Manufacturing Communications with American Woodmark & Oatey

Speaker 1:
Hello everybody and welcome to your favorite radio show, Attuning In. I am super excited for today’s episode, spotlight on Manufacturing. I am your host, Karen Landis. When I am not hosting this show, I am a manager on our enterprise customer success team and I’m excited to introduce you to the rest of our guests today and we will start out with American Woodmark.

Speaker 2:
Hi, good morning everyone. My name is Brandy Dove and I lead our corporate brand marketing and comms team. So a little bit about American Woodmark. We are one of the top three cabinet manufacturers in the United States. We do sell through a number of brands through the home centers, through dealer distributor and through new construction. We have about 10,000 employees and they span across, we have a corporate office and then also 18 manufacturing and distribution centers. So all across the continental United States and then also in Mexico. I’ll pass it to Katie who I have the honor of being on the team with.

Speaker 3:
Yes, good morning. Thanks so much for stopping by. I am Katie Gorham, corporate communications marketing manager at American Woodmark. And a big part of my role with that is managing our Firstup platform. We call it home site, and we spell site C I T E, an acronym for our company site principles, which are customer satisfaction, integrity, teamwork, and excellence. We launched our platform roughly three years ago, so during the height of Covid, which made it a very important tool with communicating across the entire company. Currently we have a 70% enrollment rate, breaking that down between salary and hourly employees. Our salary team members right now are at about 93% and hourly at 62%, and then we have a 25% engagement rate.

Speaker 1:
Perfect. Thank you so much and thank you for being on the show today. With that, I’m going to pass it over to our other guests from Oatey.

Speaker 4:
Awesome, thank you so much. So my name is Amanda Keiber. I’m the director of corporate communications at Oatey. Oatey is a plumbing manufacturer and we manufacture products that most of you have behind the walls in your homes, but probably don’t know it. So service plumbers and new build and remodel plumbers are using our products every day to make sure that you have water flowing through your home, behind the walls. So you can also look for our drains in different bathrooms that you might go through, et cetera. We’ve been based in Cleveland, Ohio for over a hundred years. We’re family owned private company. We’re in the mid-size range, so we have about 2000 associates, which are about 75% desk list, right. So in the manufacturing and warehouse environment, we have locations across the United States, Canada, including Quebec, China, Mexico, and most recently in the Netherlands. So we are growing global and just in general always working to balance that mix of the admin associate who is at a desk and the outwardly associate who is desk less.

Speaker 5:
Victoria. Hi everyone. I’m Victoria Manenti. I am the internal communications manager at Oatey. So I work on Amanda’s team and a huge portion of my role is managing and overseeing our first sub platform, which is Ozone. And we did a huge relaunch with Firstup in January and actually rebranded to Ozone 2.0. So really we are a hundred year old family owned company, but our internal communications function as a whole is relatively new within the last five years. So my role is very new and one of the things that we set out to do was really do a comprehensive and extensive overhaul of our overall internal communications content strategy and then just overhauling and revamping all of our channels. So we started with our intranet and it’s important to note that we use Firstup as our full intranet experience and we’ve also consolidated a lot of tools such as our Associate Weekly newsletter as well as our digital signage.

Speaker 5:
We’re going to, we’re not there yet consolidating fully with Firstup, but that’s on the roadmap as well. So really a lot of progress in the last five years. So wanted to give you a little sneak peek first. It’s important to note our original intranet was more static driven, so very traditional. We actually weren’t able to reach a huge portion of our associate population, which was our operations associates. They didn’t have email, therefore they didn’t have access to our app. It wasn’t very mobile friendly either, and we weren’t really able to have that two-way dialogue. So I’ll give you a little sneak peek of our ozone intranet and show you our hype video that we launched the platform with. So Karen,

Speaker 1:
Perfect, let’s take a look at that now.

Speaker 1:
Fantastic. Can we get a round of applause for that? That was impressive. I want to download the app. I’m sold. Alright, and that brings us to our, I know everybody’s favorite part of the show, our first round of Attuning In trivia. So can I get a volunteer from the audience? Don’t be shy. It’s lovely lady right here. All right. I’m going to ask you a few Attuning In trivia questions and I will come this way to you. Alright, you want to introduce yourself? My name is Rachel Williams, I’m vice president of client services for Emerge Con. Perfect, thank you. Alright, question number one, manufacturing labor makes up what percentage of the world’s workforce? A 8% B, 14%, C, 26%, or D 33%. What do you think guys vote a friend D. D wrong with D? Alright, let’s see what the correct answer is. It is B 14%, but you get another question coming away. Chance to redeem yourself.

Speaker 1:
Question two desk-less workers account for what percentage of the global workforce is it a 60% B, 70% C, 80%, or D 90%? Maybe don’t ask the audience this time. I’m going to go with a, alright, let’s see what we got. It is C 80%. I’m going to give you one more shot. Third time is the charm According to Gallup, what percentage of manufacturing associates feel actively engaged at work? Is it a 10% B, 15%, C, 20%, or D 25%? I’ll say B I’ll. All right, let’s check out the answer is D, 25%, but it’s okay. We at Attuning In believe in participation trophies, so feel free to grab a t-shirt over at that table. And thank you so much for being our first brave volunteer. Give it up for Rachel. Thank you. And obviously that is a number we want to raise. So we’re going to be talking today about how we are going to get our manufacturing workforce feeling more engaged with your organizations. And to kick this off, we actually have a listener question coming in.

Speaker 6:
Both of your companies are operating in a manufacturing environment. What types of associate roles does this include and how have you gained an understanding of these different audiences?

Speaker 1:
All right, great question. I am going to pass this over to Oatey to kick us off.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, so I’ll start. So as Amanda noted, we have a very diverse workforce, both operations and admin. So the tricky part is really balancing that and we needed to put our frontline operations associates first because quite frankly with our old intranet, they just weren’t getting the content at all or the content they needed that hyper-local relevant content that they really needed to do their everyday job. And we know with our operations associates across the board, turnover’s pretty high. So what we did prior to selecting Firstup was we conducted extensive focus groups with our operation site leaders as well as on the ground HR leaders there at the sites. So we really want to understand how can we best support you from an internal communications perspective, what do you need? So we took a lot of time to understand these workers every day a day in the life really what were the existing communication gaps?

Speaker 5:
What are those messages that they care most about? Any demographic considerations, translation and language barriers? We needed to understand, quite frankly, we uncovered language barriers that we didn’t even know existed at some of our sites. So it was really important for us to combat that with a really robust translation feature, which we found in Firstup. Additionally, as you know, there’s a lot of technology challenges with operation folks. A lot of them don’t have smartphones, they’re still operating with traditional flip phones. So really understanding their comfortability with that technology and what each site looked like, because every site’s different, every culture’s different. So we really dug deep to understand those individual cultures. So based on this information, we used those to build pretty robust personas. So we took those personas and as we rolled out the tool to the individual sites, we were able really to tailor our approach and have it be very hyper tailored at each site.

Speaker 5:
So I actually had the pleasure of traveling around to our different sites to roll out, starting with some of our largest sites and really took the time to meet individually with site leaders, HR leaders, train them, help them understand the app at a very deep level, and then we would meet with each shift. So first, second, third at all hours of the day and worked with them literally one-on-one, downloading and getting the app on their phone, answering questions. We had it on standby to help us solve those problems in real time, which was huge because I think a lot of the operation folks, if they didn’t get it right on their phone, we probably weren’t going to capture them in the future. They were kind of done with it and wanted to move on. So it was really important that we worked ahead and got ahead of those problems.

Speaker 4:
We challenged a lot of our own assumptions throughout the process, which I think is key. Most of us sit behind a desk, most of us are more familiar with an admin associate, so we definitely focus from an audience perspective on really asking questions, even if we thought we already knew the answer. And I would say this is ongoing. So we are about a year into our program, the learnings are continuing and as the site partners get more comfortable with us as associates start to realize that hey, they have a place when it comes to this company with communications, they are sharing more with us and we are just having that two-way conversation. So it’s been really rewarding and eyeopening throughout that process.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. That is super helpful. I’ll give American Woodmark a moment to answer. Similarly, is there anything in the technology that was really important to you as you were rolling this out that helped you reach those frontline workers?

Speaker 3:
Absolutely. First and foremost, when our team members become registered into our platform, we have it. So they are auto-enrolled into our company news and updates topic. That way they’re there, they’re seeing important information right away. Of course we have salary desk workers in addition to a remote workforce and then our frontline workers. So when we’re sharing content, we are using the email feature as well as the push notification to coincide with sending out that content. But what has been very vital for us and reaching our manufacturing workers is our digital signage. So even if we have a team member who may have a flip phone or maybe isn’t even registered in the platform with the screens that are displayed throughout our various plants, whether it’s in a lobby, a break room, or in an employee resource center right there on the plant, they’re able to see that information. So we’ll have the company news and updates, topic displaying information there, as well as their local location, whether it’s a plant or service center that is sharing content with them as well.

Speaker 1:
That’s so helpful, thank you. And I know we could talk more, but we do have another listener question coming in right now.

Speaker 7:
What communication channels have you found to be the most effective in the manufacturing environment and maybe some that haven’t in your experience?

Speaker 1:
Second part of that question, definitely interesting. I’m going to toss that over to Oatey to tell us a little bit about what they have found. Sure.

Speaker 4:
So one of the things that we found in a pretty significant way with our manufacturing associates is that their experience just day in and day out is so different. So I dunno if any of you in the audience have had this, but we really can’t have phones on the floor in the plant environment. So we get a lot of dialogue with our HR managers about that. They get concerned even if they see a photo posted maybe from a place that is a no phone zone, that kind of thing. So mobile is a channel that works really, really well for manufacturing associates, but we also have to kind of balance that and give them kind of thought starters of types of things to post that are still allowed within that environment. But I would just echo what the Woodmark team said, digital signage. It’s a really great way to drive folks to your app or your internet experiences that you have. QR codes are huge. Victoria, maybe you can talk a little bit about how, and I know I’ve heard this in some other sessions, we definitely still try to balance the digital, the physical and the in-person components so that there is kind of a good medley for desk list

Speaker 5:
Associates. So we really like to say that our in-person, so such as we have a bulletin board, we put out every week fresh content for our bulletin board and a communications briefing, which includes key talking points that site leaders and supervisors can use during their standup meetings to reference. So we compliment those with our digital signage and anything that we put on our mobile app ozone. And like Amanda said, the QR codes work really well to drive back to ozone because that’s ultimately what we want to do. But I think really understanding the relevancy and the types of messaging that needs to go on these operation folks channels, it really starts with that I think. Is there anything

Speaker 4:
I’m forgetting? Yeah, the one thing I was going to say, just hyper tactically is that every Friday we send out an email from our team to all of our site leaders with a CC line for our HR business partners at the sites. And it’s a talking points document and it takes the most relevant pieces of information from our app or internet for the week. And we kind of cut out the noise, get down to the sound bites and ask our shift leaders and site leaders then to have those to mention those topics in their shift change meetings or standup meetings. And then we also attach to it a literal P D F printout for them to print and put on their bulletin board. So we’re trying to drive consistency and again, we identify that content from exactly what went on ozone that week. It’s still really driven by that, but we’re doing a little bit of strategic handholding with our manufacturing locations. It’s

Speaker 5:
Essentially a really tailored roundup of the messaging that we want them to see. And I will say I even write that content differently. I think it’s really important at a glance. So I even changed my copy approach with that as well.

Speaker 1:
Thank you for that. American Woodmark, have you had a similar experience having to combine the modern technology with some of these traditional channels?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, as I’m assuming all of you are manufacturing, don’t underestimate the power of a good poster or table tent or roadshow. We tried to get away from them. I think Covid, at least for us, was a really good experiment for us. And the app is a great gap. I would say filler, but it’s not a replacement all the time. So we still send a ton of emails. If I’m being really honest, Woodmark loves good email. We love a good poster, so we’re still trying to give everyone what they need. But the one part of this question I did want to hit on is what wasn’t working. So why did we go to the app? So we used to do a, I’ll call it an editorial. I am not a fan, in case you all couldn’t tell. It was called the Woodmark Times and it was a quarterly newspaper for lack of a better word.

Speaker 2:
So by the time everyone put their time, effort, and energy into gathering stories and printing it and getting photos, it was completely outdated by the time we got it out to everyone. So luckily, we’ll, silver lining in Covid for a second, covid gave us the opportunity to say, okay, how can we do this differently now that some people aren’t in the office? We can’t start sending out these newspapers all across the continent. I’ll say, so what does the, I’ll use a covid is new normal look like? So we were able to get the company to buy into the app. So we’ve kept that obviously we’re three years in and now those stories, they’re still relevant. People still want to know about luncheons that are happening in TACO or what’s going on in Anaheim so they can form that connection, but it’s real time and they can talk to each other now. So that was really kind of that portion of the question that didn’t work for us and we were able to evolve it with Firstup.

Speaker 3:
Yeah, I actually wanted to add on it just a little bit, a couple of examples of how digital signage has been effective for us. So for all of you data-driven people out there, I mean that’s one thing you can’t really track metrics on. Somebody could walk by a screen, but you can’t report back to leadership who wants that type of feedback and say, well, we had this many people walk by and ingest this information, but you had mentioned QR codes. And early on in our adoption, I know that there were a variety of plant locations that had QR codes up on our digital signage, and they kind of had it as an experiment where a leader would say, Hey, we have this many people enrolled this morning, let’s check in later on this evening. It’s not like they were standing there in front of the screens trying to prompt people to register, but they were doing it organically by approaching the digital signage and checking out the information.

Speaker 3:
And then a second quick story too in regards to digital signage. We had a location that was only displaying company news and updates information, so nothing on the local level. And we had been sharing a lot of information about open enrollment and a team member saw this information and at that time, no one on a local level had discussed this with their team members. And so light bulb moment for this particular employee went to their manager and said, Hey, what’s going on here? This is kind of important. And so at that point realized maybe some things had fallen through the cracks of this particular location, but again, just an example to show that people are reading and looking at the content that’s being shared.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. And one more follow-up question, as you all were looking to employ a new technology, Firstup, was there something that was most important to you that the technology needed to have? And I’ll toss that over to Oatey.

Speaker 4:
Well, one thing I was going to mention is just in the space of channels, having the push notification component was something that I was really looking for just because we know that with our Dustless associates and in the manufacturing environment, the reality is if we can push especially important things, that’s an important part of the strategy. I mean, driving them and incentivizing them to come to more of the poll where they’re going to go out and seek it is great. But push notification really opened things up for us. And also just the little app, little Red Circle notifications assistant that you can push through. So I just think from a channel standpoint that kind of, it’s an app for us because we went fully to Firstup. We don’t have SharePoint, it’s our intranet. So it’s a lot of channels in one for us. I mean obviously we use it for email, we use it for the mobile app itself, we use it for the internet, we use it then for push. So there’s a lot of components baked into one, which I will add was also something that we were looking for and that I would encourage anybody who is on that journey or figuring out their use cases, the more you can bring your channels together under one tool, you will ultimately drive efficiencies and content efficiencies, which was something that we were also super excited about.

Speaker 5:
And I would just add, our previous intranet, like I said, was very static driven, and it also really didn’t have the ability to segment tailored messaging to specific pages. So now we have all of our different site pages, we have our life at oti, which is a catchall, all associates can see it, submit content to it. So we still have that ability to push out the corporate messaging, but also drill down and send out that really relevant content to our different sites. So I would say that was one of the most important things we were looking forward to.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. Well, I feel smarter for knowing all that, and I hope you all do too. It is time for a round two of Attuning In trivia. Now that you know that there is a t-shirt at stake, I hope I can get a second volunteer. All right. You come on up. Yeah. And can you tell us who you are and where you’re from?

Speaker 8:
Yes. Hi, I’m Megan Hartman. I am from Lake Charles, Louisiana with Phillips 66.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. We love Phillips 66. All right. You ready for round two? Yes. Okay. Question one. According to Salesforce, employees who feel their voice is heard are how many more times likely to feel empowered to do their best work? Is it a 3.2 times B, 4.1 time, or C 4.6 times? What do you think?

Speaker 8:
C?

Speaker 1:
And you are right, 4.6, and I have one more question for you. According to Deloitte, 49% of production workers waste an average of how many minutes per hour due to issues with technology such as a lack of devices. Is it A eight, B 10, or C 12

Speaker 8:
B?

Speaker 1:
And the answer is B. Alright, big winner, you get the same T-shirt, feel free to grab your size over there. And that will bring us to our next listener question.

Speaker 9:
What kind of content are you seeing resonate with manufacturing associates?

Speaker 1:
Alright, I’m going to toss this one over to American.

Speaker 3:
I think one common theme that we have heard over these last couple of days is how important it is to share content That’s just showing our team members in their regular day-to-day life, right? The dogs, the cats, I mean they love it. It goes over so well. But content really that just shows them outside of work. Also, I know we have a location where a team member will do an employee of the day, if you will, and so they’ve got pictures of themselves on the floor, smiling, happy, and a little bit goes a long way. We also have locations that do really well sharing photos of new hires when they’re first getting started. Also service anniversaries, birthday posts. I mean, again, it might seem simple, but it really just allows team members to feel that value and in that connection.

Speaker 1:
Yes, I agree. I think that is so important for our manufacturing folks. And I would love to hear a little bit about your process for content creation. Do you drive at all or what partnerships do you have at the facilities? And we’ll give that one to Oatey.

Speaker 5:
So I work very, very closely both with our site leaders and HR at our sites. In fact, I meet with them on a monthly basis. Sometimes every day someone will give me a call. So have really built great relationships with them and let them know, you can rely on me, you can call me when you have questions. You don’t know how to post something, you can’t find something. So just building that rapport is very important. One thing that we found out very quickly is that our associates, some of them catch on very quickly to studio and then others have a little bit more trouble with it. So we said we’re going to take the reins a little bit more. We’re still going to empower you to use studio when you want to, when you can, but don’t fix what’s not broke. If you like using and submitting content through the user experience, go ahead and do that.

Speaker 5:
And it’s been working great. I mean, every organization has to figure out what works best for them, but for us, that’s been a great way to empower them to post their own content. Otherwise we kind of divide and conquer. So at these monthly meetings, I kind of figure out what’s going on at a local level at their site, whether or not they feel comfortable posting that or they want me to take the reins. And then we kind of create a little calendar and plan. Sometimes we look one to two months ahead. It just kind of depends. And then I will help support graphics copy creating that content. A couple of our site leaders have expressed wanting to do a monthly video update. We found really great success in terms of engagement from those one to two minute videos just shot on our iPhone, very authentic. So that’s something that we’re pushing more executives to do and site leaders to film those monthly videos.

Speaker 1:
Fantastic. And as you all know, in addition to those what we call small C communicators who help power the platform, we also love to have all of our employees participating in that two-way conversation. So American Woodmark, how do you empower the rest of those associates who aren’t publishers to participate in the conversation on the platform?

Speaker 3:
I think incentives go a long way. I mean, maybe not everyone has the budget to do that, right from even for us from a corporate level down to a manufacturing plant level. But one thing that we actually have going on next week, we have an annual employee appreciation week and we drive all the content through our platform home site. And every day there’s a different prompt, if you will, to get them to maybe share a photo of them in their new company. And there’s also a prompt just for being enrolled into our platform. There might be a day where a hundred people, company-wide get something just merely for being enrolled. So that might drive them to register if they haven’t done so already. Now we understand that can’t always be the case, right? Do

Speaker 2:
You more to add to that Brandy? Of course I do. So I think what we’ve seen is really just making sure that the content’s relevant, but we give them a space to do it as well. So we I’m sure, just like you all had a lot of pushback at first around, oh, we need to lock down comments. People are going to say things they shouldn’t say, we need to monitor it. So we were really, really insistent with our business partners. Hey, we’ve got this. We will look after it. If there’s any issues, we’ll connect with the right people. And I’m sure we’ve heard multiple times in this conference, you all, we’ve had no issues, their names associated with it. It’s a business platform. So we’ve really not come across any issues. So just having comments open has been a huge kind of, I would say, opportunity for people to talk to people.

Speaker 2:
So not just from a manufacturing associate to manufacturing associate in different areas, but we’ve had people on the plant floor talk to the C E O and the C E O responds to ’em. So it just opened this dialogue that was just never possible when we had, whether it be our newspaper that you all know I love so much, or even roadshows because there were hundreds of people in a room listening to the c e O for an hour. They don’t have that time to really connect with them. So really just having those comments open, having a platform for everyone to share similar content and see everyone’s going through the same things and have those conversations has been a game changer for us.

Speaker 4:
One of the things that I think Victoria in particular has really seen come through in her close working with our manufacturing sites is we’re small enough to where we have I think more visibility to each of our sites. That might be possible for every company, but that doesn’t mean that this same concept wouldn’t work, which is there really are kind of influencers at every site. People who are just engaged, they’re a joiner, they’re probably on your associate engagement committee or they’re leading up a volunteerism effort and sometimes leaning into the people that are there for it can go a long way to setting the tone for people to submit content. We’ve even been advising our site leaders to lean in to those influencers for content ideas. The ones who are out on the floor every day, they’re supervisors, their rockstar shift leaders, things like that.

Speaker 4:
Because first of all, there’s always paralysis, I think from site leaders around what am I supposed to post about pushing local content, make it hyper-relevant and we aren’t there. What’s the scuttlebutt? And that’s where they get nervous and we have to try to kind of illustrate for them what might work. But we’ve genuinely said, go talk to John. He’s out there and he’s posting all this great U G C. He could help you get inspired for a weekly spotlight series or for a weekly associate thank you post. So just giving them creative ways to be hyper-local because we’re not local, right? We’re not there. So kind of that influencer strategy, whether formal or informal, right? We’ve heard about all kinds of organizations here that have used ambassadorship programs for internal or external advocacy. And I think some thinking along those lines is relevant here too.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. I have found in getting people to post content, a great motivator is a t-shirt. I have one more to give away. Brings us to round three of Attuning In trivia. Who can I get from the audience right there? Come on. Thank you. Can you introduce yourself to our studio audience?

Speaker 10:
My name is Shelly Tyler. I’m from Richmond, Virginia and I’m with Altria.

Speaker 1:
Excellent, Altria. Love it. All right. Let’s get into the questions. Question one, what percentage of employees use intranet’s daily? Is it a 13%, B, 25%, C 34%, or D 47%? What do you think?

Speaker 10:
C,

Speaker 1:
You go C. The answer is a only 13% of employees use intranets daily because most are obsolete or difficult to use. I think everyone in here knows is familiar with that situation. But I got one more question for you. What is the least engaged occupation in the us? Is it A dentists B manufacturing worker, C, tax accountant, or D farmer

Speaker 10:
B?

Speaker 1:
I think that’s a very good guess and it is correct, it’s manufacturing workers and I’m so glad it’s not dentists. That would freak me out a little bit. Thank you. And you can grab a T-shirt right over there. Feel free to grab whichever one works for you. Thank you all. And that closes out our trivia rounds and our listener questions, but I have one final question that I’ve been wondering for all of you. So I’d love to get answers from both teams on this. What is the one thing that you wish you had known all along before starting this journey about internal communications in the manufacturing industry? So I will start with American,

Speaker 2:
So I’m going to start it off with doing two instead of one. So the two things, and I’ve heard it throughout this conference, which I love that everyone’s catching onto it. So first one, don’t make your content too serious. We went into this thinking like, oh, it’s going to be CEO updates and NASDAQ updates and finance and blah, blah, blah. Nobody wanted that and we quickly got that feedback from everyone, which was great. So just having fun with it. So I know Katie mentioned dogs and cats, we’ve heard that a lot or posting pictures of everyone in their t-shirt. So not taking content too seriously. And then a lesson hardly learned on the woodmark side is to balance enrollment and engagement. So we were really, really pushing for enrollment. We had metrics on the scorecard. It was going up to the C E O, that was great. We had people in the platform and they were like, why am I here? There’s nothing here for me. So we started adding engagement into our metrics as well, and that’s really made it. So, okay, great. Now they’re here and they want to be here. There’s something there for them. So those are probably my two takeaways.

Speaker 3:
And I was going to say for me is the importance of fostering relationships with your location champions. We call those our home site champions. A lot of times it does fall on HR leadership. We have various culture subcommittees and a lot of those folks volunteer their time to get involved, to be content publishers, passionate about the platform, but not forgetting about those people because if it wasn’t for those connections and continuing to foster those relationships on a regular basis, we wouldn’t be successful without them, at least from a plant level.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. Team Oatey, what do you guys think?

Speaker 5:
Those were really great points and I think Amanda and I would echo those as well, but I would say really getting it right the first time. You have to have the right message at the right time, making sure technology is as seamless as possible because in my experience, you really do get one shot with operations associates. Some are already a little bit weary, unfamiliar with the technology. So going in and being able to kind of combat some of those issues and think through those technological issues you might have ahead of the game, you’re going to capture their trust right away and just being as authentic as possible with your content. Like you guys said, making it fun, real, it doesn’t have to be perfect. We always tell our site leaders just start somewhere. We don’t want perfection. We don’t want something that’s rehearsed or super orchestrated. So yeah, that’s what I would say.

Speaker 4:
Yeah, agreed. So one of the things that we really faced was we had a static content driven intranet before we switched to Firstup. We didn’t really have a feed and it served a lot of needs for corporate associates and desk-based associates. And what I think we really learned and maybe didn’t fully anticipate was how much it was going to be uncomfortable and unusual for our admin associates to realize that we were changing something to prioritize the desk associate. So there was a lot of educating about, wait, why are we doing this? I had all of my handy bookmarks exactly where I liked them. And it’s not that that’s not important, and we’ve continued to be on a journey of making sure that everyone has what they need, we have to provide that, but I think it was an aha moment of people we’re not ready to listen to us when we said, listen, this is going to become something that really connects the rest, the other 75% of our associates globally with things that are relevant to them.

Speaker 4:
All this functionality, trying to explain that to the legal department who just wanted to know why they didn’t have all their links exactly where they used to be was challenging. So number one, I think we really did a good job of coming in with our elevator speech on that and I’m glad that we did. And additionally, there was a large amount of change management that kind of went with it, and some of it we learned on our feet. We had squeaky wheels, we had people who are just going to be naysayers. We did have, as part of our launch, we had ozone champions that we identified asking them to help spread the message and explain. We’ve done a lot of pulse polls and surveys, both of our site and operations leadership as to how successful are we being at the site and then how successful from a broader population. We did pulse polls, so got a lot of data as part of that change management process and it’s not a process that’s done. We’re continuing to balance the functionality. I think we’re probably one of only a few Firstup customers who probably uses the tool as our full intranet and I think there’s a ton of benefits to that, but it definitely was a change management journey and desk-based associates are used to being kind of frankly, I think catered to more than the operations associates. So that process was

Speaker 5:
One thing I would add that we baked into our launch strategy really well, I think was really giving a lot of white glove service to our internal partners such as hr, legal it, and really gaining their buy-in very early on because we identified that these were some of our largest nay CERs. And then also executive buy-in was huge. That was something we focused on early on as well and it really paid off for us and kind of having that internal campaign to grab their buy-in.

Speaker 4:
Yeah.

Speaker 1:
Thank you so much to both teams. I appreciate you answering all of our listener questions and my questions. And now I’m excited to give our studio audience a turn to ask some of their questions. So we will move on to q and a. Do I have a question? I see some over here. Let us know who you are and where you’re from.

Speaker 11:
Hi, I am Jennifer Taylor from World’s Finest Chocolate. We’re a small manufacturer, so I’ve got less than 500 employees right now. The question is for Oatey, you mentioned that you no longer have a traditional intranet. Everything is now on the Firstup platform. Does that include marketing files, everything, so you’re hosting or archiving everything on the platform, and is that a separate topic then or channel or subset of files that they only have access to?

Speaker 5:
Yeah, so we did a comprehensive audit as we were transferring over our content from our old intranet. So we took a look, looked at everything that was outdated, worked with individual departments, built out specific topics, this is going to be moved over this and then whatever was transferred over, we input that and launched with a lot of robust content. So yes, you’re correct. All of our resources live there. We utilize our shortcut section kind of as our old intranet had a launchpad section, so that was kind of a seamless transition. We have our Workday apps up there, outlook, and they’re actually all targeted. So some of them are open to all associates, others are open to only the associates that need them or it’s relevant. So we were able to declutter a lot of our resources, request forms, brand templates. So yes, we utilize that shortcut section and then we do, if you want to speak to the topics,

Speaker 4:
So I mean we use Box as our file storage system, so that’s where the actual Word doc is saved. And what we’ve been trying to coach our partners through is that’s really your file management. So if you have a document that you want to always make available to associates, you need to put that link on a page that you publish within Firstup. And so yes, to Victoria’s Point, the shortcut section kind of becomes, it has most of our single sign-on links as well as other quick links. So it’s kind of that jumping off point for your transactional, whether it be request forms, again, SS, s o, quick reference links. But then within the structure of ozone, we have our HR topic and we have a page there that’s like the benefits hub and there’s just all these organized sections of links. They all drive out to content on either on box or to a link to another page within the internet, if that makes sense.

Speaker 4:
So it is not so different. The challenge has been because Firstup in its current state is not as static content first and they’ve recently updated some functionality, so we have more flexibility with that, but that’s kind of a roadmap thing. But their functionality is there when you can publish a page that’s like, Hey, here’s the open enrollment links and also then six months later if you need to refer back, here’s all your documents, it’s all on there, it’s box links. We don’t want people uploading and attaching files to posts because they become outdated very quickly and that can still happen with Box, but it’s much more on the business owner then to manage that file.

Speaker 5:
One thing I wanted to note too, we got a lot of feedback about, oh, I searched this and I couldn’t find it. So we’ve also made sure to add keywords. So for example, we have a page that lists all of our site locations. Well people were searching site addresses. So that’s an example of we needed to add that keyword. So as we get that feedback, we do our best to do it on our own and think through that, but then we incorporate that feedback as well, which has been huge in terms of how we’ve organized things and the ability for people to make it easier for them to find too.

Speaker 1:
Great question and great answers. Thank you. I see some more over here. I will come to you and I’ll come to you next.

Speaker 12:
Hi Kim from Boeing. Any of you unionized? And if so, how did you work with the unions or what challenges or what worked when you were implementing the app in your factory environments?

Speaker 2:
I can start. So we are not a union and I think my lucky stars every day we’re not. So I don’t have any good examples and I don’t think you all are unionized,

Speaker 4:
Not union either. I know it’s really tricky. I mean there are some considerations just in general. One thing I’ll tell you is HR, when we launched this was actually one of the first things they said was like, well, we have to be very careful, we can’t have any, are they going to get on here and chatter about unionizing? Is this going to become a place where they’re going to talk about unionizing? Which is really kind of funny to me because they could talk right outside in the parking lot every day, which feels a lot more likely.

Speaker 4:
And I mean we kind of just said, we don’t really think that’s going to happen and just move forward frankly. So I know that doesn’t address your situation, but we did have conversations even still with we need to make sure that we can’t make it mandatory that they have the app on their phone and we do make it seem like what everyone’s doing, and we don’t necessarily say this super optional only if you want, it’s like an onboarding. We just say, okay, yeah, so here’s our associate app, so you’re just going to want to download it. And that’s been successful. Again, I’m not a union expert, so there’s going to be guardrails, but we also know that we can’t post any information that is that they need to do their job. Maybe like an S O P procedure document, the only place that lives cannot be in the app that’s not allowed.

Speaker 4:
So there’s things like that that HR has helped coach us through that I think probably are consistent with the kinds of standards that unions are going to require in some cases too. Again, I really am not an expert, but we have found that a lot of those things have come naturally because we’re even not being a union shop, we’re not going to require it. And we recognize we can’t post procedures and work things only there and we are continuing to be multi-channel in our strategy and people are probably going to end up loving the app because of the connection that they feel to being a part of the team. But a lot of getting there is putting some need to know things in there if you can or a great convenient place to access information that yes, you could get in a hard copy in the HR office tomorrow, but you want to look at it tonight.

Speaker 4:
Oh, the other thing we got pushed back on was, well, what if associates are using this app after hours and are they going to try to ask for overtime pay because they got on the app, talked to legal about the policies that we sort of already had around what it looks like to get approved over time. And we have a policy speaking broadly that’s like, you have to go through this request and you have to get it approved by your manager or there’s a certain way that it becomes valid. And so legal ended up saying that they felt like really someone just saying, I did some work last night, now you owe me overtime wouldn’t really fly. So we were okay with it, but we talked through a lot of those things. So I feel like on the whole for us it was a lot of, we think we have the right policies in place.

Speaker 4:
Even I know what it was, the policy that we had for it was like our telecommunications policy that legal felt like encompassed it. Every company is going to have a different risk tolerance and that kind of thing from a legal and procedure perspective. But we found that overall there was a lot that we could still do. And I believe that would be true for most companies if you are willing to just sort of take the LS if you get ’em. But we found that folks are not really diving into those issues as much as we thought. Again, union, I know there might be some more serious challenges, but those are just a couple of maybe related notes. Thank you. A question over

Speaker 13:
Here. Hi, I am Sarah. I’m with Xeno Group, but in this session here on behalf of Kraft Hein, so huge manufacturing, lots of plants, but question to the Oatey team about digital signage. You had mentioned metrics around digital signage and being able to track that. So just a clarifying question, are you saying that you use QR codes to then capture the data of who was walking past digital?

Speaker 3:
I think I touched that on a little bit. So we can’t track metrics, right with digital signage, but we had a plant location when we were first adopting it to get team members registered that yes, the QR code brought them into the registration piece. So then they would go back on the insights and see, okay, we have this many new registrations today, so this number of team members were there absorbing the information on the digital signage screens.

Speaker 2:
Helpful note on that one, that lesson well learned have a different QR code for different locations. Just a helpful point before you started that journey, we would get one plant was doing it really well and then one plant wasn’t and we just had it filtered through on our digital signage that we run through home site. So it was a localized QR code that we could pull metrics for that location.

Speaker 1:
That is a great tip. Alright, questions over here? Yes.

Speaker 14:
Hi, I am Krista from Intel. One of the things that I’ve heard repeatedly throughout this conference is the importance of local and hyper-relevant content, as you noted for this audience. So in thinking about our content strategy in the platform, we really prioritize corporate content, which seems at odds with that. I’m curious, how do you create visibility to that localized content and then how do you balance it with the corporate content?

Speaker 4:
We could probably take it, there’s a lot of components to that. I think we are thoughtful about which pieces of local content we keep really local and which we don’t. So I mean take something that’s easy, an event that is just happening at a site. We have a topic that’s just for that site and only basically the site members can see it. And then we might do a recap of that event that everyone can see after the fact to just show some of the culture across locations and that kind of thing. Corporate content, we do always strive to have this sense of the information from the businesses should still be first despite our comments of keep it light. So we have a featured section inventory can speak to this, but we have the featured section turned on at the top of it’s especially primarily at top of desktop experience.

Speaker 4:
And then you can toggle to it in the app and that is almost always more of the global company stuff. Occasionally there’ll be something that’s maybe regional, but for the most part that’s going to be like we’re going, we have major business initiative going on. Here’s your weekly update, here’s your C e O blog, here’s a company-wide award that we won. And part of the reason we do that is because when you scroll through the latest information on ozone, it’s a lot of user and associate submitted content. So we’re trying to create that balance of, and this is what some people frankly admin associates have two squeaky wheels have complained about is they’re like, well, I used to have a little widget to my legal page right there on the homepage and now it’s not, it’s a picture of the party last week, but we just believe that that’s the right way to do it. So we really do have both. We leverage featured and then we let the feed kind of live and breathe. And certainly the topic permissions in audiences are critical, as I’m sure. The other thing that maybe Victoria you could speak to is then how we do Oatey Insider too to help.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, I was just about to say, we parse out a lot of different versioning with our associate newsletter Oatey Insider that goes email newsletter, email newsletter. It goes out every Thursday. So we really make sure to make that relevant per site as well as syncing through admin and ops associates. I think it’s important to note they’re not opening. So one thing that we found too was we had to, let me start by saying too, making sure your Workday feedback is coming in accurately and understanding

Speaker 4:
Your Workday data data. H r i s data, H R I

Speaker 5:
S. Yes. It’s just huge. It’s huge. That was something that we struggled with a lot. So starting there, understanding the fields that are being brought in and what they really mean. One thing that we needed to do too was break up our audiences. So for each of our locations we have the site location and then verified and non verified for our email. So we had to make sure that when we were sending emails we were overriding it and those emails were actually being delivered. So that’s a little bit of nitty gritty, but really understanding how your content’s being delivered by the use of not only the Workday data, but how then you segment that out into building your audiences. So that’s super important. But yes, we parse out a lot of the content and Oatey Insider also the for you section. So I really make sure to go in and optimize orchestration every time, even if another topic manager or somebody has posted, if I get feedback, oh, we don’t have a lot of signups or this has low engagement, I’ll, sure enough it’s probably not optimized correctly in terms of orchestration. So really using those audiences that you’ve created and drilling down and making sure it’s going into the right people, I think is super important.

Speaker 1:
Thank you. Do we have another question? Alright,

Speaker 15:
I, hi. I saw, I think it might’ve been Oatey, but Workday or you discussed it and I just wanted talk about any integration there or if it’s just a matter of you have the app or are you pulling the data in from Workday or integrating in any other ways there?

Speaker 4:
Yeah, so do you all use Workday

Speaker 5:
As well? We have a D p probably similar but different.

Speaker 4:
Yeah, probably similar. So I mean just when we launched, we worked closely with the gentleman on our HR team who manages the Workday world. And just to be really specific, we went through all the available fields essentially in Workday, and we went through and we spoke to him about what they mean. So any H R I S, you would probably go through this, you’re going to need to understand what each of them means. And we were able to hand select which fields we brought over. So we didn’t bring over hyper irrelevant fields, just muddy our waters. We only brought over the really relevant fields and in some cases we had to work closely with our implementation manager to understand how it was going to be labeled in Firstup, right? Correct. Yes. And so that’s been really helpful because as we were just discussing, it’s a matter of understanding, some of the fields are really similar, like employee category, employee type, job type, pay type.

Speaker 4:
Those are four different categories. So you end up knowing a lot more about that than you ever thought. But it really is a game changer. And the other thing that I can’t believe we haven’t talked about is we are out of distribution list Hell now because we don’t use distribution lists anymore because Yes, thank you. Thank you. No more it telling me, well, I’m like, who is in this group? I wouldn’t send this email. Who’s in it? And they don’t really know. I am pulling in by the most granular data that we have available as an organization straight from the H R I S and I’m saying I want hourly associates in the US who have a verified email address who started in the last 90 days. And I, that’s how we pull it. So it’s actually just a great question and a good emphasis of, it’s so important to set it up, which Victoria did. So I dunno why I’m talking.

Speaker 5:
Yeah, I would say, and it syncs every day. So that is a huge lift. I mean all the data in there, it’ll actually give you a report at the end of the day if there’s any users with errors or anything that you need to flag and go back to your H r s director and say, Hey, why was this person flagged? Why is there an error? You can work with Firstup to understand that too. So it’s just a really great way to be very drilled down in the data and then have that confidence that it, it’s accurate and real time and updated. So yeah.

Speaker 1:
Perfect. Thank you. I think we have time for one last question. I saw, was there one question over here? One last question over there. Thank you.

Speaker 16:
I’ll ask one. I’m actually from Firstup, but I caught something that Oatey said and this could apply as well. I was curious when you mentioned that the desk employees were used to being more catered to, but you are now prioritizing the operations, the frontline, the manufacturing, what benefits did the desk-based workers come around to see by prioritizing the frontline, the manufacturing? So this could be a question open to all, but it was something that Oatey mentioned that I was really, really curious on how the desk desk based workers came around to understand those benefits of prioritizing frontline.

Speaker 2:
We had an interesting situation where we didn’t have any pushback. So our company has always celebrated our manufacturing facilities and quite candidly they wanted to know more about what they were doing. We didn’t really have that, I would say tension, but we also still have a separate intranet and I think I mentioned before, we still send tons of emails, the manufacturing associates totally on board with the app and getting their updates that way. Everyone in the corporate office still wants an email about it as well. They’ll get back in the platform then, but their kind of day-to-day, at least on the Woodmark side, didn’t change much.

Speaker 4:
Which is interesting. I mean, it’s a good example that you can serve both audiences and really Firstup allows you to do that too. Trying to, I mean we were reducing email and all that. I mean far and away it’s been the fact that we have culture, this visibility of our culture and our associates and our team members around the world day in and day out. The connectivity that we feel and associates are feeling and also just the voice that they’ve been given. It’s light and day, it’s night and day. That’s why it’s sort of funny to me. It’s like, okay, so you are annoyed that you have to go somewhere else to find your quick links. And I get it, but not really because there’s so many better things that are going on now with the home feed and the ability to submit and the ability to comment and the ability to, if there’s a post that says someone has joined the company, just to comment and say welcome.

Speaker 4:
So I think the feedback that we’ve received far and away has been that is night and day. It is connecting us and it’s serving a whole new purpose. And so yes, we’re trying to do something a little challenging, which is serve a couple big purposes in one platform. But I will say that I kind of recommend it because it really has made our lives easier. It’s enough trouble to drive somebody to your app or to your SharePoint or to your Yammer. These are all challenges. And so the more centralized we’ve been able to make it, it’s a clean story. It is their hub, like we said in our video, and so we are not looking back again. There’s a lot more to come and to continue to optimize it, but the benefits have been so clear, which is why we don’t let the squeaky wheels bother us.

Speaker 5:
One thing I would add, we just recently put together a really robust impact report. So telling that story and really being transparent with the data in comparison, okay, here’s how each of our audiences, admin and ops, here’s what the engagement was before, here’s the viewership. I mean, a lot of times it was zero. So that was a super powerful story. We sent out surveys to our site and HR leaders and pulled direct quotes from things that they heard from associates on the floor, how they felt themselves, and that really just told such a powerful story for us. So don’t be afraid to kind of tell the story and toot the horn of what it

Speaker 1:
Won’t be afraid to tell a story. I think that’s a great note to end on because we are out of time for today’s episode of Attuning In. Let’s get a big round of applause for our guests and thank you all for being such a great and engaged studio audience. And with that, we are off the air.