 of American workers reported experiencing burnout in the workplace—and that number continued to increase throughout 2022.

Burnout not only affects company culture by negatively impacting employee sentiment, but it also costs companies in multiple ways. When someone takes time away from work to treat an illness, the company pays for the time and treatment. And when employees aren’t happy, they leave—forcing employers to spend time and money advertising for a new job, training new workers, and getting them up to speed.

None of this is new to Nancy Scicchitani, Senior Benefits & Global Wellbeing Manager at Nuance, or Meredith Mascolo, Senior Manager of Communications at Nuance. After the pandemic caused a massive shift in the world of work and burnout and attrition became a key focus in the media, Nancy and Meredith sought a solution to address the concern before it became a widespread problem at Nuance.

Burnout can cost a company three times the amount it would take to just address it.” — Nancy Scicchitani, Senior Benefits & Global Wellbeing Manager

Both knew that the solution for employee burnout couldn’t be handled solely by the IC or Benefits teams. After coming together and realizing that burnout is a serious business problem that they needed to tackle together, Nancy and Meredith partnered to implement a new employee communications campaign around wellness. They sought a way to consistently communicate about wellness initiatives and educate employees about burnout, without overwhelming them with a barrage of content.

To maximize the reach of their comms, Meredith knew it was essential to communicate about these topics through their most effective comms channel: email. 

The Poppulo platform enabled them to clearly communicate with employees through email, plus personalize and target messages for unique employee groups, and gather insight from metrics to continuously improve the way they communicate. Over three months, the Communications and Benefits teams worked together to design and implement their wellness campaign.

They started by using the communications channels they already had in place, including their company-wide weekly newsletter, called Take 5, which features all types of stories about products, wins, learning, recognition, culture, and other announcements. When they kicked off their wellness campaign, they started featuring articles on the importance of taking care of yourself, promoting wellness tools and challenges, and sharing resources the company invests in to show support for employees. Each edition also contains an employee survey on a relevant topic, built through Poppulo, to help gauge employee engagement and encourage employees to check out the next issue to see the results.

Every piece of content is posted on the company Intranet, and Take 5 points employees there so they know where all information can be found. The team also manages several Microsoft Teams channels—including a company-wide channel and a channel dedicated to wellness—that they direct employees to via newsletters to foster conversations around relevant topics, like self-care, healthy living, and fitness. Using newsletters and email comms to direct employees to channels like Teams and the Intranet drives greater adoption of existing technology, demonstrating the value of investing in tech.

In addition to Take 5, Nuance has three targeted newsletters sent to employees regularly. First, they have a quarterly wellness newsletter called Be Well, Work Well, dedicated to total wellness—including mental health, physical health, community engagement, financial well-being, and more. They also have a quarterly manager newsletter to share tools and resources with people managers, as well as a monthly career development newsletter. Each of these can be personalized and targeted by department or location when a message is only relevant to a specific audience.

I can’t imagine what my job would look like without Poppulo. I rely on it so much today—I never want to go back to the old way of communicating.” — Meredith Mascolo, Senior Manager of Communications

Since kicking off the wellness campaign, the team has seen high engagement and interest from employees. 

They’ve been able to share engagement metrics with leaders to prove that their communications are landing with employees, driving greater support for comms investment.

The beauty of Poppulo is the metrics. We can prove that our comms are working. We can say with certainty that people are looking at them.” — Nancy Scicchitani, Senior Benefits & Global Wellbeing Manager

In one example, a team of interns ran a two-week campaign called Work it Out to encourage employees to prioritize their wellness by making minor lifestyle improvements. They leveraged the Poppulo platform to direct employees to a Teams channel where they could participate, resulting in the involvement of more than 700 employees—a massive increase from previous programs that had less than 200 participants. The Teams channel was highly active, with hundreds of comments and high engagement. By using an integrated approach to communicate with targeted groups through Poppulo and drive them to take action, the team at Nuance not only saw incredible engagement through the metrics but also accomplished their overall objective of getting employees to talk about wellness.

Today, the Benefits and Communications teams at Nuance continue to work together to combat employee burnout through a consistent, integrated approach to employee comms. The engagement metrics they’ve seen with Poppulo prove that they’re maximizing the impact of their comms. Since implementing Poppulo in 2019, the team has seen an average open rate of 79%—beating the industry standard by over 15%. 

In addition to partnering with Benefits, the Internal Comms team has enabled over 25 users in various departments, including Marketing, R&D, Legal, Security, and more. “We have people across the whole company using Poppulo,” says Meredith, “People who aren’t even communicators but want to make sure their communications are in line with what they should be.”

Meredith and Nancy continue to look for innovative ways to leverage the full capabilities of Poppulo to communicate with employees about the importance of taking care of themselves—reducing burnout and, ultimately, driving value for the business.

Technology

Nuance

After seeing a rise in employee burnout as a result of the pandemic, the Communications and Benefits teams at Nuance partnered to boost awareness around physical and mental wellness.

Reducing Burnout at Nuance with an Integrated Approach to Employee Comms

In August 2021, global academic research and education publisher Cambridge University Press and worldwide assessment and education experts Cambridge Assessment came together to form a single organization: Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

The integrated organization has over 6,000 employees globally and an internal communications team of 15.

As with any merger, the integration created several operational and communication challenges, which were compounded by the fact that the majority of the integration took place during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Creating Comms Cut-Through & Engagement During a Time of Change

Because communication can make or break any change initiative, it was decided to integrate the separate internal communication teams of Cambridge University Press and Cambridge Assessment before the integration of both organizations. The successful integration of both internal comms teams would play a critical role in shaping and influencing the overall integration.

The key priority and challenge for the internal communications team was to achieve cut-through with the communications that really mattered during a time of large-scale organizational change and a global pandemic.

This meant bringing topics of most relevance and impact up front and center for our global employee base. In particular, we needed to ensure calls to action were being received and acted upon, while also boosting engagement with people-centered content." —Kate Hughes, Group Internal Communications and Engagement Manager 

Data-Driven, Targeted Communications with Poppulo

Cambridge Assessment’s use of Poppulo for its internal comms newsletters prior to the integration was extended to the newly integrated internal comms team and this proved pivotal to overcoming challenges and achieving business objectives.

A few key factors were crucial for this success:

A highly focused use of analytics in Poppulo that enabled the team to make informed, data-driven decisions

A decision to consolidate several employee newsletters into a single newsletter every two weeks, reducing information overload

The ability to target, segment, and personalize relevant content for multiple audiences across different geographies

Frequent assessment of content performance metrics to guide ongoing newsletter refinement, leading to more prominent positioning of call-to-action (CTA) content

The result has been transformational, with engagement levels above industry and peer benchmarks. The fortnightly newsletter Connect News now enjoys open rates of 85% and click rates of up to 20%. Kate Hughes, Group Internal Communications Manager, led the transformation of the newsletter and is effusive about the role Poppulo has played.

We pretty much live, sleep and breathe Poppulo—it has revolutionized the way we work as an internal comms team, really. The biggest thing for us is the ability to target our comms to deliver relevant content to different audiences, and the data that Poppulo provides about how our comms are performing is invaluable. It really helps inform how we do our comms and gives us insights on where we need to focus more." —Kate Hughes

The internal comms team’s focus on content performance metrics has directly impacted engagement. Since the introduction of the global newsletter for the newly integrated organizations, they’ve conducted regular audits of content performance metrics, with an aim of continual improvement. 

Group Internal Communications Officer, Patricia Evangelista (based in Manila), played a big part in the analysis.

After the first 12 issues, we produced a detailed report on engagement using the analytics available to us in Poppulo and presented our recommendations to the wider internal comms team." —Patricia Evangelista

After another dozen issues, they again analyzed the trends in the data and made further recommendations for improvements, bringing the more operationally oriented, “need-to-know” content into focus and giving it more newsletter space while reducing the focus of global news into an “in case you missed it” bullet-pointed format. 

This allowed for more individual stories without increasing the overall length of the newsletter, giving maximum priority to the content employees really needed to focus on.

Looking at trends over time enabled us to identify improvements to the newsletter to boost engagement, for example by giving greater prominence to popular content and moving less engaging material to other channels." —Patricia Evangelista

These improvements proved significant, not least because the popular “need-to-know" type content also frequently includes calls-to-action, so achieving increased engagement in this regard meets one of the internal comms team’s key priorities.

The ability to target, segment, and personalize content is crucial for an internal comms team serving a complex network of different audiences globally.

“One of the best things for us about Poppulo is the extent to which we can target our communications to get the information that is relevant to the right audiences,” said Kate. “This targeting has to be highly accurate and precise, for example on a sensitive topic like bonuses that would require dozens of different messages to multiple audiences in diverse locations globally.”

Adding personalization to newsletter subject lines in January 2023 has further boosted engagement rates.

Targeting and segmentation also helps dial down information overwhelm for employees by delivering relevant information that people are interested in, instead of untargeted generic content that’s not relevant to them.

A dynamic weekly data sync from their HR information system, Workday, to Poppulo enables content targeting by location, product group, and department—and in the newsletter 

 there is a section targeted exclusively to managers.

Prior to introducing Poppulo, we didn’t have the facility to target, so people were getting a lot of content that wasn’t really relevant to them. But now, with the ability to segment audiences and personalize content, that has all changed and is reflected in our high engagement rates." —Kate Hughes

The IC team also believes that a mix of channels is essential for their comms strategy to be successful. “With a very diverse workforce in terms of geographic location and age demographics, we can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to our comms channels, because everyone digests content in different ways,” said Kate.

People are individuals and have their preferred ways of consuming content so what we’re always trying to do is publish content across a range of channels and help people find what they’re looking for and need to know." —Kate Hughes

Cambridge University Press & Assessment has achieved record engagement with its new consolidated newsletter through data-focused content decisions driven by Poppulo analytics—Newsletter open rates of 85%, surpassing industry and peer benchmarks.

The ability to target, segment, and personalize content for multiple audiences across employee cohorts and locations has galvanized engagement levels with more relevant content.

A critical priority to create communication cut-through for the successful integration of two organizations—during a period of large-scale change and turbulence—has been achieved by Kate, Patricia, and the IC team using the Poppulo Harmony platform.

Education

Cambridge University Press & Assessment

Clever data-driven decision-making combined with targeted, personalized communications proves a game-changer for newly merged organization.

Cambridge University Press & Assessment Galvanizes Engagement with Data-Driven Communications

Since its formation in 2016, pladis has been growing by leaps and bounds. Steve Hargreaves is the Internal Communications Manager at pladis Global and the sole person responsible for sending all employee email communications.

Relying on traditional email solutions to communicate with the workforce was becoming problematic. “The tools were not necessarily right for the times. Teams were changing, functions were being added, and new ways of collaborating were being built. pladis had to fundamentally change the way it was operating. We needed a scalable solution; one that didn’t just rely on one person,” explains Hargreaves.

Keeping up with the pace of change at pladis meant going from an email blaster with limited capabilities to an omnichannel platform that could manage a richer, more user-friendly communications experience. To improve relevancy and reduce noise, Hargreaves was looking for capabilities that enabled hyper-personalized targeting and data-driven analytics.

Integration with the existing Workday people database was important to reduce the time and effort involved with up-to-date list management. Collaborative workflow processes and security governance could enable this team of one to offer agile, decentralized communications to multiple groups across the organization.

Hargreaves selected Poppulo because it met his criteria for providing a single, secure, proven platform that all groups within Pladis could use. “People were eager to try it. They were excited about the good-looking branded templates, the reliable data and the ease of use–freeing me up to focus on the bigger picture,” said Hargreaves

The consumer-grade experience and ease of use offered by the Poppulo platform enables people to take control of their communications. “Right now, there is a person who uses Poppulo daily to send news roundups to our leadership team. The brand team uses it to elevate campaigns. I use it to send out global internal announcements. The IT Team uses it to send out alerts and calls to action. And HR uses it as the key communications solution for all their processes. Having a central communications platform that everyone can use was a big check for one of our core values: One Pladis.”

Hargreaves’ willingness to encourage individual groups to control their own communications was enabled by Poppulo’s robust set of governance capabilities. Process controls, data and role-based security, and integration with Pladis’ source of people data, Workday, provided the necessary guardrails to allow all these groups to communicate in a safe, orchestrated way with minimal support or oversight by Hargreaves.

For example, in England, communicators could only email employees in that country, not worldwide. Blackout dates help reduce noise. “We minimized the risks. We didn’t allow people to upload their own email address lists, so the data stayed pure. There was nothing that could break. The guardrails gave us the confidence to allow more people to use the platform.”

Hargreaves built an effective internal coalition in support of the Poppulo platform right from the start. The IT team was especially important in this respect. “When building support for this type of solution, you need to look beyond your own communications team. We got on the roadmap early with IT and got their buy-in upfront. When IT saw what Poppulo could do, they wanted it for themselves. They were sending old-fashioned technology email alerts about system maintenance and wanted to use Poppulo’s branded templates instead. So they worked closely with Poppulo on the configuration from the get-go."

Using Poppulo, Hargreaves has taken IC to a whole new level while satisfying the One Pladis value. “I was looking for a solution that wouldn’t stop the people that were already communicating and that would help get the people who aren’t communicating at all to start reaching out and doing so. The new omnichannel capabilities extend far beyond just open and click rates; Poppulo made it possible to change behavior in a far-reaching and positive way."

Construction/Manufacturing

pladis

Scaling communications and driving business value.

Small Communications Team. Big Impact.

The Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) is one of the largest convention facilities in the Middle East and is considered the premier event location In the UAE region.

With 133,000 square meters of event space, the venue flawlessly blends first-class amenities, technology, dedicated customer service professionals and grandeur together, making ADNEC the obvious choice for events of all sizes. ADNEC’s prominence in the world’s event venue landscape is undeniable, garnering numerous local, national, and international awards for excellence.

But when the Exhibition Centre opened, all of its digital signs were managed by a competing platform. However, a lack of functionality prompted the ADNEC team to search for a replacement to the incumbent solution.

The Exhibition Centre selected Poppulo (formerly Four Winds Interactive) to consolidate the management of its wayfinding, informational, and meeting room applications under one easy-to-use software platform.

Hindered by its previous provider, ADNEC made the switch to Poppulo for improved flexibility, scalability, functionality, and an intuitive user interface.

The Exhibition Centre expected a quick transition, rapid expansion capabilities, and advanced training opportunities. ADNEC’s dedication to providing a premier guest experience required minimal screen downtime and no interruption to daily operations during the transition. This was paramount for the physical installation as well as the back-of-house content management. The Exhibition Centre also wanted to ensure its initial hardware investment wasn’t wasted, requiring Poppulo to use the existing displays.

Working closely with the ADNEC IT department, Poppulo was able to complete the entire transition within 24 hours.

There were no operational disruptions, and all content was migrated over seamlessly.

After a two-hour training on Poppulo’s advanced software capabilities, the ADNEC team was ready to manage all scheduling, template, design, and content updates. The Harmony platform easily handles the various endpoints, optimizing the management of all meeting room signage, informational kiosks, wayfinding stations, and video walls. ADNEC’s Visual Communications network now encompasses 83 screens and is rapidly expanding.

The transition to Poppulo’s enterprise Visual Communications solution exceeded ADNEC’s expectations.

In order to maximize ADNEC’s initial investment, Poppulo installed its software on the Exhibition Centre’s existing hardware, saving the venue money and expediting the transition process.

Convention Center

Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre

Consolidating digital signage platforms

Consolidating Digital Signage Platforms at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre

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

Government

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: Scaling measurable communications impact campus-wide and beyond.

The Communications Department at Augusta University oversees all the communications to the university’s more than 20,000 employees and students by managing a large network of communicators across the organization. A team of two from the department, Rachel Robbins and John Jenkins, is responsible for reaching that eclectic mix of students, professors and staff, as well as physicians and health care workers in the affiliated health system. 

As the central communications professionals, they manage 25 communicators spread across the 10 colleges and universities that make up Augusta. For example, the College of Nursing has its own communications professionals who send out a newsletter every week to the nursing students. Their newsletter highlights what’s going on in that particular program, congratulates staff members on achievements, spotlights students and covers events happening around campus.

Robbins, the Central Communications and Marketing department’s Senior Communications and Marketing Analyst explains, “It’s no small feat to leverage the power of our distributed communicator network. Before Poppulo, we had 27 different communicators spread across 11 colleges and two health care systems – all with different messages and audiences – communicating with everyone.”

The communicators had no organized way to create engaging emails and more importantly, could not target them to a specific college, group of employees or students. As a result, some communicators were sending daily emails to 20,000 or more people. 

Jenkins, Internal Communications and Publications Coordinator at Augusta University says, “It got out of hand. Too many uncoordinated emails meant that many were not read. There was no policing on our end and that was costing us a tremendous amount of money. Communicating effectively meant enabling our wider network of communicators to send targeted messages in a much more controlled and coordinated way.”

Reducing noise and creating clarity was key. To do that, Robbins and Jenkins were looking to align and empower their network of communicators. “Our goal was to turn our extended team into experts in delivering personalized, relevant and targeted content. Our communications experience platform, Poppulo, made that possible,” says Robbins.

THE SOLUTION: GOVERNANCE, TARGETING CAPABILITIES AND EDUCATION

To achieve their goal, Robbins and Jenkins designed their Poppulo environment to give each communicator access to only those individuals in their department with pre-designed templates. Regular training videos and a Poppulo FAQ on the Intranet equipped them to tailor engaging and measurable communications to their specific audiences.

The governance capabilities of Poppulo meant that Robbins and Jenkins could allow and indeed encourage their team to “be the communicators they wanted to be.” For example, Robbins sends a weekly newsletter, Jagwire Weekly, to all 20,000 students and staff. 

The central team also has the capability of reaching the whole campus via email as needed for important announcements. However, the governance feature restricts anyone else from sending communications to the entire university. Instead, individual communicators can send more targeted content to the students and employees in their own departments and colleges as required.

THE RESULTS: COMMUNICATORS CAN FOCUS ON WHAT THEY ARE SAYING AND HOW THEY ARE SAYING IT – NOT THE TOOLS THEY ARE USING. 

“After we showed the team how easy it was to create templates, target emails and personalize content, the overall volume of communications increased but average open rates tripled. The reason for this seeming paradox: people are only getting emails that are relevant to them. 

Today, we are effectively reaching more students and employees with clearer, more targeted communications,” says Robbins. In addition, the templates give them the power to accomplish things they could not before, and they are not afraid to experiment.

TOP TAKEAWAYS: WORK TOGETHER AND BUILD RELATIONSHIPS

Robbins is hyper-focused on the content that engages each audience. She knows that when emails are current and trendy, they do better. She recently changed the design of the newsletter and saw a marked increase in engagement – simply because it had a crisp, modern appearance. 

She notes, “Every year, the school takes an aerial photo of the entire class. We then email the students asking them if they can find themselves in the photo. That is always a huge hit. We encourage people to have fun. In fact, the subject line we can never top is the one offering free tickets to campus events.”

Robbins and Jenkins shared some of their key tactics for those wishing to amplify the impact of a small communications department.

Carry out regular refresher-training sessions to drive momentum and promote innovative ideas from the team.

Ensure communicators understand the power of data-driven analytics to monitor and increase open rates. This encourages them to experiment and find out what works best for each audience.

Adopt a personalized and conversational tone, which is central to driving engagement.

At Augusta, all communicators are part of a Communications Council where they learn from each other and share ideas and insights. This has been an invaluable learning forum.

Robbins concludes, “Our theme is, ‘Be the communicator you want to be.’ We have built up a close rapport with our team of communicators and they trust us. They have seen how we can help them be more successful. Now they come to us for advice when needed and run with it themselves when they don’t.”

Augusta University

A communications team of just two people at Augusta University took advantage of enterprise-wide governance capabilities to empower dozens of communicators 

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