Fireside Chat: Why Businesses Fail Communicating with Hard-to-Reach Workers

And I am gonna welcome my partner in crime here, an expert for today's session, uh, longtime friend as well, mark ue, um, someone who's been a seasoned kind of, uh, uh, expert in this world of tech as well in communications and HR technology, and a number of different ways from compliance to risk management. And really, how do HR leaders and HR departments really leverage these elements within their, within their kind of tech stack. Uh, and he is been really leading the way in terms of reshaping some of the communication norms that are out there. How do we optimize some of these workflows? How do we foster engagement in the modern workforce? And, uh, here with us at Tru, who as well, really leading the organization as president and COO. So, mark, welcome. Appreciate you coming here, man. Uh, it's good to see you and really excited for this discussion. And would love for you to kind of quickly introduce yourself, share a little bit of what you're doing, and we can jump right into this discussion. Yeah, no, thank you. I'm pumped to be here. I think this, uh, this conversation started with you and I just talking about just the space in general and workforce dynamics, and then I just kind of nerded out and then af before, before, uh, you knew it blinked once. And then I'm, I'm here doing a little bit of a presentation. So, uh, I'll just tell you a little bit about myself, my company. I work for a tech company, but what makes us unique and kind of what prompted this session and deep dive was that we pretty much work in the blue and gray collar space, the desk list space. And, um, I don't think our company really intended to get there, but we just ended up in that space, uh, just trying to solve the modern workforce problems of today. So, um, what's unique about a tech company is we just get tons of insights on stuff, and, um, I'm able to take those insights and, and share those out with you. And that's kinda what I'm hoping to do today. And we probably, we don't work directly with businesses. We work through like, uh, uh, brokers, insurance entities, you know, human capital management companies, and then they kind of take our platform and offer it to their clients. So we don't work direct, but we do play a really big role in these insights and working direct with the businesses to kind of solve some of these challenges. So, um, you know, I, I hope to share any information that I have that can help anyone on the call, um, navigate the complexities of this sort of stuff. And there's some things that, um, that we're, we've been able to uncover that, uh, hopefully sharing today will help you. Yeah, yeah. I think, uh, one thing I'd love to like set the stage with is some of those insights on the data. And for everyone listening, like, we're gonna unpack a lot of different things in terms of data technologies, even including ai, and how is this playing a role in, in terms of leaders and managers involvement and things like that. But I think it'd be really exciting. Mark, you know, you and I were talking about some of the insights you're uncovering, right? Like you're a technology company that's gathering tons. I mean, you'll, you'll share more about the amount of, you know, data inputs you're receiving on this. But I would love to unpack that a little bit with you and kind of understand like, what are some of the little things that maybe as an HR leader we're, we're not really fully aware of, but can make a huge difference in terms of the modes of communication. What are people actually clicking on and opening? What are some of the, like the terminology and language we can use and the channels and things like that. So, um, I'd love to start there with you. Um, so what were some of the key things you initially saw with the data? And I can pull up the slides too right away if, if you'd like, and some of the images, but in terms of even like communication categories and things that people are engaging with. Yeah, no, this, this is the right time to do it. Absolutely. If you wanna pop it up, I'll just kind of explain the data. So we, we have millions of messages and communications that go out out of our platform a year. And, um, we are kind of doing our, uh, recap of communications last year. Now, I mentioned that we work with insurance entities, right? So we're trying to identify what the employees are actually engaging with. And they don't just use our platform for, for one specific thing. They use it for all comps. So like the HR people that we work with and ops people that we work with, um, like they're running their day-to-day business, using our platform to better communicate. We have a feature that has text messaging, which is really appealing. So, um, they like to use us for that, those specific communications. So we were analyzing the data and we work with, uh, brokers, for example. And the one thing that I thought was really interesting is we're, we're breaking down the types and categories of these communications and the people that buy us to kind of drive benefits. It's, it ends up being one of the lower things that employees engage with, and there's lots of reasons for that. But, um, you know, it really gets you thinking on the dichotomy between what one party thinks is valuable and another party thinks is valuable. So it's not that necessarily that it's bad. I think one of the other big insights that came out of this was like, uh, wellness and wellness kind of falls into the benefits category, and it was really low from my perspective. 'cause I'm not looking at this from how, how do other people, uh, get results from wellness? And they're like, it's really low. Um, for me, it might look low, but then we look at the data, it's like 58% click rate on wellness topics and our platform, we're like, oh, okay, everyone else thinks that's great. I, I'm looking at it like, oh, it's not as performing as well. We have like 95, a hundred percent click rate. And it really gets you to kind of understand in this data that, you know, first off these categories, it's of perspective. Um, so I'll just kind of explain this and kind of how I read this, this thing on here. So we break apart all of the subjects and topics and we just look at the top and bottom. It kind of just tells us a little bit like, hey, what to avoid or, um, what to lean into, so on and so forth. So the topic and category's one thing that plays a really big role. There's several others. We can kind of explore some of those, um, uh, in an, in another slide. But if you look at the top, one thing that we found that I think is fascinating that everyone can think of, think of is, uh, the type in leaning to operations. So operations are things like there around new hires and communications around that. There are things on day-to-day communications. It could be weather, it could be send job site info, it doesn't really matter, but the things that people essentially need to do to do their job. What we found that, um, in the top is that employees generally will engage if you're trying to do like a culture of communication with things that help facilitate their job. Um, now when I get in the bottom, this starts to be fascinating. So then we look at the bottom and you go, okay, benefits, right? And that's not necessarily the case. Um, these might be the categories at face value, but when people in the bottom category benefits, when they start to dovetail their benefits, communications, if they are communicating, uh, operation operationally and helping employees, the benefits engagement actually comes up pretty significantly. So how I would read this, if you're looking at this today, is think about what your employees engage with or how you can facilitate operations. So if you're trying to drive culture, if you're trying to drive benefits or other initiatives at your company, um, try to lean into your, uh, cadence and, and do that in a way that almost pulls it through the fold so they get used to something that they need to do every day. And then you're dovetailing, you're bringing through the things that you want to drive. So that's kind of how I would, um, look at this and try to interpret and understand this particular graph. Yeah, I think one thing that kind of came outta that for me as well is thinking about, okay, if you're having really good engagement with certain types of communications or categories as you see on this stage, is like, how do you leverage that to improve the engagement on the other elements that you need to get through and connect with your people? So in a way, it's like try to take more of an integrated approach with what's working so that it can bring up maybe some of the things that you need to get across. People need to understand their benefits and they need to engage with these different things, but, uh, how do you leverage some of your strengths and things that people are already engaging with to kind of like wedge it in there and position it in there. Um, so I think that's like one useful strategy just right off the bat of like, from an engagement standpoint, you can connect those two worlds. I'd be curious on. Absolutely. Yeah. Um, to this next kind of data point that we're gonna dig into a little bit, I think sometimes people could feel like you can over communicate or under communicate on certain things, um, especially if we are kind of connecting things here is in certain ways. Can you tell us a little bit about like, communication patterns? And I think that's maybe like the next data point we can uncover a little bit? Yeah, so remember, we're primarily blue and gray here, and this is about blue and gray. So as you look at this particular data set, I'll tell you kind of the insights and how to read this. So the first thing is I would say, um, this actually follows a lot of marketing data. And, um, that's something to pay close attention to attention to. So whether your, your marketers are talking about when is the best time to do like a LinkedIn post, here's a great example. Like, they'll say, do it on Sunday, okay? And essentially, like right around noon and LinkedIn talks about this sort of thing. So when we look at this data, it's, it's very, very similar. And then you look at your internal comms and you go like, wait, that doesn't make any sense. Who's, who's sending out messages on the weekend? Right? But believe it or not, um, when you look at it, the two best performing days that we have, number one is gonna be Sunday, and number two is Saturday. And, um, and people are communicating that way and they are sending out communications that way. Now, there's probably people in here that are like, what's the, what, what are my rights as an employer? What can I do? Generally speaking, this area is super unregulated. Um, you definitely can communicate if you're not asking them to do work. Um, you have to, you definitely have to talk to your employees. But, um, the weekend performs the best. And then another thing that was really alarming, if you look at the, um, time people send, so if you look at the top graph, so they're sending, people are sending things out like in the middle of the day, right? Um, well, here's the thing. The, the sends that happen, uh, not in the middle of the day. And when people are opening 'em, um, and they're sending 'em later in the evening and they're sending them later in the shift, and you can look at the peaks below, those are actually getting the most attention. So what we've really found out about blue and gray collar, the time that they engage the most, and they have really peak times, it's right before it's late at night or right before they start, um, their day for work. So generally speaking, if you're trying to drive a culture of safety, if you're trying to drive, um, you know, better effectiveness on the job side or collaboration, that is the best time to do it is like right before their shift starts. You can do it late at night. Some, a lot of people schedule, so like that's the next thing, just schedule 'em in advance. So get used to scheduling comms and getting them prepped to go out, but that's when they do it late in the day, early in the morning. So, you know, I would recommend mapping your time to that and, and guilty admission here. If you look at the top, our own users in the platform, they're not really mapping to that, but they should, right? So we've got some coaching to do and some advising to do, but, um, those are some of the patterns. Other things, our frequency, I didn't prepare a slide for this, but, uh, here's a fascinating stat. We actually see a dip when people communicate when they go from annual and then they go to semi-annual to quarterly and monthly. There's actually a dip that occurs until you get down to weekly and daily. So the best, um, engagement that you're going to get is if you're on a, a daily communication cadence. And there's, when you start to think ops, that stuff starts to make sense. Um, um, and bringing other departments into the fold into this, uh, uh, under a singular communication channel, um, daily is the highest. It's, uh, weekly is the second highest, and then it's annually. So there is definitely a little bit of, you don't have a cadence, you're not communicating enough. Um, um, what we haven't found is communicating too often, believe it or not. Um, I, I think, uh, you can, if you're communicating too often to people that already read your message, and we do have some data on that, but if they haven't read your message and they're not engaging, you actually cannot. Uh, there is no limit. It just gets better over time, which I, I think is really interesting. So those are some other insights that I would glean from regarding this graph. But yeah, these, these are things that, uh, the employees engage with is how they're engaging and helping. Um, I'd love to hear for those attending, like, do you have a cadence today? What is it? Is it random? Is it weekly, daily, monthly? What does that look like for you today? And one thing that I've definitely heard from our community members who, who kind of note that they're having a lot of traction with their communication and they, they feel like they have a really good strategy, is it's, it was more built on like a foundation of consistency. It's just like, how do we build a rhythm and a ritual around our communication strategies so that our employees kind of start to learn and just understand that, hey, this every day it's gonna come out this time, I'm gonna look for it, I'm gonna expect it. And that's just like a ritual or an a cadence that you start to kind of build into your culture. And then it just becomes an expectation. And not just more of like a random blast that kind of comes out, you know, throughout the week, sometimes daily, sometimes, you know, weekly or just, you know, you're trying to condition your operation. Then back to the operation point, maybe that's why it's so high, is you're kind of ritualizing your communication so that you're training your people to kind of engage with a certain kind of behavior flow. And that's why I could also see so much value and then, and building this into like the earlier parts of the day or the end of the day so that you're not disrupting the flow of work either, right? So it's, if you're thinking about productivity and engagement into your comms and updates, you obviously don't want people leaving their tasks or their flow of work to read a company email, right? So, but you want them to read the company email as well. So it's like, okay, how do you build a cadence and a ritual? And maybe you'll look at your operations as a company and when they're, they're actually, you know, one's our top productivity times of the day and build a cadence that doesn't interfere with that, but actually compliments it and then build a ritual around that so people get used to it. So, um, I see a, uh, a few, two comments here. We have a cadence of departmental communication is anything before or at 9:00 AM gets the best views. Okay, John? Yeah. So that's aligned with what we're saying here weekly on the same day, 7:30 AM I love it. Yeah. So I feel like a lot of you kind of starting to really grasp at it as well. And obviously the data is showing that is like, okay, if we can just create truly like a cadence and an expected time that gets the best engagement. Um, okay, so let me stop sharing here as well. And I just kind of, I wanna talk to you a little bit about this as well. I think there's some interesting insights that we talked about before about topics and, and some of those things of just like, yeah, what actual phrases and topics are getting the most clicks and open. So we kind of talked about cadence, we've talked about, you know, which categories I'd be curious of, like the actual language and the keywords and things like that, that the data's showing you in terms of, um, I mean, there are some things when we reviewed it that shocked me in terms of like, there are certain cultural elements that got like, the least amount of clicks, and then there were certain, you know, more, uh, just other categories that were just getting most clicks. Could you maybe break that down a little bit? Yeah, yeah, no, like, um, one of the big disparities, um, uh, that we were kind of uncovering is just birthdays. So I'll, uh, kind of tell you a little bit of a story. So we ran this, um, we had a big product release last year and ran this survey and everyone was telling us, like HR people that they needed content. Um, and so we, so we're following up with people, we're interviewing people on the content, and we're just really trying to figure out, okay, what type of content. What we stumbled upon was that they wanted more content in things, HR people specifically around building for birthdays, building for birthdays, celebrating messages, customizing things. And we're like, okay, so, so we start going down this rabbit hole of birthdays and content and, and creativity for hr. And then we get to this point where we're just like, okay, let's pull the data and we pull the data. And birthdays is just extremely low engagement rate for employees. And we're like, what? Okay, what's happening here? And we're starting to just try to figure, figure out this word problem. And we're like, okay, well what if we automate birthdays and we're, we're having these sorts of discussions, like, well, what if we automate automate 'em? And HR is like, no, don't automate birthdays. We wanna put a ton of time into the birthdays. Uh, people care about it. And then we just start talking to employees because the data is telling us like, Hey, look, um, they don't care about it. Really try to figure out like, well, do you like it when HR customizes it? And here's essentially what we found out, which is I think kind of crazy, is we found out that at the HR level, there's a, a big emphasis on making employees feel special. And I think that that's there and it's important, and I think this segues really great into an AI conversation. Um, but at the employee level, um, they, they really are looking for a couple things. So in the data, they really want, they love pay time off, they like parties. You know, when we start talking about cultural sort of things. And, and the birthdays has a really interesting thing because birthdays just mass communicating birthday info not good. But what we found in this is that the, the way that information travels is impacts it quite a bit. And it's really fascinating. So if you give, like, for example, if you send out a birthday message and the birthday messages that perform the highest, if you send out to a team, just a team of people, uh, that team of people now has this, almost this exclusive information set around the birthday. And this really relates a lot to like gallops. Uh, do you have a friend at work sort of survey that they do? And, um, the team, what we found, the behaviors, if they bring people in in the interviews, if they bring people in, if employees are recognized. So employees told us, like when people know their birthday and they're not, there isn't a broadcast and they shouldn't know their birthday, they feel really good about it. It's almost like, Hey, happy birthday. And there's not this mass communication that goes out, they're not a member of that team, so they feel really rewarded. That's a really good event for them. But it, but within the team, it's not a good event. It's kinda like, well, you're my team member, you should know it's my birthday. We're, we're, maybe we're friends, we're colleagues. But it's, but what happens is those team members end up sharing that info about the birthday. 'cause now you have this social currency with other people that might know 'em, that's not on their team, that they might have a common relationship outside the the org. So like how you control the communication stuff is really important. But also, you know, employees, they don't really value, um, cultural events if they don't think, if they think that it's controlled or it's systematic in any way, um, they don't really place any value in it. So when you think about your comms, you really have to think there's this dichotomy between like, automated and corporate and just like the things that make people special that you can lean into. So I don't know, that was, that was something that we found there. And then I think that's probably a really good time for us to just talk about ai. 'cause I know it's on everyone's mind. Yeah. I don't mean to steal your thunder, but like, I'm thinking about it, just talking about it, like how big, yeah, because we were gonna do automating birthdays, we get all sorts of data. Um, 'cause people will put their entire employee files into our system. So we have all the birthdays. We could press a button and they just automatically go out and we could make it special, not doing so Anyhow. Yeah, and I found that if you look at a lot of the new tech tools that are coming out, a lot of it is built on this foundation of automation, right? Like they're building AI plugins for the purpose that can automate employee recognition, employee appreciation, birthdays, kind of all these elements. And while you're kind of sharing that story, it kind of made me think about you. I think personally we can all agree we've had this experience where, you know, Facebook, you know, you'll have today's birthdays on there and everyone's wishing person's today's birthday and you get your wall written onto and all those different things. And, and I think it's like, do you really remember anyone that written on your wallet wishing you happy birthday? No. But you do remember those that gave you a call and texted you personally and kind of reached out and wish you a happy birthday. And it just, that, I think what you just explained, that's like another good example of like the automated, like easy prompt of just wishing someone a happy birthday like Facebook does, just doesn't really have that impact. And kind of just stored memory and experience as someone proactively remembering it and reaching out to you and having a more authentic human interaction with it. So yeah, let's transition into this, this AI conversation. 'cause I know obviously that's been the theme of the year and, and even into from last year. But with all these, you know, tools that have rolled out, you know, the release of chat GPT and the next iterations of it, and now all these different platforms are becoming AI enabled, whether it's AR or not, but where using it as like a tagline to really walk into this world, that employee experience becomes more and more automated. Right? So I would love to, yeah. Maybe start there of, you know, what have you started to kind of see with this, and, you know, how maybe do people start to look at this to help drive cultural engagement in ways that it doesn't as well? Can you maybe start speaking about that? Yeah. So for auto, so for automating, I saw in the comment, uh, someone was like, you just gotta, you gotta get started somewhere. Um, absolutely. So I think there's certain things that you definitely can automate, uh, like holidays and just reminding people of holidays. Um, that's a really easy one. If you are trying to start somewhere, I recommend that. I think, you know, just, Hey, we're celebrating it. It's this day. You have time off. You don't have time off. Employees actually love seeing holidays and those sorts of events. Um, any sort of, uh, corporate events or corporate celebrations around a cadence, those absolutely can be things that you can automate. Um, but what we're, what we're seeing at our level is just a request, um, to do like certain tasks that are essentially, uh, they don't really add any, any value per se to the, um, human experience, but they add a lot of value to, to getting work done. So like the, the sorts of automations that we're seeing are like, uh, here are the safety trainings that you need to get done by these dates, things of that nature. But I think the general theme of AI that I see is there's just a lot of people. So there's this Gallagher study that, that, um, that we have, we have some exhibits for it, we won't go into it, but there's this Gallagher study they just posted, uh, published it. Um, and they're a broker. And one of the things that they talked about a lot was just, you know, people are generally, um, you know, still trying to explore this. I mean, Zach, you had, you had some insights on this sort of report as well, but basically, um, I'll transition it back to you. 'cause I know that you, you probably have some talking points here, is that people are kind of, it seems to me like people are kind of worried, and you had some thoughts on that. Um, and then I can kinda share a little bit more. There's this book, this phenomenal book that we can go into. But yeah. Um, I'll start. What were your, what were your takeaways from that? Yeah, well, I'll say one, it's just been interesting seeing the testament with AI and engaging with it. So in terms of like departments and roles who have engaged with ai, I thought one thing that was interesting, more specific to our community at achieve engagement full of HR and people leaders, um, it was like one in three respondents from HR and employee experience functions reported not having any plans for ai, which that kind of really blew me away of like, you know, maybe there's conversations around it, maybe were thinking about it, but just having strategic plans of how we're gonna start utilizing it, saying that one in three do not have that, which that kind of blew me, blew me away. So I kind of thought about like, how is this gonna impact HR and HR leaders who are not engaging with it? Because it is pretty obvious that it's gonna be a essential function or part of every role within the workforce in, in many ways. Um, and then there are some other insights in terms of like the effectiveness and satisfaction on it. And when we looked at certain, certain, like testaments with AI and whatnot, it was, it was something, I'm trying to find the stats here quick of, you know, of those not using or planning to use ai, 92% cited feeling, you know, terror or fear or denial of it. And that was 26% more than the average. And then those that are using AI felt more positive about its potential and kind of even reduces, like, continue to improve what their plans to use in the future. So those already experimenting with AI demonstrate a huge advantage of or marginally increase in positivity for AI and its future with 'em. And I think there's kind of these interesting, uh, uh, like differences in our mindsets toward, or some people are, are more fearful of how it's gonna take over our jobs. And then those that start engaging with it quickly flip and, uh, okay, how is this actually amplifying or improving my job and my role? So I thought just having those two differences was like pretty interesting to see. Yeah, Maybe you can pull up that slide. We've got this study and we can go into that a little bit more. Uh, the list employee listening. So this is probably a good, uh, slide or exhibit to talk about this. Um, so in this report that, you know, we're, we're just dissecting and talking about AI is essentially, and I don't know if we can put this in a link for the group to kind of go back and read it, it's a really fascinating report. They had over 2000 people that responded, um, to IT and HR leaders from around the world, which is, which was really, really comprehensive. But if you look at this listing in here, right? Like they value ai. They think that AI is going to be what the most transformative thing in communications to bring to the table, but yet we're talking about automation kind of stinks. So there's just a number of things that AI can't really do. So if you look on the right, the perceived effectiveness, so check this out. So by the way, text isn't in here. Okay. Side note, really frustrated by that one. Thanks Gallagher. But, um, uh, listening sessions, perceived effectiveness, 85%, uh, number eight, um, you go down to leader sessions, um, which, which went really high. You go to independent audits, 81%. So you have a lot of things that can't really be, um, accomplished with ai. So like, they are, they're human. They're, they're basically related to human interactions and people valuing the human experience. So I think if, if you're worried about AI or if you haven't explored ai, I mean a lot of people have worked with chat gt, it has a really good capability to amplify. Um, if you've done even an, an entry level, like your productivity, right? I think we're gonna see a lot of that. Or I'll tell you that our top requests are, are in people want, um, employees to automatically get, so here's some to, for us that I can share with you. People are looking for, Hey, I wanna get my pay stubs automatically just by requesting, I don't wanna go with the hr, I wanna just automatically ask my phone or a virtual assistant, Hey, can I see what, what, how much time off I have? Can I submit time off? Can I like, think of the types of tasks those are, right? So they're, they're not really providing a ton of value. You might be providing information, but is it providing tangible value in the human experience? So, um, I see more of a trend to that coming first. So if you're looking at your own operations, if you're looking to build value in long-term round comms, I would try to establish, um, in culture, I would try to look outside of the operational things and try to look more toward the things that provide human experience. And if, if you're not doing any of these things on here, um, that's absolutely cool. Uh, every company's a little bit different in the blue and gray collar, uh, work segment, definitely focused on let's get it done. Let's, let's do my work and let's kind of go home. We see a lot of that as well. But there are things that you can incorporate and weave in for, for your particular group. Um, so maybe there's some ideas in here, but, uh, but yeah, I was gonna say, I think one thing too that I thought was interesting from that report is really more about the effect effectiveness of just having like a framework to the channels that you're using. And that was kind of showing up in this as well as like those with a channel framework were three times more satisfied with their channels and effective with its engagement. So it might not be like, okay, you need to use all these different channels, but more about how are you intentionally using the ones to have a higher level of effectiveness and just have a framework and a strategy for it that meets your company's culture and operations. And if anything, that should be really exciting for HR people leaders to be like, I want to get to more of the human interaction work. Like ideally that's where we wanna spend 80, 90% of our time anyway. So how do we, uh, relieve ourselves of some of those other ones, like you noted for payroll or kind of like help desk type questions so that we can maximize our time in the field, you know, leading some of those listening sessions, independent audience, like ideally that's where we're spending our time anyways. Yep. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. How does that start to relate to, like, I, I know we had a question in here before of like group size and, and kind of the elements of that, Um, you know, group size, group size, there's a lot of data around managers and group size particularly. Um, I think if, if you go back to last year, Gartner produces, produces a lot of data on this as well. I'm sure everyone's familiar with that data source on like, okay, we gotta train our leaders. And we've had this huge transition on burnout from remote work that the white collar folks are trying to deal with. But the blue collar fo folks generally, you know, have, have their themes as well. One of the biggest themes of blue collar, which is fascinating, which we could probably talk about, that's not as much down into the ai, but we can, AI still is relevant. There is this concept of like using managers for communication. So most blue and gray really rely on their managers, um, for comms. Uh, they, they run individual teams and units a lot differently than other teams do, and for their white collar counterparts. Um, there's another Gallagher study on this that kind of talks about that. Maybe we can move to that exhibit. So the thing about that's unique about managers, right, is you can only have a manager have so many people. So this is a really fascinating, um, kind of exhibit that starts to talk about what happens in these group dynamics in small groups. So I, I would argue that the small groups have better overall communication. They have, when we witness comms and small groups, they engage more, they collaborate more. It's, it's very little broadcasting, it's much more collaboration and feedback sort of, um, types of communication channels that we see. But what I found really fascinating with this Gallagher study when they started to examine 'em, is that the managers essentially on the top graph, like they're failing at it. So, um, you know, we have this situation where, okay, it it, it's supposed to happen best with this group of people, but they're failing. So, um, what they found, which I thought was really fascinating, was that, uh, if they were augmented by another department and the other department were to give them ideas and concepts and work with them, and this, this goes right back to company culture and corporate culture, um, to help support the managers and kind of work as a team, the managers were significantly more effective, um, at, at, at doing it, right? So on top, top number one, if you, if you give a manager like goals, they're gonna be better and then they're gonna get even more better if you help augment them with materials and things to connect with, with their team and help support 'em. But basically what we found is even in the best performing dynamic, um, uh, out there, which is like these smaller groups, they still fail if they're not enabled well. So it's something that I think long term, you know, we we're investigating how we can empower managers more and we're looking into it, and I think it's gonna be a theme that you're gonna see more and more is the role of HR is probably gonna shift more into how do we help facilitate these group dynamics, especially in situations where they're not necessarily good at facilitating themselves. So, um, I think, I think that's what I would call out, yeah, from group size. And I would, I would double down on that kind of comment because I mean, this was even a theme that we kicked off the year with in some of our, our studies, um, at the beginning of 2024, was kind of the transition and mindset of what hrs role is. And traditionally it's always been like hrs the executor, the driver of these things, they have to design it, deploy it, and get it to kind of come to life where it's now how do we transition that viewpoint and even ourselves as HR professionals to not be as the executor, but as the enabler, right? Like our role is to enable our leaders to be able to execute this. So, and this even came in the, in the q and a here, someone asks, you know, do we have any data on leader listening channels where employees are sending concerns and ideas to leaders? So obviously we just kind of talked about that a little bit where yeah, if we can kind of create structures or use tools to enable leaders to be the listeners and the communicators, the effecti and the engagement goes up, right? No, absolutely. And yeah, the previous graph, we gotta make this available for everyone, but that the previous graph actually says that the live q and a and, and the lead, there's leader sessions with skip levels, they do perform really well. Like leaders, definitely, you know, getting executives out there and and creating a community where employees can interact with them, um, directly and dedicating time. Um, and they, these aren't our findings, per se 'cause uh, we're the tech platform that kind of facilitates other functions, but, uh, yeah, they definitely perform well. They, they do, you absolutely should find time for it and, and work that into your pattern. So, you know, whether it's, you know, blue and gray collar, you've got the leader visiting individual job sites, or you're setting time aside where the leader's saying like, Hey, what's going on in the job? How can we, how can we help? You know, et cetera. Just making sure that your executive team and your leaders in your company are, are paying attention to the feedback. That's great. What we see a lot of, to be honest, is a lot of just broadcasting, just a lot of broadcasting and, and, you know, too much broadcasting turns into propaganda and you have to be able to, um, establish multiple channels. So you have your outgoing, you have your two-way, which is your collaboration, then you have your feedback, you have to make sure that every single channel is healthy, um, or else, you know, culture breaks down and employee engagement breaks down significantly. Yeah. Today, I know we're gonna talk more on, on also readiness for this, but talking about kind of this, the role of the manager and making them enabled and making more of this like human element come to life reminds me of like our conversations around like social contagion and social influence and power as well as like, yeah, like the humans are underrated aspects, and I'm kind of plugging that, 'cause we talked about two books that are just really powerful on this. But I'd be curious, could you maybe, I know you have some really interesting kind of insights or perspective on that, like yeah, the power of social influence and, and truly having, um, that kind of taking a look at what does that kind of net social network look like and do you have a strong social network that is able to kind of communicate and work with each other in this more human way? Um, and I'll put those books in the chat, but yeah. Can you speak to that a little bit at all? Yeah, look, we talked a little bit about the contagious and like social, social currency, but I think the one thing that, um, that I would, that I would say to pay attention to is just how skills change and what skills are valuable and, um, especially in this, in this scenario. So, uh, like I'll give you an a real quick example and then I wanna make sure that we still have time to talk about the funnel functions. 'cause I can, I can help you give you kind of a little bit of a plan, um, to be successful if you've really struggled with communication too. So I'll, I'll talk about this skillset real briefly and then we can kind of move on. So in this book written by Jeffrey Colvin, it was done in 20 16, 20 17. So this is really far ahead of like the pandemic and a lot of the workforce changes that we've seen, um, which is generally speaking with blue collar lack of access to talent, you know, using talent multi nationally and bringing people in from other parts of the world to fill talent gaps that we have. They, they pretty much identified that this was gonna happen prior to all this. And one of the more fascinating components that they studied were just like, what skills and what things were valued when automation started to, um, to, to take place. So I think there was a comment in the book where it was like, look, I just need people to put, and, and, and when they, when, when industrial revolution was happening in factors, right? Like, I just need people to put, um, the X into the, into the y and, and I just need 'em do this. But you know what, people have brains darn it. So they keep screwing it up, right? So the book kind of talks about this dichotomy where it's like, well, we didn't have machines to automate, we didn't have things to automate, but I wish they were just dumber sometimes. And it's just, it stinks, but they're like, yeah, this is kind of how people thought. Now we're here now what? So, um, you know, these, these things that people do where they analyze and they, they use machines to accomplish these tasks. You know, there's, there's relatively little value in a, in a world where those things can just be readily automated. So what I would say for the book, and one thing to think about is, especially in comms and, and as you really start to investigate how you're going to address this, um, the blue and gray collar workforce, they're doing stuff, they're interacting with customers a lot of the time, um, not all the time, but they're, they're in front of customers. They, um, they're out in the field, they're by themselves, they're isolated. And there's a lot of things that happen in isolation that this book predicted. And one of the things that they predicted was mental health and what do we see? Mental health skyrocketing is one of the biggest things organizations are focusing on and, and what humans really need. And what humans cra and what we're built for over a millennia is this need to interact with people, this need to socialize with people that is, that is missing. And, um, and by and large, there's a whole subset of skills ranging from empathy. The book talks about empathy, it talks about teams, uh, it talks about all sorts of things such as creativity. Those sorts of skills are gonna continue to be extremely valuable. And the, the way I look at it with this, and they had this really cool case study that they talked about, uh, to call attention to this and really put this in perspective. So, um, in, uh, the legal jurisdiction, basically AI can already automate attorneys to, and judges to a degree where it can predict, uh, with almost a hundred percent accurate accuracy. Are they gonna be a repeat vendor? To what degree are they gonna be a repeat offender? And they can do all that, but our court, our legal system isn't set up to say like, yep, go in front of a machine and, um, yeah, they'll give you your judgment. It's set up where you're in front of your peers, right? It's set up very much like the social structure. So, long story short is even though the machine's more accurate, not only did the ju when they, when they went to judges and jurors and, and people that were up there under the court law, uh, you know, seeking judgment or whatnot. So even though though the machines more accurate, the, the jurors felt it was unfair, the judge felt it was unfair. Even, even the people that were, um, uh, up there on trial, they felt it was unfair. So like there is this really big interesting dynamic where it doesn't matter how accurate it is because people are not rational, uh, people just aren't rational. They, they're not great at being rational creatures. They're great at being social creatures. So when you think about your com communication channels and what you're doing and how you lean into AI and how you lean into automation and some of these tools, you really have to think about that, um, is, is a really interesting thing. If you really wanna get engagement from the workforce, yeah, you should be interested in that. So I don't know, I could, I could I kind of nerd out and go all over the place and topics like that when it's not just finite data, but Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I would, I'll wrap it up, but I wanna I want you to kind of finish off and kind of introduce some of the, like the funnel piece and some of the ways that we can, can kind of take action for those that are listening. But it is an interest interesting paradigm that our workforces have gone through where, you know, we wanted to get into a space of optimizing our production and productivity. So we implemented things to automate and help us become more efficient, which we did. We, we really started and we're continuing to reach that next level of productivity, right? But in return it brought up a decline in engagement and mental health and burnout and all these other issues. So now it's like, okay, can AI and some of these automations still support or bring us back into this space of connection and wellbeing and wellness and, and support the health, the, the cultural health of the, the company while we also still maintain this expectation that we have to be extremely productive and grow and, and all these different things. So I don't know, it's like a, just an interesting paradigm that we have to have. So, um, but yeah, as we kind of bring it home here, mark, and I'll, I'll kind of share my screen here. Um, uh, if you could kind of break this down for us and talk about this funnel and, and really what this means for our audience. Yeah. So I'll just kind of close it by just like, how can you incorporate tech and how can you incorporate these systems? And I think, um, the biggest challenge that we see is people just getting it off the ground. And I think one of the comments that I already called out earlier, you gotta start somewhere. Um, this is very much what we have the most experience in. So, um, our platform really isn't designed to go do tons of integrations and tons of automations. You know, we, we will get there someday, but, uh, it's really designed to pull people through the funnel. And I had talked about this being a marketing sort of thing. When you think about internal comms, think about it as a funnel. So on the right, what we have is from our perspective, like what it looks like, um, what it looks like from our situation. So brokers, HR and their broker, they partner for benefits and they partner, um, to try employee engagement, adoption and rewards and all that other good stuff, right? Um, but what happens is, is as you go through the funnel and it becomes more leaning on the HR and the employee, just the employee to engage, we find that a lot of the blue and gray collar and people with hard reach workers, um, they don't, they're not able to get employees use systems. They're not able to get employees to, um, engage. They're, they, they really struggle getting the culture. So there's a, um, the culture going from the right angle. So here's how I would look at it. There's a broker that we work with, um, uh, out of on the west coast and they ha they gave me this phenomenal guide that they do via open enrollment. And they break the categories that businesses fall into, into three categories. So you have tech challenge, this is companies with a lot of high turnover companies that have, you know, multilingual contingencies, tons of, um, tons of people that might be in some older contingencies, older workforce segments, not as young. Um, that just, they struggle with using lots of different technology or too much technology, uh, 'cause they didn't grow up in it the same way that, you know, the millennials and Gen Z did. Then they have your tech enabled, you know, these, this is your, your average workforce. So think of this as a bell curve. Then they have your tech forward. These people, you know, they get in, they're using Slack, they're using teams, they use it well, they got integrations with Slack and teams. So everyone falls into a bucket. But what I want to call out for everyone is what I've seen, and the biggest mistake to avoid and how to look at this from a purposeful way to get started and find success is if you are tech challenged, do not try to implement and adopt systems that are for tech forward. If you are tech challenged, be be even cognizant of what you're able to do before you get into a really big tech enabled environment. Um, that, because you're not gonna bring people with you and what you need to do if you're really trying to create change for your organization, if you're really trying to make an impact, start by finding systems and processes that you can pick off that are easy to pick off. The one that we tell people to do is just transition from email to text. Um, that's not me just doing a promo. I mean text just, uh, for the blue and remote workers, it's just so significantly better. It's 13 times better than email. I mean, it is significantly better. So try to find something simple like that and just maybe take, you know, your channel into it. Maybe take some comms that go out one way and just make it simpler. So if your PTO, for example, is paper and you wanna elevate it on paper, well, you don't have to implement a new, you know, HRIS or HCM, you know, just doing paper, doing like a, uh, monday.com form. We do forms too, so I don't want to just pedal what we do, but you can do a form and just make an electronic form, maybe put it on a QR code or something. So like, there's some easy things that you can do to transition to migrate, but just try, try not to just go all the way in the deep end. So I would just encourage people, don't give up, um, try something simpler, try to pick off one thing at a time, because the biggest thing that I see, they just try to go too fast. They can't bring everyone along with them. This very much in communications in the world of adopting and adopting new tech, it very much has the pull through funnel. So start high and just start converting and moving and, and working through change management that way. I, yeah, and I, I definitely a hundred percent agree. I think I've heard so many horror stories from our community of over investing into this massive tech system. And that costs six figures in many cases for it to not work, right? And they're not getting people to engage with the system and the rollout and implementation is just horrific. Like, and I'm sure many of you that are listening right now have actually gone through that scenario in your career at one point. So I, I'm with Mark is like, what are kind of the incremental baby steps that you could start to take to help build maturity and buy-in? And also the change management piece of like building the right behaviors to, uh, embrace this. And then once you have the right behaviors and kind of cadence to it, you can start to justify a tech that can take it to the next level. So, um, this was amazing, mark. I wish we could keep going. I know we're at time, so I'm gonna share two things in the chat here quick. Um, and I, I would also encourage you, I know Mark kind of shared a little bit about Tru who, but many of the insurance agencies or brokers out there have Tru who, so it's like, if you are looking to kind of leverage some of these different things and you're trying to make like an impact or leverage even texts and stuff like that, talk to your broker. You could probably get access to some of these things already without making the additional investment yourself and start taking some of those baby steps without, you know, directly implementing a giant tech HRIS system or something like that. So, um, just another closing note here to check out, but I'll put the SH RM and HRCI credits there on the chat and on the screen. I also really encourage you to connect with Mark directly on LinkedIn. Um, you see that link in there as well? And then, um, yeah, that's all, that's all we got. So Mark, any uh, the closing thoughts here as we wrap up? No, I, I don't have any. I am, uh, thanks for, thanks for having me. Um, and thanks everyone for attending. Hopefully you got something out of this that you can take back to improve, you know, your own strategy, your philosophy on stuff. And if you don't know, just start by measuring. That's what I would tell anyone here. So if you don't know, try to find a way to just start to measure and you, the insights will just, they'll come to you. You'll be able to see just through your own employee's behavior. Love it. Well, thanks everyone for joining us. Really appreciate you spending some time outta your day and afternoon to learn and grow and, and talk communication and AI and tools and tech and all that good stuff. So hope to see you again in the future at a future achieving engagement program. Again, connect with Mark True who some of the work they're doing, um, and we'll, we'll get some of these resources out to you, but have a great rest of your day and we'll hope to see you all again soon.

‍