This past week, a whole host of different communicators and thought leaders took to their laptops to attend Simpplr’s Employee Comms and Experience Virtual Summit. Covering a range of topics from robust IT decks to leveraging AI to boost corporate comms, it was also an opportunity for Simpplr to present their own findings in the sector.

Survey and report findings at a glance

Specifically, this involved their state of intranet technology research, which was a comprehensive look at the state of the industry today, surveying 700 comms professionals to identify what they’re struggling with in the new age. In brief, these findings included that 91% of people using intranets had better business outcomes across the board, with 70% reporting that their internal comms were excellent or above average.

For this session, Regan Zuege, Internal Comms Lead at Simpplr, chaired the panel, which featured Jill van der Poel of Moderna, Lauren Hultz from Domtar, and Kerilynn Pajer from Agero.

A strategy that worked at your company

To kick things off, the panellists discussed what really worked in their comms. Jill made the case for embracing experimentation. Social media and news cycles move so fast that the way people consume information is constantly changing, meaning we need to evolve with it.

Jill’s advice? Trial run new formats, new channels, and react quickly to metrics and feedback to see if it cuts through. If it works continue, if not try a new strategy:

• Piloting
• Measuring
• Adjusting

A recent win for Keri was a shift in strategy, finding a way to deliver it to organisations and help people understand their role within it. To do so, they let themselves be led by employees on which way they wanted to be communicated to and using one intranet hub as a main source of information proved a huge help.

When launching a new intranet, Lauren emphasised the real need to do an intranet audit. Taking the time to fully comprehend the myriad ways colleagues receive information was the means to streamline comms and create more cohesion.

What are the biggest mistakes companies are making when it comes to adoption?

Forcing adoption stood out as the main error many organisations are still making and Keri recommended taking a more Field of Dreams approach: “If you build it, they will come.” Incremental building of new comms structures before launch and incorporating feedback means you can tailor the experience to employees.

It’s also important to understand what users are searching for and what they’re not getting. Jill built on this with an anecdote about how one of the most successful tools they used was built on one team noticing another team’s usage and adding it into their workflow.

What took off in your comms strategy and what didn’t work out the way you wanted?

One challenge Domtar had was when they were trying to bring three separate companies with three separate intranets post-merger. This was successful given that their adoption averaged out to 89% of users on it, post-launch.

Lauren chalked this success up to their community focus over communication focus. This transformed their activity from making sure people had the resources they needed to giving people the opportunity to reach other departments and collaborate across the workforce.

Where is the real impact of AI?

80% of respondents believe that AI would become an important tool at their organisation.

The crucial framework was understanding when to use it and when not to use it. Jill had leveraged it as a great tool to achieve agency-level thought without having to use an agency budget. This included:

• Test messaging
• Pressure test strategy
• Simulating focus groups to test what resonated with employees
• Content development and refinement

She quoted the adage that those with AI skills will go much further than otherwise. She’d even used it to improve relatability to avoid staring at the same paragraph as well as democratising content creation.

What was a small simple shift that changed how employees consumed information?

Lauren had found moving from top-down delivery systems to fostering a more human interested based type of content creation and delivery.

This prompted Jill to discuss her own experience in podcast production, which included a “fun question” to level the playing field and present your leaders as human. She found her content views doubled with this simple tactic.

Keri responded by highlighting the importance of mission communication; the mission is the reason people stay in their roles for years to come. Your intranet drives this experience so needs to incorporate employee understanding of the mission authentically.

What metrics are more vanity than value?

There’s a myth that IC can’t be measured but we’ve learned that it absolutely can. Taking a step back and realise that the effect of internal comms goes so much further than intranets or updates, instead facilitating culture and enabling productivity.

Effectiveness can be assessed through

1. Email opening
2. Click rate
3. Intranet usage
4. Employee survey results

Be very intentional about what you’re listening to and learn to ask the kind to questions that cut to the heart of what colleagues connect with. Questions such as:

• Do they understand the strategy?
• Do they understand objectives and key results (OKRs) and the feedback systems?
• How do you understand behavioural change?
• Do leaders understand what colleagues understand about the business?

All the data you gather can be built together to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Paint the story and connect it together

Keri also commented on how unscrutinised data points could become vanity stats, such as assuming because emails are opened means good click through rate or because people have logged into the intranet that that equals usage.

The real insight is in the nuance of these findings, tracking how many articles are they looking at, driving connection, engagement and success.

What are some internal comms myths or best practices that no longer work?

Frontline assumptions

In all cases, Lauren argued that you had to leave all assumptions behind. Given that Domtar is a paper production company, 70% of their workforce is in the forest, manufacturing sites, or in paper mills.

There was an assumption that the frontline wasn’t on the intranet and didn’t want to use a mobile app on their phone. This was not the case and they found the data to prove it, and more than that union bosses wanted to incorporate it.

Cascading doesn’t work

Coming in with her self-described “hot take”, Jill asserted that cascaded comms don’t work. The intentions behind it were always good but you’re relying on a lot of people contextualising communications in the same way, which is unreliable.

On top of that, it has to come from the top and reach colleagues from a multitude of different entry points. Consistently, in Jill’s experience, people don’t get their information in a way that ensures it’s all been registered.

Do colleagues care about the big picture?

The myth that Keri wanted to bust around IC was that colleagues don’t invest in the big picture of any organisation and prefer targeted specific messaging. It’s a myth that underserves everyone because colleagues want to know what the organisation is doing and where it’s headed, particularly as big transformations affect their operations.

How someone contributes to the company goals and the overall strategy is a motivation for engagement and drives people forward.

What’s something you’ve experimented with in IC strategy?

Moderna gamified learning through a news quiz show to see how people were keeping up internally. 15 winners were selected at random and won a prize, spiking interest and helping the comms team strategically push key information in a fun and vibrant way.

What’s one big internal comms shift on the horizon?

Simpplr found that 38% of the people they spoke with attend webinars to stay ahead of trends.

Lauren believed that the pivot to video that’s long been rumoured is here to stay. Video communication was a great tool to bridge the gap between leaders and employees, allowing people to interact with it in real time. This doesn’t need a huge amount of video production to create engagement and can be a great machine to produce external content where appropriate.

If you had to give one piece of advice for someone evolving their strategy?

1. Working with IT teams was a great way to streamline your comms systems. Lauren told us to take the time to understand:

• Security review
• Microsoft platform integration
• Network bandwidth

In doing so, you can connect better with IT teams and better translate functional user experience with overall vision. Alongside this, you can keep learning and use existing connections to stay on top of these developing trends before they’re too immediate.

2. Jill believed consistency was key in communications, particularly in how you use the tools that you have and the data you present to show values to leaders.
3. Finally, Keri said that it’s important for communicators to recognise they don’t have all the answers. Situations are always evolving, but you will also always benefit from an employee listening programme.