayed the same. There have been new ones that have come to rise based on different circumstances that are taking place globally. So, sorry, skipped a slide. So one of the biggest trends that have been shaping internal communications is employee experience, and actually employee experience has kind of been the leading trend for the past 2 years as well. The only difference is that every year what employee experience means keeps changing and evolving based on what's happening at the workplace in that given period of time. So When we talk about employee experience, it's really what an employee experiences from the first touchpoint, the first interview, right up till their last day at an organization and everything that comes into play in between. So that can be what the culture is, what their role is, how they experience growth at a company. And many will resonate with the fact that communication that they receive from the company is a big part of what shapes that experience for them. So internal communicators are always focused on how they can shape that experience as their workplace structure evolves or even gets settled into a new way of working. And then followed by that, the new blended workforce is a rising trend. I think during the pandemic, all companies were innovating to find the most optimal way to run their organization, and the blended workforce became a really popular mode. So it's about how will internal communicators maintain that communication, that engagement, and the collaboration between permanent employees and transient and talent as well. So this is a big focus for people this year along with the future of work. So future of work is also something that keeps trending over the years, but again, its definition keeps changing. Now this year we're seeing a lot of conversations being shaped around the great return, the great resignation, and we can talk about that a little more. Also a lot to do with new technologies that are becoming available to internal communicators. How will they adopt that? And then things like new variants. Inflation, all of that kind of comes into play. So the future of work is constantly being redefined. DE&I, so diversity, equity, and inclusion, has also been talked about for years. I know a lot of companies have done a lot in this space, but I think the conversation is around how employees truly feel about that and whether it's being approached in a strategic way. How are they bringing authenticity into this and what can internal communications do to drive DE&I through their communication strategy? Another top trend. So these are the top 8 trends. So I'm sure everybody can like see the importance of all of them, but I would be curious to hear from JD if he prioritizes them in the exact same way. Of course, remote and hybrid, the overarching topic of every conversation, that's obviously on top of mind for every internal communicator, but also they're talking about employee recognition, getting feedback, and helping employees adopt technology even faster. All of these sub-trends kind of feed into the larger employee experience trend, which is why I think that always comes out on top. But JD, looking at this, do you resonate with the way they've been prioritized through our survey results, or do you look at it differently? What's been your experience?

Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. And it's funny too, because when you look at all of these, these to me sort of all-encompass future of work. Like future of work is kind of how we look at all of these different things and how we sort of solve for them. And so to me, that is really this whole graph. But yeah, I mean, this completely resonates. The employee experience changed completely over the course of the last 2 years. You know, and now a lot of people— I was looking at the chat, you know, so many people are now hybrid or fully remote. And that kind of changes the way that we do our jobs. You know, it feels like we sort of had practice doing it. We kind of, all of us sort of went that direction, you know, 2 years ago. And it felt like maybe it was going to be practice, that it was temporary. And then, you know, we had to sort of shift the way that we worked and the way that we did things to really start thinking about how this is the future of work and how things are going to evolve and change. And all of these fit into that. So it definitely is something this resonates a lot. And I would definitely say that employee experience is a little higher than the rest for sure.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And then with, in terms of the goals that internal communicators had, obviously tying to the trends, but the biggest goal that employee, that internal communicators have identified is increasing employee satisfaction. And I think that does tie into the whole employee experience thing, because if you're going to improve employee experience, that is what's going to lead to higher employee satisfaction. And what leads to that experience is so many facets. Like JD mentioned, it's all of those things kind of feeding into the future of work, and the employee experience is what will create that future that you want for your workplace. So higher employee satisfaction is also statistically proven to drive up engagement, and studies have shown that those who experience higher employee satisfaction year on year experience 85% more engagement from their employees. So it has been correlated to a key internal communications KPI, which is employee engagement. There's also increased participation, and increased participation is essentially just wanting employees to be more involved in the decision-making in the company. And this is a really important thing to drive that engagement because employees who feel most employees feel often that their views are not valued, but those employees that do feel like the company actually does accept their viewpoints and does actually implement things based on their perspectives, they experienced 4.4 times more productivity from their employees. So internal communicators are trying to figure out how they can make employees feel valued, and this is by enabling that two-way conversation between leadership or decision makers in the company and the employees at the ground level, not only taking their feedback, but also finding ways in which they can communicate it to leadership and have it actually implemented. Another thing is culture change, but the only difference that we saw in this year's study was that culture change was a higher priority in the previous years. And I think that makes total sense because when we started the study in 2020, there was a huge cultural shift that everybody was thrown into. There was kind of a ubiquitous way of working, and then suddenly now everybody had to move to remote. Most people, not prepared for it, and that time culture change took a huge precedence because you had to now build it from scratch in a completely new environment. And then I think in 2021, people were still dealing with a lot of that transition, and there was a lot of conversation even back then about are we going to go back to work, how are we going to enable that transition, things like that. And culture change has dropped in priority this year, but still an important goal just because I feel a lot of organizations have now kind of decided way forward. They've experienced remote, they've dabbled with hybrid. There's also a lot of examples and research out there already on which could suit you best. And so now I think that when, when we look at the responses, we can see that internal communicators are looking to build that culture within the work environment that has been chosen through different ways that we may have talked about earlier already. Another thing is improved productivity. So higher employee engagement has proven to lead to a 21% increase in productivity. Obviously, if you want your workforce to be delivering the best kind of work, you want to make them feel motivated, you want to make them feel valued, you want to drive up their satisfaction, you want to drive up the engagement. So it's all really correlated and another key goal for internal communications. But one that we've seen on the rise is better leadership communication. For the last 2 years, internal communicators have really focused focused on making sure the communication with employees is really strong, but there's also now being— there's now also a higher focus on how can you bring leadership to improve their communication with employees, not just through, you know, the company or the internal comms team or the marketing team or departmental heads, but how can we enable leaders to have more one-on-one conversations, more face time with the rest of the employees, and then eventually also lower attrition. I think with the Great resignation, and everyone's talking about it all the time. As of mid-2021, employees realized as companies started relooking at their work structure and considering going back to work or considering even moving hybrid, a lot of employees had now kind of gotten accustomed to the new remote life and the flexibility that it gave them. It also made them kind of relook at what their priorities are and view work life and work life balance very differently. So employees have really taken that decision. Into their own hands, and the Great Resignation is very much defined by employees now choosing not to stick with a company if they're not giving them that flexibility, or maybe they're not satisfied with the compensation. There's a whole— there's a war for talent. There's many reasons for this, but definitely lowering attrition is a huge target for internal communicators. How do you feel about these results, JD?

Speaker C: I mean, definitely right in line with what we've been seeing as well. I think especially because we decided to stay fully remote, the increased participation and culture change, as well as leadership communication, were ones that really stood out for us. You know, I think those— it's funny because I think those actually go towards employee satisfaction, sort of like the other graph went towards future of work. And so, you know, I think these definitely stand out to us. And, you know, in this sort of new world that we're operating in, you know, we're having to rethink what participation means, you know, because now people are in a number of different time zones and around the world, depending on the company you're in. And we're not all together, you know, participation previously might have meant that you were doing company meetings or having company events or doing offsites or being together, water cooler talk, like things like that. And so we're really having to rethink how an employee can participate, but also being very careful about making sure that participation isn't just Zoom and that we're going through Zoom fatigue and people are getting burned out on participating. So, you know, that's definitely one that is like a fine line that that I'm sure a lot of people on this call are having to walk as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, is there anything particular you've done outside of Zoom to drive the participation?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you know, we've actually gotten a lot more active, especially within our ERGs on Slack, you know, really sort of to formalize those groups and also started to build out local sort of local groups where people can actually connect locally through Slack, formalize giving them a budget to get together outside of work and do things like that now that they sort of can in a safe way. And then also just different sort of finding different ways that they can participate and hear from leadership as well. So it's not always just Zoom meetings. We started a podcast with our CEO In 2020, and it's sort of a way for them to not necessarily participate, but they can submit questions and ask what's going on and give us topics that they want to get more context into. And then they can just listen throughout the day. They don't feel like they have to dial into a Zoom meeting and, you know, join and watch and listen. They can actually just do it kind of on their own time. And I think that's something that we found too, is participation doesn't always have to happen in real time. It can be sort of an async activity. And so I think when you sort of switch your thinking into, does participation have to be real-time? No. Then it kind of gives you more options.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And finding alternatives to Zoom. Zoom is great. I think it's been there for everybody. But I think that fatigue has set in and finding those different ways like the podcast is actually such a good idea. Yeah. And now we'll move on to the challenges that internal communicators face. So we really want I want to always know what are they facing this year, have the challenges evolved, what are the barriers that they're confronted with going into the new year. And one of the main ones that came out this year was low employee responsiveness. There could be so many reasons for that, but employees often— a study by Gallup said that employees often feel that their opinions are not valued, and so they resist giving feedback because they're not seeing the change. And internal communicators obviously you need to implement change to show change, but it's also important how you communicate the change, how you make employees feel like they're heard, and how you address what they have expressed. And that will encourage responsiveness if they start seeing the value in themselves actually engaging in that conversation. Another challenge that has been pretty consistent for internal communicators is tracking and measuring, and that comes out on top as well. That's because communications in general is quite a qualitative thing. Sometimes it's really hard to quantify and justify, but there are so many ways in which you can do it, and we can— we'll get more into that later. But what we saw was different this year was that 43% of respondents found tracking and measuring internal communications to be the biggest challenge that they face, and this number has come down from the previous year where 55% of them said that. So So a majority struggled with that last year, now a little less than half do. So you are seeing a shift in that. People are finding ways to use more tools to track the ROI of what they're doing, to justify their budget, to even get a greater budget from leadership. So internal comms is making a shift into a more strategic function. I think that's been the case for the last 2 years, but it really used to just be a nice-to-have for the longest time. And now it's become very central to all companies. And not only internal communicators know that, but I think the entire organization is coming to recognize that. Another thing is collecting employee feedback. This probably correlates to the whole low employee responsiveness challenge as well. But one reason why we've learned that internal communicators struggle on this front is also because employees just don't feel comfortable giving candid feedback sometimes, even though it would be appreciated. They feel a little resistance to put those opinions— resistant to putting those opinions out there. And internal communicators really need to innovate on how they can enable that, maybe by enabling anonymous feedback, also making it less of a cumbersome process. Sometimes people would rely too much on an annual survey, which is long and lengthy and was probably just giving you skewed feedback in the sense that that could be how an employee is feeling at a particular given point in time. But if you're more active in how you collect that feedback, if it's part of your regular cadence throughout the year, you're much more in touch with the pulsing of the company as you make decisions and improve your efforts. Engaging remote employees is another internal communications challenge that is among the top 6. And like JD mentioned, it is complicated when you have people in different time zones and different geographies. And there are so many advantages to working remote, but you also don't really know what the employee is experiencing and doing on a day-to-day basis. So taking all those factors into account obviously a definite challenge. But again, we're seeing how internal communicators are innovating on that front and would love to hear from JD a little more on that. But interdepartmental communication, kind of similar. It's like you'll have different teams, but they're not only different teams, they're also in different places, in different time zones. It is obviously much more challenging than if you were in person at the office working together. And then getting budget and approvals from leadership, that has been a challenge as well for the past 2 years, but again, while it's in the top 6, it's probably lowest this year than it's ever been. We had 18% of people say that that's their biggest challenge, as opposed to 31% the previous year, and that was an even higher number 2 years ago. And I think this shows how internal comms has now become more strategic. A lot more employee— a lot more internal communicators have been saying that they've built out a strategy this year, a more long-term strategy. A majority of respondents 2 years ago said they had no strategy in place. therefore no budget. So there is a really positive shift in this direction. But yeah, JD, what do you think? Do you have these same challenges or are they in a different order? What are your insights?

Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. I mean, a little bit of a different order. We've luckily always had really good employee responsiveness. You know, our employees love to participate. And I think, you know, maybe because it is— we're, you know, still a smaller late-stage So employees really have sort of a sense of ownership, and they really want to be involved in a lot of what happens. So that's definitely not one of my top challenges. But you know, I think the engaging remote employees, which you mentioned specifically, has definitely become a new challenge for us for sure. You know, we were in basically two locations in the U.S. prior to the pandemic. And now we opened up, we're fully remote, and we're, you know, in 37 states. And so now it's definitely trickier navigating all the different time zones. I know, you know, I've done this in past roles in different ways, and I'm sure there's, you know, a ton of people that are global on this call, which, you know, really gets tricky. And but I think that is— that's going to be an ongoing challenge. I think that's just a challenge with being a communicator and with sort of being anybody within a company that is sort of responsible or has some sort of a hand in employee engagement. I've, you know, I've seen many surveys where this is always on the list. It's always a challenge, and I don't think it's ever not going to be a challenge just because, you know, when you're global or even across the US, it's just hard to engage people who aren't all in the same time zone or aren't all together. You know, and I think definitely interdepartmental communications was one that has really stood out for us as well. You know, us as communicators, it was definitely a challenge, but, you know, we stepped up to the challenge when the pandemic hit, when, you know, everybody went remote. And then, you know, I saw somebody in the chat mention how the importance of IC was really sort of It came to be fully realized by a lot of companies during the pandemic. And however, you know, that's what we do. We are communicators where we take on those challenges and we figure out how to communicate and how to engage people wherever they are. Our managers and people managers, not so much, not all the time. You know, a lot of times managers have the ability or they sort of have, you know, it's nice because they're with their teams, they're with them every day, they get to communicate in person. You know, a lot of managers, a lot of people managers haven't been sort of trained on how to manage across time zones or manage globally. And so that's where interdepartmental communications, I think, maybe faltered a little bit in the last couple of years. And so this has definitely been a focus of ours. as to how do we help make our, our people managers and other people throughout the company better communicators and give them all the tools and processes and things that they need to better engage their employees.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's the same thing as the previous slide where a big goal was enabling leadership communication, and that's basically even enabling managers and everybody, because I guess that piece has been lacking in many companies. And then we just wanted to go a little deeper into these challenges and see where the respondents stand. We wanted to know, is measuring internal communications in their eyes the biggest challenge for them? Because that has been a recurring theme every time we've talked to customers or done a survey or anything like that. And 54% still agree that that is one of the biggest challenges, or 26% strongly agree. So there's a large majority kind of still struggling on the measurement front. And then when And that ties into if you can't measure it, how are you going to showcase the impact of your communications? And as you can see, still a really large percentage struggle to showcase the impact of internal communications. And we're discussing so much how it plays— internal comms is so pivotal. It's just about how do you prove what you're doing because you are definitely doing great things. So JD, have you— how have you tackled this challenge? Is it even a challenge for you? And what have you— how have you approached it?

Speaker C: You know what, measuring internal comms has always been a challenge. I think anybody that does it, you know, other than using tools like ContactMonkey or, you know, Slack, you can, you can actually get feedback now. There's lots of things you can embed in emails that you use on a daily basis. However, you know, it's all of those things cost money. For the most part, and if you don't have that, or if you're a smaller team, or you have like on a previous survey where you sort of have a hard time getting budget and funding for those types of things, you know it's it's it's definitely a challenge. And you know it's always I had to engage somebody from our analytics team that could actually help me better. better dig into the data around all of our Zoom meetings for, you know, our global Zoom meetings. It's one thing to be able to look at it and say, okay, 500, 600 people joined today and, you know, they joined for an average amount of time. But when you can work with somebody in analytics that'll actually just take it, put it into a sheet, run some sort of a, you know, I'm really technical, I don't even know what it's called, but, you know, they run a formula and next thing you know, they can tell me by manager, by leader, by zone, by like everything about who joined that Zoom meeting and keep a sheet that I can actually then share with our own leadership team and say, hey, COO, you know what? You're having really low attendance at these meetings. Can you help us drive this? Or, you know, hey, CLO, legal's doing great. Keep it up. You know, I think there's, there's ways that you can get tricky And there's ways that you can look for help to help you measure things. And so you kind of just maybe sometimes need to think a little outside of the box.

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. I think you mentioned it is expensive. You do need to invest if you want to find sophisticated ways to track your internal communications. But it is— it all kind of ties in again in the sense that if you don't invest, you're not going to have access to that kind of measurement and metrics, and then you're not going to be able to prove to leadership that there is so much ROI in what you're doing and then you're not going to be able to get the budget, but then you need that budget in the first place to invest in those tools.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: So it's just how do you navigate that whole thing? But yeah, because we've gotten so much feedback on this measurement front, ContactMonkey has seen being an email tool, it is something that can provide you actual data and everything that we've incorporated into the product has been to help measure. Because another really important metric and probably the one that matters the most is employee feedback. So even like getting that feedback will tell you even in a qualitative way how impactful, because once you know your employees feel a certain way, that's really all that matters. And then you can look into open rates and click rates and things like that. But yeah, getting feedback and having a tool or something like that that gives you quantifiable metrics is probably the best way to go. And then we also wanted to look at which channels internal communicators rely on the most, because as mentioned, once you have a channel, once you have a platform or a tool, that's when you can start looking at data. So from our survey, we found out that email newsletters are probably the ones they use most often to send out their communication, although I'm sure everybody's kind of relying on instant messaging tools or Slack and Teams and stuff like that, collaboration tools as well. And and then the intranet. So kind of the top 4 are these tools and then a few, 2% use an assortment of some other kind. But the reason probably email newsletters come out on top is because it's the most consistent way to make sure your message is reached to a wide audience that's dispersed in different locations because you can choose the timing of when your email communication goes out. You can target it such, you can create custom lists so that you can have more customized communications going. And then with a tool like ContactMonkey, for example, you also get a lot of data. Like you mentioned, it'll tell you which departments were most engaged, which locations were most engaged, which titles engaged the most with your email. And then you can kind of be more strategic in sending the right communication to the right person at the right time based on what has been the most effective with them. And looking into whether email, the usage of email evolved during the pandemic, 70% 89% said that they did increase their usage of email over the last 2 years or their reliance on it. But we also wanted to know what are internal communicators spending the most time on because they have so many challenges and so many focus areas that where does most of their time go. And what they told us was that creating content and templates took the most amount of time. So they just spend a lot of time building out the initial communication that goes out. And if you see, then only 13% spend most of their time on developing an IC strategy. And that tells you a big— that tells you, that speaks to the challenges internal communicators are facing, because if you're strapped for time and resources, if you're just spending most of your time on the initial stage of what you need to do, which is just creating that communication, it's really taking away from your time to actually develop that strategy and approach things in a more nuanced way as you go along. So most of the time has gone through content and templates, followed by gathering feedback. So again, makes sense. That's one of the bigger challenges. You are spending more time on it, followed by measuring, reporting, and analysis, and then developing an IC strategy. So how— so which of these takes up the most of your time?

Speaker C: Oh, it's definitely the same. I mean, as communicators, we all know you sit down to write something and you're just like, here we go. You know, I'm about to go through something where I'm going to have multiple revisions and multiple people that I need to tag in for reviews. And, you know, the content in the templates definitely takes the longest. But, you know, I think those, you can definitely reduce that amount of time when you do have a good strategy in place. You know, I mean, one thing that, you know, I try to tell my team, because especially lately, you know, it's, there's been so much to react to, there's been so much reactive that's sort of been coming our way. And, you know, the thing is that I, like I said, like I tell them, is that if we have a good strategy in place for the proactive, for what we know we're going to do, do, the reactive is going to hit us less hard. Like it's not going to be as bad when it comes at us, because then we know that everything else that we're working on, we've got that strategy, we've got that in place, we can execute on it. And then we can take the reactive with a little less like, ah.

Speaker B: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. That's a really good point actually. So yeah, finding a way to kind of be prepared by investing in time to to build a strategy and also finding ways in which you can help your content creation process move faster, whether it's investing in a tool for it or adding more resources to your team. But those kind of would complement each other if they're tackled simultaneously. We also wanted to ask what the leadership attitude toward internal communications was, and the results were really positive and wanted to show how they've changed over the last 3 years. And when asked whether leadership recognizes the value of internal communications in the organization. In 2020, 74% of them agreed. In 2021, 83%. And in 2022, 90%. So it's always been majority feel their leadership values them, but it's great to see this consistent increase. And I guess the proof is in the pudding. There have been— internal communicators have started to be more strategic. They have become more central. They have started investing more in a strategy. They have become better at measuring internal communications, even though they still have challenges. And this kind of shows that they have been, to an extent, been able to prove to leadership the value that they bring, and that is being reflected through these results. So I don't know how it was at Thumbtack for you. Has leadership's attitude evolved, or was leadership kind of always just as invested?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, luckily, you know, Thumbtack has sort of always valued internal communications. You know, they brought me in pretty early, earlier than a lot of startups will, because they know the value of it, they know the importance of it. So I've been very fortunate. However, you know, that said, when 2020 came, you know, it was the last couple of years, I think it has definitely, you know, now it It's like, okay, now we really— like, we knew it was valuable before, but now we really see the value in what you do and let's further invest in it. So, I mean, this definitely rings true.

Speaker B: Yeah, this was really good to see. And then just going deeper into how they prove the impact, because clearly they have been proving the impact more, I guess, because majority of the respondents do rely on email newsletters the most. They have also using open and click rates to measure the effectiveness of what they're doing the most. So that's 54%. But then there are things that tie into internal communications KPIs and their goals. So they're obviously tracking employee engagement levels through employee engagement scores, employee satisfaction scores, and then tracking retention rate, turnovers, things like that. And then 43% also rely on employee employee feedback. So I think we've touched upon all of this already, but essentially these are the key ways in which you can focus on— these are the key ways you can focus on actually proving what you're doing. In the interest of time, I'm just going to move a little fast. But yeah, when it comes to third-party internal communication solutions, we still see a majority internal communicators don't use any, and there could be many reasons for that, but one of the main reasons is likely to be budget issues, just because there are so many tools now available at your disposal, whether it's email, intranet, whatever it might be. But it— there is a little bit of a challenge when it comes to getting the budget approval and investing in it. But we also have been seeing this number rise from the previous years. I don't have the comparison, but every year you see more and more internal communicators moving in that direction. And I think that also would probably explain how measurement is being tackled better and ROI is being proved more often. So those who do use internal communication softwares, we wanted to know which features they find the most useful. ENPS, so that's Employee Net Promoter Score. It tells you how likely your employee is to recommend your company as a place to work or even your product. And that's a good way to tell how happy and satisfied your employees are. If majority of them are viewed as promoters or score high, those are the people that are most enthusiastic about your product or your company, and those are the ones you really want to talk to to understand what they like because you can actually build on that. And then there's pulse surveys, emoji reactions, comments. So these are employee feedback features that we have inbuilt within ContactMonkey's email solution. So they have really done been really helpful in helping internal communicators get anonymous employee feedback. Email template designs is probably the most popular because content creation and templates being the most time-consuming thing, obviously a feature that helps you tackle that challenge is going to come, come out on top as the most useful feature. And then event management. So a lot of companies have events virtually mostly now and just bringing employees employees to attend those events, engage with them, get feedback on those events can be a challenge. So a tool like ContactMonkey does provide you with that event management feature which helps you plug in events, gets it into employees' calendars, helps you get feedback on the event, and that is also highly valued as well. And then we wanted to discuss how internal communications has evolved. in the post-pandemic world. And the first thing to really look at, which I think we've picked up from this chat as well, is that most companies, 43%, are hybrid. And that's probably the majority— that's the direction in which majority organizations are headed. But 25% are moving back in office, 20% are deskless, and 8% who responded are purely remote. So I also think that depends on the industry you're in and the kind of work your employees need to do, but this was the overall representation of the respondents post-pandemic. When asked how current employee engagement levels were at the organization, we saw that majority, which is 48%, had moderate employee engagement levels, so definitely scope for improvement, and only 28% were really just satisfied with high or very high levels. Levels of employee engagement. So how is it for you? Has your employee engagement levels changed, dipped, increased at Thumbtack?

Speaker C: I mean, they definitely went down a little bit, you know, at the very beginning of the pandemic, but not very much. Like it was single digits, not a ton. We've, we've been really fortunate to have really high employee engagement ever since I joined, you know, over 3 years ago. And it's starting to trend back upwards. You know, I think when we first announced that we were going to go fully remote, there was a lot of people that didn't like that, you know, and we knew that was coming. And so we saw that a little bit of a dip in our employee engagement results. But, you know, now that we sort of leveled out and now this is kind of the way that we've been, And we are going to be, you know, we've seen those results go back up and we've done a lot to sort of adjust and really listen to feedback. I think that's the biggest thing is really listening to the feedback that you do get from those employee engagement surveys and things like that so that you are addressing the concerns of the employees. And I saw somebody put in the chat that, you know, one of the top things was around health or mental health health and also burnout. And, you know, there was a lot of things we saw that in our surveys as well. So there were things that we implemented as quickly as possible to help address those. And, you know, when you, when you actually take action on those results, I think it pays off with the employees in the long run.

Speaker B: Yeah, and I think the fact that you said you have high employee responsiveness in your company speaks to that as well. And then when we asked how has remote work affected employee engagement levels, majority said they actually stayed the same. So probably I think people might have experienced a decline, a slight decline like JD had said as well when the initial change occurred, which I think is natural, but overall have managed to maintain employee engagement levels. When asked what the biggest barriers to adapting to remote work were, communication issues and barriers I think remote workers trumped all the other ones just because I think we've talked about this a lot, but just finding ways to communicate and keep everyone connected when they're all over the place is, is a challenge. And then communications would likely be something that you have to tackle as the biggest issue. But that was followed by disengaged employees. I think they all tie into each other similar to the other questions that we asked, which is finding ways to help them prioritize work. Maybe sometimes people end up overworking. The lack of human interaction plays a role in that. So these are kind of common ones that I think everyone could resonate with, but enabling communication will probably help tackle a lot of those. In terms of which tools have been most valuable during the pandemic, again, we did talk about this earlier, but email came out as the most valuable just because I think it was the easiest way for employers to send out consistent timely communication, followed by collaborative apps, Slack, things like that, video, Zoom, and then also phone, just because sometimes you don't have employees that have access to email. How are you going to reach these deskless workers? They kind of would get missed through the email platform, but SMS is a great way to get in touch with those people because SMS is can help you deliver time-sensitive messages when it comes to crisis communication. You don't want to wait for an employee to have to access their inbox to communicate with them. And so we, even through the pandemic, have evolved the Contact Monkey tool to bring in SMS so that people who have deskless workers and who need to send out crisis comms have SMS and phone as an option as well.

Speaker C: I have something really quickly to that last slide.

Speaker B: Please do.

Speaker C: I think one thing too is when you think about video, you know, a lot of people just think of like Zoom or live video, but I think you also need to think about async video. Some of the— some of our most successful communications over the course of the last 2 years have actually been recorded videos that we did around our future of work with our CHRO, and it was like a test that we did We used a platform called mmhmm to record them, and it was just sort of a new different thing. Sorry, my voice is going out. That people really appreciated just these short little videos with our CHRO talking about what we've been doing and where we're at in our progress, and they've actually received more views than any other video we've ever made in the company. So you know those are those are great ways to engage people as those async videos as well.

Speaker B: So they would log into a platform and then watch a prerecorded video. Is that how it works?

Speaker C: Yeah, we have a— we use YouTube. So we— part of our Google package comes with a corporate YouTube account that is private and internal, and we use that.

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, that's really cool as well. It's a way to get FaceTime without having to schedule live FaceTime.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker B: And then, yeah, and then the last question we want to go into is, has internal comms been elevated to a more critical position? And 88% do agree. Again, this is a number that keeps increasing every year, and looking at how leadership views internal communications also kind of proves this. So internal comms is overall headed in a very good direction. It's only seen growth, it's only seen improvement, and I think the function as a whole has reached a state of stability. I think there was a lot of discovery that took place, a lot of, just a lot of learning, and I think now as a more established function, it's all going to be about optimizing and improving going forward. And then just before we wrap up, if you want access to this global survey, there's an entire comprehensive report available for download on this link, but you will also get access to this resource in your email. in a day or two, as Joyce mentioned. And if you're curious to learn more about ContactMonkey's email and SMS solution, you can always book a demo on our website using this URL, but we'll make sure we send it to you in the follow-up as well. And now I'm leaving some time for questions.

Speaker A: Wow, you sped up New York fast there, Matili, at the end. I love it. So great conversations. I have to say, I just want to say to the audience, the chat is very healthy. So what we will do is following taking our survey, we will send you a transcript of the chat as well, because I know there's a lot of ideas being exchanged in the chat, as well as some questions that need to get answered. And speaking of questions, Matili, just to start at the top, you may have said this, but it was missed by some of our attendees. How many people actually took the survey?

Speaker C: So we had 1,000 people take the survey.

Speaker B: So we had a little under 300 that responded. Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. And obviously the results will get demographics, etc., for the— for those who took the survey. I just want to go back to employee responsiveness because there were some questions in the chat as well as in the Q&A. And the question was, does the research identify what kinds of of employee responsiveness is expected or desired?

Speaker B: No, it doesn't kind of go into what kind of employee responsiveness, but it's kind of explained as just having employees share their feedback, or if you are asking them for their opinion in a decision-making process, how likely are they to put forth an opinion and share it.

Speaker A: Perfect. Perfect. All right, well, I'm going to move into this Q&A. We have a very lively Q&A here as well. JD, I think you mentioned podcasts. You certainly just mentioned videos. There are a lot of questions around podcasts. So we'll just start at the top. How do you go about setting up an internal podcast? Where do you host it? And then we'll move into listener rates for podcasts and what the success has been.

Speaker C: Yeah. We kind of, I took an approach of like, I think this could work. Podcasts are popular. Let's give it a shot. And when I do those types of things within our team and within our company, it's always just like, let's see, let's figure out how we can do this before we invest a lot of money in it. And really we started by base, I would just get our CEO host We have different guests that come on and we just, we log onto a Zoom together, we record it on Zoom, and then basically I go to edit it. We, I'm on a Mac, so I just edit it in the movie editor, iMovie. I do it in iMovie and basically just separate the audio from the video, export the audio. add a little jingle at the front, add a little jingle at the back, upload it to our YouTube account, and then just put a photo that basically just plays. And so people actually just listen to it through YouTube. So we're not doing any like professional broadcasting equipment. We don't have, you know, all the mics and the mixers, and we didn't invest in a podcast platform or anything like that. And that was one of the trickiest things is because a lot of the podcast platforms that actually distribute podcasts, Are also external, and so through our research, I'm like, let's just let's just try it on YouTube and see if it works. And people love it. People tune in, and they they you know we've gotten a lot of really great feedback from it because we really use it to to dig deeper into topics that maybe we've discussed at like an all thumbs or other all company meetings where you know maybe a topic presenter has ten to fifteen minutes, where now they've got thirty minutes to really answer the question. question of why did we decide to do this? How did we go about doing it? And really provide the context behind what they had maybe presented before.

Speaker A: And tell us, do you— what are the— you said you got great feedback from it. So any listener rates that you can provide? And I love all thumbs. That's great.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's funny. I say it now and I just like, it's normal, like everybody has an all thumbs. Yes. We, on average, we probably get about 25% of the company that listens to it. Sometimes it's high depending on the topic, but I would say on average it's about 25%, which is actually pretty good. You know, if we're asking somebody to do something that's not required of them, that, you know, might not even be a topic relevant to their department. So, you know, I feel pretty good with that. We're continually trying to, to sort of push that up, but we're about a 25% rate.

Speaker A: Okay. Going back to employee responsiveness, there was a question in the Q&A, you know, overcoming struggles and challenges with getting employees to provide feedback. So any tips, takeaways you want to mention, JD or Matili?

Speaker C: Matili, do you want to go first?

Speaker B: Yeah, sure. So yeah, the biggest solution we found to employee responsiveness is just to create a safe space for employees to feel like they voice their opinion. And getting anonymous feedback has probably been a very effective way in getting that responsiveness. And like I mentioned, more real-time feedback through pulse surveys, for example. Pulse surveys are just mini surveys which help get an employee's state of mind or feeling about a certain event or change that has taken place in a company. So, for example, if you have a new policy policy, sending a pulse survey through email can tell you immediately how your employees are feeling about that change at that given point in time and can help you constantly adapt your strategy. And when you show that you're adapting your strategy based on their feedback, that's going to start increasing responsiveness. So just kind of creating that psychologically safe environment where you can enable an employee to express themselves and then showing how they're being heard and listened to and communicating that they're being listened to is probably the best way to improve responsiveness, in my opinion. But JD is an internal communicator, so he's done some things, I guess.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I think it's really thinking about it in all of the different— like, we have all the different channels that we use as communicators to get our message across. We need to think about that when we're trying to get feedback, when we're trying to get participation, is there's multiple channels, there's multiple ways to get it. And there's multiple ways that people can participate. So, you know, if we're thinking about participation in just sort of like one lane, through how many people join a meeting, or how many Q&A questions do we get, like, we really need to sort of broaden that and think about that, like we think about our communications channels, there needs to be sort of participation channels as well.

Speaker A: That's an interesting point, because one of the questions in the Q&A was the following. So maybe you can provide some advice here as It says, if an organization prioritizes employee satisfaction as a key goal, does it make sense to create and promote channels that offer engagement between employees for engagement's sake? So think like, like a pet fan group or a coffee fan group, even if that channel has no tie-in to the org's strategic goals.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, we have these and we encourage them. I think it's one way to really ensure that people are bringing their true selves to work and that they can be themselves while they're at work. I'm part of the cats channel. I'm part of the music channel. You know, it's definitely like something that people need to self-regulate. And I think maybe it comes up It could be something that maybe comes up later in, you know, managing in performance reviews or things like that. But, you know, we sort of— to us, everybody that we hire is an adult, and they should be able to sort of manage themselves, take care of themselves, you know. And if they're spending all the time of the day in a cats channel on Slack, then it's not going to go unnoticed. You know, I think to us that is something we encourage because it really sort of creates a good experience for employees when they feel like they can— they're not just, you know, 8, 10, 12 hours a day doing work, work, work, work, work. It's nice to be able to take a break, give your brain a break. You know, a lot of— I'm not going to— I'm not a researcher, but a lot of the research says that, you know, When you want to be your most creative, when you want to sort of break barriers, you have to put your mind in a different place. And so you need to sort of step outside of your work every once in a while to do that. And I think that that is one way that, that, that can happen.

Speaker A: Okay, so similar to the old-fashioned water cooler, except it's online and you're talking about things outside of your normal day-to-day responsibilities.

Speaker C: Exactly. And I was just going to say really quick, you know, I think as communicators, we've all— we know the importance of water cooler talk for employee engagement, employee experience. But I think especially over the course of the last 2 years, we've really seen what happens when that water cooler talk doesn't exist anymore. And so we've had to sort of help create new ways to encourage that water cooler talk. And I think that's one way that that happens.

Speaker A: I don't think we're going to get to all the questions in the Q&A. So for any questions that we don't answer today, we will have Matili and JD answer them separately and send those along with the bonus materials. But let's see if we can fit in at least one more before we, we finish up here. People are talking about non-connected employees. Any magic bullets, you know, ideas that you can provide, both of you, you know, in connecting with those people?

Speaker C: Go ahead, Matilda.

Speaker B: So you mean people who don't have access to email and things like that?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So yeah, that's the thing that has been coming up a lot with our customers and the whole way is just to find different channels because they're still not going to be around you in person or face-to-face. So looking at alternative channels is where SMS has come in from our perspective and there is a lot of value being seen for customers especially who have employees that that don't have that connectedness through email, because pretty much essentially everyone has access to their phone. And obviously you need consent to reach people on their phone, and there are ways to do that. But that is a surefire way that you're going to be able to communicate to them when you want to communicate to them. You can make sure they're not going to miss important things, and you can use it in very innovative ways. It doesn't even have to be crisis comms or an urgent update. But you can send surveys through it. You can send reminders through it. You can even use SMS as a way to give employee recognition, introduce new employees, just keep everyone connected even though they may not have access to a desk or email.

Speaker C: Yeah, and I would add to that the power of the cascade. I mean, your managers, your people managers that see those people every single day, Are some of your strongest advocates for communications, but you need to make it easy for them to do. You need to give them the tools, give them sort of those best practices, and make it easy. You can't send them a giant long email of here's what we need you to tell your employees today. That's just text, text, text, text, text, text, text. Like make it easy. Bullet points, short little quips, you know, fun things that they can do to engage around that information. information. You know, I think even in a world where, you know, we're moving to all of this technology, it's still like the power of your voice and the power of interpersonal communications, I think, will never go away.

Speaker A: That's great. Well, JD and Matili, thank you so much for all of your insights today and the survey. And to this fantastic audience, we'll give them round of applause. What an inspiring chat, so many great ideas. As a reminder to our audience, you will receive a survey within 24 to 48 hours. Once you respond, you will gain access to all of the slides, the recording, all the bonus materials, the chat, the Q&A within 3 to 5 business days. But again, you must take the survey. On behalf of Reagan Communications and Contact Monkey, thank you for attending today's session. Have a great rest of your day. Thank you.