Modern Intranet with American Eagle & Otsuka Pharmaceuticals

Speaker 2:
Okay. Good afternoon everybody. I hope everyone has had a wonderful start to day two of attune. We are so excited to be here. For those of you who I have not met before, my name is Tahni Morrison. I’m Director of Customer Success. I have flown all the way from London to be with you all today. So very, very excited to be up on stage. It is my great pleasure to be introducing to you two of our most successful customers. We have AEO and we have Otsuka Pharmaceutical. Did I say that right? Everybody? Yes. I’ve been practicing. I’ve been practicing. So they’re going to be running through a really, really awesome topic today, which is around exploring the modern intranet. And the modern intranet is something that a lot of us are talking about. It’s a growing topic. A lot of businesses have traditional intranets and a lot of us are trying to make them a more modern and better experience. So we’ve got great examples today of two businesses that have done exactly that with us at Firstup. So they’re going to be running through what they’ve done. They’re going to have some really awesome ideas, some controversial ideas, and we will be having a q and a at the end. So please hold questions till then. But I am going to start, first of all with a fun fact for each of you. Ashley, would you like to go first?

Speaker 3:
I would love to. I was a synchronized swimmer in college.

Speaker 2:
Awesome. Lani.

Speaker 4:
So I’m a bit of an amateur singer and actor. Very, very amateur. I performed in my children’s high school show, elementary school fundraiser show. So

Speaker 2:
Yeah, amazing creative people on the stage.

Speaker 3:
So I actually live in Mr. Rogers childhood home. So

Speaker 2:
It was not an American, I had no idea what that meant, so I’m so glad that everybody reacted well to that. That’s a great fun fact. I’ll get some more context later. Alright, so we’re going to kick it off. So Alexis, over to you.

Speaker 3:
Yeah. Awesome. I am so happy to be here today. I, I’m Alexis Tragos. I oversee corporate communications for American Eagle Outfitters. This is my first conference since before covid, so I’m really excited about all of the energy and all of the ideas and I can’t wait to take it back to my team. Before we get started, I just want to understand the audience here. So who is a Firstup customer? If you could just raise your hand, keep your hands raised if you’re an OG social course customer. Alright. All right, awesome. How about Dynamic Signal? Okay. Alright, now the big question. Is anyone here still using a SharePoint based intranet? Can you raise your, Ooh, okay, I see you. There is another side. We can get you to the other side of this. So I just briefly want to share a little bit about the company.

Speaker 3:
So we are a 5 billion global retailer. Most of you probably know American Eagle. It’s been around since 1977. We also have our Aerie brand, so go women’s empowerment and body positivity. And then we have a sub-brand of Aerie, which is offline by Aerie, our activewear brand, which we launched during the pandemic, which is wild. And then two luxury brand, so a men’s wear, Todd Snyder, and then unsubscribed, which is more slow fashion, sustainable materials, and all about casual luxury. So we have about a thousand stores across the us, Canada, Mexico, and Hong Kong. We also work with licensee partners across the globe and ship to 81 countries. I also think it’s really helpful to give you an overview of what my audience is and my population as well as the teams. So something that I always find myself talking to fellow conference goers is just like, how are your teams structured?

Speaker 3:
I’m always so amazed that for very large companies, a lot of us have very small but mighty communication teams and it always makes me feel really good that it’s not just us. So we have 40,000 global associates, five corporate offices, three distribution centers. One of them is in Canada and then a thousand stores. So I will note that my team is responsible for corporate distribution center and our culture and business updates to our stores. But we ourselves do not oversee that day-to-day messages and communications to our retail associates, which as you can imagine is a very large population of ours. So it’s about 35,000 of those 40,000 associates. Yet it’s our role to still get out some really important information to ’em. We use a couple of different channels. So Firstup really powers most everything that we do. Intranet, all of our emails. We do some smart newsletters that we’ll get into.

Speaker 3:
We also have a WebEx bot, so I’m really excited about maybe even testing out some AI capabilities with that over the next year. And then we still use some digital communications screens too. So I report into our SS V P of corporate communications and investor relations. So I sit within the finance function and then we have a manager, a lead, and a graphic designer. So again, very small but mighty team. I will also give you another really small fun fact. American Eagle did not formalize its corporate communications team until 2017. So as a 5 billion company, that is still really shocking for me to say out loud. That’s not to say that we weren’t doing it, it’s just that a bunch of different teams had pieces of communications, store ops had internal, the CSR team had crisis come. So it was all sort of these really disparate communication functions.

Speaker 3:
So in 2017, our investor relations VP was like, we need to have one voice for the organization as we continue to grow and we continue to scale. So she formalized our strategic communications function, which leads me to a conversation that she and I had. So I was on the CSR team at the time and I joined this larger team and I sort of raised my hand. I’m like, Hey, I’ve got this internal experience from previous roles. I’ve got events, would love to do more in internal. So I know she gave me a shot where I’m getting my bearings, I’m learning how to use SharePoint. I’m like, what kind of guardrails do we have in place? What are we doing here? What are our tools? And she’s like, we should get an app. And I’m like, what are we? Okay. So I am the only communications associate at this point, and I knew then that we didn’t understand our audience well enough to be able to roll out a full fledge app. So what I did is I found a great conference to go to and went to that conference. This is actually a picture of a slide that I took at that conference and I felt seen for the very first time. So it still makes me laugh.

Speaker 3:
Why did it do this to all of us or many of us? It wasn’t even supposed to be for internal communications. It wasn’t supposed to be for a communications platform. It’s for saving and sharing of documents. So I still ask myself that question of why. So got some really great ideas from that conference. So this is 2018, maybe this next one is not my best idea, but at this point I knew that we did not have the buy-in from leadership that anybody was going to give me $350,000 to buy a communications platform that I really needed to demonstrate that we had the engagement. I needed to demonstrate that we were a trusted advisor for the organization. And so I’m like, let’s just give our intranet a facelift. So this is what the old intranet looked like. And I’m like, well, we can do a little bit better than that.

Speaker 3:
So we paid a SharePoint developer, we did some updates, we added some quick links, we added a library where associates could go and find their previous communications. That was always something nobody could ever find. The emails. I think I heard someone say in a presentation, well, we sent the email, right? Well, we sent the email, we can’t find it. So we put some things in place that they could easily find information, but I still couldn’t find, I had no data. It was very rudimentary. So this is what we lived with for about a year. It took way longer than I thought it would to sort of give the intranet an update. And then of course 2020 happened. A couple of things happened that year, right? Our communications team actually found a tool that we were going to deploy to help us just share more engaging emails and content. We also were paired with technology partners that were completely amazing and incredible. And of course the pandemic happened, which completely changed the way all of us communicated with our populations. So on March 16th, 2020, we issued our first Real News, which was a daily newsletter that myself and I did get one more additional person. By that time, we produced content for more than a year straight every single day.

Speaker 3:
However, we quickly learned that the tool that we had signed on to use was not working. And I mentioned that amazing technology team. They really recognized that communications at that time were so important and that we were struggling and we really needed a solution. I have a question, another question for the audience. Is there anyone here whose technology team maybe came to you all with Firstup? No. 1, 1, 1. Oh, they hated your last platform, so they came to you with it. I feel very lucky that I have some amazing advocates on our technology team. I was just talking to Carrie and Kelsey about that. They know very well that our technology partners are very, very involved in what we do. They came to us with Firstup. They were like, we think we found you a solution. We want you to meet them. We think we can really make a difference. So within a year we went from this, and I’m not going to spend a ton of time on this, but to this where we could really share some smart newsletters. I think our content just got a lot more engaging. Obviously we are a fashion brand, and so for me it was always really painful to see these really terrible emails that we were sending. And then our marketing team is sending everyone these awesome emails. So we were very, very happy with that progress.

Speaker 3:
So the next step in this, so we launched our Firstup app in 2021, and during that time, this amazing technology team that we have also, they must be crazy, also decided that we’re in the middle of a pandemic. They’re going to get rid of Microsoft, and we are moving to Google Workspace. So we launched a huge campaign and we went Google. So going Google over the next year was a really big part of our SharePoint conversion and migration. We made that decision together, and I cannot emphasize that enough that if you are looking to sort of close down your SharePoint and or move whatever you’re using over to Firstup, to use Firstup as your modern intranet, you have to have that buy-in from your technology team. I think it is extremely critical and to both be on the same page. It was also I think a really good decision for us. Our associates were having a lot of trouble. Do I go to the internet? Do I go to our life at AEO app? I don’t know where my one source of truth is. And so that was something that we really wanted to make sure that our associates knew where to go for the most reliable information. So we set out on this journey in February of 2022. It took a year, so it was not a short process.

Speaker 3:
We again, I’ll stress that technology partnership again. They need to be along the journey with you in this migration. And so this team, they took the initiative, they went to SharePoint, they did a complete audit, they queried when are these files, when’s the last time they were used? I mean, some of these files hadn’t been accessed since 2015 and you still had people that were hanging onto it, those jeans that don’t fit you from college, but you can’t throw away. They’re like, no, but I need that article. And we’re like, no one has opened it. No one has gone there. No one has opened it. You don’t need it. So we did this inventory. We found out what are the pieces of content that people are using the most. Another thing that helped, obviously I mentioned the Google workspace, we were able to figure out are we migrating content to the new intranet to life at AEO?

Speaker 3:
Are we creating a Google site to house that information? So think a lot of HR information. We were able to move those pieces of content from the intranet and move it from the SharePoint intranet and move it into a Google site. So that really helped or are there just documents that we could get rid of? So we sort of went through that process. We also met with every single business partner across the organization and not just our communications team, but our technology partner set in on that. So they sat in on every single meeting and listened to the needs, the concerns of those business partners. Some of them were like, yeah, sure, here we’re good. Here’s the keys to the car. Just tell me where my content lives. Other people were a little bit wary and needed some handholding. The biggest piece to this is our technology team also didn’t know that there were some sites out there living on SharePoint that they had no idea about.

Speaker 3:
So we also had to collect a few of those sites and points because there were just some unknowns that we didn’t realize were out there. And then just that change management. So I think that we all know that as communicators, we do need to bring associates along for the journey. For something like an intranet where they’re going to find the information that they need all of the time, you really have to make them feel at ease and feel comfortable that they’re going to be able to find exactly what they need on whatever your new intranet is. For us, it was obviously life at aeo and then have fun. I mean, we are not having as much fun as the Wawa team. If anybody was here or JP over at Southern Fuel, is it Southern Fuel? I mean, they’re having a lot of fun, but we sort of what we did with our intranet, we just made light of it.

Speaker 3:
So we’re telling people we moved, oops, this is awkward. The content was old. People are like, why is this old stuff here? And really making sure that we’re directing people back to our app on the SharePoint site. So we also, our campaign is life at AEO as your first stop. That’s the first place that you go for all of your content. This is what our desktop and mobile experience looks like. We have the addition of the quick links now that I think are really, really helpful for people to be able to navigate to be able to find that content. So that was definitely something that happened during our migration. Firstup, launched those in the spring.

Speaker 3:
Let’s see, we also made sure there are people who are still resistant to change. We sent out mailers. So we do a strategy mailer each year since we’ve sort of been in this hybrid working model. And we also sent paper just information about how the content was moving to life at AEO, how they could quick link, how they could bookmark articles, all of the great things that you can do on the life at AEO app. We organized content in a toolbox too. So that was really helpful. So all of those popular resources, we put all in one place in a toolbox. And then, sorry, I’m speeding through this. I see my clock ticking down. I did not time this and did not realize I had so much to say honestly. So our adoption rates, we’ve been really happy with our adoption so far.

Speaker 3:
So except for stores, which I said that I would get to. So corporate has been great Distribution centers, amazing. These are all Dustless associates. They had no access to the internet except for one kiosk in our dcs. So we’ve been very, very happy with their adoption. I will also note, so this M D C, this is our Mississauga dc and their monthly click rate, their adoption rate is super high. I will tell you that that is because they have a content creator that is not just a content creator. She is out there and she’s on the floor of the distribution center saying, did you download the app? Hey, all of the startup meetings now our startup meetings are now digital. So she created, I think just a library of really great content and I think it’s just absolutely necessary for the success of your deathless associates.

Speaker 3:
And then we’ve had some really great culture surveys. So I think comments that I think reiterate that people are really happy with this move, that they love having content all in one place. When you have new hires, you just have to tell them to go to one spot. And then just some key benefits. So I think everyone knows it’s an elevated user experience. Our associates don’t have to be on A V P N anymore. We have credibility now. The information is accurate. We know it’s all in one place. Time savings for my team, we’re not posting duplicative information in multiple places, and it’s a cost savings. So we probably save in a SharePoint developer about a hundred thousand dollars a year. So it really helps to weigh the cost of having an enterprise wide communications platform. There are tons of opportunities. We are still new in this.

Speaker 3:
We’ve only been with Firstup for three years. User generated content is one of them. So I love all the ideas that we’ve been getting this week. And that store adoption rate is really low, so we’re sitting at that 15%. So if anybody wants to talk more about that, we can do that. After the presentation, I want to turn it over to Ashley and Lani and then integrations and navigation. So always looking for improvement and opportunities. So Ashley and Lani are going to dive into some insightful content about how you can really drive that engagement with the modern internet, how they’re engaging, I think leadership team. So excited here. There

Speaker 5:
You go. Pass the baton. Yeah.

Speaker 5:
Alright, well thank you all for having us. My name is Ashley Smith and I have the privilege of leading our internal and executive communications team at Otsuka Pharmaceuticals. We’ll talk a little bit more about what that is. And my colleague Lani. So I’m Lani Lipkin and I’m the associate director of corporate communications at Otsuka, and I lead our digital strategy. So I love the connectivity here, right? We’ve heard this really compelling and tremendous story about how did we get here and how did it change and evolve along the way? And how did internal communications change as the external environment and pressures that we were all facing became critical mass in moments around the pandemic, whether you were a Firstup customer prior to that as accelerated by the pandemic or used that as part of your compelling proof point to bring your leaders along. It was a moment, right?

Speaker 5:
The moment where internal communications kind of stepped into the forefront of leaders, recognition around the value that we bring in terms of engaging people, building and maintaining culture and driving the business, all of those things. And so where we’re going to pick up in the storytelling here is to take you into what modern intranet means at ska. We’ll start by giving you just a little bit of context about who we are. We are a large global publicly traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Japanese company. We have a little less than 50,000 employees worldwide at about 13 billion worth of net sales. We operate in the pharmaceutical business across eight primary disease states. And we do everything from research and development science all the way to walking pamphlets and samples into healthcare provider’s offices. So the commercialization. And we work in serious unmet medical need and rare diseases.

Speaker 5:
Things like schizophrenia, bipolar rare kidney diseases, doing research in PTSD and ADHD agitation associated with Alzheimer’s, really heavy weighty stuff. We have our nutraceuticals business, which looks at health from a consumption standpoint. So you may know brands like Crystal Geyser, nature made vitamins fall under that. And then last but not least, our consumer business. Oh no, that’s the mineral water, sorry. Nutraceuticals is Pocari Sweat, the Asian market Gatorade. So Crystal Geyser and Ridge Vineyards highly recommend any sort of after work event at Otsuka because it’s always very well stocked.

Speaker 4:
In the US we have two companies. One is, it’s a big mouthful, but OPDC or Otsuka Pharmaceutical Development and Commercialization, and that’s our R&D arm. And then OAPI is our commercial arm, so our sales marketing and our internal functions. We have four home offices, two on the East coast, one in Princeton, that’s our largest office, Rockville, Maryland. And then we have two in California smaller offices.

Speaker 5:
And so this is where Lani and I sit is in the US healthcare business. I have to tell you a little bit about the people that we support because I regularly come to the table with our leaders and say, you’re really important because our people are more important. That is who we as internal communicators view as our primary stakeholders. And I’m pretty loud and obnoxious about that with our leaders to try to help to reinforce that perspective with ’em. We’re about 40% traditional home office desk base spread across those offices that Lani described. We have a further 25% of folks who are in non-sales roles who are truly remote, might come to the office once or twice a year, but truly remote. And that’s a growing population for us and something that’s new and different. The remaining third about of our population are our traditional field sales.

Speaker 5:
So these are the pharma reps that are going to drive from healthcare provider, hospital clinic to the next location, go in and meet and then come back. What makes them a little bit different than some of the frontline workforces we’ve talked to folks about this week in the manufacturing or the healthcare provider space, is that we do have the benefit of when these folks come out of a healthcare provider interaction, they sit down in their car, they open up their iPad, they document notes, so they’re connecting back into the corporate infrastructure periodically throughout their day. Now whether or not they prioritize going to our employee engagement platform is another situation, but we do at least know that we have connection points with them throughout the day that we can leverage to bring them into the content that we’re excited about.

Speaker 4:
So today we’re going to talk to you about Ziga Vine. So or we call it the Vine, and that’s our internal communications platform. It’s powered by Dynamic Signal. So I know there may be a few people who are still on the dynamic signal platform out there, but this is really our front door to the employee experience at Otsuka. So just a little backstory, you might be wondering why there’s a photo of a tomato plant on the right. So one of the inspirations for our name for the vine actually comes from one of our Japanese cultural symbols, which is the hydroponic tomato plant. So fun fact, a traditional tomato plant produces about 50 to 60 pounds of tomatoes per season. Hydroponic cultivation can actually increase that to 10,000 pounds. So that sort of symbolizes the potential to, I guess unleash your potential by stepping outside of the norm. So that’s why it’s one of our cultural symbols. And also the vine just literally symbolizes sort of that connection that we’re creating among all of our employees. So just a little fun fact of the history of the vine.

Speaker 5:
When I first got there, I was like, I don’t get it. Help me understand this. But now I do and I love it.

Speaker 4:
So this is the Vine. This is our homepage. We are desktop and on mobile. And as I mentioned, this is the first stop and really the one-stop shop for Otsuka employees to experience everything Otsuka. So it provides employees with all of their news. So all the organizational announcements, events, cultural moments, learning opportunities, all their news is housed in the vine. It also has our business strategy. So our corporate goals, there’s an entire page dedicated to our long-term strategy. So this is where employees will go to get that information. It has all of our employee resources, so everything they need to do their jobs every day from IT help, HR support, compliance training, even the company store, everything is housed on the vine. And then we have a whole department page section. So each department has its own page with information about their team members, their mission, their resources. So this is really everything the employee needs to experience sga. So the mine is actually the center of Otec is Digital Workplace. So it connects employees no matter where they are. So actually mentioned, we’ve got remote employees, we’ve got field employees, we’ve got home office employees. This is the one place they go and they can find everything they need. So Workday platform is linked out. We’ve got our social impact platform, excuse me, battling a cough. So Otica is actually committed to a hybrid work approach. And so the Vine really supports that. Excuse me. Thanks.

Speaker 5:
It is, and it’s a really important way that we keep everybody coming through that consistent front door. Forgive me for taking over for just a minute. No, go ahead. I’m good. And so even though from a technical standpoint, speaking very tactically, we don’t have a p I integration between SS a P and the Vine, but what we do have is a consistent front door that we can reinforce through QR codes, through messaging, through Leader Cascade to ensure that we are constantly and consistently pushing all Otsuka people through the front door of the vine, which gives us better recognition that that’s the news source, the place to go for information. If you have a question and you don’t know what to do, start with the vine, right? That’ss essentially what we’re trying to create here with this approach,

Speaker 4:
And it’s actually the backbone also for all of our enterprise wide messages. So we don’t have individual messages coming out from departments or from leaders. Everything originates from the vine. So when employees receive those communications, they’re coming from Otsuka Vine. And this helps us manage email overload, which is obviously still a big issue for everyone. And it’s also a really important way that people, especially in the field, experience Otsuka culture.

Speaker 5:
And that’s all about the content to build that culture.

Speaker 4:
So these are some statistics, our engagement and our adoption that we’re very, very proud of. And this is just a snapshot. So this represents mid-August to mid-September, which is typically a little bit slower as it is in most companies. A lot of people take PTO, but we’ve really seen consistently high adoption and engagement over the last couple of years. So 94.6% of our registered users are active users, and that’s 60% over benchmark for other internal communications programs. So we’re really proud of that. And they’re not just using the platform, they’re viewing posts, they’re engaging. So 83% of active users actually view one post in the past month. We also have a really successful broadcast open rate. So employees are opening those emails, they’re going in to see they’re engaging, they’re going in and opening, and they’re taking them back to the vine. And that’s also 5% over benchmark. And most importantly, it’s creating that connection for employees to the company. So from our last year’s employee engagement survey, 88% of employees said they feel proud to work for Otsuka. They feel it’s a great place to work. They’re confident about the future success of the company. So we’re building that strong pride, that strong belief in what we do.

Speaker 5:
Alright, on par, I think it’s going relatively well. I’m a very biased audience for sure. But on the whole those numbers, those numbers tell a fairly compelling story and I think they indicate that some things that we’re doing are working in our environment. And that brings us back to this concept of the modern intranet. And as we really talked through this, to define what does that mean? The answer was it’s different for everybody. However, there are some consistent elements that we think anyone can employ to get to the version of the modern intranet that their people need and their people want. And it has to be both, right? Because there’s content that must get delivered that we need you to read that isn’t going to be as fun as jps how not to have a performance eval conversation, love of the levity there, but it is that blend.

Speaker 5:
And so as we started to think through why do we see those numbers and why do we get the anecdotal and the qualitative, sorry, and the quantitative feedback that we do, three things came to the surface first, can’t move without it is an engaged early and committed leadership team. We have an exceptionally aligned leadership team. Lani talked about the fact that everything funnels through the vine and that wouldn’t happen if the leaders weren’t behind it. Second, everything that we do on the vine is grounded in strategy. Both the business strategy and the underlying internal communications and executive comms strategy that supports those business goals and objectives from that flow, our editorials, our content strategy, our editorial processes, all of the things that we need to make it happen. And then last and certainly not least, the most important thing probably is to keep that employee first mindset all the time.

Speaker 5:
And that is our first goal and objective, both from a design and an execution standpoint. So all the way through everything we’re doing, we keep employees at the center, both desk and desk lists. Talk a little bit about the leadership piece for a minute. How did we get and maintain that leadership commitment? We’ve heard it before it. It is truly about treating your leaders as change champions and stakeholders, winning them over in the beginning with the data, with the math in terms of what this will save in terms of consolidation of platform and spend, what your employees are saying they expect based on their consumer communications experiences, all of those things. And we’ve made it very clear that we understand and operate for everything that we do and maybe softer or funner. The role of internal communications at its core is to motivate, inspire, and inform the people who drive the company.

Speaker 5:
And for us, and for many of you, that goes one step further into your purpose. And for us, our people drive our company to improve the lives of patients who are suffering from serious medical conditions. So like I said, we keep leaders engaged through data, we do that on a regular basis. And where that has netted us out is that consistent organizational commitment to enterprise-wide comms driven from the center. Are there rogue things that happen that we are constantly fly swatting? Absolutely, but we are generally pretty successful at moving things through the vine that touch the enterprise wide audience. Now if finance wants to send a newsletter to finance people about finance, things that’s within their purview. But those enterprise wide touches that really clog the inbox, we’ve managed to eliminate the majority of. The last thing I’ll say here is that we also keep leaders as a key component of Otsuka’s corporate voice. And so we have them delivering messages, we ask them to share their perspectives. We ask them to be vulnerable and share their experiences related to caregiving or a particular disease state. They are important osca people before they are leaders, and that’s what helps to keep that commitment.

Speaker 5:
Next on that list of three was really being grounded in strong strategy. I’ve talked a lot about the tie to business strategy. So what you see on the left hand side of this slide, these top two pieces, those are the emblems and the visual marks we use to delineate our corporate strategy and our ideological commitment to patients. And from there, our internal communications on a page snapshot is derived right? Without that, there is no internal communications framework. They have to ladder up and fit together. And from that we can get into the operational resources, processes, the ways in which we engage with our internal stakeholders to operate in a consistent way that supports the business, supports the people who support the business. And so some things that we utilize in terms of tools, digital editorial process, documented, standard operating procedures, templated creative assets, digital calendar that’s accessible, a number of other things like that.

Speaker 4:
So the third component I think to success with us is really putting the employee first and designing everything from that employee perspective. And I mean that starts from just the homepage design. So our homepage is an auto launch from Google, so it’s a no-brainer. People open up their laptop and they open Google and that’s the first page that they see.

Speaker 6:
I’m going to mess this up.

Speaker 4:
So we’re also very strategic about our categories and I know topics are probably more the term we used to, but in dynamic signal we use categories, but our category names are really designed with the employee perspective in mind and what employees are looking to find. So career development companies, executive messages, very purposeful about how we name our categories, menus and quick links. So those are also the strategy behind where we put those and their prominence. So our quick links are all of our most frequently used platforms and the things that employees are using on a regular basis and need every day. Our menus at the top, our strategic pillars. And then third, keeping everything very visually interesting. We use a combination of photos and graphics and videos and of course everything’s always aligned with our corporate brand, but it’s just really a beautiful site to look at. We have an incredible creative team that supports us in a lot of this. We also use a combination of videos, we’ve dabbled into podcasts, we do infographics, we do articles, we’ll do quotes. So we really try to mix it up and keep it interesting. And then we also incorporate our campaign visual. So a lot of our campaigns have their own logos, their own branding, and those are used throughout our content.

Speaker 4:
And then we also have gotten very creative about how we use broadcasts and newsletters. So getting back to the point of avoiding that email overload, we find that broadcasting is really the most effective way of drawing our employees back to the vine. But what we’ve tried to do is sort of streamline those communications. So if there’s an awareness month, let’s say for example, and there’s a few different posts about mental illness awareness month, we’ll put those in one broadcast newsletter and send that out rather than three different posts. And then we have a end of the week, peak of the week, which I think a lot of people do that. But our recap for the week.

Speaker 4:
So another way that we put the employee first is we make everyone a contributor. So the Vine is a very self-service model. So Otsuka is a highly regulated company in pharmaceuticals, and I know I was talking to some other people or heard some other comments yesterday about other sort of risk averse companies where we can’t necessarily hand over the keys to our employees to submit that content. So we’ve designed our Vine content review form and that gives the employees sort of that autonomy and that creativity to submit their ideas. But we still have some control over what content actually gets shared enterprise wide. And we work with them. We provide strategic oversight, editorial oversight to make sure that their content is landing. We also have a decentralized manager model. So similar to what I’ve been hearing about how other companies are using topics, we have department news pages. So each of our departments has a content manager and the department news pages are the places where they can share the news that is not enterprise wide. Things like birthdays and babies and team accomplishments. And so this really enables the storytelling at the team and department level

Speaker 5:
That hyper-personalization we’ve been talking about yesterday and today day. Okay, the countdown clock here is not our friend, so we’re going to just leave. What we’ll leave you with, what we’ll leave you with are the last two things that we wanted to share, which is the effort that we put into showcasing the employee first. It all goes back to people are our priority. We launched about a year ago our advocacy program, which we call my Otsuka, where we lean into the really robust capabilities that the dynamic signal platform has around sharing content. We work incredibly closely with our corporate brand and marketing colleagues who manage the corporate social channels to ensure that we have an integrated content strategy and that we are enabling our employees to share the things that our corporate voice is talking about. All in the effort to lend credibility to our corporate voice, to help the advocacy work, support the advocacy work that our patient stakeholder folks do. And we’re very clear about the value proposition in the communications and recruiting people into the My Otsuka program. This is for you to show up as a leader in the space that you want to pick and choose the content that you love to share that’ll resonate with your networks and share it through the supported channels.

Speaker 4:
And finally, we’ll just spend two seconds on this because we’re very proud of this series. So our Voices of Otsuka series is our employee storytelling platform. And so we use this in so many different ways and for different topics. So just to give you some examples, and again, this is all about putting the employee first, making sure they see themselves in the content so they’re vested. So just one quick example, earlier this year we had two F D A approvals within two weeks of each other. And so rather than just send out the traditional yay us, we got F D A approval, we went one step further and we had a series of videos spotlighting the employees who have been involved in that approval and along the journey that sometimes went back 10, 15, 20 years and letting them share their stories. So from commercial to the research organization. So just another way of celebrating employees, making them feel like they are, they’re vested, they’re part of the process and I think that really has helped a lot with our engagement.

Speaker 5:
And so we’ll leave you there. We have some things that are next on our agenda and we’ve learned a lot here. I think fun and levity and building community beyond this storytelling mechanism is one of the key learnings I’m taking away from here. But that is the story of Otsuka and the Vine.

Speaker 2:
Amazing.

Speaker 2:
I’m going to stand over this way so that we can face the crowd of questions. So well done ladies. That was awesome. Really, really great learnings. I am going to start with some questions for the room. I’d love people here first of all to put their hand up if they currently have their Firstup program as their all employee homepage when they open up the internet. Not many. Okay. Do we have anyone in here that has brought someone from IT in their organizations along to aune? Yes, Zach from agco. I can see you over there. Wonderful. So first of all, people who have not put Firstup as their homepage, please speak to your customer success manager. They’ll be able to help you. Who here is using A V P N to access Intranets? Way more than I would’ve thought. That’s crazy.

Speaker 2:
You don’t have to do that with, Firstup, who has multiple intranets? So more than one still quite a few of you. Yeah, quite a few. And who is double publishing because of that? Loads. Okay. Alright, so lots of work being done. And I mean the examples that we’ve been through today shows how we can be successful. And the thing I want to highlight here is we have two very different businesses, A very regulated organization that has a lot of legal, privacy, data concerns, and then obviously a retail population that is again, very different retail organization. Alright, so we’re going to stop some questions for you all. So I do want to talk really quickly about what the modern intranet means. I mean an intranet is an intranet, we’re all familiar with that term. What is a modern intranet? Do you want to start?

Speaker 5:
Well, I think I provided some of my own thinking about this, but if I boil it down to one sentence, for us it’s technology that enables information, connection, and engagement that drives a business, right? All of those pieces have to show up in some form or fashion and at different points in time, different pieces dial up in importance and dial down. You pull those levers as you need them as communicators, but having a technical platform that can help you achieve all three of those things in an agile flexible way is what modern intranet means to me.

Speaker 2:
And for you, Alexis,

Speaker 3:
I think for us it’s making sure that we’re breaking down any barrier for our associates to get information and content. So modern internet to me, to those of you that were raising your hand around, do you have to log onto A V P N to get to your internet? That’s what we were doing. And I think that that is a really big barrier for associates to get the information that they need and similarly to have that sort of connection. And we’re trying to build this sense of belonging, especially we are a very hybrid focused organization where we are not required to be in the office. And so for us, modern is really meeting our associates with the information that they need when they need it, where they need it in a really easy way. So whether that’s app or desktop.

Speaker 2:
So personalization is really what’s coming through here. So modern intranet is making it personalized for every person in your organization and ensuring that they’re getting what they need when they need it. Awesome. That sounds fantastic. So the other thing I want to ask is around putting your modern in intern as the front door, I mean obviously we’ve got a lot of people in the room who have not taken that leap yet. Can I get some feedback from both of your organizations on why that’s so important and also what feedback you’ve received? So Lani and Ashley,

Speaker 5:
Do you want to take that one?

Speaker 4:
I mean I think it’s super important. I mean everyone is coming in the same way. I feel like there leaves very little room for error and we can really kind of control the message and I feel like it’s convenience, it’s accessibility. Yeah,

Speaker 5:
No, I think it connects in a lot to what you were saying, right? It’s delivering what people need when they need it, how they need it, and by creating that expectation that if you have a question, the answer in some form or fashion is going to be found on the vine, gives people a destination to head to then work to solve problems themselves quickly, at least as a first stop. And it takes a lot of technical integration to your points, again, around the strong partnership with your IT team and infrastructure. It takes a lot of integration to do some of the more sophisticated pull through, but there are some easier ways to connect links on a homepage. Anyone who’s on Dynamic Signal who now has nine quick links, you can thank her afterwards.

Speaker 2:
And Alexis, I really want to ask you, so a lot of people in SharePoint in this room, SharePoint’s not going to go away in some capacity in terms of Microsoft, we partner with Microsoft very actively. But you guys at AEO got rid of SharePoint. What was the response? I think one of the biggest pieces of feedback we get in customer success is that there is no way the business could survive if they got rid of something like

Speaker 3:
SharePoint. I think for us what was different is we did move to Google Workspace. So obviously that was an advantage in our case for support of this. There really was no option. I guess we flipped the script on that picture that I showed where it was like there are no options to SharePoint. Well, we told them that there are no literally we’re getting rid of SharePoint. So I think for us it just made it a lot easier. We made an enterprise wide decision. I think if it was just the communications team saying like, Hey, we should get rid of this, we wouldn’t have had buy-in. But because our technology partners, because our leaders also wanted that and also wanted that centralized location for information, it was easier. But I said it took a year. I mean we had to migrate files. I mean again, I cannot say enough about a’s technology team and in particular my technology partners, we would not have been able to do it without them.

Speaker 2:
Amazing. And I mean another thing that does come up all the time is documents, document repository. We need all the policies from 2001 to today still available. So I know that you spoke Alex about how you did an audit to ensure that you were only keeping the stuff that was important. How did we do that for the two of you?

Speaker 5:
So we actually still, this is like a dirty secret. We still have a SharePoint infrastructure, it’s just latent. We do not double publish the only place. It is still active substantially at the enterprise level. We have an HR site that has just a huge repository of information, which since nobody from there is here today. I will tell you when I do a search there, I get stuff from 2013 that does not help me answer the questions that I have. So that’s an exercise candidly, we need to continue to push to clean up what exists. So we haven’t gone through the complete decommissioning of, we have successfully moved people away from it through that leadership enabled front door, shut everything else down and push through the vine. So that site I described, we have a quick link, a quick link for it that sits on the homepage of the vine so at least people know how to get there through our front door.

Speaker 2:
And I’m going to ask one more question before we open up to the room. So we’ve got Chris Thompson in the back, so if you want to find someone with a question while I asked mine. So final question, I mean you talked a lot about I think having fun was what you said, Alexis, and we’ve talked in the breaks about having fun with content and ensuring fun is still strategic. So I would love to understand, I’ve got sort of two parts to this question. We had someone yesterday talking about how do I get rid of the dog pitches? How do I have an experience that feels personalized but also strategic? I mean Ashley, what’s your thoughts on that? How do they make the dog pictures strategic?

Speaker 5:
You have to vote me off the island here. I’m the fun police. So Lani’s the right answer there.

Speaker 4:
So we just had that recently. So I think it was a few weeks ago, it was National National Dog Day. And so we had a vine post and we encouraged people to comment about their favorite dog and the names of their dogs. But there was also a component there about the benefits of having a dog to mental health and the therapeutic benefits of that. And so we connected it back to the business but we still were able to make it fun. So that’s how,

Speaker 2:
I think that’s the best campaign advice I’ve heard all day, strategic advice all day

Speaker 3:
That amazing

Speaker 2:
Strategic fun dog’s, mental health. I advocate for that. Alexis, really quickly to you before we get a question, how do you make fun? Content strategic?

Speaker 3:
I mean, I hate to say we do things similarly. We try and see what are our associates posting, what are they excited about? And we do try and make that connection either back to not necessarily strategy but back to some sort of culture element, some sort of maybe idea initiative. So our ideas, inclusion, diversity, equity and access. So we try to make connections in that way because something that’s really important to AEO is culture community. I think I mentioned we are a very hybrid organization, however, our model is right now you have to make five in-person connections a month with someone, a peer, a business partner. And so we just really try to look for opportunities to leverage what is exciting our associates and see if we can make it happen.

Speaker 2:
Fantastic. Alright, we’re opening up. Chris, do we have a question? Ken, will we please have your name and where you’re from?

Speaker 7:
Hi, I’m Erin Kennedy. I’m from Community Health System in central California. So we have a 2013 SharePoint. So really that one slide resonated with me and we’re moving to the cloud base. We also have had Firstup for three and a half years, we have pretty robust engagement. Half of our SharePoint intranet homepage, well I say more than half two thirds is integrated with our Firstup content. So it seems very seamless. But I had sort of a tactical question about how you do the department pages because if I want to get rid of SharePoint, I have to convince our department leaders that everybody can still get to their stuff and their documents and their form to request maintenance on a CT scanner or whatever. So yeah, that’s a big problem. So I’d like to know how you’re handling that kind of thing.

Speaker 4:
Sure. In Dynamic Signal, we use custom pages for that. So each department is built on a custom page and so we’re able to include their text, we can include attached documents, we can link back to documents in SharePoint. So we use the custom pages in that way. We sort of got a little bit creative with that. We needed a lot more custom pages. I don’t think they’re always intended to be used that way, but that’s the way that’s, we’ve gotten around that and it works well.

Speaker 3:
And then for us, so we’re on first steps, so we use topic pages. So our technology team for example, has their own sort of topic, I guess they’re not channels anymore, but I’m going to say topic channel. So they can put all of their content in there. But if there is something that is really important to a department or very vital to, again enterprise wide, we make sure it’s in that quick link at the top of the page. So just making sure that our associates can navigate to that. And again, because we did this migration in tandem with going Google, we also were able to build out those Google sites, which was really beneficial to us. So the technology team could have a Google site that they could also link to or the HR team. We’re actually currently still building out the HR Google site right now, but that will be within life at AEO. We also have pushed the search feature a lot. So our SharePoint had a search feature, but it was a little clunky and not great. And I think within our life at AEO app, while there are still some hiccups with how searches are queried, for the most part people can find the information that they need just by typing in what they’re looking for.

Speaker 2:
Alright, we’re going to take one more question so we can give you guys enough time for a break. So who else in the room has questions? Yep, down the back. Great.

Speaker 8:
Hello, my name is Fatima Boyer, I’m with Sentara Healthcare on the east coast. So my question is with the metrics that you shared, I know a lot of employees are going to the intranet and it has the Firstup integration as far as getting employees to download the app to their phone and to go into the app. Do you have metrics on that or are you having an issue with getting employees to want to put the actual app on their personal devices?

Speaker 4:
I can’t speak to the metrics. The majority of our employees do use it on desktop or iPad. So that is one of our goals is to get more employees to download the app. So our field-based employees, they use iPads and so they use the web version and that’s what we use in the home offices primarily.

Speaker 3:
And then for us, I don’t have the breakdown for corporate associate, but our adoption rate is 97, 90 8% for corporate, for the distribution centers, they’re completely dustless. So their metrics are only for downloading the mobile app. And so they span, and I’m going to get this wrong, but we have three dcs. I think their adoption is between 78% to that Canadian DC I was mentioning, which has a 98% adoption rate. So I think they literally have two people that haven’t downloaded the app, which is amazing. I will say though, our opportunity is really our retail associates. We have really, really struggled. Our retail associates we launched almost a year ago, so they were last in the rollout. They are primarily 18 to 30 years old. Oh, I see. Is pulling up my metrics for my Thank you for keeping me honest. So our retail associates, we hear a lot of why do you want me to download another app? I have work Jam, I have a real rewards app. And so giving them the reason to download it around finding out business and culture updates is not always super sexy. So we are still trying to find that unlock for our retail associates.

Speaker 3:
It does help for corporate and distribution center because there is something very valuable on that app that they want and the intranet, which is their associate discount. And so being able to incentivize people that there is something that they need and want on that app or within the desktop experiences is definitely helpful.

Speaker 2:
Amazing. So I want to end with three takeaways. I always like to have three takeaways. Takeaway number one, modern intranet is personalization. So if you don’t know what a modern intranet is, I want you all walk out knowing that that’s what the definition is. The second key takeaway is about partnering with it. So if you don’t have a really good relationship with your IT partner, please reach out after this and say, Hey, I found out I need to talk to you. Let’s sit down, let’s make this work for all of us. And the third one is, you can have fun strategically. So think about how you can weave those dog pitches into something more strategic for your business. So I do want to have a final round of applause for the ladies on the stage. They’ve been wonderful. Thank you very much. And just to remind us if we now have a bit of a break, we will have our closing keynote starting at 12 o’clock, which is maximize workplace success through the power of play with Gary Ware. So looking forward to seeing you all there. But enjoy your break.