The Global State of Internal Communications and Its Impact on You

Speaker A: Hello and welcome. I'm John Minnick, conference producer at Regan Communications and PR Daily. I'm thrilled to welcome all of you to the Global State of Internal Communications and Its Impact on You in partnership with Contact Monkey. Before we get started with our program, some housekeeping notes. If you run into any technical issues, you can use the chat function at the bottom of your window for assistance. Additionally, please use the Q&A function to ask our speaker any questions. Again, that's chat function for technical issues and Q&A questions for today's speakers. There will be plenty of time at the end of today's session for questions. 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 be on the lookout for that survey. Now let's get started. Hybrid and remote environments continue to change the way we work, making it more and more difficult for organizations to keep employees informed and engaged. Internal communicators must spend more time nurturing the employee experience in smarter ways to help build cohesion and encourage teamwork. Today I'm joined by Maitili Jha, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at ContactMonkey. She'll share key findings of the annual Global State of Communication Survey and what it means for internal communicators. And now I'm happy to turn things over to Maitili.

Speaker B: Okay, great. Um, so yeah, thanks for the introduction. John did a great job of providing context for today's webinar, so I won't I'm really looking forward to sharing, sharing the findings of our annual global survey, which I'll talk about a little bit shortly. So let's dive in. Just before I begin, a little housekeeping. I know it's— John mentioned already, but we will have a Q&A session right at the end. So feel free to keep popping in your questions as we go along into the Q&A box, and we'll get to you toward the end. There'll also be a recording of the webinar available. You'll receive it on email, and we'll also have it up on our website.

Speaker A: right after.

Speaker B: So to begin with, I'll just give you a quick overview of what to expect from today. So I'll start off with just setting context, talking a little bit about the Global State of Internal Communication survey that we conduct. And it's the findings of that survey that I'm going to be sharing with you today. And then we'll go into market conditions. So this will really just explore the state of the market today and how it's affecting internal communicators. We'll move on to talking about the top trends that are engaging more interesting internal communicators in 2023. We'll discuss key goals, key challenges. We'll talk about workplace culture and the different elements of it. We'll also talk about channel usage, different softwares, what kind of tools are valuable to internal communicators. We'll talk a little bit about where all your time is going or what— where the industry's time is going in terms of what all responsibilities you have. We'll talk about leadership attitude towards the company and internal comms. We'll talk about strategy, which includes KPIs, things like that. We'll also discuss what the impact of internal communications has been and is as of today. And then we'll finally talk about current workplace structures and what that means for different organizations. And we'll close out with the Q&A session. So I'll dive right in. So the Global State of Internal Comms study is actually a survey that we launched at ContactMonkey 4 years ago with the idea of just getting insight into what's happening in the industry and how internal communicators are feeling, what their outlook is, what their challenges are, just for us to get a better understanding of the industry and also share those insights with people because it's a great way to evaluate where you are at, understand where industry trends are heading, and help you shape your strategy going forward with all that information. So this year our survey garnered over 300 responses. We had a wide representation across geographies. So we had USA, Canada, Africa, India, Australia, UK, quite a few countries participate. And in terms of company sizes, we had startups all the way to large organizations with 10,000 employees or more. So you will be represented in this survey regardless of what the size of your company. And then the departments that participated were obviously internal communications. There was respondents from human resources, Marketing, and a few other assorted ones as well. So I'll start with the market conditions and we'll talk about what this means for internal communicators or what our respondents had to say about it. So when asked if a team or organization had been negatively affected by current market conditions, which could be inflation, recession, there was the Great Resignation, there's a lot of things happening in an economic context. context, in a sociopolitical context. And 49% of respondents said they had been impacted. I think it's safe to say that every individual and every company is impacted by these in some way. But this is more to gauge which companies were facing a direct impact at the time of the survey, which was earlier this year. So that is a majority of the respondents. 36% did not experience a direct impact at that point in time. And 15% just didn't know. When we asked which market situation has affected their company the most, majority of the respondents, which is 75%, said it was inflation that had the biggest impact. I think this would make a lot of sense to all of us. 48% said recession fears, which is kind of closely tied to inflation anyway. And then 16% were experiencing mass layoffs, again, as a result of company decisions based on inflation. And then market correction was what affected 22% of the respondents. So market correction is basically the sustained decline in the value of a market index or the price of an individual asset. So it really all just ties back to the fact that we are experiencing inflation. Organizations are preparing for recession, and therefore they're making financial decisions that would influence how they spend their money, and therefore they might be downsizing. So it's all kind of correlated, and this is kind of the situation in which internal communications is functioning at this given point in time. When we asked how their team or organization has been affected by current market conditions, unsurprisingly, most said that budget cuts and tech spending has reduced. Is an obvious step that companies take in the face of recession or during inflation because you are experiencing— people are spending less, there's declining profits, and therefore you need to manage your costs and expenses accordingly. And if you see the rest of the results, you'll see it's kind of a trickle-down effect. Budget cuts do lead to things like, for example, employee turnover, which is what has affected 41% of respondents. All of this can lead to a drop in employee So 48% have experienced a drop in employee morale. So these are the top 3 kind of effects of current market conditions. That's followed by hiring freezes, which affected 32% of our respondents. Low wage increases. So you're probably not seeing as many bonuses or raises going around this year. So that's affected 22%. Again, that would definitely influence employee morale. 16% are experiencing a higher attrition rate. And only 12% at the time of the survey had not been affected by market conditions, which is really great. Must be specific businesses. But as we can see, largely most companies have been affected in some way by the situation. So this is the context in which businesses and internal communicators are functioning this year. And it's good to keep in mind because it does make a lot of sense when we see some of the trends that follow later in the study. So I'll dive into the top trends that are popular among internal communicators in 2023. Coming out right on top is employee experience. So for 4 years consecutively, employee experience has been the number one priority for internal communicators. That makes a lot of sense because the whole goal of internal communications is to drive up employee engagement, drive up employee satisfaction, and providing a good employee experience is the crux of that. What has changed over the 4 years though is what employee experience means. So for example, when we did the study in 2020 pre-pandemic, employee experience was really all about the flashy things. How can you make your workplace stand out and be attractive to employees? What are the cool new things companies are investing in to elevate the in-office experience? But soon after that, the pandemic happened. So when we asked this question in 2021, employee experience was on top. But that time employee experience was all about like how do you shape the remote employee experience? How do you make them feel part of the company and engaged while they're working from home? And then as of 2022, companies had now started transitioning back to work. There was a rise in hybrid workplaces. And employee experience was all about managing an effective transition back to the workplace. A lot of crisis communication. managing change, that was kind of a top priority within employee experience. Sorry, my voice just went. And then this year employee experience is very much about going beyond the frills and addressing what employees really need to feel content in the workplace. So yes, you want to create strong internal communications, you want to have a strong culture, you want to have a good in-office experience, all of that. But a true holistic employee experience is really going to be about addressing what matters to them. How do you help them manage burnout? How do you encourage work-life balance? How do you enable employees to take care of their physical and mental health? How do you support an employee's desire for growth? So it's a lot more intangible, but it's still part of building that great employee experience. experience. So that was the top trend. Second most popular trend was actually tied for proving ROI of employee communications and diversity, equity, and inclusion, with 55% of respondents choosing that as their top trend. Proving ROI of internal communications, I think, will always be an important thing as the years go by and as the function kind of becomes more of a permanent— have a more permanent status on the C-suite table. It definitely has proved itself. But I think measurement is always a really hard thing to do with IC just because it has a lot of intangible effects. It is a lot about how people feel, and that is something hard to put a metric on. But there are so many ways in which you can still measure that. It's just you need to have the right tools, you need to have the right softwares, but you also need the budget for those those things. So that is a constant challenge and a constant thing internal communicators are focused on exploring. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, again, I think will continue to be a priority, probably until we reach a point where things are very equitable. But what my conversations with a lot of internal communicators is, the E&I is something we talk about a lot. A company wants to do a lot on that front. But Not— we don't always have the budget, and we don't always have the means to make a big impact on this front. But really thinking about how internal communications can be the voice of minorities, or how internal comms can help amplify the message, or help amplify awareness through their communication channels, is what IC can do and what IC can focus on. A few other top trends. So remote and hybrid work structure, that has kind of been around for the last 2, 3 years. It's dropped in priority, but it still remains a priority for 48% of our respondents. 46% are most concerned with eliciting employee feedback, which is the truest and best measure of your internal communication. So that makes sense. I won't go in depth into all of these. They have been kind of recurring themes. We do elaborate on them in the report as well. But mixternal comms, which is a priority for 45% of the respondents, is a new trend that we've seen kind of come about this year. It's possibly due to the fact that companies are looking to streamline and maximize existing resources and kind of do as much as they can with what they already have. Mixternal comms is seeing a rise, and that's basically how can you when you align or combine your internal and external communications efforts. So that's definitely a new trend that's come into the forefront. So this is kind of an overview of that. And then we'll move on to the key goals for internal communicators in 2023. So we asked respondents what their main priority for internal communications was this year. All the things listed on the slide are priorities. So we asked them to rank it. Number 1 was higher employee satisfaction. We could all probably resonate with this just because that is the ultimate goal of everything internal communications is doing. Better leadership communication has now risen in priority as a goal. And this is because I think leadership communication was not something that was being nurtured as in with as much focus as the other things were, just because the previous years had so many other priorities like crisis communications when you had to suddenly go remote and adjust to that, or managing change when had to bring the employees back into the office. So those things have kind of consistently taken precedence over the past few years. But now a lot of companies have kind of settled into their workplace structure. Things are kind of going more smoothly. And it's kind of highlighted this other gap, which is leadership comms, which is essential to kind of keeping your employees aligned, keeping morale up during difficult times. So when market conditions are so volatile, having Having your leadership communicate consistently, having different ways in which your employees and leadership connect is gonna be really essential to like lowering your attrition, boosting morale, managing high turnover, stuff like that. And internal communicators are really focused on kind of being the conduit or the enabler of leadership comms. The third-ranked priority is increased participation. So maybe with lower employee engagement, lower employee morale, current conditions, internal comms really wants to help push employees to feel more involved with work, feel more engaged with work, participate more in the decisions of the company. So innovating and thinking on how they can enable that is also a goal. Fourth is culture change. So a lot of companies have already transitioned into the kind of workplace structure they are going to move forward with. A lot of them are still in the process of it or have just recently changed into a new workplace culture. For example, I know us at ContactMonkey, we came back into the office as of November and we're working hybrid now for the first time and we've kind of settled into it. But there's— you can see we're always kind of evolving and settling into the next stage. So you're constantly managing employee expectations, needs, hiring, expanding your teams to meet this criteria, and internal comms becomes very important in kind of keeping everyone updated, involved, on the same page, and giving everybody clarity. With the next priority is improved productivity. So productivity is very much tied to employee engagement, which encompasses employee motivation and morale. And as we can see, a lot of companies have seen a dip in employee morale. So kind of helping boost that productivity through encouragement, recognition, and just different innovative ways is another goal for internal communicators. And then finally, lowering the attrition rate. That is really important because you do not want to constantly be onboarding new employees, losing valuable assets. And making people feel involved, included, addressed, enabling employee feedback, communication with leadership. All of that is essential to reducing your attrition rates. So those are the top goals. And then we had questions around the key challenges faced by internal communicators. So most respondents, which is 63%, said tracking and measuring was their biggest challenge. This too has been a pretty consistent challenge. We still every week get on calls with internal communicators who say that is one of their biggest issues. It's just very hard to quantify. It's very hard to measure. They're looking for tools that can help them do that. And so that remains a challenge. What is good to see is that although it is still the biggest challenge, it's a reduced percentage of respondents that have said that it is the biggest challenge. Like, for example, I think a couple— 4 years ago or so, it was maybe in the 80%, and now we're down to 63%. So that's good to see. Interdepartmental communication is the next big challenge. That is another thing that gets challenging for internal communicators to enable, because you do— it is, you're dealing with different departments. To get everybody to align on a single modality can be challenging. And I know a lot of internal communicators are therefore focusing on empowering people managers or department heads to become internal communication experts within their realm, because that is the best way to enable interdepartmental communication rather than have IC drive it on its own. Low employee responsiveness is another challenge. This is really just, are employees giving you feedback? Are employees responding to what kind of outreaches you have? Are they engaging with content you're sharing? This is really comes to— it's kind of like the marketing side of internal communications and how marketers really want to engage customers. It's about finding the right channels, finding the right content, experimenting with a whole bunch of approaches till you find what works for your employees. Even things like knowing what are the best times and days to communicate with employees. Those are things that would help employee responsiveness. And on that note, for those of you that use email, which I assume is most of you, to communicate with your employees. We have an internal email benchmark report which kind of gives you a lot of best practices on how to improve employee engagement through email, but it also has benchmarks for your industry on what you can consider a good level of engagement, what you could consider a good open rate, click rate, what you can consider a good read time. And we've also done an analysis where we can recommend to the best times and days to send your communication, which are known to help improve employee responsiveness. The next challenge is engaging remote and hybrid employees. Definitely a lot of companies still remote, some hybrid. That is always going to create some level of disconnect. It's not as easy, or you can't take it as much for granted that your employees will feel connected, will be communicating regularly. So enabling that remains a challenge. And then what there is getting budget and approvals from leadership. So a lot of the solutions to some of the issues like measurement, responsiveness, even engaging remote employees is to use an external software, whether it's an intranet, whether it's an app, whether it's an email solution like Contact Monkey, SMS. Yes, it— all of it requires an investment. And considering a lot of people are already experiencing budget cuts, leadership is not spending on tech, getting budget and approvals is a difficult challenge at this given point in time. We do have resources that can help you actually build a business case for your leadership, which we'd be happy to share in the follow-up with all the other bonus materials. But we found that that's been really helpful to use those kinds of approaches to convince leadership to invest in a solution. And then finally, collecting employee feedback. This can also be tied to low employee responsiveness. If your responsiveness is low in general, it's unlikely employees are gonna engage with feedback surveys. So that does make sense that that's a challenge. There are many ways to address that as well, which I'm happy to discuss toward the end if you'd like. But really one of the keys I would say is Highlighting and making sure that the employee is anonymous really makes people feel a lot safer to kind of be candid because whether or not it's going to be taken a certain way, employees always kind of have that reservation in their head of being completely open if they feel it's not anonymous. And then people do all kinds of feedbacks, but at ContactMonkey, one of the ones that have worked really well for our customers have been pulse surveys because these are again anonymous and they're really short, so it takes second for somebody to respond because you're only asking them one question. But it's a really good way to get feedback on individual things like a change in the company or introduction of something new or feedback on a certain process. So those are ways to tackle these challenges. But these are the top ones that internal communicators are facing as of this year. We also wanted to know, because measurement has been such a challenge, we wanted to know if they consider that their biggest challenge. And 72% of internal communicators do consider it their biggest challenge. 47— like 25% strongly agree. So that is a large amount of people. That just tells us that there's more to be done on this front. It really would depend on kind of what channels you focus on and whether those channels provide you with the analytics. But the best way to start proving ROI is to start using solutions that have analytics that they offer you, because when it comes to getting the— getting employee sentiment and employee feedback, you could face different challenges. It could be a little subjective, but an easy starting point where you can quantify it would be to use a solution. When we asked if it's difficult to showcase the impact of internal communications, a very high number of respondents they do find it really hard. It also kind of just echoes the earlier question about measurement. It's all really just to say that quantifying the impact, showcasing the impact, that's the challenge, not really making the impact. Then we kind of delved into the culture bit of it just to understand what's happening on a culture level at different organizations. The first thing was to know what the current employee engagement levels are on average at the respondents' organizations. And most of you would know this, but employee engagement is really just a reflection of the level of employee involvement, motivation, employee morale in the company. Employee engagement has been directly tied to profitability and productivity in multiple Gallup studies. So this is a really important criteria, and most internal comms goals would tie back employee engagement. What we see here is that 58%, which is most of the respondents, experience moderate employee engagement levels, while 18% experience very low employee engagements, and only really 24% have high employee engagement levels. But that's really great to see. And that's not mentioned on the slide, but as a general rule of thumb, if 50% or more of your employees are engaged, you can consider yourself to have an engaged a healthy or good employee engagement level. And I don't have the averages across the globe, but in the US, approximately 36% of employees are engaged. So that is below average. And what these numbers tell us is that it's probably a global situation where there is a lot of scope for improvement. Workforces aren't engaged, probably due to external conditions as well as things you could do internally. So that's definitely an area that needs to be impacted. We also asked respondents to rate organizational alignment. So organizational alignment is just a reflection of whether at every level of your organization, right from somebody who's a new joinee to the decision makers and the C-suite, how aligned are everybody on a shared vision, a shared mission, and just overall values for what it takes to bring the— make the company successful. And this is a hard hard one to measure. So I would assume that a lot of the responses are based on employee engagement or employee satisfaction figures, company profitability and success, and a little bit of subjectiveness. But most still experience a moderate level. There is scope for improvement there, with only 27% experiencing high or very high. organizational alignment. Okay. We also just want to make sure I didn't miss anything. Okay. Yeah. We also asked if these companies have a formal employee recognition system. Sorry. Because employee recognition is a very strong component of having high employee engagement. And it's good to see that 65%, which is a majority, have an employee recognition system. 35% don't. That doesn't mean that 35% don't provide employee recognition because we have people who've responded from smaller companies and startups. It makes sense that you wouldn't have a formal system in place as long as you have a mechanism for recognizing your employees, as long as it's part of your culture. That is what is most important. And then yes, it does make sense that as you grow, So larger in size, having a formal employee recognition system is very important because it's a way to keep everybody accountable. Things get busy, things get— when you're in a large company, communication can get more fragmented. So having a fixed mechanism or process in place to provide recognition is very important. We also wanted to know about employee feedback. That is a big challenge for a lot of communicators, as we saw. We wanted to know how many are already collecting employee feedback. It's good to see 88% are. 12% that don't, it is essential to do that because at the end of the day, I do strongly believe in the value of getting quantitative metrics to prove ROI and using softwares that can provide that. But I also do strongly believe that employees are the best teller of whether what you're doing is working as an internal communicator. So getting those— that feedback from from them and testing out different ways to collect that feedback is the best way to do that, which is why we also asked what type of employee feedback has been most effective for the respondents. This might be useful for people that aren't feeling satisfied with the way they're collecting feedback at the moment, are not finding it effective enough, or those of you that haven't started collecting employee feedback. These would be some good ones to try. The most popular one is a comprehensive employee survey. These usually those once-a-year employee engagement surveys or whatever they might be called. They're pretty long and lengthy. They kind of COVID every aspect of an employee's experience and tell you the levels of employee engagement at your company. They are definitely telling because they're so comprehensive that they go into every aspect of your work culture. 46% of respondents found short pulse surveys the most useful. So I think the pulse surveys would be the most useful. Either to use them with those comprehensive surveys or to use them individually for a different use case. So I'll elaborate on that. Pulse surveys are basically just one-question quick surveys you can embed in an email and send out. An employee has to take no time to respond to it, so it doesn't take as much effort or investment from them. So sometimes they get more responses than those larger surveys. They're also anonymous, so employees feel a little safer to give feedback. So it would be recommended to use it along with an annual survey just because then you can have a pulse on what employees are feeling throughout the year on a given situation at that time itself rather than a retrospective survey where the employee reflects back on it at the end of the year where their feelings might have changed. So short pulse surveys are also really good when you want to— suppose you've had an event and you want feedback on how they felt about the event right after, that's a really useful one. You are thinking of implementing a change and you want to know how employees would feel about that at that given point in time, short pulse surveys are a great one to use in that situation as well. 44% of people found face-to-face feedback the most useful. This is very effective. I don't think anything could ever fully replace face-to-face feedback, although not everybody may have access to it depending on the work structure you you have. 39% of people found anonymous comments the most useful. So anonymous comments within ContactMonkey are basically just a comment field that you can embed in your email. You can ask whatever question you want. It's anonymous. Employees have been fairly candid through that. It makes them feel kind of psychologically safe to share whatever they're feeling. So it makes sense that people found that very useful. And then there is ENPS scores, which are a really simple metric to measure how your employees truly feel about your company. And again, these are anonymous, so people will answer honestly. ENPS is basically an employee net promoter score. So it measures how likely your employee is to recommend your company to a friend. So obviously they're gonna recommend it only if they think it's worth it and if they like working at your company. So if you get a low ENPS score, you know know there is things that need to be addressed. And I'm happy to share how those are calculated too at the end if you wanna know. Just pop that into the Q&A box and I will share. So when it comes to channels and tools, we just wanted to know what kind of resources internal communicators found the most useful. Maybe these are things you guys could refer to. Feels kind of funny saying informative webinars first while doing a webinar, but those have been found to be the most useful, followed by templates and practical resources. I think templates are really helpful because they save you a lot of time by providing you stuff that you would have to build from scratch otherwise. Virtual or in-person conferences are also very popular. We've seen a lot more in-person conferences happening again, which is great to see. And ContactMonkey will be having a virtual one this year as well. So hope to see you guys there. Email templates, same email templates, practical resources, blogs, podcasts, ebooks, and white papers. So these are kind of the resources that internal communicators use quite a bit. When we asked on which— what internal communicators rely on the most to communicate, email newsletters came out on top. Those are the most popular ways to communicate with your employees. It has been cited as most effective because it can give you the widest reach. People— you can measure open rates. I think email also gives you very comprehensive analytics and helps prove that ROI, which is another benefit of that channel. 32% found intranet the most useful. 8% find instant messaging tools the most useful. So tools like Slack, for example, collaboration tools. So Slack and Teams for instant messaging, collaboration tools like Trello and Asana, extremely popular as well. 8% use that the most, and then 7% use others. But internet and email are on top in terms of channels for IC communication. We were also, since email came out on top, we were curious to know, was the usage of email, has it changed since employees went remote or hybrid? 70% of respondents said it's definitely increased. So I mean, that makes perfect sense as well. We also wanted to know what kind of emails internal communicators send out the most, and most of it is important updates. That would depend on the company you're in and the industry you're in. So whatever qualifies as important. 70% use it for CEO office announcements. So yeah, using email for leadership comms is also a really good effective channel. A lot of companies do events, so email is used for that as well. We also have event management at ContactMonkey since a lot of our users do manage— do internal events. It helps you promote it, employees can RSVP through it, add it to their calendars. So that's been a really popular feature as well. And then quarterly roundups, holiday themes, new hire updates, and then 12% send an annual newsletter as well. So that's kind of the assortment of communication that goes out through email. We also wanted to know who uses a third-party software, and at the moment only 48% of internal communicators use one. This is kind of a surprising stat because the amount of work internal communicators have to do, the of communication you need to enable, the amount of challenges you're facing in terms of measurement, employee feedback, it would be really difficult to do without a third-party software. But it's also understandable that the number is low because if you're not getting leadership buy-in for spending, if you're working with limited budget and resources, it's difficult to adopt one. Again, I would highly recommend our resource on how to build a business case to get leadership buy-in for a software because that would help with that. We're also curious to know about who had an emergency alert or crisis communication system. This has become of growing importance ever since COVID at least having some sort of process or SOP around it. It's good to see 70% of companies do have that system in place already. And then we wanted to know about time investment because it's been a recurring theme that internal communicators are strapped for time and resources. And disproportionately high number of respondents said creating content and templates takes up most of their time. That's followed by 16% saying developing a strategy, 12% saying measurement, 5% saying employee feedback, and 6% saying something else, which is really interesting to note because when you see that most of the challenges are around gathering feedback and measurement, but very little time is actually being spent on this because so much time has to be dedicated to creating content and templates, which is just the circumstance people find themselves in. And therefore, again, using tools that can help you save time, relying on resources, templates that can provide you ready copy. There's another another feature at ContactMonkey that people have loved, which has saved them a whole bunch of time, which is we have an integration with OpenAI ChatGPT now. So we have an AI assistant in the email builder where a user can just input, you know, create a town hall invite for employees for this date, and it'll create the entire email copy for them within seconds. And it has saved people a lot of time on this front because really we're just identifying that creating content is such a big bottleneck for internal communicators. And these are the kind of solutions that would help. When we asked about strategy, 48% of respondents said they have a long-term strategy in place. 52% still don't. This again makes sense if you're spending a lot of time on just getting the execution-based stuff, creating content, it will leave you less time for strategy, and this is just a consequence of that. Most internal communicators don't have a fixed budget. That is another reason why you face so many challenges with getting new software, spending on things that would help you get through work, and that is something that proving the ROI can help build a budget for. We also wanted to know whether leadership recognizes the value of internal communications. So what we've seen is since 2020, leadership has seen an increased value in internal communications. However, as of 2023, this has dropped. Fewer people agree with the statement, and that's probably because of other Again, market conditions, internal comms may have been deprioritized, spend on internal communications may have reduced, and therefore internal communicators feel like they have not recognized the value of it as much. When it comes to proving the ROI of internal comms, employee feedback has been seen as the most useful way to prove the ROI. That again makes sense. We've discussed that. I'm gonna be going through these slides a little bit faster just so we have time for Q&A at the end. Employee engagement levels, open rates and click rates if you use email are really useful, and then employee satisfaction scores and retention rates. So this is really what internal communicators use at the moment to measure impact. When we asked where they have the most impact, most internal communicators felt that driving company culture was where they have the most influence. Followed by enabling team collaboration and then reaching a dispersed workforce. We also wanted to discuss workplace structure and see how that has evolved to this year. So 51% of respondents have now settled into a hybrid workplace structure, with 26% keeping it flexible. So flexible is just you have the office option, you have the remote option, employees decide what they want. 8% are fully remote, 6% are fully in office, 1% are deskless. I'm not fully sure what other is, but I guess 8% is other. But as you can see, hybrid is definitely the dominating workplace structure now. 61% did change their workplace environment in the past year. And sorry, losing my voice. Hope you can hear me. But 61% of them did change their workplace culture. And that's why you can see managing change is also a goal for internal communicators this year. How did they change their workplace structure? So most people changed from fully remote to hybrid. I think that's the most common situation, followed by a few who were fully in office somehow, and now they've moved to hybrid. And then there's a few who went from optional hybrid to mandatory hybrid. And so on and so forth. But you can see again hybrid is dominating. We wanted to know how changing the workplace structure has influenced employee engagement. 68% of people said they didn't affect it at all, which is good to see, and 20% saw a decrease. This just means you need to try new things, need to get more feedback on what has affected employees, and take your strategy. from there. When it comes to productivity, 74% said productivity has stayed the same. That's good to see. And only 6% saw a decrease in it. When it came to how does leadership respond to returning to the office, again, only very few didn't feel supported. 18% felt extremely supported, or 33% as well. And then 33% found it somewhat helpful. So that really depends on how the size of the company, what the leadership approach was, and how supported IC felt through it. You might feel represented in these numbers or not. And then finally, we wanted to close with, has internal comms been elevated to a more critical position in 2022? 67% agree, 33% disagree. I, in my experience and just talking to internal communicators, observing the trends over the last couple of years, and this survey as well. I think it's definitely a fact that internal communications will constantly be elevated to a more critical position in a year like this year because of financial circumstances. Maybe internal comms is seeing less of an investment, but the need has already been seen. The effects have already been seen. And as internal communicators move on to keep proving the ROI, finding out ways measure their impact. They will be able to prove their very obvious positive impact, and this— and therefore their position will be elevated more over time. I'm fairly confident of that. So that brings us to the end of it. This is just a link to the free download for the full report, so you can get a comprehensive look at all the results, and there's more information on that. But we will also be including it in the bonus resources the follow-up after. And if any of you are at all curious about how ContactMonkey helps tackle a lot of these challenges, whether it's saving you a lot of time creating content, measurement, employee feedback, using email effectively, we know people would not want to commit to an entire one-on-one demo, which is why we've launched these weekly live demos. They're basically just webinars for 30 minutes where one of our account executives walks you through the entire tool and all our features. features. So it's a really good way to kind of not commit but get a full demo of the product. So if you want to sign up, here's the link, and my colleague Ty will be sharing the link in the chat as well. Now, if you want to check it out, you can always sign up. It happens every Thursday at 12. And now hopefully we have enough time for Q&A. Sorry for rushing at the end.

Speaker A: No, again, if, if you— if anybody has questions, use the Q&A function to submit your question. Any questions we don't get to during our session today will be given to ContactMonkey's team for follow-up. Um, so our first question, let's start off with, um, I spend a lot of time creating content and I wish I had more time to focus on strategy. Do you have any recommendation on how one can create content faster?

Speaker B: Yeah, so again, because I'm in ContactMonkey, I have a lot of recommendations on creating email content. Um, and because we have received this this challenge many times from users before. There are a whole bunch of solutions we've come up with. One, as I've mentioned, I highly recommend if you do not have an external software of some kind to use that to support you in just fastening the process. We also recommend just relying heavily on templates. So either they're pre-built email templates which we have in ContactMonkey, but we also have ones available for download for free on website because we've kind of looked at all the kind of communications internal communicators send and we've created sample emails. All you really need to do is copy paste it into your communication and customize it a little bit. That saves people a lot of time. As I mentioned, we also have the AI integration. So using chat, like, I don't know, people have a lot of views on ChatGPT-3, so I wouldn't say you must use it, but these kind of solutions have really provided a way to really quickly turn around content even for in marketing or a lot of internal communicators. So exploring those tools definitely would help speed up that time.

Speaker A: Well, since you brought up the AI element, can you talk a little bit more about the AI bot helping to create content and integration as well?

Speaker B: Yeah. So this is a recent integration we have. So if you already have ContactMonkey, you already get it as part of your solution, or if you want to start, it's inbuilt within the email builder. Builder. So it's really just, we've integrated with OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT-3. What it looks like for the user is you have an email builder which plugs into Outlook or Gmail. So all you have to do is open the email builder, it's drag and drop, and people usually type out or paste their content in, add the images. Now instead, you have a paragraph box, you can just write a one-line brief instead of building out the content. And the AI assistant will just generate content for you in seconds. And then you can give feedback if you want saying, could you make it shorter? Could you add in this information? And it'll do it for you. You can even be like, give me a whole bunch of subject line options. It'll provide you subject line options. It can be like, give me an interesting headline for this topic. It will do that for you and all really fast. And I know as I build out a lot of email content for marketing, something like that is like a lifesaver.

Speaker A: So I can only imagine this would save you a bunch of time Um, we have a lot of people asking about how are you defining engagement, since that came up quite a few times.

Speaker B: Yeah, so that, that's the thing with the survey. So we've defined engagement as the level of motivation, morale, and just employee involvement in the company for those people that don't do employee engagement surveys. So because we've surveyed over 300+ employees, employee internal communicators. It's hard for us to guarantee that everybody does a measured employee engagement survey. We would assume a lot of people have those numbers already, but a few might have been responding subjectively based on those characteristics.

Speaker A: So metrics also came up quite a few times. Can you talk about what email metrics are most helpful to look at?

Speaker B: Yeah, so with Email, I think different metrics tell you different things. So obviously the first step is you want your employee to open the email in the first place. So open rate really tells you about your subject line. Is the content of it, of the email, and therefore the content of the subject line something that resonates with the employees? And that's a good way to inform whether your employees are interested in what you're talking about. Then the next thing I would look at is the click rate, which is an evaluation of really the content that you've shared within that email. So once an employee opens the email, have you engaged them with the information, the images, the content, the buttons? If the click rate is low, you know you can do more things in your content to improve engagement. And then one really useful metric is read time. So read time tells you how long a person spent looking at your email. So if they just glance at it, they probably didn't find it useful. They opened it and said, nah, don't want to look at this, closed it. If they skimmed through your email, they spent a little more time looking through it. If they read your email, which is a few more seconds, then you know the content actually resonated with the employee. So I would look at all of these metrics together and then within ContactMonkey at least, and maybe in other tools too, you can get information on which departments engage with your emails, which job titles engage with your emails, because that's very telling to say this email didn't resonate with this department, maybe it's not relevant to them, maybe we need to set custom communication to this job title. So getting more granular and analyzing who you sent it to and how your email performed, I would say, are the key metrics.

Speaker A: So going along with that a little bit too, um, what makes employee feedback effective per the graph you shared earlier? Does that indicate clarity of employee sentiment or high participation rate, or has it resulted in meaningful changes?

Speaker B: Employee feedback, that's a good point about meaningful changes because employee feedback is just the first step. I think you can look at these metrics and it'll help you evaluate your communications. You can explore other metrics that'll tell you how that channel works, but you really don't know how your employees are feeling about your communication or about things in the organization unless you're asking them directly. These metrics will not tell you that, and that's why employee feedback factors as the highest and most effective. And that could be employee feedback from face-to-face conversations, those comprehensive surveys, pulse surveys, whatever you choose. But it again, it doesn't mean much if you're not taking the feedback, analyzing it, and then making meaningful changes based on that feedback, because then it's just feedback that exists with no real changes to your strategy.

Speaker A: It sounds, sounds on topic. We also had several questions coming in about trends. Does the study include year-over-year trends to see where things are projecting?

Speaker B: No, we don't have projections. The trends are really about like what is happening this year, which trend is dominating this year. But we have conducted the same study last year. study from the past 4 years, so when a trend has come out on top, for example, in our report, we'll talk about whether this has been a leading trend in the past. So we do look at it retrospectively, but we don't look at it from a forecast lens.

Speaker A: With organizations that may be more geographically diverse post-pandemic, are you seeing a return to print comms as part of the portfolio?

Speaker B: Maybe like an employee magazine that could We personally haven't seen a rise in print, but what we have seen is people using the analytics to understand geographical engagement, looking at our benchmark report for understanding best times and days to send, and we've seen people create separate campaigns that are targeted to different regions and to make sure that they're engaging them in a more personalized way. But I, in my experience, haven't seen a rise in print.

Speaker A: We're seeing low rates of employees opening emails recently. What days, times of the week does research show are the best to send email to employees?

Speaker B: So as a general rule of thumb for employees, it would be usually sending them on a Monday, avoiding sending them on Thursdays and Fridays as people are winding down and checking out. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, so Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday are pretty like people are in work mode, people are engaged. But we also have seen that it really depends on the industry, just because some have frontline workers, some have employees that work late, some have employees that work within certain timeframes. So it really depends industry to industry, which again, why— which is again why in the benchmark report, we've provided best times and days to send emails for different industries, because that might be more valuable than just one single guideline for everybody. And also, it would depend on your specific company. So I would suggest, although there are benchmarks, try to send out communications at different times, test it out for yourself, look at best practices, but maybe look at your results and then kind of finalize on which one works for you the best. But the best thing to do more than even focusing on which time and day is to Identify— once you do that, identify a cadence where you're regularly sending communication on the same days at the same time, because employees start expecting that communication, then they're more likely to look out for it, and therefore they're more likely to engage with it.

Speaker A: Okay, we have time for one more question. I don't have leadership buy-in for purchasing internal comms software. Do you have insights on how people navigate this?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I do. I would say I've referenced that business case PDF a couple of times now. So I'll just do it once more. We'll try to include it in the bonus materials. But that's a really comprehensive guide on how to build a business case. But in a nutshell, what it says is you just need to, you just need to make sure that leadership knows that this is a thought-through decision. And there is a, there's a promised ROI at the end of it. So start with highlighting the main problem and what the effects and risks of not addressing that problem are. So if you're like, oh, we've been consistently having low employee engagement levels or low employee feedback levels, this means this has a certain consequence on the overall productivity and profitability of the company. You can reference secondary resources. It shows you've done your research. That's highlighting the problem, then highlighting the solution. So if you believe a certain software is the solution, talk talk about it, talk about exactly how it'll be addressing those issues, talk about an implementation process, a timeline, talk about how you'll review the performance so they know you're looking at it very strategically. And then highly recommend having an estimate for the ROI, even if it's a broad one, because that's really what clicks with leadership. And that really shows that you've done the groundwork and they can trust that if you're suggesting we make this investment, you should make this Well, that's all the time that we have today.

Speaker A: Any questions we didn't get to will be handed over to the Contact Monkey team for follow-up. And as a reminder, the survey that will be going out, you'll get access to the survey, the report, everything. So that brings our time today together to a close. Once you receive that survey within 24 to 48 hours, once you respond, you will gain access within 3 to 5 business days to the slides, bonus materials, so be sure to take that survey. On behalf of Reagan Communications and Contact Monkey, thank you for attending today's session and have a great rest of your day.