THE CHALLENGE: GOING INTERNATIONAL WHILE KEEPING IT PERSONAL 

When Gilead Sciences made inclusion a core company value, it took its DE&I program to a whole new level. The mission was to create and foster a work environment  – around the world – where differences are valued and all people are involved, respected and connected.

Implementing that goal would require taking a holistic communications approach that would work on an international scale while also keeping it local, even personal.

From the get-go, Gilead’s Public Affairs and I&D Teams worked together with the Employee Resource Groups on the new DE&I communications plan. Nishma Patel, Senior Specialist in International Public Affairs at Gilead, in her role as communications lead for the Australia, Canada, Europe (ACE) region, leveraged Poppulo’s omnichannel platform to make it happen. 

Our definition of diversity encompasses diversity of thought, diversity of background, ethnicity, religion, sexuality… in short, what makes you, you.  Inclusion was then defined as bringing all of this together. We needed a way to put this value into action. Poppulo provided it.”

The Poppulo omnichannel platform gave the DE&I Team the capability to handle communications differently in each country while still maintaining overall governance and the ability to scale.

For example, the Gilead PRIDE Alliance had its own account and controlled all the LGBTQ communications worldwide. This account featured employee stories and personal messages from the leaders in all its PRIDE newsletters. People took comfort from the newsletters because it showed them it’s normal to be LGBTQ.  

It even encouraged people to come out at work. Patel says:

“The ability to reach thousands of people through Poppulo is brilliant. All of our collateral – the videos, Vimeos, Youtubes are presented beautifully in Poppulo. 

"The consistent and streamlined way in which we could tell people’s stories via the Poppulo newsletter made a huge  difference. The fact that everything was in one place was very valuable.  We were able to roll out awareness training sessions online for people to become advocates for LGBT inclusion and for allies as well, to understand the stigmas around LGBTQ

"The result was that the LGBTQ employees no longer felt different,” 

Poppulo made it easy for Gilead to measure tangible progress around DE&I. Using Poppulo’s metrics, the Team demonstrated the value of its communications to leadership. Open and click-through rates identified how much an issue was resonating. 

Leaders got actual statistics and benchmarks to measure progress. Poppulo CSMs provided insights into benchmarking data from other pharmaceutical companies; these industry averages on click and open rates brought the ‘outside-in’ and helped create more improved and tailored messaging.

THE RESULTS: Communications that are driving DE&I at Scale

Effective communications is enabling Gilead to create an inclusive work environment internationally, where everyone can bring their true selves to work. By making it possible for employees to share their stories in every location and providing the resources so that all employees feel safe and protected everywhere, the company is making DE&I relevant to everyone.  

Today, Gilead publicly supports DE&I special events around the world and works with local governments to create change and foster DE&I.

Gilead recently conducted a series of short DE&I surveys to get feedback on employee sentiment around the world. In Switzerland, employees noted the lack of women at a senior level. In response Gilead has increased by +20% the number of  Women in the Swiss Leadership Team and by +10% in the whole affiliate.

As a result of their efforts, Gilead Switzerland has been granted the Swiss LGBTI label for demonstrating special efforts on DE&I, especially for the LGBTI Community.

Externally, Gilead funds organizations to bring down barriers in countries where being LGBTQ is illegal. A point person on the ground looks after employees, answers questions and gives advice.

Gilead has leveraged the unique functionality of Poppulo to communicate its DE&I programs on a global scale, closing the gender gap that previously existed.

Poppulo enables the PRIDE Alliance to easily keep in touch with employees working at home. The most recent campaign focused on the glimmer of hope about being able to meet in person again and rolled out various collateral levels available for all employees to download, including PRIDE t-shirt designs, zoom backgrounds, face masks, fans for the heat and more.

Gilead continues to increase diversity in leadership with more black men moving into leadership positions. Post George Floyd, Gilead introduced an Advancing Black Equity Strategy and created a Black Equity Position at a VP level. Today, a black man who identifies as gay, holds the position and works with the CEO on DE&I.

“We face the unique challenge of global communicators of implementing DE&I programs at scale. Yet DE&I is personal; it's about hearing, understanding, and acknowledging individuals' experiences. Through Poppulo, you can speak to the employees’ range of experiences and situations when communicating on a global scale.”

Pharmaceutical

Gilead Sciences Inc.

How the ability to create personalized connection in global communications through Poppulo's omnichannel platform was key to DE&I success.

Gilead leads the way with successful DE&I implementation

The challenge: Aligning people and company goals to drive business results

As a contractor providing business process services to government agencies in several countries, 

 employees are distributed across a variety of locations, often working in highly secure and regulated environments. Maximus treats each team as a separate business unit, making it challenging to effectively communicate with employees and keep everyone aligned around company goals and initiatives. To address these challenges, Maximus adopted an integrated platform that allowed the Internal Communications (IC) team and business unit managers to connect, align and engage with its 34,000 employees on a consistent and timely basis.

Our initial communications goal was to help improve the overall company performance by creating a stronger alignment between our business strategy and our people. We wanted to enable our leaders and business unit managers to operate at a higher level – and it would all start with how we communicated with our employees.”

— Jared Curtis, Director of Communications at Maximus

To ensure that the program was successful, Jared and his team opted to take a data-driven approach to Maximus’ communications strategy. They wanted a fact-based method to determine how, what, when, to whom, and why messages were delivered.

The solution: Using an integrated platform for scalable communications

Using Poppulo’s Enterprise platform, Maximus implemented a holistic approach to its internal communications program. This approach leveraged four key capabilities: effective governance, personalization, data-driven analytics, and multiple communication channels.

Using role-based security, integrated calendaring, collaboration, shared content, and template libraries, Jared developed a governance model that allowed his IC team to work with other departments across the organization while maintaining visibility and control over communications. The IC team built an ambassador network among leaders and managers across the organization to assist with driving change and encouraging interactions. This approach improved messaging alignment and increased the reach and impact of the central IC group.

Jared leveraged this model across two key comms channels: email and mobile devices. Mobile was especially important given the complexities of the working environment for many Maximus employees. And when the pandemic hit, it became clear that a mobile app would be essential to reach employees who were at home without access to the office email system, particularly for sharing HR-focused items.

In designing our communications platform, we knew it would be critical to offer employees the choice to receive information and engage with us on their channel of choice. We have 7,000 employees using our mobile channel now. We can specifically target those on the Poppulo Mobile app for communications or even send on a different schedule.”

Content and tactics were guided by data, using in-depth metrics on time sent, open rates, and engagement levels across channels and departments. But this focus on data was not limited to just Poppulo data. “We knew a successful integrated communication platform that was driven by analytics and data would not be possible with just one data set. We needed to merge the Poppulo data with other components, whether it was Grammarly, Word, or other applications, to understand the readability, length, and other metrics of the emails. As a result, we have a holistic view built with the core metrics from Poppulo, enabling us to be more effective with our communications and guiding other team members to success,” said Jared.

Maximus uses this data to create communications strategies for larger campaigns.

We can set goals, metrics, determine audiences, mitigation steps, engagement tactics, and more to share with our leadership to set realistic expectations. Data is the key to how we communicate and take action.”

This data-driven approach was integrated with personalization for greater impact. To accomplish this, Maximus wove together various data sources including integrating its Workday employee data with Poppulo to segment communications by business unit, level, location, and more. The filtering captured trends of what was popular among the different groups for accurate targeting of the communications. And the integration reduced the workload on the company’s IT team by automating the maintenance of up-to-date distribution lists. Additionally, the Maximus team built an ambassador network among leaders and managers to assist with driving change and encouraging interactions.

The results: Driving quantifiable results across all channels

The combination of governance, multiple channels, data-driven campaigns, and personalization has enabled Maximus to optimize its employee communications activities. The results have been impressive:

An 80% open rate of its communications; with a 90% open rate among supervisors

A higher than expected average reading time of three minutes and 30 seconds

Insights that indicate Mondays and Wednesdays are the best days on which to share communications

Connected one-third of employees and growing through the Poppulo Mobile application

Top takeaways for enterprise communicators

Maximus optimized the impact of its employee communications by:

Extending the reach of the IC team by enabling a network of ambassadors while maintaining overall control

Governmental

Maximus

Leading government contractor, Maximus, implemented an integrated employee communications platform using a data-driven approach and multiple channels to improve company performance.

Aligning people and business goals through integrated employee communications

The challenge: Communicating how and when the employees needed

Stewart Milne Group is one of the U.K.'s award-winning independent housebuilders and leading timber systems providers. With more than 800 employees spread across offices, factories and housing developments, the Internal Communications department needed a streamlined method for disseminating information across all the sites. This was especially important during the period of change and uncertainty brought about by the pandemic.

While employees had access to a SharePoint Intranet site, they often struggled to access it, making it difficult to share information related to their training, HR and leadership messages. Employees on sites and factory floors had limited access to company email to get updates. As a result, there was a sense among staff that they didn’t feel like they were part of the business as they did not know what, how or why any changes were occurring. A more integrated platform for employee communications with multiple channels and the ability to create two-way engagement was needed to drive greater clarity and a sense of inclusion.

We decided to do a staged approach where we first implemented Poppulo Email and then brought in the Poppulo Mobile app. The goal was to reach all of our employees on the channel of their choice and provide them with the information they needed in a quick and consistent manner. Since 50% of our employees are non-desk-based, we required a communications platform that would effectively handle multiple communication channels simultaneously, and we found that in Poppulo.

— Kirsty Morrison, internal communications manager, Stewart Milne

The solution: Building out communication channels for engagement and Inclusion

With the ultimate goal of boosting employee engagement across the company and promoting a sense of belonging, Morrison began with email communications as the first step. She used SMS messages to reach the non-desk-based employees to inform them of an email update, but results were not measurable and it was a costly option.

We implemented the Poppulo Mobile app to best reach our workers on factory floors and sites and already have a third of workforce using it. It has become key to communicating with employees who weren’t in the office or who were on furlough to ensure they were aware of all changes in real-time.

In launching the Poppulo Mobile app, Morrison opted for a methodical approach. “We had a select group of Director and Senior Managers and representatives from all levels of the organization work with us to understand the type of content that resonated, discuss new ideas and act as ambassadors with their teams to get others engaged or demonstrate how to interact with the content,” said Morrison.

The Poppulo Mobile app serves as an information hub for employees. Quick link sections to learning and development, connected with the payslip and benefits programs worked best.

“Workers who are on a job site or traveling to meet with a client or at home can just grab their phone and know the resource is there,” said Morrison.

As the mobile content tends to be short, snappy and with lots of emojis and visual content, it drove higher engagement. The people side of the content has been the highest engaging thus far, whether through human interest posts on the history of the company, sharing of employee photos or for events such as Apprentice Day. Morrison also built out video content with the Executive Chairman, CEO and Senior Leadership teams on the positive side of 2020 and the company’s direction following the pandemic, which drove insightful engagements on the app.

This approach was highly successful in driving clear communications during the company’s internal restructuring. Using the Poppulo platform, employees were surveyed to understand how they were feeling throughout this time. From this feedback, Morrison worked with managers and leadership to address uncertainties through email and mobile communications to allay employee concerns.

“This was not something we had done before. We were able to get real-time thoughts and feelings, connect employees with Senior Leadership, share the 5-year growth plan and how it impacted employee’s learning and development plans and more. We eliminated any guesswork and put the effort into the content that the employees needed to address their fears,” said Morrison.

The results: Simplifying communications creates sense of belonging

In building out its integrated communications approach, Stewart Milne saw success in reaching and engaging with its employees including:

Savings from removing the SMS outreach feature, where they were charged per text message

Engagement with one-third of the employees, and growing every day, using the Poppulo Mobile app, with a goal of reaching as many employees as possible in the coming year

Using video as the most engaging content with longer viewing times by employees

 offer employees the ability to receive a wide range of information, from HR items to culture posts, on the platform of their choice and choose how to engage with that content.

 helps Stewart Milne know which content is favourable, such as the email promoting the Poppulo Mobile app launch, which remains one of the most highly read emails to date.

 ensured that during times of change, whether it was a pandemic or restructuring, the IC team was able to partner with HR and the Executive team to respond quickly and give employees a clear sense of belonging.

Construction/Manufacturing

Stewart Milne Group

One of the U.K.’s leading independent housebuilders and timber systems manufacturers, Stewart Milne implemented an integrated email and mobile communications platform to build a sense of inclusion among its employees who were distributed across a network of offices, factories and housing developments.

The future of employee communications.
Today.

What drives us at Poppulo?

Our People

Where A-list organizations look to transform their employee communications

Our offices

Cork, Ireland

Poppulo

Customer Support

Sales

Waltham, MA

Poppulo

Customer Support

Sales

The future of employee communications. Today.

What drives us at Poppulo?

Our People

Where A-list organizations look to transform their employee communications

Our offices

Cork, Ireland

Poppulo

Customer Support

Sales

Waltham, MA

Poppulo

Customer Support

Sales

The future of employee communications.
Today.