Decentralizing Internal Communications to Boost Engagement

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Okay. Thanks everybody. I know how it feels right now. It’s 2:30, but it’s 5:30 in the east. We’re running out of fumes in the caffeine, right? It’s after lunch. We already been through how many sessions? Some people just flew in today. So we’re doing okay. We got the energy, we’re feeling all right. We’re getting there. Yeah. Okay. Alright. Well it’s good having everybody and a shout out to Kyla Turner, my teammate from Firstup, she’ll be roaming with the microphone for us. So you see Kyla right there. So when we get into the questions, so we’re going to have a conversation, so it’ll be the three of us in a conversation and we want to hear from you too. What approach worked for you if you had an approach or if you’re new. So we’ll get a sense in the room here for everybody, like who’s new with the platform, who’s had it for a few years, and they want to hear, well, we tried this, didn’t work, this is what we did.

Speaker 1:
So we want to hear from you. In other words, don’t hesitate to chime in. And Diana hear from USAA. She knows me if you don’t hear me. If you need a question, not shy about shouting, Shawn. Whoa, slow down. I have a question on that. Let’s pause on that topic before we move on. What other customers I see Lehigh University. Awesome, great having you. What other familiar faces do I have? Who have I worked with in here? I’m trying to see back there. Oh, Woodward. Hey, good to see you. Thanks for coming from Fort Collins, Colorado, right outside Denver. Awesome. They’re doing great work too. So excited to have you all in here. And it’s a beautiful thing too because it’s our community as we see each other, we yearn for this, right? The learning and the connection with each other. And you are representing so many people right now in a time where jobs are coming in going fast.

Speaker 1:
There’s a reorg it feels like every couple of months. It’s a lot of stress. It’s a lot of pressure. People don’t know if they’re going to be around in six months. So that’s pressure on you all. So give yourself some grace as you’re here and you’re opening up with each other and what we’re going through and trying to find out what’s going to work. How are we connecting from leadership to the rest of the organization here in this stressful time and then it’s remote or it’s hybrid. We’ve got all of that to figure out. So very grateful with everybody that’s here. You’re here for the right reason as we’re here to bond with each other and make these connections and new friends that we take back home. Quick poll for all of us right here just to find out. So one of our guests, they’re headquartered in Atlanta.

Speaker 1:
Anybody from Hot Atlanta? I know Jason. Okay. Oh, we’ve got a few. All right. Shout out. Nice. Or Georgia in general. We’ll take Georgia. We’ve got Georgia over here. The southeast. Anybody? The southeast? Okay. Alright. So how does this compare? Is the dry heat, is that BSS or is it hot compared to the southeast? It’s still hot. Still hot. Okay. Just curious. Okay. And then we have here from TE Connectivity in Philly. Any Philly people here? The Eagles are undefeated. There we go. Let’s flag. Yeah, I know Lehigh. We’ve got Pennsylvania, others. Pennsylvania, a Pittsburgh. Okay. Steelers fan. Yeah. Do you have to ask that question? Right? And then I’ll just throw it out even more because they’re the global headquarters in Switzerland. Anybody Switzerland, this would shock me or has been to Switzerland. Okay. Would love to go to Switzerland, right? All of us here.

Speaker 1:
Okay, so I’m Shawn Floss, strategy advisor with Firstup, work with a lot of customers in implementations come from the world of employee comms. And I like to tell customers I’m your therapist as well. Knowing what that’s like, going through all of that and having that pressure and from executives who say, oh, this is great. I know we spent a lot on it, but I still just want you to send out the all employee email. Just get that out and I’ll be fine with it. Are you kidding me? Right now we’ve got all these metrics here that we can go through and we’ll get into that as we talk about empowering engagement and how we’re connecting with our employees. What is that approach? What is it like one or two people on our teams, usually in employee comms? How are we going to connect then with a hundred thousand employees that we have worldwide?

Speaker 1:
Where do we start with that? Also quick poll, let’s just find out for us as we have this idea here, who here has had the platform, a digital platform for a year or two? Has it for a while? Okay, good. Show of hands. Who’s new? Like implementing now? I know Diana. Yeah, we’ve got a few others. Okay, anybody who doesn’t have one yet, and this is totally okay. So let us know if anything doesn’t make sense at all. We’ll try to keep it universal with terminology and stop us afterwards. Like what the heck were you talking about? Topics? This what that let me know. Just break it down for me. So keep us honest on that. Fun facts as we meet our guests here. We’ll start with Tyler Wenger from TE Connectivity. It’s been fun in general getting to know you both. Yes, as we’ve been doing our prep sessions, all that. I’m sure you were like another one. I’m traveling this week for this work. We’ve got another prep session. Tyler, your fun fact, if you weren’t here, you’d be down at the water slide right now.

Speaker 2:
That is right. Yes. Hi everyone. Tyler Wenger from TE Connectivity. And a fun fact about me is I love water sports specifically wakeboarding water skiing, wake surfing tubing, all that good stuff. My family has a boat and grew up on the lake and love going to the lake every year.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. So that wasn’t you at midnight though, on the water slide yelling right there. Partying. I

Speaker 2:
Can either confirm nor deny

Speaker 1:
Christina Moylan for Newell Brands with us here. You have the power of Disney with us here. Explain

Speaker 3:
That. Oh yes. So I was a Walt Disney World cast member for about five years. Started as an intern and worked there for quite a few years. I was a communications cast member, which was a lovely term for working in the parking lot and being on the tram. And I told you all about what was going to happen in the parks that day. So two o’clock parade, what was coming down Main Street, that was me. So they coined that as a communications cast member role. I beg to differ at this point, but it helped me with a lot of things that have helped me

Speaker 1:
Out. I was going to say, a lot of lessons learned that you took away from Yeah, absolutely. And they’re all called cast members regardless where they are. Yeah, that’s right.

Speaker 3:
Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
Okay, so again, we’re going to get into it here and we’re going to set the scene for us. So take us around the world for us.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, just really quick so everyone understands who our companies are and what our platforms are and what that looks like. Te we’re a global technology engineering manufacturing company. We have around 85,000 employees all around the world and around 16 billion yearly in revenue. And in terms of the Firstup platform, we have around 200 topics, 300 trained content creators and have been using Firstup for the past two years,

Speaker 1:
Two years. That’s the key. We’re going to stress that again, is that it takes time. It’s not overnight.

Speaker 3:
Absolutely. And we’re comparable, but different employee numbers and that sort of thing. So that helps you give a little bit of context as well. So Newell Brands, you might not know us, but you definitely know our brands. We are leading global consumer product company with a large portfolio of brands like Rubbermaid, Greco Coleman, Yankee Candle, Mr. Coffee, and the list goes on. So we are global, like I said, operating in many countries and we have more than 20,000 employees

Speaker 1:
And we have part of the brand. We have some product goods over here, some free

Speaker 3:
Swag. You can, yes, I brought a little swag because I have to do that everywhere I go because I’m part of Newell. Paper Mate. One of our top brands is here with us today, so maybe you’ll get some swag. Let’s give a round

Speaker 1:
Across from Molly.

Speaker 3:
My lovely colleague Molly Martin is also here who’s going to keep me honest and answer all of your questions on the way out.

Speaker 1:
It’s been awesome getting to know you and Molly, I had a chance to work with you on an audit a year into it with the platform and do a nice review and see what’s performing well and not, but you’re just kicking butt. Molly, both of you, Molly

Speaker 3:
And you and Molly’s been with me for a little over a year and we’ve had the platform for now six years. Wow. So we’ve been around a little bit. Great work.

Speaker 1:
Yeah. So on that note, let’s just start here. Employee engagement. We hear it so many times, right? The buzzword. Anybody want to just shout out what you think of characteristics when you think of employee engagement to you, what it means we say it so much? Anybody just shout out a couple of things. Aware of and connected to your culture. Where was that? I like that. Can you raise your hand? Oh, thank you. Oh hey, from Wegmans. Thank you. Right against the wall, Molly, let’s give our guest a pen right there. Thank you Molly. Awesome. Thank you. Our guest speaker from last year at Attune. We appreciate you, but for you, let’s go through the characteristics here as we’re talking for. Yeah,

Speaker 3:
Go for it,

Speaker 2:
Tyler. Yeah, I think to start, we just wanted to level set because engagement can mean so many different things to so many different people. Certainly there’s likes, there’s comments, there’s views, there’s registration and people using the platform. But really for the sake of our conversation, what we want to center the term engagement around is in connection to the company, the way employees feel, their positive attitudes and their belief and their passion for the company. That’s really what we’re trying to drive. And so that’s our north star when we’re thinking about engagement. So the other term that we’re using also is called is empowerment. And so really what we’re looking for with empowerment is how can we train other people to tell our story or to tell stories in our organizations, whether that’s a specific trained content creator or topic owner, but also using user generated content.

Speaker 2:
So as Shawn said, we’re going to be interested to hear from a lot of you and the theme of empowering engagement. We want to empower you to share your stories, hear what’s working well, or if you have questions about what we’re talking about, please feel free. Put a hand up, we’ll get the mic to you and talk through that. But again, engagement our North Star. We’re really trying to get employees excited to come to work, excited to work for organizations and have a passion for that. And through empowerment. Christina’s going to talk about this a little bit, but one of the terms that kept coming up in our conversations as we were getting ready for this was decentralization. And so really again, it’s getting other people to be the voice of the organization, to be the voice at their local site or within their business or within their function and to be storytellers and communicators for us throughout the organization.

Speaker 1:
And I love what you were saying when we were having our sessions together, that theme will keep coming back to with trust, that we want to get their trust, they trust us too as well. That relationship that’s back and forth over time with this to develop that autonomy for them with content. So Christina, with decentralization, this could be a daunting word for some.

Speaker 3:
Absolutely. I remember we used to use it a lot too. And then I do feel like especially with leadership, we talk more about the expansion of the program because while we did decentralize, we started with just a few of us and a few topics. Shout out Jason launching the platform. We expanded that, we really did. But we stayed at kind of the center and the hub and we management of the platform while also empowering and giving our topic managers the tools they need to succeed and the tools they need to start their own topics and engage with employees that way. Share stories around Newell globally. And so it has been more of an expansion for us. And then with that we’ve empowered them. So these are the keywords that came up when we were discussing all of this. So for us, yeah, it started very, very small and we’ll talk a little bit more about how we’ve expanded, how many channels we have, but we knew at the very beginning that was a goal. Decentralization, we couldn’t do it all. We couldn’t be at all places at all times. So we needed those ambassadors around the company to really help glean those stories, publish those stories, and create a platform that was kind of a one-stop shop in the sense of getting all your news and information about Newell globally in one platform, which we had many at the time

Speaker 1:
For you decentralization.

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think another theme we’ll come back to is that it takes a lot of time, so I’m sure there’s plenty of you out there who this isn’t a new concept for. So hopefully the things we’re talking about is just an extra encouragement to you to take this a step further to think how you can expand this even more at your organizations. But also it’s something if you haven’t done it and if you’ve got tight grips on the publication process or what content creators can do or who they can reach, just encourage you to think outside the box. Employees can surprise us in some really good ways and we have some good examples that we’re going to get into with that. But I also like the term enfranchisement. So if you think about a McDonald’s or a franchised organization, really that’s what we’re doing is we’re setting up little McDonald’s all throughout our organization to say, Hey, you have the power, you have the control. Run this company a topic or channel or whatever you want to call it and make it your own and share stories and make that the best that it can be. And then we will get into some of the benefits for us as platform owners and those of us in corp comms

Speaker 1:
And those are the subject experts when we’re thinking through the governance approach. And when you talk with customers, you think of, okay, these are those touch points I heard in the last session, the change champions, those influential people that they are trusting in that employees trust they see every day. Executive leadership is one thing, my manager, my supervisor every day, how do we get them involved? Do they have bandwidth or who does that look like that we can get in there and set them up for success with it. But the McDonald’s, I like that comparison as long as the ice cream machine works. Okay. Right. So for growth now I like what you said earlier, you said start slow, meaning again, it’s a process, it’s not overnight.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, absolutely. When we launched our platform, we were a new team in general, so we were a new corporate communications team at the time, headquartered in Hoboken now in Atlanta. And so we were building relationships, we were building contacts, so we didn’t always have stories to be putting on the platform. I wouldn’t say we were scraping the bottom of the barrel, but I do remember contacting our chef at the Atlanta headquarters and the menu being one of the first things that was really cool on the platform to the

Speaker 1:
Cafe. So what’s your quote? You have a great quote on that since then.

Speaker 3:
So we used to say when we were trying to attract topic managers, now they come to us just so it does get better, but when we were attracting employees to adopt the platform and topic managers to launch their own topics, we would try to say, all right, well everyone goes on the platform for the menu, but we really want them to stay for the CEO announcement. So if they’re there, they might read both come the menus. So that was kind of how we started marketing the app. And we still make those jokes today. We’ve come an incredibly long way, but there was a time where we only had less than five topics we have here. We were just managing the platform, it was just us. There was a time where I think it might’ve just been me trying to get stories trying to publish, and we were just in the us.

Speaker 3:
And so that was something, a goal of ours in the very beginning was we knew we couldn’t be, so we were a global company, but how can we do that? How do we manage that? And so that was slow growth with the platform and getting the right content contributors to join us on the platform, know how great it was, get the adoption, and then get people reading and publishing things. So here we are now with 35 topics over 50 trained channel contributors and we have adoption in over 60 countries. So we’ll go back and forth with our approaches to all of that. Tyler may think we’re a little more conservative on our approach to topics and how we launch them, but we are very open to more, but we go into it pretty strategically and we have a process for it. So we want to go even bigger, but the right teams and the right publishers will make that happen.

Speaker 1:
And it’s good because you hear customers say, what are others doing? What are others doing? We can show you examples, like two examples here, but then your audience best and okay, how do we get into that relevant information that I hear you talking about to get into those segmented audiences? So then this is a whole reason we invested in this to get out of the SharePoint world where everybody’s just looking at the same thing, the same emails piling up, but I’m in one job function. I should be seeing that need to know content that’s important to my function. And then yeah, company news, leadership news important as well, making sure that we’re seeing it. I liked what you said when you get into your approach here, it’s a workout. So I’m sucking in my gut as I look at that right there with Chris Krat. It is, it’s a workout. You refine this over time.

Speaker 2:
It really is. And honestly, the story that Christina just said for renewal is very similar to TE. A few years ago we had just a handful of topics. They were business topics, a global topic and a handful of content creators and that was it. And now we’re over again, I think it’s around 175 active topics and over 300 trained content creators. So our maturation could be similar to Chris Pratt’s maturation in his acting career where he started off maybe not prioritizing his health the way he should, but hey, that worked for him as Andy I think is his name. Yeah,

Speaker 1:
Yeah. Parks rec

Speaker 2:
In Parks and Rec to now star Lord in Marvel. And we can just see that transformation. So yeah, similar to exercise, this is something that takes time. So if you haven’t done this yet, we’re going to talk through that growth process, but you’ll see that maturation as you empower more people to help tell those stories and communicate with employees.

Speaker 1:
Empowering topic managers. The keyword that jumped out at me early on in this is that autonomy, trusting them, as we said, getting back to trust that they earn over time and then lifting them up for success.

Speaker 3:
Absolutely. And that’s really worked for us. I mean, of course trial and error and things work and then you got to pull back. But at the root of it, that has been what we’ve always wanted to do. Give them the tools they need, allow them to have that autonomy and publish and monitor and how they see fit for their region or their business. And so we’ve learned a lot in this topic too that different topics, it’s not a one size fits all. Our topics are so diverse, whether it’s because of location or business or brand. You saw our portfolio of brands, a lot of those brands have been some over a hundred years old. They operate a certain way. And so that is kind of reflective in their topics too. It’s interesting. And then you’ve got regional topics who have different cultures and different celebrations and different ways to do things.

Speaker 3:
So the way we approach it is that a topic manager, a potential topic manager approaches us and Molly prepares them with a playbook and goes back to them and tries to understand the business case, what they want to achieve, what their problem is that they’re looking to solve. A topic isn’t always the answer, believe it or not. Sometimes we have a topic already live that they don’t know about that we can fold them into. So the answer isn’t always launch a new topic, but oftentimes it is. But we do have that conversation first and then we equip them with those tools like a playbook, a cadence that they should be publishing, and then we manage those expectations and make sure they understand the responsibilities before launching. That can look different for everyone. For us, we suggest three to five posts a week. That’s kind of our sweet spot.

Speaker 3:
And we also suggest two to three topic, one topic manager and two contributors per topic. The reason for that is people leave, people come and go, and we’ve been in the situations where we have an inactive channel. We didn’t have enough topic managers, so we go through all of that before we even launch. So as easy to launch, we do have that time in the beginning leading up to that. So we do trainings. Molly now records herself training too and shares that with our topic manager. So it’s really Newell branded and it’s really personal to us. And then we support them with strategies. Molly’s always has her door open to our topic managers, but it’s also strategic too. So she has a monthly meeting with an agenda. And then we also sometimes have office hours where it’s a drop-in, you don’t have to come, but if you have a question or forgot how to send a push notification or want to move, make your newsletter a little more entailed or designed or look better, that’s where you come the office hours and we’ll help you with that.

Speaker 1:
I remember the conversation with you and Molly on the audit and we found some channels that were dormant. We’re like, what happened? Where did that go? And I learned with that and shared it with other customers to what you said, people come and go, there’s movement. So don’t just identify one person for that department, have them train the trainer. How can we expand that to get a good bench in place here for that long-term continuity so you’re not as comms people starting over and recreating the wheel for yourselves.

Speaker 3:
Absolutely. And one thing we always remind ourselves is these topic managers, and I’m sure this comes up for a lot, they’re not communicators by day. This is either a passion project, they’re really engaged in employee and they want to be a part of this, but they have other responsibilities too. So having that backup has been needed for us because then we can rely on someone else if things are slow.

Speaker 1:
And I like, let’s go to Tyler here, but I like the balance of the self-service of learning. We all learn differently, but then offering the hands-on approach and we see that success with customers that balance between the two because again, everybody, this isn’t their wheelhouse. They don’t have the bandwidth. So we want to nurture them along if we can. Yeah,

Speaker 2:
Totally. And you can click through these. So show of hands, anybody else going off of what poet did this morning and speaking the same language. Anybody have the experience that I’ve had of you’re on a call or you’re on a project and you’re with IT or HR technology or somebody in a function and you need their support specifically usually it for me. And they don’t give you great care, they’re just looking to get the box checked and move on to the next thing. Okay, good. So I’m not the only one.

Speaker 1:
You don’t have anybody else here do you from work

Speaker 3:
Your it?

Speaker 2:
Nobody from t e I. Okay. And hopefully they can’t watch this recording,

Speaker 2:
But I think it’s just important to remember care, right? So similar to what Shawn and Christina were just saying, many of these content creators are topic owners. They’re not communications professionals. This isn’t their full-time job, they’re doing something else. This is a pet project, a passion project, or sometimes they’ve been voluntold to do it by a plant manager or local hr. And so just give them care, whether that’s office hours, one-on-one calls, training videos, whatever they might need. Ask them for feedback. Hey, what do you need? How can we be more supportive to you? And give that to them. Send them newsletters about some of the things that you’re seeing in the communications or things that you want to see them improve on. But I think all of some of these tips and tricks that we have here really just boil down to give them care and don’t give them that experience that it has given me and some of you.

Speaker 2:
And when they leave that experience with you, let them leave knowing, oh, this person is here to help me and support me and I’m looking forward to helping them or I’m looking forward to doing the thing that they’re trying to help me do. And then lastly, I’ll just touch on this trust. Again, this is a theme that we’re trying to hit on, but you’ve got to trust them to run with it. As Christina mentioned, there’s different cultures. People are going to share different things. The cafe menu will likely pop up at some point, but people in China are going to share different things than people in Mexico and people in North Carolina are going to share different things than people in Germany. And you’re definitely going to see that. And so you can work with them in those things. Obviously it’s got to make sense, but just give them trust, let them run with it and then give them some boundaries to play within that realm. And we’ll get into that a bit as well.

Speaker 1:
And we’ve seen that where it is different regions, some love the babies, the birthdays, the celebrations, others are business only.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, we have multiple regions that have their own topics and you can see it all successful topics with great engagement, great adoption, but one feed you’re seeing engagements, promotions, people, profiles and features. And then on the other one, you’re seeing business wins and commercial, those kinds of touting that stuff. It’s really about the business and really about strategy and all of those posts and you don’t see anything of the other, both engaged, both successful, but sharing different things. And it works for them.

Speaker 1:
And it gets down to our initial goals going into this is what the audience wants. We can’t decide it. I like what you said on one of our calls, we can’t pretend to be the smartest people in the room, then we’re in trouble. We need to learn from the audience that feedback loop

Speaker 2:
What they want. Yeah, I think one of the other things we talked about was inclusiveness. Inclusion is a buzzword that we all hear about, we talk about within our corporate communications, but I think it’s also a challenge to all of us as communicators of how can we be more inclusive? And it’s not easy to do that, especially when we think the topic, the content should be published in a certain way or look a certain way, but you really do have to trust them and let that community of content creators or really the employees who are a part of that community, let them run with it, let it take shape in the way that they want it to take shape. Because again, I’m not going to know what’s best to share to a local city topic in Shanghai and vice versa. So yes, we want to give them guidance and support, but we also have to give them some autonomy within that, which again, autonomy goes back to decentralization, goes back to the engagement that we’re trying to seek.

Speaker 1:
And this gets into what we were saying, the what’s in it for me factor. Why should I care as we know very well in communications.

Speaker 2:
So again, I’ll ask another question and show of hands, who here struggles to find inspirational, exciting, fun, interesting stories at their organizations?

Speaker 2:
For those of you who don’t have your hand up, I’d like to talk to you afterwards to hear how you’re getting those stories. We’re always looking for more of those, but right, so if you’re sitting there and you’re saying, Hey, this all sounds great, but I don’t want to have to take the time to create all these resources, to set up these calls, to do all this work. It is a lot of work. Let me share one specific example from TE of why you should do this. A few years ago we set up a local topic for our employees in Herma Seal, Mexico. And randomly we happened to see that there was this post that was starting to gain some traction, get a lot of likes and engagement on it, and it was a breast cancer awareness video. And so a few of the people on our team, we decided to watch it and it was this awesome video.

Speaker 2:
Everybody was wearing the same clothes, they were outside. There was this choreographed dance, it was well edited, it was this awesome video that the team did. I wish I had it here to show you guys, but without having a local city topic for her Maceo, we never would’ve had visibility into that video. And so what we did, we took that video, we helped amplify it throughout the organization and gave a little pat on the back to the Hermo C team to say, Hey, great job. Look at this cool video everyone. This is awesome. And people loved it. It went trending or viral, so to speak, within internal comms as viral as things can go.

Speaker 2:
So it gives you, as a platform owner or somebody within corporate internal communications visibility into the stories and messages that are happening at your organization. Also, the things that they care about, maybe the employees really care about. Maybe there’s a specific E R G at a site that’s really popular and growing and you can help connect them with other ERGs around the globe or whatever it might be. So it just gives you that insight into what’s going on throughout the organization. But it also goes the other way as well. You then get champions or ambassadors. Somebody last night described them as beat reporters to give you better insight or sorry, you can give them and help them be champions for the causes that you care about and the things that you want to help disseminate to employees. Yeah, so it goes both ways in that you get insight into what’s going on at the local sites, but you also can then help or they can help you promote the things that you care about.

Speaker 1:
They are, they’re the eyes and ears to the organization. And you said that you were delightfully surprised at all of these pieces?

Speaker 3:
Pieces? Absolutely. Our team is also responsible for global meetings on our corp comms team. So oftentimes we’re scrolling the platform and we find out, and sure we can pull this from an HR file, but we find out someone just celebrated 50 years at Newell and it is celebration and really events taking place locally for this employee. And so we’ll take that and maybe our C E O can give that employee a shout out at global meeting, really broaden that message and do those real people stories. And if it wasn’t for those regional channels, we wouldn’t get that information and we wouldn’t be able to reshare those images and things like that. It’s just one small example of what we’re able to do some stories and sometimes they’re business wins that maybe we weren’t aware of and we see it. Or an award that’s a really good one, an award that Elmer’s won for something. We can amplify that broadly. We do a monthly corp comms newsletter that kind of curates all of the content that is worth broadly sharing and sometimes we get that from our topic managers. So it really is that opportunity similar to the video of exposing us to those stories so we can amplify them

Speaker 1:
In the employee resource groups. You talk about the heartbeat of an organization and the change champions and the engagement that they provide and the influence. It’s another great example of those that let’s tap into that and let’s get some ownership for those stakeholders in the platform if we can to help with the content. Okay, we’re going to pause here and before we talk about how the sausage is made and the nitty and gritty with the governance, any questions coming up from so far, what you’re hearing? What’s burning? Jennifer in the back there? Thanks Kyla. I had a

Speaker 4:
Question. Oh, sorry. Oh yeah, we’re very new with this. We launched, I guess it’s three or four weeks ago. We already have 31 topics and I think 70 content creators. Wow. Oh my gosh. Well first I’ll say one thing that we did, and this is just baby stage right now, but we set up a topic for those content owners. So that will be a place we’re going to have monthly meetings with them, go through dashboards, best practices, and then share content that can be syndicated on there as well as allow them to ask questions. But a question for you is one thing we did right off the bat, maybe we jumped into soon was open one channel or one topic where all of our members can post pictures to uplift. We call it uplift how I uplift. We got a lot of cats and dogs, lots and lots of pet click bait babies and things. We’re trying to turn it, we like that, we like the pets, we love them, but we need to start, it’s kind of flooding the feed, flooding the feed. And so wondering if you have experiences with that with open channels. We are currently still approving those, so we still do look at them. But any experience with that and having kind of open topics for members or employees to post to.

Speaker 2:
Are you auto subscribing all employees to that topic?

Speaker 4:
Do we auto subscribe, Ashley? No, we do not. Yeah,

Speaker 2:
So there’s probably 20 different opinions on that within this room. I can give you the example at te. So we similarly started, and we’re going to get into user generated content here in just a little bit, but we have an employee photo and video topic where employees and members can share their stories. Similarly, we’ll get random things that get published into there. So what we did is we didn’t want to shut that down because if employees love sharing photos of their pets, let them do it. It means they’re using the platform and that’s how they want to engage. So great. Go ahead. You do that. But we actually created a separate topic, I would say a little bit more business centric. We call it share your story. And so we’re promoting that as, Hey, tell us about a cool thing your coworker did or tell us a cool thing that your team’s doing.

Speaker 2:
Or if you or someone else ran a marathon, climbed Mount Everest, whatever it might be, tell us those stories where it’s a little bit more inspirational than, here’s a picture of my dog. And so we’re using, we have a separate place then where we’re trying to get those stories. So my recommendation would be don’t, I would encourage employees to keep sharing those pictures, those pet pictures. And employees love pets. If anybody hasn’t asked employees to share photos of their pets, do it. You’re going to be so amazed at what you get. Of course. So willing to take a picture of their pet. And then in terms of, you also asked about open topics. Most of our topics are open for all employees to subscribe to and then we auto subscribe a subset of employees that that topic is specifically geared towards. But we want to make sure that it’s open. If there’s somebody else that wants to get insight into what’s going on within a specific function business or local site, they can do that.

Speaker 3:
I have two quick thoughts, suggestions. One, if it’s flooding the feed, do fun Friday or something and hold them and do it once a week would be one suggestion. The other is keep the channel for sure, but monthly do a contest. So it’s dogs and cat, it’s share your pet contest or raffle or something, and then that kind of hones in the pictures a little bit and so that you’re only getting them during a certain period. And so people can expect the feed to be flooded during that time. But love it. During Covid we did, we were so amazed by show us your work from home space and we were flooded. We couldn’t believe it, but I think that’s what everyone needed at that time was that kind of interaction. And then prior to that has prompted a lot of ideas for having a strategy around that so that it’s not always flooding the feed and then maybe hiding something that might be more important that week or something. Not that dogs and cats are not important, but a big company announcement might take precedent that day.

Speaker 1:
But shout out to Jennifer, VP of comms there and Ashley and I don’t know if Tracy is in the room from Woodward, awesome job on piloting and launching at the plant in Fort Collins where Tracy was there doing, or Ashley doing hands-on tutorials to get them registered on the app at a barbecue party there. So we shared that internally. So awesome job there. Yeah, definitely a couple of minutes. Let’s do two more. Right here. Front row saw you right away. Go ahead and shout it out. Kyla’s like I’m not going to get up there. Go ahead. My

Speaker 5:
Question is, is Molly in meetings all day with these topic

Speaker 3:
Matters? I’ll repeat it.

Speaker 1:
Question is Molly in meetings all day for crying out loud with these topic managers,

Speaker 3:
Molly would say no, she’s shaking her head no. I can attest that. Good question not it is a great question. So I do feel like years ago it was kind of, that might’ve been me years ago, but when we did the monthly meetings and the open office hours, people do tend to save things for them, right? You would agree. I will say her team’s messages though are probably blowing up all day. Is that accurate? Yes. So a lot of the topic managers will pinging her, and I know she’ll go on an impromptu call if someone’s like, oh, I need trouble, I’m troubleshooting push notifications, or I’m trying to get this newsletter out. And Somali will do that a lot, but the harder questions or the walkthroughs people do tend to save those for the monthly meetings in the office hours, if that helps. So you’re meeting with

Speaker 6:
All

Speaker 3:
Yeah, when they show up. But yeah,

Speaker 1:
So this is a good point that she followed up on having a cadence if it’s a monthly meetup with these topic owners trying to find that development. So it’s like working the beat, but also any questions that develop with them to, again, getting into that empowerment of success that we talked about earlier with there. Molly, do you mind giving her a pen right over here? And Jennifer if she needs a pen as well, time for one more and then we’ll get into governance. Yeah, go ahead Kyla and introduce yourself. Go

Speaker 6:
Ahead. Hi, I’m Jennifer Taylor. I am the communications person at World’s Finest Chocolate question. So are your content managers going through you for approval before they publish? Are they communications specialists? No. So grammar mistakes,

Speaker 3:
Oh gosh,

Speaker 6:
They’re showing up

Speaker 3:
On the platform again. Years ago we were able to monitor that more. We had less topics. Now you just can’t do it. But Molly does a great job. I do a two scroll a day. That’s pretty much my rule. Now I will message them and I will just change it or Molly will just change it. But we will let them know, Hey, we noticed wrong possessive form of that word, but we went ahead and changed it for you. So we are monitoring, but we’re monitoring it on the employee end. So the chances are someone could see that error, but we are scanning and sharing that feedback when necessary. I will say those monthly meetings, Molly shares style guides in those meetings as well. And those who take it really seriously, even if they’re not comms professionals, they will check things and we always say, give it another set of eyes, share it with a peer. They don’t need to be a writer either, but a fresh set of eyes can catch a lot of things. So I do know that that’s part of their process within their topic, which could differ from topic to topic. It differs from our process as well. So it does happen.

Speaker 1:
Before we move on, go ahead. So something

Speaker 2:
Else to keep in mind for us, you’ll generally see the further down you go, the less comms expertise those content creators have. So you’re more likely to get those mistakes, but also the further down you go, the smaller the audiences that they’re reaching. So it’s just a local site. Good point. In most cases, yeah. This

Speaker 1:
Isn’t with,

Speaker 2:
You’ll hear this a little bit when we get into governance, we’re a bit more liberal, but unless it’s egregious, my stance, and some of you might need to close your ears, I would say that’s fine. If there’s a minor apostrophe, oh my goodness, life’s going to go on. The message is going to get through. The other thing is, unless you speak, at least for te, we’re in almost every country, and I don’t speak German, Chinese, Spanish, all those languages, which they’re publishing in the local language, we can’t always see and know exactly the right.

Speaker 1:
But you gave us a good segue here because we want to ask Christina, Mayor Quimby gave the key to bar to the castle. It surprised me because I knew you from having the platform six years, and I thought, wow, they’re doing all kinds of users submitted content and opening it up to the masses. But you told me as we were preparing, I wasn’t there in the beginning. I was not ready for all of that. And we’ll get into comments in a bit, but tell us more.

Speaker 3:
When we launched and a few years in, we were in a unique state at the company and varying levels of morale and things like that. So commenting and things like that, turning that on was nerve wracking for us. We didn’t know what people were going to say, but it turned out everybody was, we haven’t had a problem at all, guys. Everyone’s been great. Similarly when launching topics or getting that U G C and we really were nervous, but it all worked out.

Speaker 1:
It’s back to

Speaker 2:
Surprise

Speaker 3:
You in a good way. Yeah, we surprised in a good way. We do have standards though, so we’re not super strict, but we do have certain things we do ask all of our topic managers to abide by. And when we’re asking for U G C, we’re usually very specific on what we want. And that’s really just to keep everything cohesive and within our new style and keep that community pretty consistent. And so that’s why we have a lot of that in place. But typically employees really do surprise you in a good way. And they want to do right too, and they want to create engaged communities within Newell communities. So it’s really good.

Speaker 1:
And like you said with the guidelines that quote there, give them boundaries, but freedom within those boundaries, that autonomy we talked about

Speaker 2:
Earlier. You can set up a guideline, a policy, a governing team, whatever you want to call it for anything that you’re fearful of or any problems that you’re seeing at te. We started out more restrictive, similar to how Christine is, and a few years ago, I mean I think it was probably last summer 2022, we saw a lot of excitement internally, specifically from ERGs and some other groups around Yammer. And we did not want to use Yammer at all. We had talked to some of you that had been using it and everybody said, run for the hills, go away from Yammer.

Speaker 2:
So we didn’t want to use Yammer, and we were afraid of losing communities to Yammer. So we actually have become a bit more, and our internal comms team will talk about it and say, does it make sense? What problems might we run into the future? What precedent might we start by saying yes to a specific topic? So we still want it to make sense. We’re not just setting up topics willy-nilly for any random thing, but we are a bit more liberal because we want people to be using our tool and we want people to know, Hey, if I’m going to be collaborating or conversing or getting company information, this is the tool that I go to and not, oh, there’s Yammer and there’s SharePoint, and there’s Firstup, and there’s all these different things. Because our team, we’ve specifically done it. We’ve tried, we’ve worked really hard.

Speaker 2:
We were in a fragmented communications model with all these different tools to now we really just have the first dub platform, and we still use SharePoint, but we have micro apps that are connecting all that information. But to the comment I made earlier, if you’re worried about what employees are going to or what topic managers are going to publish, just have some guidelines on here are some general guidelines and what we want you to publish. I’d encourage you to keep ’em vague things around exercise, respect and kindness, and it should be informative and things like that to help you make decisions on whether or not you should set up a topic in the future. Or if you’re seeing content that’s not aligning with those guidelines, you could then make that decision if you’d want to remove that.

Speaker 1:
Before we get into some of the great examples of how the employees shared some beautiful user submitted content, let’s hit on comments like you said, because we get the employee engagement surveys and we see what people say. They just rip right into us into the company, and it scares people, like, whoa, what are they going to say now when they have this platform?

Speaker 3:
That’s exactly how we felt. So our team manages all employee surveys and employees tend to be very honest via surveys. And so we started the platform pre comments being a capability. So we were there when it was introduced, and so we didn’t have it for a while. And so we’re like, oh, okay, we’re not going to turn it on for X, Y, and Z announcements. Just don’t turn ’em on. And then eventually we’re like, oh, it’s fine. We started small, we did the people features or awards and things like that. Turned on the comments. It was lovely to see the engagement and the community building that created. And then we just earnings, okay, we’re going to turn it on for earnings. Everybody hold your breath. It was fine. What we found was that people in that environment, they won’t be inappropriate. We literally, in how many years we’ve never had an issue. And then it is another outlet for employees to ask questions. So sometimes they’ll comment with a question for corp comms that doesn’t seem related to what was posted, but it might be just a way for them to get in contact with you. So that’s kind of what we’ve found with that. And so we’ve really loosened up on governance. And when it comes to commenting,

Speaker 1:
It’s a beautiful way to break down the silos, to connect people from, especially with these two companies, you’re all over and they get to know each other that way through affinities and connections

Speaker 3:
Quicker. Yes. That’s such a great point. Yep, absolutely.

Speaker 1:
What have you seen with it? You felt like this is where we saw the deferring approaches. You’ve made it clear, you were just like, let’s go

Speaker 2:
For it. We’ve always had comments on encouraged employees to share their voice. And I would say we run into an issue with a negative comment, I shouldn’t say negative, a comment that we have to take down maybe once a year. Usually it’s an employee who’s leaving was let go or fired or for whatever reason was disgruntled and wanted to share something on their way out the door. But yeah, I mean in my six years at te, I’ve maybe had to deal with three or four times of notifying a local HR and their manager of, Hey, this employee left this comment, and we had to take it down because it didn’t follow our comments policy, which we have a comments policy saying again, exercise, respect and kindness and care with one another. And so if it doesn’t follow those guidelines, we can then,

Speaker 1:
And it’s great with, we haven’t really gotten into leadership, but it’s an opportunity for, we’re trying to make our leaders human authentic, and it’s a way to connect and you get the comments in there and they’re

Speaker 3:
Engaging. I was just thinking about that actually. Yeah, we’ve had comments that we send back to the leader just in case they didn’t see it. And we’ve had a lot of success with leader content in the last couple of years, and the platform has been really great for that. We have a couple of leaders who will post videos or have someone post a video of them, and that’s really engaged. The comments come rolling in, and we share that with our leaders too, and our leaders who are on the platform. It’s a big deal when they comment on something, people get really excited about that. And so one leader I have in mind in particular, she’s great about scrolling Newell now our platform and she’ll comment and things and that makes employees feel so great that she engages

Speaker 1:
With them. Is that the brand VP you were talking about? Or

Speaker 3:
Marketing? She’s CEO of one of our segments.

Speaker 1:
Okay, awesome. See, some of those don’t need much guidance. They’re right in there engaged. Yes,

Speaker 2:
Shes fantastic. And really quick, cause I know we got to move on for time, but if you want to make your leaders feel really good about themselves, do a profile on them, publish it, ask them something. I mean, ask ’em a bunch of interesting questions that employees would be surprised to learn. And then put, Hey, you want to win some sort of incentive prize? Leave a comment here stating something new. You learned about that leader. We’ve been doing that for the past few years. We get tons of comments on those articles and it makes that leader feel great when they go and look at that and they’re like, oh, look at all these fun comments. Nice.

Speaker 1:
Love that. Love that. Okay, as we close it out here, now let’s get into with the user generated content and how beautifully surprised you were. Yeah,

Speaker 3:
I’ll take this one first. So our big engagement initiative now yearly because of the success is community week. So last year we had week of happiness and that really took off and we realized, oh my gosh, not only are employees engaging on the platform, but they’re doing local events and they’re engaging with each other and they’re just embracing this week of happiness. And so we leveraged that success and we came up with Community Week for this year. And so our goal is to kind of change the theme every year. And so Community week this year was strengthening and supporting our communities. So as you can see, we had a lot of stats we could share, which was really great. And we had engagement in 50 plus countries, I think thanks to 120 ambassadors. And that was 80 locations globally, so that could be a couple of locations per country.

Speaker 3:
It was great. We saw so much engagement on the platform and like I said, with each other through events. So this is a quick look at our metrics and that for us that week, it was really high open rates on our newsletters, the user generated content increased, viewership increased for us. That’s good. Click-through rates, but that is for new employees. That’s good. I know we’ve got work to do, but for us that is good. It takes time. Yeah, new registrations. And one great fact about Community Week Frontline, which we won’t get into in this session, but they’re always hard to adopt the platform week of Happiness and Community Week. We saw a lovely adoption from our frontline employees during that because they wanted to be a part of it as well, and it was open to them. So here’s just a glimpse of Community Week. Different locations did different things. They printed out signage, they had potlucks, you name it. There was a, Thailands Got Talent, I think it was Molly, right? And they did a huge event and people sang and it was great. My favorite was the flag in the bottom. The bottom left here. Our Bradley manufacturing site had a flag printed for community week and put it right up there against their other flag.

Speaker 1:
You had no idea, right? They were

Speaker 3:
Going to do that. No, that was my favorite one because I just thought it took so much time and effort and it was just, I loved it. It warmed my heart. So this is kind of community week at a glance, but when it comes to engagement, we talked about these events being like the fruits of our labor just shown through our employees and all the work you’re doing to get those topic managers ready. And those ERGs, they’re really a big part of community week too, on the platform and engaging. This is one of our best examples.

Speaker 1:
And speaking of surprises, my goodness, the pictures you have of your employees.

Speaker 2:
So again, employees can surprise you in some really, really cool ways. So seven years ago we started what’s called Orange Day, which is our largest employee engagement event of the year now. But what it started as was our internal comms team saying, Hey, employees wear orange. It’s our company color. Celebrate our team spirit and culture and take pictures and share it with us. And that’s transformed over the years. And now seven years later, we have photo contests that we do with it with different categories. One of those categories that we’ve done since COVID started was most scenic. You can see we’ve got employees slack lining across the canyon in Mexico, employees swimming with dolphins, skydiving in their orange T gear. But we get thousands of employee submissions each year for this. And the ways that teams celebrate globally is incredible. And it just started as a simple ask of take pictures and share it with us.

Speaker 2:
And still, this is really celebrated locally throughout te all we do is publish a few articles, send an email, get employees excited about it to the best that we can, and they just take it and run with it. So again, employees can blow you away. They can also scare you with some of the things that they’ll post sometimes, because honestly, we’ve gotten some questionable photos. It’s not all sunshine and roses. I’m not telling you every photo looks like this. I handpicked some of our best ones. So they’ll certainly share some questionable stuff at times, but we don’t want to miss out on that potential and those potential stories and that impact that our team, we can then use these photos throughout the year. We can share with our brand teams to share on social and for other campaigns. And so it’s really just turned into this awesome event for TE each year

Speaker 1:
Being seen and heard at the end of the day for the employees. Briefly, let’s get into metrics before we get into questions here. What you termed for success when you were growing with this.

Speaker 3:
So if you have the platform or you just started, or you’re looking into it, that there’s a robust dashboard of metrics. And so Molly’s been really great about sharing those with us. We shift, we adjust based on the metrics, we make those moves. But I think outside of that, on paper, I think for us measuring success has been those stories of a leader stopping you and saying, Hey, I saw community week on the app, the great stuff, and oh, I engaged with my location. We did a volunteer project that week. We saw it posted. Those types of things have been really great. In the very beginning of this journey, we were solving for a lot of different platforms, a lot of different outlets, and trying to get everyone in one place. We’ve achieved that. So that’s a success. And then I was joking with Molly earlier that I think for me, a measure of success too has been people name dropping us as problem solvers. Just this week it was like looping in Christina and Molly, I think they can help us solve here. And it was using the platform to help them with something

Speaker 1:
They’re seeing the value of

Speaker 3:
It. And so I think that has been huge because six years ago I had employees telling me to my face it wasn’t going to work. We’ve tried everything, it’s not going to work. And then here we are now problem solvers for a lot of teams and helping them reach their goals in communicating with their teams. And I think to me that’s really big. Metrics are huge too, but that kind of stuff to me is like, yes.

Speaker 1:
Yeah, right. I love that. And quality over quantity. You

Speaker 2:
Wanted to say it can be hard to measure success in this area. Certainly you can look at likes, comments, the different metrics you can run on. Firstup, you can see how much content your topic owners are publishing to those topics. For user generated content, it’s not always easy. Are you trying to drive quantity of photos, which I would argue might not be the best way to measure success. So one of the things we’ve tried to do at TE is just a simple question of does it pass the eye test? And again, does it make sense? So would you rather get a thousand bad pictures of employees or pictures of their dog? Which again, nice picture, but maybe there’s not much we can do with that. Or would you rather get two great pictures that help spur an event like a community week or like an orange day and turns into this great campaign because somebody might say, oh, a thousand pictures, that’s great.

Speaker 2:
Employees are using it, that’s success. But if you can get a story out of some of these topics that you can then share more broadly and really run with it and help tell your company’s story, I think that’s another way to measure success. But for the topic owners specifically, over time I think you’ll see their questions start to improve and mature. That’s one way you can measure success. Where at the start it’s going to be how do I publish, what do I do on the deliver page? What box do I check, push email, which one should I do to hopefully months and years in, you get to more questions around strategy and I want to use the tool for this, or what do you think about this? And you can tell they’re just maturing in that evolution of how they’re using the platform to communicate with their employees. And I

Speaker 1:
Should add too, when you’re with the platform, you have this partnership with the customer success manager where you look into that, those metrics after you’ve piloted tested a month out, six months out, how are we looking? Where does the registration look? What opportunities do we have with departments? Okay. Kyla, do you have your track shoes on? A quick first question pop up. I saw yellow first right there? Yes ma’am. Is that yellow? It looks yellow. That’s you. Oh, it’s green. It looks yellow

Speaker 2:
Up

Speaker 3:
Here. There’s a lot of lights.

Speaker 7:
Hi, I’m Lonnie Lipkin. I’m from Otsuka Pharmaceuticals. So I was just wondering how you recruit your topic managers and is there a strategy you found particularly effective or do they just come to you? How do you get them? Good one. I

Speaker 1:
Can take it.

Speaker 3:
Go

Speaker 1:
For it.

Speaker 2:
So it’s going to be different based on your topic. So our content strategy is we’ve got global news that our team is publishing, business unit news that our business unit communicators are publishing and function news as well. And then lower right beneath that would be local news and content. So those would be topics where we might be a bit more involved reaching out to a plant manager, a local HR and saying, Hey, we recognize, we call them communications champions. We recognize you don’t have a comms champion. We think you should get this started. Here are the reasons why you should do it, and here’s in it for you the benefits that you would see. So there might be some more work to that, but there’s other topics where the people are coming to us and saying, we want this topic for our automotive team in China and it doesn’t necessarily fit into our business or country model. And so we got to figure out how are we going to make that work? We got to talk to them. What’s the use case? How much content? What content do you think you’re going to publish? So it’s going to vary based on the specific topic.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I would agree with that totally. If we see a need that should be filled, we might recruit. But with the platform where it is and the adoption and people seeing it, it’s more often than not, someone comes to us and says, we think we need a topic. Can you help us? So it does depend, but we’re still doing a little recruiting. We see some gaps in regions. Oh hey, they need more content or we need more content from them. Who can we recruit?

Speaker 2:
So

Speaker 1:
I saw the striped shirts. Yes. Right there. Thank you.

Speaker 8:
Alright. I work for a very risk adverse company.

Speaker 2:
Yes.

Speaker 8:
And so the thought of trying to find people to publish, even if it’s regional to go through compliance risk, legal makes my head want to explode though it’s the right thing to do. Did you encounter that and how did you overcome that? And I know there’s governance, but our people are crazy. So just the thought of them even leaving publishing something without it going through seven layers of approval probably will make our legal head explode. So just curious if you guys ever combated that in any way. Do you have

Speaker 2:
Something you go and then I go, oh no, you go first. Okay, I’m scared of

Speaker 1:
That one. It’s risky if you don’t. I have one too.

Speaker 2:
Since I don’t know your organization, I don’t work for them. I would say can you not get them to know about it and ask for forgiveness? And what

Speaker 1:
About anybody else in the room? Finance? Yeah, who’s a risk averse company? Not another question, but somebody who could offer to that. So I’ve worked with a couple of customers in that category. Large finance companies, same thing. It is that. So they start very small, they convince the stakeholders. They say, this is just the dogs and puppies, here it is. We’re getting ready to open this on Friday on a fun day. It’s a light day and we’re just going to let them comment. Here we go, okay. They feel better and then they build from there and then they know where they’re going, but they’re letting legal know it’s just dogs for now, but our plan eventually we’re going to get to much bigger things months from now. Then they’re like, oh yeah, I see the success. I trusted, okay, yeah, you’re good. Keep going. Yeah, that’s fine. Next thing you know they’re not paying attention and you’re opening more topic and you’re good to go. So start small. I love, in other words,

Speaker 2:
Okay, mean? No, that’s exactly right. Start with one. Find one topic that you want to explore. Maybe it’s an e r G, something that you think would be successful that isn’t going to make people lose their crap but safe. And then you can be extra hands-on with those topic owners and give them all the support and care they need. You’re not going to have to do that hopefully in five years from now with everyone, but do what you can to get it off the ground to Shawn’s point, and then go from there so that they can see, oh, we’re afraid employees are going to publish bad stuff or the topic owners are going to do the wrong thing. I know we have the quote on the governance slide, but one of the things we kept talking about as we were preparing for this was employees can surprise you in good ways. Everybody’s so afraid of what employees are going to comment or say, but their name’s tied to it. They’re more likely than not going to post a bad thing. So just try it, see how it goes, and we go from there. The way, wait, this two and

Speaker 8:
A half years to Yammer, which I agree with you is the worst thing ever. And all it is is dog photos so

Speaker 1:
Validated right now. How are we doing on time? What time is it right now? Are we

Speaker 2:
Over time? We’ve got three minutes.

Speaker 1:
Oh, okay, great. Oh, we’ve got somebody, sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 9:
I’ve got one quick question. For your communications champions out in the field, aside from training them on the platform, what else do you do to set them up for success? Are there toolkits, templates, other resources that you use? I assume branding and consistency also probably come in place

Speaker 3:
There, right? Yes. I could start with this one. I know we have similar but yet different approaches. Yes. Toolkits. We have a playbook that is specific to Newell that we’ve created. So it’s got the style guide in there, it’s got all of that. We’re actually working on some documentation as well too that we’re going to share with topic managers and it has all of that in there. Yeah, that’s a one-stop shop and it’s pretty much review all of this and then if you have questions, bring them to those monthly meetings. But even if it’s a share out email, we’re going through a brand refresh right now at Newell. So that one’s been very particular in sharing with our topic managers. Here’s our new branding and here’s what you should use. One capability in the studio right now that’s really great is the library you can fill. That for us has been a game changer. Like there’s really no excuse not to use our branding and get something off clipper. Please don’t. All right here for you. So we do make sure they have all of that and I am happy to even share those examples if you need ’em.

Speaker 1:
And I’ll say too, the strategy advisors, when we work with the customer, we have templates of that, of examples that we’ve built and the customers as well to look at. So for sure on that, go ahead.

Speaker 2:
The one thing I’ll add that we do is we created a brand identity for those comms champions to help identify them at the manufacturing site. So that way as employees walk by their desk or they might have a space in the cafeteria or something, it’s like, here’s who your communications champion is and it gives them just some additional visibility at the site. So if it’s something, if they’re looking for growth opportunity or if they’re excited to do that, it gives them more face time with the plant manager, with HR leadership, operations leadership. But then by they get a little logo and we print out some things, I think we give ’em a mug and some other stuff so that way it makes them feel special and a part of a broader team and they’re not by themselves. I love that

Speaker 1:
Question up front. Go ahead.

Speaker 10:
Hi, I’m Will from nasdaq and I have a question about how you sunset topics or stop having them. We have 78 and it’s a lot for us and we’re going to go through an audit, but if you could just share some examples of how you create the kind of

Speaker 1:
Governance around, did everybody hear that? Talking about auditing

Speaker 3:
Topics for review. So setting topics. So the questions around sunset topics, how do you do that and how do you audit? We’re fresh off an audit, so I’m happy to take this

Speaker 1:
One. Oh you are? Yeah, that’s right.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. Thanks to Shawn Floss. We are fresh off our audit.

Speaker 1:
I hope it helped.

Speaker 3:
So we started with some tactics in the sense of if they haven’t published in 30 days or more, that’s kind of where we started Molly. I think that was our baseline. And so we went from there. We did have a restructuring this year too. So in some cases it was just those people were no longer with the company. In other cases people gave up and didn’t let us know. So there were varying stories. Yes. So we did have a strategy around what do we do? Okay, if the people left we’re going to recruiting, right? If the people didn’t leave and they’re still there, we gave them notice. We were like, we’d love for your channel to still be active. It’s published, everyone can see it. It’s been inactive for 90 days. If you can get a new channel, a topic manager and publish content by XX date, we’d love to reactivate your channel. And then we give them ideas to how to relaunch it and bring excitement back to the channel. Sorry, topic as well. So yeah, this is kind of fresh for us. We just recently did that and then we said if we don’t hear back from you, which also happened, if we don’t hear back from you from XX State, this topic will be sunsetted. And we did it. Cut the cord. Yeah,

Speaker 2:
Just create simple guidelines. Yeah. I don’t know that we actually have them official, but every six months we’ll reach out. Similar, if somebody hasn’t published a single post in three months and say, we’ll reach out to the topic owner and say, Hey, you haven’t published in three months. If we don’t see consistent content within the next three to six months or whatever it is, or follow these guidelines, wherever you list that out, we’re going to archive the topic. But the nice thing in Firstup, I think you can archive it. The content will stay there. Correct. If somebody comes out of the woodwork in two years and says, Hey, where’d this go, we need it. You can unarchive it and bring

Speaker 1:
It back. The data is preserved time for a couple more questions. I didn’t want to ignore this side over here. We had a question right here. Yeah,

Speaker 3:
We’ve got one over

Speaker 1:
Here. Sorry. Ky. I know

Speaker 11:
Also know that we have some time built in, so if we need to go a little bit over. Thank you. We can

Speaker 3:
Because we’ve got some great questions. We won’t be offended if

Speaker 1:
People, is it okay if we go over here?

Speaker 2:
You got to go.

Speaker 1:
Did you have a question? Yeah, yeah, go

Speaker 2:
Ahead.

Speaker 12:
So talk up. I was wondering how you guys engage your teams that are non wired. So your hourly employees. We really struggle getting people to download something on their personal phone.

Speaker 3:
Cool. Want to take that?

Speaker 2:
We struggle with that too. Yeah, we do too. We’re in the manufacturing setting. It’s very difficult. There’s access issues for them and our IT teams don’t make it easy for them to log in. Their passwords reset every six months. Again, they don’t have access to the computer. I don’t have an answer for you other than I’m just sharing in misery. But one of the things we’re trying to do is explore dual authentication with Firstup. So our online employees would still log in with SS s o and there’s manufacturing employees could log in with a different authentication method directly through Firstup. I’m hopeful that our IT teams will prove that, but not overly confident. But one of the shifts that we’re making a little bit moving forward is how can we leverage managers because we have high adoption and usage from our manager groups, like 90% at our organization. And maybe that’s low, I don’t know. But we feel good about that. So we’re trying to leverage them more and communicate with them to help share those. But that is definitely a challenge. And if anybody has solved that, I will take you out to dinner to

Speaker 3:
Find that answer. I’ll just add really briefly to that. We are in the midst of a frontline campaign right now that’s working really well. It’s focused on hand safety and our manufacturing sites. And so I think just quickly put, we’ve taken the pressure off of ourselves on the adoption number so much. Of course we’re looking for that. We do look for that, we track that. But we just want to meet them where they are at this point. So we’ve actually printed newsletters from our studio and we’ve done flyers and we do QR codes like crazy. And that helps. Do we have that exactly in our metrics? No, but we do get feedback from our HR partners that are saying they’re loving these flyers, they’re loving these printouts. We did printed quizzes that came straight from the platform. Poor Molly. How many submissions? About a thousand printed submissions in your inbox right now. Something like that. Yeah. 3000 from our frontline. So it’s not the best answer because they’re not always on the platform and a lot of times they have similar access barriers, but we’re just trying to meet them where they are. We use digital signage a lot too for that group.

Speaker 1:
That’s another good example like meeting where they are doing some discovery to find out like he said, what’s the infrastructure like? How’s the wifi? The managers, supervisors, how can we get them involved? Do they have the daily standups, the huddles? Can they incorporate that, shorten those huddles and say, you’ll find out more on the app. Is there any exclusive content we can get on the app unions? Yeah, there are the challenges, but any content we can get to make it need needed, relevant, useful for them. Hyperlocal, we’ve been talking about that. So come for the menu. What’s going on at that plant? Advertise it menu here. Parking renovations at your plant here, the bathroom stalls, renovations here. That’s important to them. And getting that on the app. So just a few highlights

Speaker 2:
There. We didn’t even mention the word personalization during this presentation. Shame on us. But really that’s what we’re going for. I know I talked about our content model of global BU local in terms of importance. That’s flipped. Local is the most important. So what we’re trying to do is empower these topic managers to publish local content messages from their plant manager, the cafe menu, things that we call ’em, go meetings, the morning standup meetings, the safety moments, whatever it is. And publish all of that in the app. Yes. We’re also using digital signage. So if they don’t want to use the app, they can still get it there. But get that local content for them. That’s what they’re going to care about. The message from some president who they’ve never talked to, they could care less about

Speaker 1:
Kyla Turner. One more. You pick. I know everything on time. Okay.

Speaker 7:
Right. My name is Marsha. I’m from McKee Foods Corporation, which is a manufacturing company. And to go along with what you were saying, we do have a great number of employees who don’t want to put an app on their phone. We did make it possible for them to access through their web browser. So there are a lot of employees that are going that route. And then also, and you touched on it, we did find certain bits of content that we only publish on the app. So on our digital signage and things of that nature, our e posters and all of that, we’ll say for this particular information, go to, we call our app, we call it mix. So go to mix to get that information. One of those things is like the food trucks. So we have food trucks that come to the plant so they know that they’re going to be there, but they don’t know what the menu is. They don’t know which truck is showing up unless they go to the app to get it.

Speaker 1:
Nice. Alright. Thank you. Love it. And that is it for time, right? Kyla? I defer to you. Okay, thank you Kyla Turner and thank you. Shout out to Molly for the pens there, for the gifts and the great work. And to our guests right here. Thank you. We did it. So the keynote at 4:00 is The Dilemma of AI. Alright, thank you everybody. We appreciate the questions.