Thierry Moncoutié: Tailoring Content to Your Employees
In the workplace, content for employees ranges from training materials to a photo of their colleague’s dog. Companies therefore need to cut through the digital noise to convey key messages.
“Look at past consumption of your content and adjust your content strategy accordingly, making sure that your core messages get to the right audiences,” said Thierry Moncoutié, senior product marketing manager at LumApps.
LumApps is a global employee experience platform company and a sponsor of Simpler Media Group’s recent Digital Workplace Experience conference. To follow up on its session, SMG spoke with Moncoutié about how content can improve the employee experience, how to identify key personas and using analytics to update content strategies.
Digital Content Communicates Key Messages
Simpler Media Group: What is the role of content within the digital employee experience realm, and why is it important in today’s workplace?
Thierry Moncoutié: For me and for all workers online, content is key in terms of employee awareness, when the company wants to convey key messages to their employees, like strategy moves, financial performance, or just regular information or enablement. You need to enable your employees and empower them to do their best work. Content includes everything related to the company, the tools, the processes, the habit, the culture. This is especially important for new hires.
All of that combined makes content very important to address the appropriate message to the appropriate person in a personalized way, as it will be more impactful and more engaging.
This contributes to employee engagement, employee retention, and a sense of belonging, regardless of your role, your location, or your language.
SMG: How can content enhance (or detract from) digital experiences?
Moncoutié: All of us are flooded with information and a constant flow of messages. Most of the time, a big part of it is not relevant to our role in the company, or to our interests. The most important information is overlooked because we don't know where to find it. If the content is not distributed correctly to the right audience at the right time, it will detract employee experience.
On the reverse, if a company broadcasts the right content to the right person at the right time and in the most appropriate format, and on the most relevant channels, then it contributes to an employee experience. For example, we know that Gen Y — digital natives — are more likely to watch a video than read a piece of content. Companies can personalize the content to the needs of each employee segment and to the habits that employees have in general. It’s kind of adapting marketing techniques and technology we are used to on a day-to-day basis as consumers to the work environment.
Content Best Practices
SMG: Where do organizations start with employee-generated content and what are some best practices?
Moncoutié: Employee-generated content, for me, is more about sharing knowledge among peers, and even embodying the culture and the values of the company.
We have a customer in Europe who is named Norauto, a car maintenance and spare parts leader with 400+ auto centers. They like to use video as a format to share best practices and knowledge, for example on how to repair specific car parts or how to install marketing and merchandising tools in their stores. They shoot a video and share it with their peers on our platform. It’s very convenient and it’s very engaging, compared to having a document or a memo.
We even have some customers such as John Lewis Partnership which owns and operates two of Britain's best-loved retail brands where any employee can ask the CEO questions that they have. They disclose their name or make it anonymous, but any employee can ask the CEO why the company is going that way. The CEO is willingly answering all questions and taking time to answer questions.
Finding Your Audience and Analytics
SMG: What advice do you have for organizations who want to overhaul their content and employee experience strategy, but aren’t sure where to begin?
Moncoutié: They have to put the employee at the center stage and start with who is their audience. Who are they talking to? It really requires to define what we call personas. And then analytics can be a good input.
How is your current content and internal communication platform used? What is the type of content that is consumed by employees? How is the content consumed, by which type of employees, and on which type of device (web, mobile app, web-responsive app)?
Learning Opportunities
For example, on the LumApps platform, stakeholders like HR managers or community managers can access detailed analytics on how the content they produce or promote is consumed. For videos, it’s how the video is viewed: Is it on the mobile app, on your desktop? When do you see a drop in video consumption? For example, if you posted a 4-minute video and you see that everybody drops after 2 minutes, then you will think maybe I need to repurpose the key messages from the second half of the video into a different piece of content and publish it again to be sure your message is heard.
You can also analyze the past consumption of your content and adjust your content strategy accordingly, making sure that your core messages get to the right audiences.
SMG: How should they measure progress/success?
Moncoutié: They have to set KPIs depending on their initiatives. If you don’t know what you need to measure, you won’t be able to see better progress.
And in addition to analytics, don’t hesitate to run surveys. Did you hit the mark with that content strategy or not? And why? It’s easy to know if you hit the mark with the analytics.
But it’s not easy to identify the why. Is it a problem of format, language, or timing? We are in an “economy of attention,” so it’s very difficult to know when and how to distribute a key message to our different internal audiences.
Analytics can help in defining the right moment to distribute the right message to the right audience segment, but sometimes it can be complemented with a face-to-face meeting with key employees of the different audiences to know better their habits and fine-tune your content strategy accordingly.
Tailored Content
SMG: What are you watching or reading these days? Does any of the content or how it’s distributed influence your work at LumApps?
Moncoutié: I’m currently reading “Petite philosophie de la chaussette,” a book by Jean-Claude Kaufmann, a sociologist who wrote about the history of socks and how socks are perceived in different centuries by different populations. Depending on your culture, region, history, or education, people don’t perceive socks the same way.
Most companies have teams in different countries or locations, and we don’t behave the same way. It’s important that whatever content you distribute on your intranet or employee experience platform you have accessibility and inclusivity in mind and make sure this content can be consumed in some way, by all the different people in your company.
For example, if you post a video, make sure it can be consumed by people who may have vision issues and may not be able to watch properly with audio on due to their work environment. If some employees have a hearing impairment, make sure that they have access to subtitles or transcription. If the CEO is speaking in English, some people in other regions might not be at ease with technical or complex terms, so be sure to have the transcript in different languages.
Watch the LumApps Digital Workplace Experience session on-demand here.
About the Author
The events staff at Simpler Media Group, publisher of CMSWire and Reworked, work to inform our readers and community on our two conferences, CMSWire CONNECT and Reworked CONNECT.
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