 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."

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