Delivering Exceptional Employee Experiences with Firstup

– [Announcer] Firstup founder and CEO Nicole Alvino.

– Today we are going to dig deeper and really understand what the power of the moment is and how we can give those types of experiences to all of your people. When we do that and we connect with our people with meaning and purpose, that’s when we can all do amazing things. So first, I want everyone to close their eyes and think about a career highlight. Could be a promotion, the way you were treated by a boss during a hard time, connection. Okay, some faces smiling. That’s good. When you think about that moment, there are probably four things that are the common thread of a powerful moment: elevation, insight, pride and connection. Elevation, the moment is something that came to your mind, whether it was two decades ago or two weeks ago. Insight, maybe that moment gave you an opportunity for a new perspective. The poet talked about perspective and the importance of really tapping into that. Pride, was your moment something that you felt so proud of yourself or someone else? And connection, really is about that connection that you created with somebody else, with a patient, with a customer, with a coworker. Think about how you feel just reveling in that moment and think about the opportunity that we all have to deliver those types of moments to all of our people throughout their lifecycle with us. Most of you have thousands of employees, tens of thousands, some of you, hundreds of thousands of people. And so think about the opportunity to connect with each one of those people like we really know them, to create that magical connection. Some of the things that the poet was showing us, just the inspiration that we can have. That is what we’re going to explore further today. It all does start with data. So remember that. We’re gonna come back to it. But if we think about what we’re all doing. If an incredible employee experience is a beautiful operetta of these memorable moments, communications professionals are the orchestrator, designing, making sure everyone’s singing beautifully together. If you don’t have communications in your title, if you manage people, you need to communicate, and you have the power to create these incredibly impactful moments. This is about creating the moments that resonate with each person, and this is something that is a C level problem and opportunity. How do we connect with people, truly connect with them to make them understand their role and their purpose in work? To help me unpack this a little bit further, I’m going to invite Evan Wittenberg to the stage. He’s been chief people officer, chief talent officer, several times over at Pivot Bio, Ancestry.com, HP, Box, and Google. And we’re gonna have a short conversation about how communications is not only the connective tissue, but the foundation to truly unlocking an exceptional employee experience. Welcome, Evan. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, we’re gonna do a fireside chat, not a song. So first I want everyone to get to know Evan a little bit. When we have new people starting Firstup, we have people introduce themselves with three fun facts. So, Evan, what are your three fun facts?

– Three fun facts. I’m a father of three kids who are still young enough to be living at home, so my wife and I are very busy. Let’s see, I’ve been practicing martial arts for about 30 years, black belt in full contact, Japanese karate. And I used to do a lot of adventure travel. So I’ve been to all seven continents and including camping in Antarctica on three separate occasions.

– That’s a good one.

– So this is hot here.

– Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not Antarctica. Different packing.

– Yep.

– What was the most memorable moment of your career?

– I think the most memorable moment has to be standing on the podium at the New York Stock Exchange when Box went public at the beginning of 2015. But the things I really think about every day are the people who I’ve had the opportunity to work with throughout my career, who have gone on to do great things and are chief people officers or other kinds of leaders. That’s the thing that actually fuels me every day.

– Love it. What’s been your biggest challenge as a chief people officer?

– Oh, COVID, the combination of COVID and social justice, you all know this. Those two things kind of hitting together at that time made it really difficult. And seeing certainly, in the United States, the divide that employees and most of our companies are really on opposite sides some of the time. And how unfortunately, you know, we can’t look up for modeling of how we all can get along. So we have to figure that out ourselves. That’s been the biggest challenge over the last couple years.

– And then what’s been the biggest opportunity?

– Look, I think every employee wants to feel valued. They want to feel like they can have an impact that they can be recognized for, and they wanna feel the sense of belonging, right? And I think our companies all have an opportunity to provide that and provide a sense of community that maybe they’re not getting in other parts of their lives and really empower folks. So that’s the opportunity in front of us. We don’t always achieve it, but if we try hard for that true north, I think we’re gonna be in the right place.

– And what’s an example of when you’ve done that well?

– Oh, let’s see, I mean, I think we’ve done better work over the last couple years balancing all of these challenges and trying to help employees see common ground than I think I’ve done in my career before. It hasn’t always felt that way. Sometimes it feels like you’re losing, but I think creating a safe space for employees to do their best work has been both the challenge and the success of the last couple years.

– Yeah, no, it’s incredible. If you think about all of the changing moments and opportunities and kind of blending those together. How does it work inside a company? Chief people officer, there’s HR. There’s comms. Sometimes we need IT in the mix to at least create a type of employee experience. How have you seen that work well or not, kind of bringing those different groups together?

– Well, the chief communication officer has always been one of my closest partners, honestly. So at my current company, we have Wendy Watkins from Hormel is joining us today actually as chief communications officer. So I’m very excited to work with her. I’ve always worked closely with chief communications officers. I will say that sometimes there’s that, like, which side of the line does the work fall on? And so it can be a little bit friction-full, if you will, but I think if you know what you’re both solving for together, that kind of true north for the employees and the company objectives, then it makes it go a lot smoother. So I think actually that’s a critical relationship, and I actually think it’s very aligned in terms of what we’re trying to accomplish together.

– Yeah, definitely. And then I mentioned data before. Data’s gonna be a theme that’s going to go kind of throughout Attune. What kind of data do you look at in general? If you step back, what do you need to show your CEO? What do you need to show the board?

– Yeah, I think one of the biggest challenges actually is most of the data that we look at on the people side of the business is after the fact, right? We look back and see what attrition was in the last quarter or the last year. We look and see our employee engagement survey, which was at a point in time, and by the time you process it and talk about it, it’s been a couple months. So what we’re really looking for is the predictive analytics, the predictive data that helps you change something, change a business outcome moving forward. And those pieces of data are actually hard to find and super useful because while you do wanna report what happened, more important to spend your time on, how do you stop or start something happening that might not otherwise?

– Right, more like the windshield to look out versus the rear view mirror that we’re often getting. What’s an example of something that you could see if we could take, you know, signals that employees would send us in the form of data to get to that predictive piece or either change an outcome for good or bad?

– Yeah, so I mentioned going public at Box when I was there and we put in place an amazing employee stock purchase plan. It was like the platinum plan. I don’t know how the comp committee approved it. It was fantastic. And it became an intelligence test. Like if you didn’t sign up for it, believe me, our engineers pushed us for a long time, pushed me for a long time. Like is there any, you know, weird thing going on? No, it was just a great plan. And so then I looked at the data afterwards as who signed up and there were a group of employees who didn’t sign up. We said, “That makes sense,” right? “They’re entry level. They’re paying their rent and paying their bills, and they probably don’t have a lot of extra money to purchase some stock.” But then there was a group of employees that didn’t seem to have that excuse if you will. And so I looked carefully at that group and said, “Maybe they’re not planning to be here six months from now in the first purchase period of this plan.” And so we were able to do some positive things like talk to their managers about, “Oh, here’s some conversations you might want to have with some of these people on your team about, you know, how they’re doing, what they’re liking, what their career goals look like, et cetera,” to try to get ahead of it. It wasn’t done punitively in any way, of course, but it’s like, “How do we reengage these folks who seems like they’re thinking maybe they’re not gonna be here in a little bit?”

– Yeah, no, that’s incredible. So something like that to signal that our people are sending to us based on some behavior or lack thereof. And then you can say, “Okay, they’re not as engaged as we might’ve thought, if we wanna try to retain some of the top performers.” So I think that’s a big opportunity that we’re gonna continue to unpack and see, how can we really learn more about our people? What are they telling us that they might not actually be telling us? And I think that’s going to be the way that we can really use data to elevate these experiences. So slightly switching topics, can’t have anyone on stage without talking about AI. So what’s your view of AI? How is it gonna change the world?

– I should type that question into ChatGPT and see what it tells me to say. I mean, in the kind of employee experience people space, one of the things that most of the companies I’ve worked at have been pretty high touch, right? Employees today generally want the high touch. They’re not gonna go look at the website to figure out what 10th page of benefits say to get their question answered. They wanna talk to somebody. And I think without staffing up our function to an extent that doesn’t make any sense. I think AI has a chance to help with a little bit more personalized support for searching through tons and tons of information that might help our employees feel more empowered to do what they need to do for themselves. So that’s one opportunity I’m looking for. It’s an opportunity to be a little more kind of white glove, high touch without actually just adding head count.

– Yeah, it’s the power of personalization to make those moments, whether it’s you’re searching for something, kind of elevate that to make it work for you and connect with people, even if you have thousands and tens of thousands of people to do that with.

– That’s right.

– That’s great. So you’ve obviously seen a lot in your career, leading people teams at all various companies and sizes. What is your hope for the future of the employee experience and what are you continuing to drive in your organizations?

– Yeah, I mean, I think I said it before, right? We want an experience where everybody feels like they can do their best work, that they can be connected to others, that they can collaborate well and ideally connect to a higher purpose than themselves. That’s what gets people out of bed in the morning. That’s what helps them have the energy to grow their careers and do the hard work that our companies need to get our company objectives done. So that’s my hope is that we get even better at creating environments where that’s possible.

– Great. Super. And before you leave, what was one takeaway that anyone who’s going to camp in Antarctica should know about?

– Don’t get wet ’cause once you do, it’s gonna be really cold.

– Great. Don’t get wet. Okay. Thanks, Evan.

– Goodnight. Thanks so much.

– Okay, in a few minutes, we are going to reveal some innovative capabilities in our platform, designed for all of you. Tools that will empower you to create impactful moments, create the type of experience that Evan talked about, create that connection and purpose that we felt with Poet Ali. We’re going to talk about these moments using personalized data, talk about the power of AI, and also the opportunity to delightfully guide our people throughout their journey. So it all starts with data. So let’s unpack what that really means about having data to drive an exceptional employee experience. Gonna walk through three people to help bring this to life. So first, let’s meet Jane. Jane just signed a contract to start a new job. She’s incredibly excited, but also a little bit nervous. Is she going to like her new boss? Will she connect with colleagues? Will she like the culture and assimilate? What is it going to do for her child’s daycare drop-off? All of these questions running through Jane’s mind makes her pretty anxious. Did you know that 28% of new hires retract on their offer after they signed their contract? Think about all of that wasted money, from your employer brand to all of the talent acquisition. And 90% of new hires decide whether they’re going to stay or go within the first 90 days. That’s a pretty steep opportunity cost to make a first impression. Creating moments of connection and understanding for Jane before she starts a new company gives her that sense of belonging and purpose from day one. Now, meet Miranda. Miranda’s been at her company for five years working in finance. She’s recently pregnant. She remembers something in open enrollment about adding a dependent, but because she wasn’t pregnant at the time, she ignored it. Going through, I have three children, so this moment of having children, obviously the most incredible in your life, but also terrifying if you think about, how is my employer going to support me during this massive life change? Did you know that 58% of employees are unaware of available benefits? So for all of the things that you might do, from food stipends and Milk Stork and PTO balance and daycare, your people might not even know. And 30% of benefits go completely unused. So the power of the moment to get Miranda exactly what she needs could change the course of care for a parent and their child. It can make them feel more closely connected to their company or push them further away if they have feelings of frustration and resentment. Now, meet Adam. Adam recently lost his father. He can’t even think about work and he doesn’t know how to process his grief. There was an email sent at the beginning of the year about some EAP counseling services, but Adam doesn’t have an email. Adam works on a factory floor and mainly gets his information from a standup in the morning. Only 8% of employees use EAP counseling services. So the right message at the right moment in the right place for Adam to get it could change the course of his career. He would know that he can spend time with his family and be able to get the grief counseling he needs so he doesn’t risk poor performance or worse losing his job. So what do Jane, Miranda and Adam all have in common? At one point they were sent a communication by their employer with great intent. However, because they maybe didn’t get it when they needed, for Adam, in a place that he actually could get it, they didn’t know what was available to them. So the good intention of the company had no impact. So think about the power of the moment for personalized communications to support our people. Let them know we really care and also save the company money. How many times have we all said, “Well, we sent an email”? But no one knew what was in that special magical email. Did we think that maybe we didn’t send the email with the information when Jane or Miranda needed that specific information? Or again, Adam and 80% of the global workforce who doesn’t sit in front of a desk and probably doesn’t access email, how do we reach them in a way that works? And have you looked at what you sent, emails or otherwise, in the context of what you’re getting in your personal life, what you’re being sent from the Nikes and Apples of the world, the way that marketers have figured out exactly who we are, what to give us when we need it. Think about how Amazon has completely transformed our buying experience and what we expect as a consumer. Highly personalized, giving me what I need, reminding me of my son’s birthday before I forget it and birthday gift options. This all starts with data. There’s behavior data. There’s usage data that continues to fuel this hyper-personalization that we all get in our consumer life. And this meets me where I am, my mobile app in the morning, desktop during the day, Alexa in the kitchen at night. So if we think about what marketers have been able to do to transform our consumer experience, think about the opportunity that we all have to use those same principles of hyper-personalization to transform the employee experience. It’s obviously what Firstup does with intelligent communication. So with intelligent communication, the Firstup platform would know that Jane just signed her contract. She would start to get a series of messages welcoming her to the company, maybe a CEO video, maybe what to expect in the first 30 days, a colleague talking about the mission, vision, and values. Jane feels a connection and a sense of belonging before she even starts. She feels less apprehensive about starting a new job and really feels that the company cares about her. She’s not part of the 28% who signs a contract and doesn’t start. Better for Jane, the company’s investment is protected. The power of the moment. When Adam applies for bereavement leave, that kicks off a journey triggered first with a push notification because Adam has downloaded his company’s branded mobile app where he can get things like his payslip, the lunch menu, educational opportunities. That’s how the company can really meet Adam and reach him with what he needs. So Adam gets information like PTO options, grief counseling, before he takes his leave. And then upon his return, he knows that there are continued resources available for him. Adam gets time with his family. He gets the grief counseling he needs, and he can return to work more focused and ready to perform. Better for Adam, better for the company, the power of the moment. And Miranda, the system knows that when she applies for her maternity benefits, that she gets all of them listed out, information about when to add a dependent to her healthcare and when she returns, what to expect, what are the daycare options and maybe even a highlights that you missed while you were out. Her manager is also sent something to remind him when Miranda’s coming back to make sure he sends a welcome back message. Miranda has peace of mind about her baby’s wellbeing. She feels even more connected to her company because they cared for her through this incredible life event. And she remains even more closely connected. Better for Miranda, better for the company, the power of the moment. Each employee has their own personal journey from the moment they sign a contract until the moment they retire or choose to go somewhere else. And so every communication, every message, every touchpoint is an opportunity to create a memorable moment, a magical moment for all of our people. And so in order to start to show how we create these moments that matter for all of our people, I’m going to welcome Cheryl Chavez to the stage. Cheryl is our chief product officer, and we talked about what marketers have been able to do to transform our consumer experience. Cheryl has spent her career building Marketo, the world’s leading marketing automation platform, as well as another consumer experience platform Bloomreach. So she’s got incredible insight on how to take what we’ve done in the consumer experience and bringing it to the employee experience. Welcome, Cheryl.

– Hi, everyone. It’s really great to be here. I wanna start by, first of all, just thanking everybody for being here today. And, you know, it’s really great for me to get back up on stage and talk about what I love, which is building great products and delightful products for our customers. So let’s get into it though. So we’re gonna share a lot of really cool innovations that we’re working on today. So just a few minutes ago, Nicole shared three employee experiences and how personalized communication at the right moment can play an integral role in how an employee’s experience will be designed. You might all be thinking to yourselves right now, “Everything that Nicole just said, wow, I would really love to do that, but how am I gonna do that? How am I gonna scale and operationalize all of those things in my organization?” So what I’m here to do today is to show you all the cool things that we’re gonna be doing and how they’re gonna help you scale. So back in July of this year, we made an announcement that we were gonna infuse AI into our platform and how AI will help you communicate easier and faster in those just in time key moments. We have a number of new AI capabilities that will help you to streamline your workflows, seamlessly tailor messages, categorize campaigns, and precisely target specific employee segments. Okay, I’m just gonna let you sit with this slide for a second. It’s like mental air conditioning a little bit, right? It’s hot here. We’re in the desert. I’m assuming a lot of you will experience this at some point in the next couple of months. I’m a California girl, so this is not as near and dear to me, but anyway, so let me set the stage. All right, snowstorm is pounding your city. Schools, roads, businesses are all closed and employees at a local grocery store are trying to open up the store for customers that need food and key essentials. But some of these employees are without power. They don’t have daycare for their kids and maybe there’s no transportation to actually get into the store. Your employees need key information and assistance so they can assist their customers while also balancing their own safety and their team’s safety and security. Now this is a nationwide chain, so they also need to send important messages to these employees that are being impacted by the snowstorm. They also wanna send corporate-wide communications to make sure that HR, safety and payroll are also aware of what is going on. So different audiences are all in the need for slightly different messages. Communication AI can play a pivotal role in helping get crucial information to the right people quickly in the moment that they need it most. So I’m gonna show you how. Okay, so as communicators, in this scenario, let’s say it’s really happening, the first thing that we need to do is write our communication. And, actually, time is of importance here too. So we need to get this message out quickly. It’s gotta have all the critical information such as, which stores are gonna be open and closed? What are the new store hours? Are there any safety precautions that we need to be aware of? What shifts need to be covered for folks that maybe can’t get in? And also being aware of any of the employee assistance programs and emergency benefits. And so we wanna make sure that the title of the communication that we sent out is impactful so that people actually don’t ignore it. They read it and they open it, and they get the information that’s most important to them. So there’s a lot at stake here as a communicator, right? We need to get this email into their hands. We need to make sure that they read it and have all the information that they need to be successful in the days ahead. So communication AI can help, and I’m gonna show you how. So Firstup’s AI engine can suggest the best title for your communication based on the content. So think about the AI engine ingesting the content that you just wrote and then providing you with a very compelling title to put onto your communication. It can also create a concise summary for you, checking your tone and your grammar, giving you the peace of mind that you have helpful and impactful communication when it’s gonna matter most to your employees. Okay, so what do we do next then? All right, we’re in Firstup. We’re building our content, and we’ve got our content in good order, but now we need to make sure that we’re sending it into the right feed in our mobile applications or in our portal. So this is where AI can also come in and help. AI can help you pick the right topics in Firstup. Our AI engine will ingest the content, understand the content that you wrote, and then recommend the best topics to publish that content too. So in our snowstorm communication, it’s gonna recommend that we send it to the Parma and Rocky River stores, which have been impacted by the snowstorm. It’s also gonna recommend that we send it into the safety topic. So now we’ve got that all set. And now we wanna target our communication a little bit more specifically to a very specific audience. So the AI engine is gonna help with that too. You can simply use natural language to describe the audience that you’re trying to target. In our example, we’re looking for people who live within 10 minutes of the impacted zip code. This makes it easy to quickly identify and precisely target your communication without needing to put together a complex logic statement with ands and ors, ifs and thens. Communication AI can help you unlock unlimited possibilities to the audiences that you’ll be able to create. Okay, so we have the right message. We have the right topics. We have the right audience. Now let’s take another look at how AI can really help us. With optimized delivery, the system will determine the best time, the best channel to deliver the communication. It’s gonna do all the hard work for you. So in our example, Jim, who doesn’t have an email address, the system knows that the best way to reach Jim is through a mobile push notification and at the time when he’s going to most likely see this message. And so to wrap up our story, now that the communication is out with your employees, you may take a look at the comments to see the sentiment and to see if there’s any questions that you need to answer. AI can help you quickly understand the overall sentiment to get a feel of how people are feeling about what’s going on, or if anything urgent needs to be taken care of. For example, if the sentiment is negative, you can adjust your communication or you could optimize it as you move forward. So AI is all the rage. I know I’m very excited about it and there’s other folks I’m sure here who are excited about it. And we’ve been working with ML for quite some time now, but we really were thinking about, what are the things that we think we can deliver in our product that will make the biggest impact on all of you and help you in your day-to-day roles using Firstup? So I hope you’re excited about these features as well, and we will have more information about them outside of these doors after the keynote.

– I can’t continue my excitement, so I’m coming back. She’s not done. Don’t worry, don’t worry.

– Let me get out of the way.

– Can’t keep me backstage. No, so super excited. I’ve tried this new functionality. I think it’s incredible. If we think about what generative AI can do for all of us who are professional communicators, even more importantly the ones who are not, the line managers, all of the people who we want to have better communication. We can help make those messages really impactful in that right moment. And for the employee, we’re giving them the opportunity to get something that’s hyper-personalized to them. So we talked about one moment with the snowstorm, one moment, one important communication, one way to maximize the impact, the outcome we wanted from that communication. But think about all of the times when one communication isn’t enough. When we need multiple communications to get to an outcome for a certain group of our people or for an individual. We call these journeys. So Firstup Journeys are… Think about a trigger of the state of an employee. So I am starting a new job. I’m pregnant. I’ve suffered a loss. That is a moment that sends a signal to trigger a series of communications either to a specific individual or a group of people to drive to an outcome. So if we think about Jane and Miranda and Adam, giving them what they need exactly when they need it. So this is the next big opportunity to manage those moments that matter throughout a personalized journey for them. This is our opportunity to really orchestrate that employee experience, giving them what they need in their life while also giving what the company wants to deliver to them. So we’re going to take a deeper look at the power of journeys. Back to you, Cheryl.

– Great, thanks Nicole. All right, so we’re gonna set this back up again. We’re gonna tell a little story as we go through journeys. So a few minutes ago Nicole introduced Jane. Jane is a new employee who is starting at her new company soon and Jane, like most, she’s nervous. She’s excited about her new job. She’s maybe feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Does anyone know she’s joining? How is she gonna get her computer? Who’s going to answer questions for her? Who’s gonna be there on her very first day? All of this is making her wonder, did I make the right choice? Think about your first 30 days at your current job. There’s so much to know. There’s so many things to take action on. It’s easy to miss information as there are so many channels for consumption. It might be on a portal or maybe it came in the snail mail, or maybe it came via email or maybe somebody forgot to send it to you in the first place and you never even got it. Well, the result of this disjointed or miscommunication can cost a company. It can make an employee feel lost, disconnected, and second guess the decision to join. As communicators, you can all change that from day one. You have the ability to make a new employee have a great experience and save your company money and risk. All right, so introducing Firstup Journeys. Firstup Journeys will allow you to design and automate a campaign that guides employees through a series of interactions or journey. Journeys will ensure that employees will never miss a single bit of critical information, that they have received personalized messages that are relevant to them and the work that they’re doing, giving them a stronger sense of belonging to your company. All right, we’re gonna introduce someone new here now. Diane is a communication manager at a manufacturing company. Over the last year, the company has seen low engagement scores for new hires and Diane has been tasked with increasing the engagement rate by 20% during the first 30 days. So how is Diane gonna do this? Anyone can guess? She’s gonna use Firstup Journeys, of course, right? So she’s gonna send a series of personalized communications during that first 30 days, during that welcome stage, to get employees to feel more connected to the company. All right, hopefully this looks familiar to some of you in the audience. So Diane is going to log into Firstup. She’s gonna look over on the left hand navigation and see that there’s a new area called Journeys, a new module. You may be asking, “Okay, well what’s the difference then between a campaign and a journey?” Well, a campaign is a single message delivered to a topic and an audience or an audience. It can be scheduled and it can be delivered to a variety of the different channels. A journey is a triggered automation, a sequence of messages designed to guide an employee through a predefined path with a specific outcome at the end. Now, before Diane’s gonna get in here and start actually building out her journey, she needs to go through what we call a journey mapping exercise. She’ll define all the communications that need to be included in her journey, as well as the cadence in which she wants to send that communication out to the employees. Okay, so let’s say Diane is ready. So she clicks Create. The first thing that Diane is gonna see is a library of pre-built journey templates. They’re available for Diane to pick from and she can take one and further customize the journey. She could also start from scratch, but in this case, there’s no need to do that. The benefit of the pre-built journey is that she can get started quickly and easily and then just add in the customizations that she requires. So we know that Diane is trying to create a welcome hire journey. So she selects the Welcome New Hire template. So what we see on the screen now is a basic journey that she’s gonna start with. Diane knows that she needs to customize this journey based on the journey mapping exercise that she just completed. But the first thing that she needs to do is she needs to tell the system how does an employee actually get into this journey. How do they start receiving the content? So she clicks on start journey and here she can select what will trigger this journey to start. For the welcome journey, the trigger will be if the employee’s start date is today. This data is gonna be pulled into Firstup from your HR system and stored there. The system is always on and listening and will add employees at the right time. Okay, so next, she’s ready to build her audience. She wants this particular journey to go to full-time employees. There are different journeys that may go to other types of workers, so this one is very specific. So she starts to type in full and a list of the predefined audiences that were previously created appears. She selects full-time employees. Diane can create an audience based on any attribute that sits on the employee record and is stored in Firstup. And then don’t forget what we saw just a few minutes ago. She’ll be able to utilize AI to help her quickly and easily build the right audience using natural language. Okay, so now what’s next? So Diane is now ready to start building out the communications that will live inside the journey. So she’s gonna kick click on the first communication box in the flow. Next she sees an asset library where she can choose from a number of prebuilt communications. So she selects Welcome New Hire, and the first communication is added to the journey. If she needs to edit the communication, she can do that as well here. And then next she’s gonna define the delivery options for the communication. This is all the channels that are eligible to send the communication: email, assistant and mobile push notifications. She selects all of the channels and Diane continues building her journey by adding communications that provide history of the company so new employees like Jane can better connect to the mission. Okay, so Diane now wants to further customize the journey. So she’s gonna click on the plus sign and gets a menu of different options where she can adjust timing, decisions and the delivery options. So here she sets delay and sets it to three days. Now Diane also wants to send regional specific communications to the people in the EU. So here’s where she can segment her journey audience and send them different messages. She can do this by selecting decision from the menu. Diane wants to split the audience. So she selects the location attribute from the dropdown, and then she puts in EU. She’ll build a separate journey for the EU employees. So she’s branching out her journey. And for non-EU employees, well their journey’s gonna end right here. Okay, so now she can start to customize this new EU branch that we just created. She wants the next set of communications to be optimized by the system, which means the system’s going to determine the best channel and the best time to deliver the communications to the employee. So she’s gonna select engagement boost from the menu. And here is where Diane can now add all of her specific communications. She’s gonna set the duration to send out the group of communications to 30 days. So essentially what she’s doing is she’s saying, “I have three pieces of content that I need to get out to my employees within this timeframe that I’ve specified.” And the system is gonna take over and ensure that all three messages are sent to the employees within this time period. And the system will also find the best time, the best channel to send these communications through. Great. So, okay, so she’s gonna zoom back out. She’s gonna take a look at her fully built out journey to make sure that everything is set up correctly. She then hits publish, and the journey is ready and live for her first employee. Okay, so just imagine a couple weeks go by and let’s bring Jane back, our new employee. Jane’s looking pretty happy as she receives different communications through all the different channels that the communication were sent through. She’s feeling engaged and is very happy with her decision to join the company. Now Diane, on the other hand, she’s also excited but nervous about the performance of the journey. She can easily check on all the analytics, which are intentionally overlaid on top of the journey for easy understanding. It’s basically a pulse on the health of the journey. For each communication, you can see who has been engaged. You can also get more data on these members by clicking on view members. Here we can see each of the individual members that are in the journey. You can also see the date that each communication was received and when the next communication will go out. Now if you recall at the beginning of the story, Diane’s goal was to increase the engagement rate by 20% for new hires. So let’s fast forward a few more weeks and take a look at some additional journey analytics. Diane meets with her HR business partner and together they evaluate the engagement of the journey and the impact that has had on key HR metrics. They determine that the new hire journey has contributed to positive outcomes, 76% increase in completion of onboarding paperwork, 60% fewer questions from new employees. And remember that goal to increase engagement by 20%. Well, she knocked that out of the park and helped increase the score to 45%. All right, so that’s the end of our demo of our new journey capabilities. I’m really excited about all these new capabilities. Even though we just showed you one example, there are endless possibilities to automate all the moments that matter in the employee lifecycle. So hopefully this story hit home for some of you, and you can see how a personalized journey can really make an impact on employee engagement. And if you’re interested in learning more about the AI capabilities as well as about journeys, the product management team will be outside of these doors at the end of the keynote and they’ll be there to show you more and answer any questions that you may have.

– Thanks, Cheryl.

– Thank you.

– Okay, so as we witness the transformational capabilities of Firstup journeys, think about the extraordinary power you possess to really create those moments that matter for all of your people. It’s going to positively impact both the employee and your company. So we never like to think about things as tools, but this is a game changer and we all need to recognize that every single employee deserves to have a hyper-personalized experience tailored just to them with what they need when they need it, and where they can find it the easiest for them. Those companies who embrace this transformation will get to know our people on a much deeper level. We’re going to continue to take the signals that our people send us. We can make things even more personalized to them, get better signals, drive more personalization, which ultimately drives that sense of belonging and purpose. For those organizations who embrace this transformation we’ll unlock that symphony of moments that resonates with each employee. So we’re connecting with them like we really know them and we’re making their experience exceptional. For those organizations who don’t embrace or hesitate, the cost can be steep, an ever widening gap of disengagement. A little math, Gallup estimates that 32% of employees are actively engaged, which means 68% of employees are not. They also estimate that a disengaged employee can cost a company a little over $2,000. If you have a company of 20,000 people, 20,000 times 68% times $2,000 is $30 million, $30 million of potential savings to your company. Take that number to your CFO. While this is expensive for companies, the good news is we know how to solve it. So every study from Gallup to McKinsey shows that when we can connect with our people and we can better communicate with them, then we can increase engagement. So we are doing our own research, trying to give you more ways to continue to show ROI in the platform, the continued investment in all of your people. So we looked at the relationship between engagement with communications in our platform and then looked at what that correlated to employee ENPS score and performance. No surprise, positive correlation between communication engagement, engagement with the company and top performers. We didn’t stop there. We partnered with leading workforce analytics company, One Model, who’s here with us today, to examine the relationship between engagement with communication and the signal that it can send for things like attrition. The findings revealed a positive correlation, a very strong signal between engagement with internal communications and someone’s likelihood to either stay or leave a company. And we’re able to find that you could get these early warning signals up to three months before an employee would leave. So we can start to look at a drop off of engagement from a certain cohort of people, all GDPR compliant, don’t worry. But to help us find these signals so we can step in and change the course of action. One Model will be presenting their findings tomorrow at a session, so it’s definitely one you won’t want to miss, but this all just underscores the pivotal role that communication plays in fostering engagement and retention and the power that we all have. Think about the opportunity you have to take a signal that you get. You can see that a certain cohort of people have disengaged from certain communications. Think about the opportunity to say, “Let’s trigger a message to all of their managers so the managers can have a stay interview.” Kind of like that employee stock option plan, people not signing up for it; that’s a very strong signal. Then think about an opportunity to start a pulse poll campaign with these people to try to understand what is causing this point of disconnection. Maybe we learn that they love the company history, but don’t feel like they’re connected anymore. Maybe we trigger a campaign, a journey, with multiple stories about the company’s rich history to bring this person back to the central purpose of the company and their role in it. This is the big opportunity with the power of moments. By taking insights and turning them into action with journeys, you have the opportunity to save a top performer from leaving your company. So the future of work is here. There’s no denying it. In order for companies to succeed today and tomorrow, it’s imperative that we embrace the transformational opportunity for personalized, contextualized communications at scale. We know this works. That’s why we’re all here today. You all are ahead of the curve. Your thought leaders in your company. Your leaders in communication, HR and IT. And you know the power of connecting with people in just the right moment with what they need to drive engagement, performance, productivity, retention, even revenue growth. These are opportunities that no CEO or CFO can ever deny. It’s putting people first to lift companies up. Firstup, that’s our name. Our vision is to make work better for each one of our workers. And together we’re working on our shared mission to make every moment matter in an employee experience and make that experience truly irresistible. So thank you for being with us today.