Did you catch the virtual broadcast of our Attune All In event? We hope you were able to tune in to learn from speakers at Dow and U.S. Steel, hear from our co-founders and envision the future of the employee experience along with our Chief Product Officer.
If you missed the event, you can access the full video online. We’ve also put together a recap of what we learned, including the highlights and challenges shared by your fellow employee experience professionals.
U.S. Steel explores internal communications and EX: then vs. now
U.S. Steel has 23,000 employees across the country and in the EU, and the company recognized that their methods of reaching that workforce needed modernization. The top-down communications the enterprise used to engage workers a decade or two ago simply weren’t working; the company also relied heavily on surveys to gather employee data, resulting in significant “survey fatigue” and a lack of real-time insights.
Chief Communications Officer John Ambler shared how the company had modernized communications into a data-driven function and saw a dramatic turnaround in just a matter of months. Employee engagement rates have grown from 15% to 46% and counting. More importantly, the comms team is beginning to gain insights on what truly engages employees, and optimize their communications accordingly.
U.S. Steel’s employee communications department is now producing more content focused on employee recognition, volunteerism and community events—things that bring meaning to work. And, they’re increasingly putting communication directly in the hands of their employees, with their employee resource groups proving incredibly adept at producing content and growing their audiences.
“Our team of professional communicators embrace the data and support our activities through the data. They don’t think of this [modernization] as a project. They want this to become the vehicle that transforms the company. And, I think we’ve got a good chance at that.”
— John Ambler, Vice President & Chief Communications and Brand Management Officer, U.S. Steel
John also shared examples of the content U.S. Steel producing, including the types of posts that get consistently high engagement.
How Dow is achieving ROI on improving the employee experience
Fortune 500 manufacturing company Dow began modernizing their communications and employee experience in 2015. Today the company has 100% adoption of their Dow Connect communications platform across all employee groups, including the hard-to-reach frontline employees who make up the bulk of their workforce. In their session, Dow communications and engagement leaders Christine Miller and Jennifer Holzinger shared the story of how they reached this critical milestone with Firstup Strategic Advisor Rey Bouknight.
Dow used a combination of strategic content placement and integrations to fast-track adoption among its 36,000 employees and 9,000+ contractors. Critical information, such as bonus structures and performance rewards, was made available exclusively on the platform, and employees were required to register to access it, leading to a jump of 10,000 registrants in one day. The company also integrated their platform directly with their Sharepoint intranet, so employees who were used to using the intranet for updates did not need to change their workflows.
Perhaps most critically, the Dow comms team was able to facilitate two-way communication and connection between employees and the company. The company went from not even enabling comments on posts to having 99 channels of employee-created content, many of them managed directly by employees.
“We have about 375 people in the company who are managing content in Dow Connect today across 99 channels. […] And maybe the next time we talk, we’ll be at over a hundred channels, [so] we’re pretty excited about that.”
— Jennifer Holzinger ❘ Global HR & Employee Communications ❘ Dow
Find out how the Dow comms team learned to put employees in the driver’s seat of their communications. Watch Christine and Jennifer detail their training process in Dow’s Attune All In session.
Firstup CPO Jed Brown on what the future holds for the employee experience
To wrap up the broadcast, Chief Product Officer Jed Brown shared how Firstup’s newest software release will change the digital experience for employees, communicators and companies. Watch Jed’s session to learn how:
- Hyper-targeting audiences allows you to better personalize your content, so the right message reaches the right employee
- Intelligent orchestration makes sure that message arrives at the right time, on the right channel, ensuring your content cuts through noise of dozens of other messages
- Content creation is now so intuitive it’s nearly instantaneous
- Processes that used to take communicators hours have been shortened to as little as 12 minutes
Attune All In is not all over… It’s coming to you
While digital events are all well and good, after 18 months in the virtual space, we wanted to help employee experience professionals reconnect in the best way possible: in person. So we’re extending Attune All In to five free regional events in October and November. We’ll be hosting them in New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco and London, and we invite you to attend the one closest to you.
Each event will feature networking opportunities with other communicators, HR and IT professionals from leading enterprises, fireside chats or panel discussions, plus cocktails and light fare at some of the most impressive venues in the US and UK. We hope you can join us and meet your peers who are going all in on the employee experience. Of course, each venue has strict capacity limits, so we recommend registering now to access these engaging events!
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