Back in November, we were at the Gallagher Digital Experience (DEX) Summit, and we’re bringing the insights we gathered from there to your screen.

The four big buzzwords were: AI (maybe technically two words but…), trust, behaviours, and frustration.

So, without further ado, let’s get into them:

#1: The omnipresent AI

No surprise here – AI was big on the agenda. It popped up in all sorts of areas. There was a sense of slight fear of AI, with many mentioning concern about redundancies, and discontent among colleagues in businesses in general. However, there were also undertones of hope for the applications of AI.

AI – ushering a new place and role for communicators?

Many talks praised the pros of AI for communicators – and suggested there is a significant shift in our roles to come.

As Frank Dias (Quilter) noted, AI and how and where to implement it is at the forefront of mind for businesses – this could give communicators the opportunity to reposition comms and its role within the business. We can be at the front of this change curve.

Marc Wright (Gallagher) highlighted key areas of shift: Strategy, structure and skills. Particularly interesting was the idea that IC people have the human key to unlock many of AI’s pros – we may move away from producing content, but we have the knowledge, the artistry. Our new place will be to be inquisitive, ask the questions and be listeners and ‘no longer microphones for leaders’.

Personalisation – bring it on?

A comms win – thanks to AI, we can far more easily personalise content for our employees to get access to what they really want. For Staffbase, this can even go so far as to have individual AI podcasts, tailored directly to the needs of your employees – spooky(?).

In reality, it seems most are using programmes contained to tagging topics, and personalising in a more basic – but nonetheless valuable – way.

Some questions that did emerge to our minds when talking about ‘hyper-personalisation’ were: Does this pose a danger to comms? Could it degrade and/or fragment the information people receive and reduce coherence across the organisation?

Using it (it being AI)

How do we fold this new tool into our own work? A great tip was to sit down and pinpoint your weaknesses and limitations and then see if we can work AI into our flows. We should become ‘architects’ of content now, rather than core producers.

Many comms professionals we spoke to were using AI to do first drafts of anything from social media posts to strategy documents, using it to give inspiration and a rough structure, before going in re-writing, tweaking and, of course, keeping a few words or sentences here or there.

In the AI panel, featuring Sonya Poonian (Gallagher), Stephanie Griffiths (Visa), Charles Radclyffe (EA), Michael Nord (ASML) and Charlotte B (Gallagher), there was the concern raised about AI being used to the point where authentic voice is lost, not just in regards to corporate comms, but in personal emails as well.

Tips were that we should always be checking our AI work. Also, if you prompt AI well, it should be able to get a grasp of your voice, and you can always edit, and add your own personal turn of phrase. However, this concern for a loss of authentic voice definitely has validity to it.

Really using AI – organisation wise implementation.

Stephanie Griffiths highlighted the importance of building specific use cases when adopting GenAI. She drew on her experience from when Visa did this with 32,000 colleagues. Use cases are a great way to show employees how they can instantly implement GenAI into their daily flow without the hurdle of ‘where do I even start’. It empowers people to take the first step and leads to actual adoption and ROI. Leadership engagement, AI ‘change agents’ (mentors), and building employee awareness about the tools through storytelling and competitions were other ways Visa boosted uptake.

#2: Don’t forget about trust

Maintaining trust was top of mind, and came up in various contexts, so let’s dive in:

AI – surprise, surprise our old friend!

In the age of AI organisational culture is under threat. Automation is shifting workplaces and ergo culture. Stuart Maister brought great discussion on how we should centre trust at the middle of all of this change. For him, there is a ‘trust triangle’. If people have the full 3 sides of the triangle (clarity, character (behaviours) and capability) then trust, understanding, and use of AI can be built healthily. Kevin Hänhlein from Staffbase made a similar nod towards the importance of building trust in employees as you increase AI adoption in your digital experience tools.

Transparency

Coca Cola’s approach to the EU Pay Transparency Directive is one to be commended. They are making their pay benchmarking incredibly easy for employees to request. On top of that, they are creating a specific portal where employees can not only access their benchmarking, but learn more about the context, making the information more meaningful. They view the directive as a way to get ahead of the curve, be trailblazers and take transparency even further. This move has a big potential to build trust.

Building trust internally and externally – in tandem

NWG, during a time of bad press and backlashes against water companies, built a Viva Engage channel to talk about just that – the ongoing situation. This built trust internally due to transparency. They also encouraged their employees to take this newly instilled pride and knowledge about how NWG was handling the situation to become a ‘team of 3,000’ ambassadors’, spreading their knowledge where possible with family and friends. These internal and external functions created a two-pronged campaign with boosted impact.

#3: Get a grip on behaviours – bringing people on the journey

DEX tools and frontline workers

Getting frontline workers to interact with DEX tools is always a challenge.

At MAX Burgers Sirincan Ariason discussed a few ways they had encouraged frontline staff to interact with their new DEX tools. Basic functionality was a huge point; by   simply reducing steps to enter online tools, removing 2 factor logins, and making essential information such as payslips available on their platform, people were drawn in to engage.

It’s also always good to put yourself in the shoes of frontline workers to check your comms are performing their function. Alana Foster from Travelex revealed their comms team have an imaginary employee named ‘Lucy Jones’ (who works frontline, in an isolated role in one of their branches) – they always ask themselves comms: would it reach her? Would it land? Would she care? This is a great exercise.

It’s all about your people

Recognition and people stories were other stand out methods to employ. MAX Burgers have ‘People Behind the Burgers’ some of the elements of which include employee podcast stories, blogs from the CEOs, and the award ‘Ebba of the Month’. This award was named after a late employee who embodied the qualities of a MAX burger employee – giving it a very personal, intimate touch. Employees nominate and vote, and they love the award. The impact of this is important because, as Sirincan noted, ‘recognition works best when it is employee driven’ – increasing engagement and building a sense of community.

Storytelling and building a community is essential in comms. Again, people stories are at the centre of Travelex’s DEX platform ‘The lounge’, giving them a real voice. Travelex’s Alana Foster approach to comms was particularly interesting, she taps into her journalistic roots, using the 5 Ws (who what where when why) to craft comms which are truly impactful, showing people their stake in what is being communicated.

In sum tell stories, give identity, give place, and your comms will soar for themselves.

#4: It’s driving me crazy! Digital frustration

On the topic of giving people voice – there were a lot of frustrated voices at Allan Tanner’s round table ‘it’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it’ where intranet governance was the topic.

Intranets and governance

Comms folk – the intranet is often a key part of our job, and a large amount of comms goes through there. Lock down permissions, practice hygiene, have rules on file storage and naming conventions so people can find everything. It may feel inconvenient in the moment. But it’s a world of a lot better than trying to clean up a behemoth of an intranet later.

ESA had to do just this – as they jokingly said they could ‘send someone to space but couldn’t find a document in their intranet’. The golden thread of behaviours goes through this story, as they built from the ground up, engaging their people where necessary to gain feedback and make a design which really works. Impressively they cut down their intranet from 35,000 pages to 1,200. That’s pretty significant. They now have an automated system where page owners get notifications if their pages have not been updated recently, this is then repeated every 2 weeks five times and then reviewed by other site owners or other admins to see if the page is liable for deletion or out of date. This keeps the content tightly maintained.

Cutting down on comms noise

Frustration with surplus comms was another theme. FIRST tacked this with their FIRST HUB. As an international consultancy their employees were being peppered with comms that weren’t even necessarily relevant. So, they consolidated their comms onto a hub, which has multiple hub areas, and an overarching search function. This meant people could join hubs relevant to them and interact as they chose. It led to a 35% reduction in comms year on year, a great amount of time and bandwidth cleared up for employees.  As an international consultancy their employees were being peppered with comms that weren’t even necessarily relevant. So, they consolidated their comms onto a hub, which has multiple hub areas, and an overarching search function. This meant people could join hubs relevant to them and interact as they chose. It led to a 35% reduction in comms year on year, a great amount of time and bandwidth cleared up for employees.

Getting buy-in

Finally, a masterclass in getting buy in from leadership to invest in new DEX tools to reduce comms frustration in your workforce – just show them just how inefficient your current systems are! This was the valuable lesson from KCL’s Christine Shukis-Brown. Aside from academic research on digital stress and standard documentation to argue her piece, she also conducted a dragons’ den pitch – getting leaders to close their eyes and try to visualise finding documents on the intranet. That was the feather in the hat to her pitch.

If your tools are horrible to use, they can not only take valuable time away from you people, but increase stress, exhaustion and burn out. You must address it.