Personalizing Employee Relationships with AI

Speaker A: Welcome to the Data Driven Podcast and I hear everything production. In this podcast we explore how to transform your company and career through data driven decision making. Want to become a data storytelling aficionado? Then sit back, relax and get ready to unlock the true potential of your data. Here's the host of the Data Driven Podcast, Dominic Bohan. Welcome to the Data Driven Podcast where we dive deep into getting more value from our business data. Whether you're a data professional leader or just curious about developing data skills, the Data Driven Podcast is here to guide you along your journey. I'm your host and the co founder of StoryIQ, Dominic Bohan. Yesterday, Harold and I discussed AI driven employee engagement. And today we're going to discuss measuring the impact of internal comms on, on employee engagement. Here's my conversation with Carolyn Clark, the Vice President of Employee Experience Strategy at uh, Simpla. Carolyn, thanks for joining us back again today on the Data Driven Podcast. Yesterday we talked a little bit about employee engagement. Today, want to drill down into internal comms and how we can measure its impact on employee engagement. Tell us a bit about the fundamentals of employee comms. It's something many of our listeners might not be familiar with. What does an internal comms person do for an organization?

Speaker B: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, first of all, they do a lot, as most people, as you could imagine. But I think what they're really known for is for connecting the dots in an organization. And what I mean by that is it is the role of an employee communications person to understand the audience, right? So to know who the employees are, what their needs are, to connect the dots between strategy and vision of the company and news and information and the day to day life that an employee lives, right, their day to day work. And it's, you know, the words that you hear a lot is like, it's their job to inspire employees. So it's the fun stuff that you think about, right? Like recognizing somebody for a milestone or, you know, celebrating, you know, a momentous holiday as a, as an organization. But it's also the tougher stuff. It's the stuff that they do behind the scenes around things like organizational changes, layoffs, stuff like that. And internal communicators are known, right? Traditionally the best ones are known for being problem solvers. They tend to be really good decision makers so they can make a decisive decision really quickly. And honestly, they're incredible at uh, relationships because if you think about it, their job as a communicator is to bring all these pieces together, make sense of them, and so they have to be good at. They have to be like reporters. They have to be able to get information out of people and translate it. So that is sort of the highest level thing I can say about what they do day to day. And the smartest companies and there's all this data, uh, I can throw you some stats if you want, but there's all these stats about people who have employee communications, have better retention, have higher revenue, their employees are more productive, they're happier, all of those things. And so you have seen employee experience and internal comms jobs kind of spike really much more in the last, I'll say 10, 5 to 10 years than ever before, because people realize it's, it works.

Speaker A: Okay, that was very eye opening for me. I think I had some misconceptions about what an internal comms person does, possibly based on some experiences I've had. And maybe this is something that still occurs where I've seen cases of they're basically a copywriter, uh, that does what the executive says and puts it into words and gets it out there. So is that something that's still happening out there? Is that perhaps not the best way to do it?

Speaker B: I mean, I think what you're talking about is ghostwriting. And look, the reality is that ghostwriting happens. And it should, right? Because you've got, let's say you've got a CEO who's incredibly busy, right? They know what they want to say, but they may not be able to. First of all, they may not know the ins and outs of the employee audiences as well as they should. They generally do. But I think what you're talking about is this idea that when you get something from an executive that it's coming from like it was written for them, it's missing the authenticity. And I would say if you're reading something and it doesn't feel authentic, it doesn't matter who wrote it, it doesn't feel authentic. But if you read something that resonates with you, that is authentic, that is transparent, then you're going to be probably more likely to buy into whatever it is that they're selling. And I'm using my fake quotations, but, you know, and, and I think that that is what I would say is like, it doesn't matter who's writing it if it's authentic to the voice or the person. But yeah, there's a, there's definitely a misconception. There's also a misconception that all internal comms people do is pretty things up, they make beautiful graphics, or they make PowerPoints pretty. And it is so much more than that. And that's kind of where that's where it should go. That's where it's going, is that these are strategic partners at a company. Comms has got to be a strategic advantage. It cannot be your nice to have or your politics, you know, your propaganda. It has to be more than that, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. That resonated with me when you said it's gotta be authentic. And I'm like, even if I disagree with something, even if I'm upset by something, if I can see it's authentic and genuine, I'm gonna connect with it and give it a chance. Compared your classic, okay, this is our little corporate script saying what we think you want us to say. And I think people see right through that.

Speaker B: Oh, they do. And this is where, you know, we talked yesterday about AI, right? That's where you gotta be smart. If you're just using AI, you're gonna read the same way that people are like, oh, uh, this was written by some corporate person. It's the same thing you're gonna know. And so yeah, authenticity and that curiosity are the two really most important things in when you're doing something, writing something for somebody else.

Speaker A: Cool. So authenticity and curiosity when presenting things and what we're really doing or an internal comms person is doing is connecting all the dots from the high level strategy and vision of the company all the way through to perhaps mundane day to day information that people just need to be able to get on with their jobs. And bringing all that together sounds really tough to me. Can you tell us a bit about how we can do it?

Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, I think it is tough and I think that the way that the people who are doing it well are doing a couple things. One, they're considering the learning style of their employees, which is something that's relatively. It's not new in teaching, it's not new in other parts, but it's kind of new a little bit in corporate. Right. Where I want to know if you prefer a video or you prefer three line summary to a long paragraph. I want to know what you how you consume information best and I want to deliver it to you that way. The same way we were talking about the reason that people ghost write for executives is because some executives hate writing. But if that executive is way more compelling in video, put them in a video, let them shine through that way and deliver the message. So I think the key to successful internal comms is knowing your audience. Besides the thing we already Said it's knowing your audience and it is delivering diverse content in different learning styles and it's not expecting everybody to consume the same way. Right. You may be working on a project, right? And we're asking you to read this two page document. It's going to totally mess up your flow. It's not what you need to do. So rather, could we just say to you, hey, by this date, do this thing and we're going to remind you with a one word alert that says read the read or whatever. You know what I'm saying? I'm just saying I think it's all about understanding the individuals that we're trying to deliver messages from or we're trying to inspire. And uh, it's. That's really hard to do. I don't think everybody's doing it right. I don't think I've even done it right. But I think people who are thinking that way create better, more effective comms.

Speaker A: And so understanding our audience and tailoring our message, even the types of content we produce. Is this something where we can be data driven?

Speaker B: Well, certainly. I mean, I think one, it's going to be anytime you're producing any piece of any asset, whether it's an infographic or uh, any kind of visual or a long form writing or a video, anytime you're creating that, you're getting data on consumption and you should be just like marketers, Right. That's another thing I'll say is internal comms people need to be learning from their marketing friends because they're looking at data constantly and adjusting their strategy. So if I know that 80% of the people watch the video over reading this long form, that's going to give me a signal and it's going to give me data to think, shoot, I should be doing more video. Or this is too long, you know, like this is too long of a piece. Uh, people stopped reading this way through. So. Absolutely. I mean, I think that any kind of data signals, any signals you can get to improve your delivery of whatever it is, you should be using it. Now, you forget there's that like human element. I might say to my CEO, hey, everybody wants video. And he might say, well, or she might say, I hate video. And then you've got to come up with an alternative. But that's okay. Like that's why we're creative people, is to come up with what's the alternative and what are the new ways of being effective in comms?

Speaker A: Okay. And how can we bring that back to improving the employee experience?

Speaker B: Yeah, One of the things about employee experience just generally is as a function. Let's talk about it as a function now, not as like a concept as a function. Right. That's living maybe within HR or living with an organization. It tends to be pretty underfunded. And the reason that these parts of the business are underfunded is because they're always seen as a nice to have. Remember we talked a little bit about, like, how do you make sure that employee experience is seen as a strategic advantage to your company? Well, the way to do that is to measure its impact on the numbers that matter. And it's those numbers that we talked about, retention, revenue, productivity, those are the things that your top leaders, your shareholders, everybody actually cares about. So if you're saying, hey, we made everybody happy, we gave them free lunch, but you're not measuring, did that change your retention number? Did that make people work faster? Right. We introduced a new search. People found their things faster. Did our revenue go up? Because we, those two hours of time spent searching is now on projects. So I think the key is looking at how employee, all of the different programs and initiatives and things that you're doing, how they ladder up to the numbers that matter so that you can, one, get more budget. Right. So that you can do even more. Because that's always an issue. Right. Most people don't have big enough teams when it comes to comms and experience. And two, you start to get the clout, which is hard to get. Internal comms and HR don't always have clout when it comes to employee experience. And I mean, you proved it by saying what you said earlier. So how do you get that clout? Well, you get that clout by proving to leadership and to others that it's authentic and that it has an impact on the numbers that matter, like retention, revenue, all of those things. And those things are hard to measure, but you have to.

Speaker A: That's right. That makes a lot of sense. How do we do it? Do you have some examples of where we've, uh, done an initiative in the employee engagement or comm space and it's translated to a bottom line impact or something else that shareholders and execs would care about?

Speaker B: Yeah. So a specific example I think to think about is when employee comms and employee experience people come together with change management. So let's say your company's investing in, um, something new, I don't know, a productivity tool or something like this, that the success of that tool depends on the adoption of that tool. It depends on the feelings the employees have towards that tool, the effectiveness of it. So what's happening in the background? What should be happening is the metrics that we're using when we introduce that tool, we need to be laddering those up to whatever the goal of that tool is. This is getting a little confusing, but what I'm trying to say is, like, if we're introducing a productivity tool and nobody uses it, well, then it's going to have a negative effect on productivity. If you can prove the positive effect, it has this tool, because you communicated, you walked people through the change, you help them understand what the reason that you're using this new tool was. All the details. And then you start to track the productivity lifts which ultimately result in money and productivity numbers. Right. If you can do that, then you've got a proof point about the effectiveness of what you've rolled out and why the money you've spent on X tool was worth it because it increased this productivity number over here as well. So the truth is, it's hard to do, and I don't think everybody is doing it. Well, a lot of people are not doing it. We surveyed recently, and a lot of people are not measuring at all, which is nuts. So I think we're going to start to see people doing more and more measurement.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, it's a great example. And sometimes you have to make some assumptions, and that's not a bad thing. When you're analyzing data, there's no such thing as a perfect answer that's 100% unassailable. And so in this case, where someone could turn around and say, well, even if you hadn't done the fantastic work you did in comms, people would have used the tool anyway because it's a terrific tool. And so you can never 100% with certainty, tie the effort to the outcome. A bit of a challenge. How do you work around that, where, let's say intuitively to you, you know, that it obviously has made an impact. People wouldn't have adopted the tool at the same rate without this comm strategy. How could you dispel some of the concerns of a naysayer in that situation?

Speaker B: That's the hardest question. That's the question I'm always scared to get asked. Um, from a CEO is where they say, well, wait a minute, how can you prove. So one of the things that I would do. This is getting really complex. But first of all, this is where the partnerships come in. So who actually owns that data is where I would start. So let's say we're using the Productivity metric. We've introduced this tool and uh, we want to prove that this, that the communications we did, that there were some spikes in the usage or some. You're going to have to use some kind of timeline to show before and after if you can. You also are going to have to partner with the people who know the data well. And that is where it gets tricky because it's about access and bandwidth. But what I would do is if I'm uh, measuring a productivity metric, I would be going to my friends in it and I would be asking what they're already measuring. I would be asking for that data in advance and I would be trying to compare or asking them to go on that journey with me of comparison. So really I'm trying to find all these advocates because the truth is all the people introducing news and information to employees want to promote it. They want it to be communicated, they want it to be successful. Right. But they need to partner with the comms team for that to happen. And I think it's a two way partnership. I would be going back to them and saying, hey, I want to help you, I want to communicate this. I'm going to use all of our channels, I want to use my best creative energy on this. But you're going to have to give me something, you're going to have to show me what success is going to look like and how we can get credit for that success, for our efforts. So some of it I think is relationships and actually saying like, hey, we've got to earn from this too. Um, and that's just some of the trade offs, I think, that happen in companies, you know, where you're, you're saying to your HR friends, give me insight into retention numbers and let's measure together so that our joint efforts in employee communications, we can prove that it has an impact, even if it is a minimal impact. Any lift, I think is a positive thing and it shows the value in the work we're doing.

Speaker A: Okay, great answer. I asked the question because I have no idea. So I was hoping to learn something and I did. Thank you so much. Yeah, so, uh, leveraging the relationships you've got and I sort of infer that that means planning ahead as well. Because this is the situation I've been in where it's like I want to prove after the fact that something's been useful and then I'm scrambling to get the data or get some old data that hopefully helps me establish a baseline.

Speaker B: Yes. Oh, that's so annoying. I think you're exactly Right. It is planning ahead and it is asking the person. Right, the comms person. Their job is to amplify whatever the stakeholder wants. Right. So asking that stakeholder from the minute they walk into your door or ping you on Slack or whatever, and saying, what does success look like? How are we going to measure this before you do anything? And honestly, two things happen there in my experience. One, it weeds people out. They're like, oh, Lord, I don't know. And I'm not ready to release this thing until I figure that out. Or they'll say, okay, I think we can measure it this way. And that opens that door to saying, okay, well, before we do anything, give me the data that you have. Let's find that baseline. So I think, I think it's a combo. But yes, you have to plan ahead and you have to also assume, which sucks, that somebody else is thinking about data the way that you are. Because if they're not, then you got a whole bigger conversation to have.

Speaker A: Sure. I mean, if we're not in a data driven organization, we've got all this work ahead of us, um, just to be able to get data and get people using data. But yeah, assuming that we are, let's partner with those people that already have access and can help us out.

Speaker B: Exactly. And I think the thing that I would say to the data owners, the people who have that data, is, uh, I've seen this happen in organizations and I wonder if you have. Where they hoard the data, they like, don't want to share it. And it's like, hold on, if you don't share it with me. Well, first of all, what are you worried I'm going to do with it? But second, if you don't share it with me, I can't help you prove the effectiveness of the thing you want to do. So, like, we should be open, we should be sharing. We should have, I would say being more transparent is better because it also allows other people, other thinkers to come in and look at that and have a different perspective on the data that maybe the original owner wouldn't have or see a signal that was missed. So I just like, plea for people to stop hoarding data because it's not a good use of collaboration.

Speaker A: No, it's really not. I see it all the time. Why do you think some people are so hesitant to share data? Why do you think the hoarding takes place?

Speaker B: Well, yeah, I mean, I think in my world it takes place because a lot of the information is really confidential. Right. So like, if droves of People are leaving a company, you have extremely high, um, attrition. That HR person is going to be worried about that number. They're going to think it's a signal on the, you know, they may be measuring that signal in a different way and it might be affecting something negatively in their world. So they don't want to share it because they're afraid. And I think a lot of this comes from fear, the fear that it's going to affect the work they're doing, a program they're doing. So I think, I think it's based in fear. And so that's where, when you are the person asking for that data or asking for access, you have to be very clear about your intentions. You have to have that collaborative relationship. Right. You have to make that person feel safe. Like, here's how exactly what I'm going to do with that data, and if I want to do anything else with it, I'm going to ask you first. So I think some of it is that I think I, uh, think people are afraid. Generally, people are afraid of losing their jobs. People are afraid of their job not being relevant. And when that happens, they're going to shield others from things that might signal that to them. And so that's where that just like, hey, we're in it together kind of concept, I think, is pretty important.

Speaker A: So it's almost like we need a calm strategy to get these people on board.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like we need a comm strategy for the comms people to show them how to approach asking for this data.

Speaker A: Right, right. It's very meta. Okay. But it does make sense to me.

Speaker B: Okay, good, good. Well, you know a lot more about data than I do, so I'm glad it makes sense.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you for sharing. Okay, thanks for joining us again. That wraps up this episode of the Data Driven Podcast. Thanks to Carolyn Clark, Vice President of Employee experience strategy at SimPLR, for joining us. If you'd like to hear Carolyn, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or visit her company website. That's simpler with 2ps.com just one link in our show notes I want to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes, head over to datadrivenpod.com we've got summaries of all our episodes and contact information for our guests. Of course, you can always reach out to me@storyiq.com, just send an inquiry if you haven't subscribed yet and want a steady stream of data driven brilliance in your podcast feedback. Hit that subscribe button and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow. That's all for today. Remember, until next time, when it comes to data, less is more.