Energy Communications with PSEG & Energy Transfer

Speaker 1:
Hello everyone. Hello and welcome to Spotlight on Energy. I see some familiar faces in this room. I have had the opportunity to work with quite a few of you on energy campaigns or in the energy industry with communication campaigns and platforms designed to reach your workers in the energy industry, which definitely comes with its own special challenges as I know from working with a lot of you, but also comes with some really great opportunities and I’m excited to have with us today two folks who have done a fantastic job leveraging those opportunities and creating really engaging and successful platforms. We have with us today, Alexis Daniel from Energy Transfer and John Nolan from PSEG, and I’m going to get applause for both of them and I’m excited to let them tell you a little bit about their platforms and things that they have done to ensure the success of those platforms. Both have some great stories. So with that, I will turn it over to Alexis.

Speaker 2:
Thank you so much. We’ll start with the name of our presentation. We have a fairly large company, but for our comms team, for the internal side, it’s two of us that manage it. So when we were first tasked with that, it was a little daunting, but our MyET platform, the reason we chose it is because it’s really user-friendly. So we’ve found a lot of success with it. And just a little bit more about our company. We are a midstream company and basically what that means is we’re the middle guy, we’re like the FedEx, we don’t own or find the product, we deliver it and process it. And so we are in 41 states across the country. We do have an office in Beijing as well with some potential expansion. And then with that is 10,000 employees. 65 to 70% of those are in the field.

Speaker 2:
And to give a little bit of history about how I came to the company, we were the ad agency of record and the PR firm that handled most of the crisis communications for about 10 years before we were brought in-house. And when we were brought in-house, it was sort of at a time of great political and great public scrutiny of our company. And so the company realized they needed more employee advocacy, they needed more education about our projects, about our people, a little bit more celebrating. And so we came in with so many great ideas of videos and we were putting ’em out on the internet and it was crickets. Did you see our great video? Nobody opened it. Did you see the CEO talk that we did last week? Nobody saw it. And so we quickly realized the field is not going to connect to the SharePoint team in the middle of nowhere, west Texas.

Speaker 2:
They can’t a lot of times. And so we had to try to find some way to reach them, which is why we got MyET. So it’s a very conservative company. We don’t get to do a lot of really fun stuff. And so this was one of the areas that we knew if we were going to launch something, a new platform, we were asking people, Hey, you need to do your expenses and concur. You also need to look at Outlook. You also need to do this. And by the way, here’s this other new fund thing. We needed to have a fairly large launch. And so we have an amazing internal graphic design artist. And so it was one of the few times where our company just kind of let us do whatever we wanted. So we sort of took that to the extreme and we had posters all over the field offices.

Speaker 2:
We blasted the intranet, we emailed, we had small amount of tchotchkes for some of the offices. We didn’t have a huge budget for the launch. It was mostly communication in all of the platforms we had. And it was funny, we were getting a lot of questions about it, so we knew people were at least interested in something that wasn’t quite so corporate. We did host about a month long beta testing. So we reached out to IT, HR and a few other strategic offices and engaged them. And we got a lot of great questions. For us, it was we’re going to do social media internal and for them it was like the legality and the HR and all the boring stuff that we didn’t want to think about. But that four week period was really important. One, it got our IT team sort of excited about something and it got us thinking about some of the security aspects of it because a lot of our field employees have been told, if you post on social media, it’s immediate fire no if and or what about it?

Speaker 2:
And so some of that education of well a press release is okay to share a new service milestone is okay to share. And so that employee education has been really critical in sort of turning the tide, if you will, but not without some passive aggressiveness from our management, we still have to quad duplicate post a lot of things. So our response to that has been a passive aggressive as seen on MyET, even if it is moments, hours before, we always try to launch stuff on our platform first and then if we get the, you need to post that on the internet, you need to email, we do, but our graphic design artist adds this little as seen on MyET. We also have a internal newsletter that we do once a month called In Case you Missed It. And in that my header is worded every single time, Hey, this isn’t the only thing, you might be missing some other things because we get a lot of sort of misunderstanding about the platform.

Speaker 2:
People will say, you didn’t post it. Yeah, we did. Well, I didn’t get an email. Well, not everything is broadcasted that’s in the platform. You might be missing it. So it’s just constantly trying to find the a hundred percent even though we know we’re never going to get there. But it’s reaching people in a variety of ways to try to do that video. Some people still aren’t going to watch the videos no matter how interesting we make them. People always want our tickets. That seems to be, we do a lot of golf sponsorships and that always garners a lot of attention.

Speaker 2:
But our biggest win early on was finally getting a MyET exclusive. We have a large partnership with the Houston Stock show and rodeo and we finally were able after six months to convince our management that we had to have something exclusive to MyET. So our Houston office is our largest office. I think we have about 2,500 employees and we have a large promotion with the stock show and rodeo. And with that, each night of those throughout the month long is a different concert. And so our employees have the opportunity to win different concerts and it really is a huge deal. If you live in Houston or are familiar with it, it’s a big deal. So it was the first time that we were able to only access to these tickets was through MyET. And after that we saw a 9% increase in those registered users coming back to the platform, not just for tickets.

Speaker 2:
So that’s definitely something that we’ve learned that regular content on a scheduled basis is really important and we’ve found a lot of success with sort of manipulating our calendar. Another really big win that we’ve had is through our contributors. We’re constantly trying to bribe our different ownership in the company for content. There’s no way we can know everything. We can’t write it all. And so some of those wins have come from people sending us content on a regular basis. One of the first ones was with our HR group. They have a micro-learning miniseries that they do. It started out weekly and then they realized that might be a little too much. So now it’s every other week. Sometimes it’s as small as a book review. Sometimes it’s something that was in the leadership meeting that they recently had. And it always gets a lot of engagement.

Speaker 2:
It comes at nine o’clock every Monday morning. People really engaged on that. And I think once we had that template to show some of the other departments that it’s not, Hey, we need a year’s worth of content, it’s just a month’s worth of content, two posts. Can you send us two posts? And then our graphic design artist does all of the imaging. We do all the scheduling. And so with that now we’ve gotten the safety group involved. It has come along. And then we also have an exclusive, we’re a big veteran supportive company. And so we have our MyET heroes that they self-identify in the company. We reach out and we do a little story 1 0 1 of them, but the regular content from other employees has been a huge win for us. It took some time, but I think once we had the template to show people that it wasn’t, we’re not looking for years worth of content. You don’t even have to make the images just a couple of sentences each month. That’s been a big success for us.

Speaker 2:
And then currently, one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about with some of the other platform users is our users are all Energy Transfer employees. They have to have a domain that is Energy Transfer, so no contractors, which makes our lives a little bit easier. It’s all single sign on. And so they get pre-registered in every morning with the higher and termination. And then out of those pre-registered, we have 91% that follow through with signing on. And of those, this is just our third quarter stats, which is a little bit outdated, but we have 55% active users. So we’re always trying to get that number up. But compared to where we were previously where no one was watching our videos, we’re pretty happy with 55%. And then post submissions, we have a lot of employees who are very comfortable submitting info. We’re always looking for more of that.

Speaker 2:
Inevitably we still get the emails every day saying, Hey, can you put this on the platform? And our general response every time is No, but you can. We have a little quick tip sheet that we mail them. Sometimes it works, sometimes we still have to post it, but that’s always something we’re trying to increase for sure. So those are our sort of highlights. Currently. One of the things that we probably don’t focus on as much that I know some other companies do is the post shared. So that is something that we’re cognizant of, I guess is the external sharing. But for us it’s more about we want our employees to be educated, we want our employees to know what’s going on. We want our employees to have a spot that they can share the successes. So that’s the post submissions and active users is probably a number that we pull up every morning and look at more than the post shared. So those are ours our big

Speaker 1:
Awesome. Thank you so much Alexis. I love the examples there and I know our next presenter has some really great ones to share as well. And I will turn it over to John from PSEG.

Speaker 3:
Good afternoon everyone. My name is John Nolan. I’m an internal communications manager for PPSEG. I’m here with my colleague Brittany, who’s taken pictures for our internal platform. So make sure your name is on there as well. Brittany, I’m just going to share a few lessons learned with you today and things that we’ve really concentrated on at PSEG. I’ve been with the company for five years. I’m a recovering political legislation person before all this. And if there was anything that I learned in that time, it’s he who speaks the least is invited back. So I’ll be quite brief. I would like to thank our investor relations department for putting together this hodgepodge of a slide, but this one basically gives you an overview of PSEG. So we’re an award-winning energy company comprised of electric and gas utility. That is P S E and G and also PSEG Long Island and a nuclear generation business, and that’s PSEG Nuclear, which you’ll see on there.

Speaker 3:
There’s lots of lovely stats there as well. But the takeaway is that’s our company and we’re powering a future where people use less energy and it’s cleaner, safer and delivered more reliably than ever. That leads us into our numbers. To give you just kind of a broader overview of the company, if I was going to concentrate on any of these now is probably the amount of customers served 3.8 million customers across New Jersey and Long Island. If you looked at the map of New Jersey, you would see us up in the Newark, New York area and then diagonally down to towards Philadelphia as well. We have about 12,500 employees. Of those 61% is union workforce. So if folks in the room in utility companies themselves, we’re probably struggling with some of the same issues where we have people that are out in the field, we have people that don’t have email addresses, we have people that don’t have ss, s o and all kinds of barriers shall we say that we have to get around.

Speaker 3:
The link is our internal platform. We link ourselves to the company and to each other through it. Currently we have approximately 71% registered. Our union population is at 58% registered. I’ll let the stats, you can read those, only there’s read them for you. But it’s something that we’ve been growing. We’ve been on the platform for three years and we’ve just signed another extension for three years too. And similar to yourselves, we’re trying to hit that a hundred percent mark and find ways of getting there. So the things that I’ve learned with the link and its rollout, and I’m stealing this one from Ram Manuel who was Obama’s ex-chief of staff, is never let us serious crisis go to waste. And don’t take the things on screen for what that piece says because that’s a point I’ll get to later. But we rolled out in April, 2020, I think April or May, so it was right after Covid hit and the way that we had been communicating with people all the regular ways that utility company would huddles morning meetings, sending emails to managers saying, pass this on, please print it out.

Speaker 3:
And we really needed a way in the end of March when the world shut down to continue to reach people and to have that engagement with the employee workforce. And we had been talking to social course at the time for probably about nine months, and the executive team then came to us and said, Hey, how do we do this? And we said, we’ve been telling you for nine months we need to go out and get something like this. And so they bought in at that point. And when I say serious crisis, of course Covid was kind of a unique situation, but what I mean by that is the moments, right? So what are the big moments that you can get people inside your platform? What are the moments that you want to make exclusive on that platform? What are the moments? And the one that I have on screen as an example is we had a C E O transition where our old C E O Ralph Izzo was retiring after many years at the company and our new C E O also named Ralph luckily, or unluckily perhaps, I don’t know, was then taking his place and he was within the company.

Speaker 3:
And in this particular example, we use that as an opportunity to make the link, the place to go for the information about the transition. Of course there’s the run the business stuff that people need to know, but anything that was nice or video related or could be heartwarming, we put that on the link to force people to get in there, go check out the content. And if you can see on the screen, we got a good number of likes for a lot of that stuff and lots of comments and engagement. So it was really a fantastic way to bring people into the platform. My next point, I’m going to allow my daughter Nora to demonstrate, and that’s swag, big and small. So big much like yourselves. Again, we sponsored the North to Shore festival in New Jersey earlier this year and that had huge headliners, Santana, housey, big, big names that people want to go and see.

Speaker 3:
Bill Burr another fantastic example. And we finally got permission or we begged basically give us the tickets for those and we’ll find a way to distribute them. And so offering that, you’ll see the post right there, 354 responses just on that post. We ask people put into the comments which show you want to go to and then we’ll go out and we will do a random drawing. And our C e O was so happy with the results. And actually Brittany did much of the legwork on this. So all credit to you, Brittany, he was so happy with the results. We originally had 50 tickets, he bought tickets for every single person that entered.

Speaker 4:
Oh wow.

Speaker 3:
The response was so good. But my point around this is how many thousands of dollars do we spend on this platform to begin with and then don’t back it up with any money for swag. So our argument now going forward is we need to put this into the budget every year we need to talk to the C-level and say, listen, you’ve seen the results and this was his idea was to then capitalize on the momentum. So continue to let us to do this. If you spend thousands of dollars and you don’t put a couple of extra thousand for other swag and it can be anything. I mean again, my daughter Nora, thank you, Nora helping this peer of success. She’s wearing a PSEG hat and we had a thousand responses because we put out a survey that said the first a hundred people to reply from the union get a hat and we get a thousand responses.

Speaker 3:
And it just works. It just works. And in this particular instance, this swag was old swag. We changed our brand this year and we had a warehouse or a room full of stuff that we were looking for a way to get rid of. So how do we be creative and get it out there and take that opportunity to use that people love stuff I guess is my point on that. And then thirdly, what makes your people proud? And the picture on the far right side, it wouldn’t be a PSEG presentation if we didn’t show off that Thomas Edison used to open our plants back in the day. But it’s really, it’s a point of pride for employees. So this year we’re celebrating our hundred and 20th anniversary, we are giving employees prompts of what makes you proud of the company, why do you like to work here, what is the greatest piece of advice you’ve ever got?

Speaker 3:
How do we help people in the community? And you’ll see some examples of that here. And what generation are you? So other utility industry people here will know it’s an industry that people get into, they stay into the one on the far left here is fifth generation, which is absurd frankly. I mean they’re probably there. When we started the company, we celebrated a guy called Rocky, of course he was a few years ago pre covid. I think he was in his 65th year of the company. I mean it just so lean into those things that make you different. Utility industry is different because of those things. It is places where people come and they stay and people are proud of the work they do in the middle there. That’s our law and compliance office. And they are happy because they did a summer event at Rutgers Gardens and they post it on our legacy campaign and everybody in the law department is happy to see the people around them, the people they work with.

Speaker 3:
We’ve had other stats. Our data analyst tells us whenever we use the word union in posts that are about union, union engagement on those posts goes up. So just little things like that that we try and capitalize other things to consider. Don’t forget where you come from. So huddles, talking points, site visits, QR codes, all of those things are still necessary even though you have this very digital environment, we’re never fully going to be able to reach everybody, especially when they don’t have an email address. So continue to push those things. Managers, supervisor talking points less is more. We found that we had very stringent guidance when we were asking other departments to come onto the platform about how many things they had to post per week. If you want a topic on here, you need two, three posts a week, make sure that there’s stuff in there.

Speaker 3:
But in fact, the more topics that we started to populate, the less people. There was more traffic, there was stuff getting in the way and the main messages weren’t getting through. So reducing the amount of content that has actually helped us out and keep it fresh, we’ve used a lot of the backend data in good ways. There was one particular example from a year or two ago where we pinpointed that Tuesdays was our lowest engagement day and we need to do something about this Tuesday needs to be awesome. So we decided to do shout out Tuesdays where everybody goes into the thing and comments on the post and shouts out a colleague tags and it went bananas for eight months. People loved it and then it just went to zero comments after that because they kept seeing the same post over and over again every Tuesday and it lost the engagement. So now with the help of Brittany again, we really switched that up now and we ask people their favorite places to go, their favorite ice cream shops, their favorite things around the state and recommendations. So those are some of the things that we’re doing.

Speaker 3:
There was one other point I wanted to mention that isn’t on this slide, but the other piece that we try and do is to make it as easy as possible for people to get in there, even though there’s those constraints around how they sign in onboarding is key at the minute particularly we have an age and workforce that is aging out of the workforce. In the last two years we’ve had 3000 employees out of 12,500 leave the company. We’ve been able to get close to 2000 registrations in that time to continue to replenish. So as your attrition goes, you still need to concentrate on the front end and getting people in as soon as possible. And then also moving the app as part of the company suite that we put onto people’s phones, onto their devices, their MDTs. We have a separate branded icon that we put out there and it links through just to the main page of the website just to try and reach them where they are. And I can go into more I’m sure in the q and a if people want to talk through that or whatever questions you have, but I’ll leave it at that.

Speaker 1:
Thank you both. That was great. I loved hearing some of the similarities that you’ve found in your programs and some of the differences and ways that you’ve managed to work given the restraints you have, the culture that you have. I love the focus on the content. Content is king and you guys have both done a fantastic job of using the right content to engage that workforce. Happy to open it up to the floor for questions.

Speaker 2:
Wait,

Speaker 1:
Do my job. Thank you. Thank you. Alexis, I would love to know when you began talking about sharing externally instant fire, and if I looked at your numbers correctly, I mean it’s almost a one-to-one little less active users to share content. How did you make that change?

Speaker 2:
So we have always allowed external sharing. We didn’t realize that not everybody did that. And there was a few things that when we talked to other people we’re like, oh, y’all allow people to submit posts didn’t always allow external sharing through. I guess we started in summer of 2019 and each quarter when we first started, we would have different campaigns like this month we’re going to focus on sharing. This month we’re going to focus on submissions. And like John was saying, it would be a sticker or a hat and people sometimes didn’t know what the prize was, but we’ve had a lot of, we call ’em the super users, the super users are going to share. We found some of that. We’ve dug into some of the numbers. Some of the sharing is a little, maybe not as accurate as it was, some dummy social media pages up loaded.

Speaker 2:
But because of the analytics and algorithm, our social team’s like don’t tell ’em to take it down because then our content is still getting seen. So we thought if somebody’s willing to jump through so many hoops just to get a couple of tickets to something, we’re going to let ’em do that. And the last year our external sharing shot up exponentially and we really dug into the numbers and yeah, it was, I would say under 20 that we’re really sharing, but those 20 people are also really engaged in other parts of the company. So now we’re trying to manipulate the reverse. We’re trying to go to some of the people that are really beloved in the team and say, Hey, if you start doing some MyET and sharing, maybe the reverse behavior will happen. So that’s sort of been on our wishlist. It sort of organically happened and we’re really happy about it.

Speaker 5:
Who else has a question? There’s one in the back there Susan. So since we’re in an energy session here, I wondered have you used the mobile version of the platform? I’m new. I haven’t set anything up yet. Just to give a little disclaimer. So I’m trying to absorb as much as I can and I work for a company that we do utility broadband, we do electrical distribution type stuff. So a lot of times we’re kind of responding to storm situations where we’re bringing transformers and putting new poles and all this good stuff and giving things to our customers so that they’re enabled to do that. Do you have any examples of business use cases where you had channels set up for employees to communicate real time in the field from one site to another or anything like that? Or are you really just using it from a corporate push information out and hear what’s happening with that? I’m just curious to see if there’s ever been a business type application. Does that make sense? If you need me to,

Speaker 3:
I think I understand the question. I would say there’s a few things. We’re trying to get more localized topics is the first thing I would say. So trying to make our content more local for the people in various departments or various locations around New Jersey and Long Island. And that way the content and the stuff that goes in there is more relevant to them and something they’re more likely to go and explore. And with that, some of that is a two-way communication with people able to upload their own content, doesn’t need a corporate check, just that’s your community run with it. We’ve done that with our E B G so far, but we’re trying to extend that as well. I would say some of the challenges we faced with that in particular, and we’re heavy union shop as well, is the worry from the unions of people posting stuff that is going to get them in trouble or they’re not wearing the right safety equipment or those kind of concerns.

Speaker 3:
So that’s kind of been a hindrance on us being able to do that. We would love to source it for storm duty pictures. We would love to source it to grab images off of or stories and then push those externally. But I think we’ve had quite a large amount of resistance from the field workforce to do that. But to your first point, we rolled out with the mobile app. I mean again, not all of our employees have a device, even our desk employees, majority of B Y O D rather than a corporate device. And for our union employees, there’s many that don’t even have email addresses. So that was the first part that we really marketed that hard rather than the website to make sure that people were downloading it and something they can keep in their pocket.

Speaker 5:
Okay. I have a follow up unless you have

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I was just going to add a little bit to that. So can’t we find that to be so true? We call it the two thumbs theory. People care about themselves and they want the content that’s relative to themselves. And so reaching out when we saw a couple of those super users that were somewhere in Indiana, somewhere in pa, what’s the tone? What’s the verbiage you guys use? They’ll submit stuff and we’re really cautious about overly editing it. The grammar technical writing side of me struggles with that, but our legal team has also said don’t heavily edit that, but we have really tried to be a little bit more location specific for an incident, particularly if there’s a crisis, something like that, but it’s so fast moving and they have to have so many other platforms when an incident happens that we sort of try to keep this as the information and corporate on purpose. There have been post-crisis where we’re sort of the, hey, you may have heard, but even that, it’s just a little bit of a different tone. We’ve looked at exploring if there’s a private category just for the comms team or just for safety, but we haven’t sort of gone all the way there yet. And we do have the mobile app. I will say when we first launched our IT team made us have a third party authentication prior we had to go through, I forget the name of it.

Speaker 5:
That’s my follow-up question is how did you get around? Because we are going to have to do multifactor.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, so we have M F A and that’s pretty easy. It’s just a text and it’s very quick, but it wasn’t through the initial download wasn’t through the app store, so people immediate power down. We since removed that barrier and we’re trying to build on that. I will say that even in the field, the desktop version is still the most popular, which I find. I think it’s just people are used to log on corporate info. Yeah, I don’t know. I think it’s just the culture of work is computer life is phone. I don’t know.

Speaker 5:
One last thing. I’m sorry you guys, there’s probably other people with questions. I want to hear about the education that, you mentioned it during your presentation about educating people. You had a policy where people couldn’t post externally, but then you were, can you delve in a little bit more to what was that education and how did you roll that out?

Speaker 2:
We probably should have been a little bit more nervous than we were. We were more let’s open it up and see what happens. In hindsight now, I hear horror stories from legal and other folks like, oh, well we’ve done it right so far. But it was a huge, I think people were hungry for it. The other thing is we didn’t have a platform before that we were trying to transition from. So they had nothing, there was no two-way communication. We had just started even having social pages that were our branded. Our company was very, we don’t talk about it. We do good things. We put out our press releases. There was no, we donated as the comms team, like millions of dollars last year to Salvation Army. Like, well, we don’t talk about it. So I think when we started opening our social media pages in general and trying to tell people internally, Hey, we have a LinkedIn page.

Speaker 2:
Hey, we have a Facebook page. Hey, we have a Twitter page. I think it was such a slow process, but that is something that we really focus on because our folks in accounting, they don’t know that we’re doing a construction project in PA or they’ve read a headline that is absolutely not true. And so I think that employee advocacy is why we were able actually to get the platform. And it’s funny, the press releases that go on the intranet, nobody opens them. The press releases that go on MyET, everyone opens ’em and they’ve always been available all these other places. So it’s been interesting to see the behaviors change, but I don’t know that I think we’ve just sort of thrown everything against the wall and when we find something that works, we keep trying to do it.

Speaker 2:
Originally we had all of these great strategies and what we found is we don’t really know until we start trying it. Our graphic designer and we think we come up with some really great ideas and we’re like, this is going to kill. We’re going to have to clear our schedule Thursday, nobody opens it. And then we throw up one of our most popular posts every year is our birthday celebration. We post thanks to everyone, MyET is a success. This is our fourth year thank you to everyone and executives that never comment will comment on that post. So we just try everything. That’s our biggest lesson.

Speaker 3:
We were the opposite on rollout. We were very conservative and probably part of that is because we were rollout during covid, so no comments turned on, no external sharing and worked for probably a year with legal to make sure that there was guidance in place and guidelines that we can put on the platform to make sure that there were posting rules, essentially sharing rules. And even our external team ended up doing social media mandatory training as well, just to let people know your reputation extends beyond the company when you post stuff. So we’ve been lucky to be able to work with legal and do that because oftentimes when you listen to legal, you’d never get anything done. But I feel as if we were very forthcoming with ’em about what we wanted to do and gave them more something to react to and them tell us, no, you can’t because I find oftentimes that may be their first reaction. But we’ve been great with the comments honestly. I mean, I think people see it more as LinkedIn than they do Facebook. They understand that it’s their reputations out there when they’re posting stuff. And aside from a couple of vaccine posts that we had, I think we’ve done all right.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, that’s definitely been, we launched before covid and we had a social media policy and we had a MyET policy that they have to check off when they log onto MyET. Yes, you acknowledge that. You’ve said that in our annual training, there’s the social media training. But yeah, we had to relaunch that during covid of just because you said it online and deleted it, we were sent at five different times. FYI.

Speaker 6:
Right. John, this is purely for you. I think you’re talking about reaching people where they were. You’ve got some people that are at desks, some people that are out in the field. Can you go into how do you make access easy for someone who doesn’t have an email address or if you’ve got teams that are used to going to the internet and what does that look like for your caregiver population? Do you have to target different tactics to different groups within your company?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, you do. And we could definitely do a better job of it. I’ll say that upfront. I mean, there’s only so many resources that we have and how much time and effort you can put into stuff. So I mean for the people that have desks, desks somewhat easy enough, right? S s o turn it on, they can get in, they can get their messages over email.

Speaker 3:
It’s not too bad. One thing that we’re looking at doing is actually making the employee experience the front page of our intranet, and we’ve used the new icons across the top to link two places that people need to get to by business unit as well, which is really great. We were able to segment the Long Island benefits site from our Jersey benefits site. When it comes to the non emailed people, I mean it’s hard enough reaching them for mandatory training. So we’re relying on frontline supervisors. So there has to be a mechanism, and I don’t know if we’re there yet, but there has to be a mechanism of accountability for frontline supervisors, managers that is part of their job to help spread culture within the organization as well. And the people under them need to be signed up for this. Now, some of the fight that we’re up against is voluntary because we have unions.

Speaker 3:
So one of the initial conversations was, if I’m on this at 10 o’clock at night, am I getting paid for it? Well, no, it’s voluntary, but that also limits us to force people to do it. So they’re in trucks, maybe they don’t have an email address, but they have an M D T. So we’ve put an icon on the MDTs. We’re looking at new technology. M 365 is rolling out in the company over the next few months. So we’re going to explore that with teams and see how we can use that to get people in there as well.

Speaker 3:
Roadshows that we’re doing for M 365 roadshows that HR is doing for annual enrollment, can we advertise in those places? Can we find evangelists another part of the company to go out there and spread our message without our team of two being going all throughout New Jersey? So just really hitting them over their head repeatedly in many different ways. Yeah. When it comes to communications, I always come back to one message. Many voices has always been my mantra. So wherever you can get them with the same message over and over again. But I think the accountability piece is key and hopefully at least for our own situation in the next five to 10 years, that’s something that we can steer the organization towards because I think oftentimes they don’t see that as part of their job, whereas they see I have to have this guy go do cybersecurity training as part of their job, but they need to do the same for communications.

Speaker 7:
Question over here, I can give

Speaker 8:
You the mic,

Speaker 7:
Alexis. I love the as seen on my

Speaker 2:
Thanks

Speaker 7:
As spectacular. Was there a before and after when you finally did put it on, did you notice a there increase there? Do you link on the SharePoint? Is there a link to download the app for more interest in that? Please tell me more about that.

Speaker 2:
Yes. So that came from our frustration of our management saying you didn’t post it. And I would say, yeah, I did. It’s on MyET and we call it the quad duplicate posting. We have to quad, duplicate post. Okay, well how are we ever going to train people? We do have a direct link to MyET on the front page. We have a banner story that is currently very stagnant on purpose. I try not to update that. I don’t want people to say, oh, I saw it on the internet. I want people to say I saw it on MyET. However, if you looked at our intranet right now, it’s very similar to MyET because we’re doing our annual employee giving campaign, which is a huge quad duplicate whatever. Everywhere we are posting, everyone in our company hates comms right now. And it’s one of the few times that I do try to, if anything, I’ll sort of, oh shoot, I forgot to put that up there. And it’s a day later.

Speaker 2:
I don’t know that I saw an increase with my as seen on MyET. It was more trying to remind people that there’s a reason you’re not seeing as many stories there. When we, I think probably about six months before launching MyET every story I could find, we were loading people up and so then when we launched MyET, it was a lot of like, Hey, that stuff you found, it’s over here now. I don’t know that Theon helps. It makes me feel better. And since I’m the one that leads the team, I think our boss knows when she has to ask us to triplicate post, part of us powers down, but there’s some people that aren’t ever going to download it. They’re never going to pull it up, even though it’s a single sign on, you just have to click it. So there are things when our fortune number comes out, when our Forbes number comes out, when our CEOs talk, we’re going to have to put those things a couple of different places.

Speaker 2:
But I would say 95% of our content is on MyET. Our one tricky thing is we do have a subsidiary that we own Sunoco. They’re not on the platform. It is my goal every day, and I used to think when we first launched that the SharePoint team’s going to hate us that we’re taking that bit of info and they’re like, no, we want your intranet to be the new story. We don’t want to manage that and this please take it. But they can’t have a broken experience for half the company clicking on it, otherwise the service desk would get overwhelmed. But of course NOCO has all the fun race info and all the great content. It’s just been a totally different c e o, a totally different budget. So we’re really trying to get full company on there, all 13,000. But baby steps,

Speaker 9:
Question over here. Oh, is there one back there first? Sorry. Okay. Hi. I’m in the energy world as well, and we launched just this year. So of course you might know we have an engineering mindset across the company are lots of engineers that work for us. So anything we post is all oftentimes anyone we’re working with in the business unit wants to know all about insights. So now that we have those and then you know what we have, they want to know everything there is to know. So from your perspective, how are you guys using insights? This may be a little high level, but what do you do with it? What reports are you pulling most? Are you connecting with people to show that type

Speaker 10:
Of stuff

Speaker 9:
Or are you just keeping it between your

Speaker 10:
Groups of two?

Speaker 3:
Sure. I think where we use it the most, we partner with a lot of people in the business to create their own content. So for instance, D E I, we’ve assigned somebody as you are the content person for D E I and cybersecurity, you have two content people of cybersecurity and they upload it, we check it and then we publish it. So where we use, I think we use the insights the most, is guiding them in how to communicate, what to communicate, what mediums to communicate in. Video images, cut down your stuff. It doesn’t need to be five paragraphs long, please.

Speaker 9:
So

Speaker 10:
Many times

Speaker 9:
Do you have to tell people shorter?

Speaker 3:
Yeah, shorter, exactly. So I think that’s probably the area where we use it the most. We do obviously pull some reports for mainly our communications team and the C H R O that we roll up to, but mostly on an as requested basis. I think the good thing is, especially with the north to shore thing that we have, it’s very visible that you’re doing well or you’re not doing well because there’s likes, there’s comments. So I think for a lot of our executives, I think they just kind of look at what’s going on on the platform and they see that visibly that things are doing quite well. So they’re not asking for an executive report every week, but where I’d like to get to is where we can use those things to ask for more money.

Speaker 10:
You just use

Speaker 9:
Your daughter’s space

Speaker 10:
For that

Speaker 3:
Should it works on me.

Speaker 10:
Okay. This question’s mostly for John, but also Alexis, if you have any insight. You did mention that you have an aging workforce and I work for the Department of Energy. That is something that we are very concerned about and has been since I joined last year. Something that comes up a lot. And so I was just wondering, similar to his question, do you see that that impacts your communication or how have you addressed that issue in general? I just know that for us it’s been hire, hire, hire. We’re trying to set numbers of hiring, we call it early career professionals. I’m just wondering how an aging workforce and potentially a lot of people leaving and maybe more younger people coming in, how has that impacted your communication?

Speaker 3:
Sure. More video, more images. I think people are used to social media looking things. I think this product is part of the answer to that question. Before this, we literally used to print out 15,000 monthly newspapers and put them at sites, something that had gone back more than 40 years. So I’m the person that destroyed a legacy for many people in our company and they included my email address in the last ever edition. Actually, I think it was more than that. It went to retirees too. So I got a few nasty grams. But yeah, I think that’s why the onboarding piece is so particularly crucial because we will be hiring more Gen Z millennial and the next one coming after, I’m sure in the next five years, there’s just going to be so much demand for talent that we’ve got to get ’em as they’re coming in the door. There’s a lot of people that will never be on the platform, as you said before, and I think a good majority of those are the ones that are retiring out to begin with. So it’s not that I’m forgetting them, we have to reach ’em in other ways. Like I said, don’t forget where you came from, but if you want to get people and you want retention rates, let’s get ’em engaged early, get ’em in the platform, make ’em feel welcome. So this is part of that solution.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I would agree with that a hundred percent. Our workforce is about 30%, 30%, 30%. And those 30% when we first launched from August to January, if we never got the last 30%, we sort of moved away from them. And I would say our new hires, I think we’re at 98% sign on and active users for the new people because they think it’s protocol and they assume Our HR group does a really great job of including it in onboarding and talking about it. We have a tchotchke that’s MyET branded, not just Energy Transfer, but MyET branded that they handed out. And so they think it’s, and I would say the new generation coming in, they’re way more hungry to learn about all of the different departments versus I’m in hr, I’m going to go here, I’m in accounting. They have been the most, they ask the most questions, they’re the most engaged.

Speaker 2:
We did a deep dive probably at the end of last year of which departments, which locations, which age group and really sort of honed in and it was, yeah, the new people are the most active, which is great. Then you hope that they stay longer and retention. Yeah, it’s been very interesting to try to get some of the older people on. But yeah, I think you’re right. I think they’re more familiar with social media and they’re more familiar with this is a LinkedIn type verbiage and this is what I would say on Instagram. And so they’re way more engaged.

Speaker 11:
I was curious to know if you see leadership involvement, like senior level leadership involvement in the platform is a critical success factor for it. Did you do any outreach to senior leaders to get them involved or does that even play a role? Just interested to hear at either of your or both companies what that’s like.

Speaker 2:
It’s like those commercials where they’re like the PR person’s coming and you see everybody hiding. We’re begging our senior leadership and the engineering and construction team, they get it. Our safety and E N C group is constantly liking, commenting on service milestones. But our co-CEOs and our founder, we call them the lurkers. We know they see it, but they’re not going to comment. They’re not going to. So we go over there and make them, Hey, we have a new volunteer shirt, put it on and take a picture. We just can’t express to them enough how I think they think that’s silly. Like, oh, nobody wants to see me. And we’re like, you don’t understand. If I go to an office in Philly, it’s the first thing people ask about, what’s Tom? And so I think the more it’s sort of the Pavlovian, if they get good response, then they’re more willing to participate in those videos. Our employee campaign that we’re doing right now, they did it’s mission impossible themed. We didn’t copyright any of it, so nobody tell anybody that. But both of our co-CEOs did really funny spoof videos and our boss was like, I can’t believe y’all got them to do that. We just asked. So some of it was the cart and the horse and some of it was a little bit of kicking and screaming.

Speaker 11:
Any final questions? Oh, you got another one.

Speaker 7:
I was inspired by both of you. The concept of those who will never use it, talking about those who are aging out, we’re talking about the high percentage of those coming in newer who are just all over it and 98% I’m sitting here with the thought that I’m sharing with everybody live here, reverse mentorship, the younger people getting kind of assigned an aging out employee or something along those lines to kind of help that, to spread that news, that word. I know. Thank you.

Speaker 11:
One more. Adopt an old person. I love it. One more question. Hi. I think this is for both of you. It sounds like you both have some pretty consistent content contributors, if you will. I’m curious about how that relationship relationships were fostered and how you continue that in our organization. It takes a lot of handholding and it’s kind of like pulling teeth a little bit. And I’m curious if you’ve found a good way to consistently get that information from them and whether that’s them posting it themselves through the platform or sending it to you and then you’re formatting it. So I guess that’s a couple questions.

Speaker 2:
Some of it’s both. One, Brandon’s not here. He was cheating on me and going to another one. But we have an amazing graphic design artist. He can do animation, he can do illustration. He is fast. He does all of our brochures. We have one out of 12,000 employees, all of our presentations. He does it. We also have an amazing videographer. And so I think when people can take that piece off and they just know it’s the content that sort of helps because we were getting, Hey, can you email this out? No, but I can post it on MyET.

Speaker 2:
Well, okay. And they would stock photo and then we just wouldn’t tell ’em and we’d change out the photo and it sort of organically came through. HR was our first group, and then I think other people saw the value of we’ve sent out this IT message 10 times and nobody’s read it. And we’re like, well, but look at this cool animation brand and did, they’re going to watch it now. So some of it was organic, some of it is still handholding. Some of it is just case by case basis, but it was actually, our account rep said, if you get the regular, if people start looking at Monday, Wednesday, Friday as days that those things come, and we were like, we just want content. We’re just so hungry for content, whatever. And so we really had to sort of space out HR stuff is Monday and those behaviors, we started seeing it worked. They know what they’re talking about.

Speaker 3:
So we’ve always had good relationships across the business. And I think over the last five to 10 years, it’s been more apparent that corporate communications sits on the business. I think we’ve taken a very hard line and for the good, to be honest, where we are not the arts and crafts department. We are not here to create an email for you and give you pretty words. You tell us what the content is, we’ll tell you how it should be better and how to deliver it best. So I think obviously there’s a couple of outliers there that probably need a bit more handholding than others, but we’ve been very particular and deliberate in telling people timelines and objectives. And we’ll ask people, what is it that you want to make people do feel and think and what is a reasonable goal for this? And just setting those objectives up front has helped us really kind of herd all the cats that are across the company.

Speaker 2:
I’m going to use that arts and crafts

Speaker 11:
Term later. That brings us to time. So let’s definitely give a big round of applause to John and Alexis

Speaker 1:
And thank you all for the engaging questions. That was such great conversation. I learned a ton. We’ve got a half hour till the next breakout session so you can all get some water. Enjoy the sun outside and we’ll see you back in breakouts at 2:30. Thank you all.