Q&A Panel (All AMER speakers)
SWOOP Analytics
AMER | Viva Engage Festival 2025
Q&A session with all AMER speakers.
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Just honestly, thank you for all of you today for joining us. So I'm going to read out the questions that have been upvoted. So we have one here from Kathleen.
So what I'll do is I'll ask, if you can't answer, feel free to pass it on to someone else in the panel. But curious to know if others allow contingent contract workers to use Engage in your organisation. So this, I think this is a key one.
So, Carla, can I give it to you to answer? Sure, I'll try. I'm not sure what by contingent contract worker. We do have external contractors who would have a .ext extension in their email.
And yes, they are fully able to post and engage on Viva Engage. I see Ray, you're not in tune. I was just letting Carla know you had it right on the dot.
That's exactly what we refer to as contingent workers. Our external partners who have access to our Microsoft environment. And in our case, we do not have contingent workers in our space.
Sometimes, especially when we get to Lilly Connect, it's family only. We could be talking about particular products that are coming out. We could be talking about salary bonuses.
You just never know. So this Viva Engage is just us. It hurts sometimes because you want to point somebody to a great thing on Marketplace or a great puppy picture.
But no, Viva Engage is just us. I should clarify, I would just clarify. These are people, they do have a Siemens Energy Microsoft account as an .ext. We have other contractors who are not in our Microsoft Azure environment.
So there are some we exclude, but those with the Siemens Energy .ext account are in our environment. Thanks. And Chris and Chris, I think I saw one of your comments as well, that you also have contractors.
Is that right, Dan, as well? Yeah. Yeah. Chris Martin, you want to take that one just from an operations perspective? Yeah, absolutely.
So we do have contingent workers that work for Nuveen as well, and they are, keep me honest, but they are included in our Viva Engage just because, you know, we look at it as, you know, they're part of the family as well, a part of the community. And so we want them to be engaged as well in some of the stuff that we're posting out there. Amazing.
Thank you. So there, Kathleen, the consensus is yes. Maybe something to revisit.
I always had it open for contractors as well. So Casey has asked a question, even with guidelines, this is probably quite, have you experienced issues with people feeling that their freedom of speech is being challenged or if a post would be deleted? Dan, can I give that one to you first? Sorry, you're about to drink. I drink a lot of seltzer.
It's OK. I'll have a swig in a minute. Yeah, I mean, the question was about deleting posts.
Well, people experience issues with feeling that their freedom of speech is being challenged if you've had to remove a post. Yeah, I mean, we really don't remove a post. I think we did once.
And I mean, it really and that's. That's how much it stands out at one time. I mean, ultimately, unless you're violating company policy.
I really don't see a need, you know, especially now with the tools that, you know, Alison and team, you know, the engaged product team have rolled out in terms of moderation. You know, we were just having a discussion the other day about muting posts, you know, because it was a topic that's like, well, we don't really need this going viral. I mean, it's not we're hiding it.
It's just like we don't want to consume all the energy in the room around this topic, especially since it was about someone had a misunderstanding of something. So it wasn't even really accurate. But ultimately, you know, we kind of fall back to, again, company policy.
And really, you know, from setting the tone at the top from the beginning, this is no different than the office. This is no different than standing up in a town hall. If you want to stand up in front of the CEO and say something inappropriate.
Good luck. Good luck. That's really what it is.
Right. So it's just the virtual office. And if the same rules apply online that they do in a town hall or in any other place in the office.
Carla, did you have something to add? I would just add that that calling in technique versus calling out really helps to manage or assuage any concerns that you're that you're censoring, what people can say or around free speech, seeking first to understand, seeking to clarify. And again, it's probably less than 10 cases that I've had to do that in two years. And in every time, both both sides, myself or my colleague and the person we reached out to have come away better for it.
And not and no one has felt like we are we are censoring people. And I think that's the thing, isn't it? I think you've got to trust. It's got your name to your picture.
Hopefully your pictures on there, your names attributed to your post. In my experience, I think in my whole time of managing social network networks, I had to remove one post. I think, Carla, like you said, sometimes it's just lost in translation or somebody that sometimes you just don't mean how you feel it comes across.
So, yes, definitely. Right. OK, so let me have a look.
So I can't. There's so many questions. So Viva's seen.
This is from Greg. Viva's seen by numbers seem squishy at best. It's trying to push this out in our corporation Viva being compared to our intranet.
So the views, how do you deal with. Things like the seen by because I think there was a really great comment from Buddy and Ty earlier in the comments, you know, people love they want big numbers on seen by. But actually, you know, what's the objective? Is that posted? Do people understand it? So how do I'm going to go back to all of you if that's OK? So when someone comes to you and says, I don't want to post on Viva Engage, it's only seen by 10 people.
How do you come back with that challenge? So, Ray, I can see you first. Yeah, I'd be glad to. I'm trying to catch up with people's comments.
So thank you, everybody. A lot of fun. I think.
Seen is easy. If you put a GIF, especially in our world, you put a GIF, use Copilot to do something clever, use bullet points and make it easy to read. You tell Bryce that maybe he should sing a song.
You get a lot of eyes. That's great. But it's the response.
I should have shared the story of another, which is our new Outlook community. We are in a migration from one version of Outlook to another, and it's very different. And so that one is a straight on conversation 24-7.
This is a situation I found. It's not working for me here. And we use that because I came running into this meeting from a conversation with Microsoft, where some of those power users here at Lilly were in a call with the Outlook guy because it is it's a challenge.
It's a journey. And so in that space, very much not just about the scene. We could say this is our timeline for turning the switch or flipping that thing.
It's about how does that impact you? Because we don't want to slow people down. We want to make them go faster, help them go faster, help us help you. And it works.
We be able to take that stuff and run with it and got a call from Microsoft. And here he is working on it. So I think scene is easy.
Put a GIF in the right place. Million eyes. But do they really understand what you say, what they're reading? Yeah.
Yeah. Anything else to add on that team? Like it's more of a Chris Dickey question, if you had anything to add. Only Chris.
Oh, sorry, I was already unmuted. After three years, the scene by for us is kind of just baked in and we look at it as the percentage of our total population, because, as you know, we're a smaller part of the broader organization. So we have more people in our all company group than our employees.
So we just look at we have a baseline from three years of just looking at how many views are we getting on a post. So that's just kind of like our scene by baseline. And we're happy with that number.
It's usually like 80 to 90 percent. So if something dips below that, then it's usually a glitch in the system. And that's a whole different conversation.
It's not like people ignored it on purpose. It's like, OK, what else is happening? Are a ton of people on PCO today or something like that? So the scene by is really baked in. And I think it is based on individual viewers.
Like you can't keep reloading the page and getting new numbers. It's the people individually who are looking at the post. So it's unique views.
Now, that's cool. And so also I'm going to do a little plug for SWOOP here. So we do in SWOOP analytics.
We do look at the scene by. And then what we can do for you is also we work out then that reach and engagement as well. So if you want to look at a post, your most engaging post, we can look at that scene by.
And then we'll also work out that reach and engagement for you. So if you're using it as a beaver engage, as a comms tool, we can also calculate that reach and engagement. So it's like people you do need.
I think you do need it, but people can get so hung up on it. And I think it's, you know, it's something that we added quite recent because it was something that people wanted. And I'm going to have a question here.
I've got a question. And actually, Coco and I, when we talk to companies, this comes up quite a lot. Who is allowed to post in your company? So first of all, do you have an all company feed and who is allowed to post into it? Is it restricted or do you have it open to everyone? I think this is a really good question.
And I think this is something that can help everyone. So, Chris Martin, I can see you. Are you OK to answer this? Was this a. Yeah, absolutely.
So we have sort of. So basically how it worked is we sort of had an all company sort of community before we started rolling out a lot more communities. So we sort of left that all company as just a free sort of channel where anyone can post.
And then what we've done is sort of branched out to other communities. For example, we have one for our parent company, TI Communications. We have one for Nuveen as well as different smaller business areas that we restrict posting on.
But we wanted to still leave some because we don't use storylines much. I think we're more of a community based organization in terms of being engaged. So what we did was sort of leave that all company open.
So people still felt like they had some sort of a community, a channel to post about personal stuff. And then for the other more business related ones, we've sort of restricted that to where only admins can post, which we keep a close eye on. Anyone else? Can you talk about Siemens Energy All Company? Yeah, we recently rebranded our all company as Team Purple and we made it restricted.
It was previously open to anyone, but we were getting a lot of feedback from our people that they didn't know where to find the most important information in the company. They weren't sure what went where because we had Siemens Energy News. We had this all company, then we had regional communities, etc.
So we made a conscious decision to turn the all company into a restricted channel and we communicated and educated our people that that's where the most important news goes. That's where the executive board members post. We have six of them.
Of course, they have communication business partners who sometimes post on their behalf. But they are the ones posting the senior leaders and that is a dedicated channel for what we consider to be the most important company news. And then we have Siemens Energy News, which is open and that's like our town hall or community square or newspaper.
Anybody can post and engage there. And Ray, same for you, all company? All company and our team, Lilly, which are both of our global, are free to post. Anyone can post, not anyone can announce.
That's the email blast and we don't want to create noise. But if you have an idea you want to share, if you have something you're proud of, you're welcome to use either. Some people use both.
I agree with Carla that the executive committee tends to use all company. The team Lilly thing, I don't know, the fuzzier stuff goes in there. So this isn't a question, I don't think this is in the Q&A, but this is something I'm curious about.
And actually, it's something that we're hearing a lot from. I think APAC had it this morning and it's something that we definitely saw in Amir. Is these announcements, like how do you deal with announcements, ping enough, information overload? Do you allow people just to announce within your guidance, guidelines? No, Carla, I can see Carla.
Carla, we'll start with you. Let's talk about announcements. Well, for me, the foundation of the issue is for us, I posted earlier, you know, we have this mantra, reduce the noise, increase the impact.
I was presenting at Microsoft last year about this. We have eight employee personas. We did rigorous research.
We looked at surveys, we did interviews, you know, more than 1,500 hours of interviews with our employees to create the personas. And everything they said was it's too much. And we created a slide with this guy, we call him poor Jens.
And in an average week, Jens get email, health and safety, compliance, Viva Engage. He's got SharePoint, Teams meetings, digital screens, in-person meetings, posters, stuff in the cafeteria. Like, ah, so that's why we call him poor Jens.
So we did the personas. Then we did an editorial calendar. We have a separate tool that we use.
All the communicators, there's 250 of us, have access to it. Everything gets scheduled. A Viva Engage post by a senior leader at the N-1 or N-2 level gets scheduled.
Announcements get scheduled. Emails, newsletters, everything is scheduled. And we do not do more than one announcement per week, more than one employee letter by email per week.
We schedule articles in SharePoint and all of that. So it's really about knowing your audience, understanding all of the channels that they have access to, who they are, what channels they use, and targeting the communications by employee group and by channel. That's amazing.
Does that answer the question? That's amazing. I just think, yeah, I think. And it's like having air traffic control, isn't it? You absolutely need that, I think.
Because otherwise, everyone just, it's just announcements, announcements, announcements. And then, as you said, the emails are coming out. So it's just, this is why I think the information overload calculator, that's how that came about.
Because the feedback we went out with before we started the benchmarking this year is, what's one of your biggest challenges? And it was this information overload. So I think it's just really, you know, how does a comms team work with teams that love an announcement? Chris, I know you spoke in there, and Dan, you spoke about your, you have a content calendar as well. So is that something that you cover with your announcements? Do you ever use announcements? Yeah.
Sorry, go ahead, Dan. No, I was just going to say, yeah, I think just to give, given where my part of the presentation was, and then I'll turn it over to CM as we call him, Chris Martin, Chris Dickey. You know, the announcement thing, and this is something that, you know, even going really my whole time using the platform, you know, it's gotten a lot better, obviously, with the not having everything be a duplicate push of teams and email.
Really, we focus the announcements on the leadership team of whatever that given group is, right? So really, it's the senior executive of that group and their leadership team that have the rights to send, and that's it. And we try and manage that with them. At the Nuveen level, where we have the editorial calendar component, I mean, it can range.
I mean, there are some weeks where it is heavier, but it also relates to something specific, like in a past life, it was customer service week. So there was more that particular week versus, like, the middle of the summer, not as much. But really, we restrict it to the people that people really want to hear from, like the State of the Union, you know, where are we going? You know, and they're looking to their leaders for that information versus just kind of random people around the organization.
They don't have those capabilities. But Chris, if you wanted to add there. Yeah, it's just with our organization and, you know, the fact that we have sort of handed off some of the keys to different sort of smaller groups within the organization.
It's definitely something we want to coach them on to just because, you know, a lot of times you don't have visibility as to everything that's sort of going out amongst the organization. So, for example, like our workplace services group does a lot of posting for sort of events that just are going on in the office. And sort of how we try to corral them is just say, like, hey, can we reduce the number of announcements that you send in a month? So instead of sending out, you know, daily daily announcements about, you know, coffee in the break room, can you do maybe one announcement at the beginning of the month or for a quarter basis where you're sort of lining out all the events that we have? So it's just another way to sort of reduce the noise that's sort of coming out of, you know, a nuanced organization like ours.
That's incredible. Yeah, it is. It's just helpful, isn't it? And also, I'm just going to plug one of our Viva Engage success guides from information overload.
I think it's guide seven is dealing with information overload and some things to think about. So I have a look at that. I think that that's super helpful as well.
I'm going to just I don't know if I can open it up to the floor. Does anyone have any questions? Well, we've got this incredible panel here. Do we want to take advantage? We've got about five minutes.
I didn't know if anyone wanted to come off mute and ask a question because I can see we've got the Q&A's and a lot of them have been answered by the team. So thank you. Thank you for helping.
But is anyone here want to come off? You can even ask Cai a question as well on the benchmarking report. It's a bit daunting, isn't it? Coming off mute. OK, well, I think I'm going to wrap it up there.
Are you all happy to be connected on LinkedIn? I'm just going to say, is that OK? Yeah. Brilliant. Thank you.
Thank you. Just thank you again for. Can I just ask people include it? Can you just include a note, a note when you get to put my LinkedIn there, but just a note from SWOOP Festival just so I can.
Yeah, that was great. You are a communicator, Carla. Good call.
And just while you're all here. Thank you. Thank you again for taking two and a half hours out of your day.
And thank you to everyone. Also, that is on the call. I know some people have had to drop, but thank you.
Like it's kept everyone engaged. The presentations have been out of this world. Honestly, I've never seen a chat as on fire as that as I have today.
Like it was incredible. So thank you. Thank you to everyone.
Meet the speaker:
Dan Mulcahey
Nuveen
Carla Guest
Siemens Energy
Ray Gonzales
Eli Lilly and Company
