Effectively engaging associates spread across six different hospital locations and more than 100 physician and specialty offices is tough. Now try engaging almost 10,000 associates, physicians, and volunteers working on various shifts with tasks ranging from cafeteria staff to neurosurgeons. You understand the challenge that St. Elizabeth Healthcare was facing. St. Elizabeth Hospital partnered with Cerkl to replace the employee newsletter PDF. It introduced AI-powered email and intranet personalization and started measuring employee engagement statistics.
Since opening its first hospital over 155 years ago, St. Elizabeth Healthcare has launched many initiatives both internally and externally – including health, environmental, open enrollment, and community involvement. Developing a unified message for these community initiatives was top of mind as Sarah Wice-Courtney, Director of Communications and PR.
Sarah and her team knew they needed to take this challenge head-on. She decided her team would utilize the power of A.I. to personalize St. Elizabeth’s associates’ content. Discover how personalized employee engagement leads to awesome retention rates and an innovative workplace.
Bringing AI-powered email and intranet personalization
Sarah wanted to create content that was not only easier for her team to produce, but that would resonate more with each individual associate. That’s why Sarah and St. Elizabeth joined forces with Cerkl to deliver AI-powered email and intranet personalization.
Sarah and her team are now able to maximize content creation by both generating content within Cerkl and pulling their existing content from their website using RSS feeds. Both sources then combine to populate the personalized automated emails that are distributed to all associates.
Through RSS feeds, St. Elizabeth is able to deliver a wide variety of content that reflects the diverse interests of its associates. Shifting from the tight confines of the employee newsletter PDF has made the team “feel more like an online newsgroup.”
The team is able to automatically distribute content to staff based on their interests, position, shift, and location. For example, instead of receiving an email about parking lot repairs at the Ft. Thomas location, an associate from the Florence location who is interested in wellness initiatives and patient experience will receive personalized content reflecting those interests.
Cerkl compiles the content, and Sarah and her team create it into the St. Elizabeth Healthcare Connection Content Archive. This archive has become the de facto intranet and has helped keep users out of email. It exposes staff to other content that may be of interest through Cerkl’s intranet personalization. It also helps build out their interest profile so they can continually shape what content they receive.
The IC team has received many positive associate reviews that specifically mention their love for their personalized, AI-powered employee newsletters. Each associate’s personalized interests send them stories that cut down on spending time weeding through emails that don’t affect their position.
Additionally, cross-departmental collaboration has increased, as jostling for positions in the static employee newsletter PDF is no longer required. Now each team has its stories told and automatically distributed to those who are interested or need to receive the content.
Getting Rid of the Static Employee Newsletter PDF
Sarah says Cerkl has removed the tactical stress for the St. Elizabeth team. The roughly 40 hours per month spent building the static employee newsletter PDF are now reclaimed! Her team now takes on mission-critical tasks sooner and moves the needle in truly impacting associate engagement.
Sarah’s team has been able to translate this additional time to create new, engaging content and streamline their new hire onboarding process. Using Cerkl, all new associates receive a welcome email. The email signals the start of their onboarding and a personalized, engaging relationship with St. Elizabeth. This welcome email is then followed by engaging content that gets them up to speed earlier than the former process.
“Cerkl’s introductory email is another way we welcome new associates to St. Elizabeth. We’re able to engage these new hires, establish a conversation, and have them become acquainted with our voice and culture.”
Chad Schwalbach
Communications Coordinator, Associate Engagement, St. Elizabeth
With more than 100 physical locations, communicating and engaging with each practitioner, staff member, or physician could be difficult. With Cerkl, St Elizabeth no longer sends one message meant for the masses. Now it utilizes its Insights to grow its content strategy and generate actionable employee engagement statistics for the IC department.
Actionable Associate Communications Metrics
After two years as a Cerkl partner, St. Elizabeth has saved $717,066 in employee productivity cost savings.
Using the Insights feature, Sarah and her team have accessed a wealth of information, from overall metrics down to the metrics of each individual associate.
For example, let’s take a look at a Nurse Practitioner at St. Elizabeth, Emily. Insights show us important information such as her personalized delivery settings and information, her employee engagement statistics, and her top five interests. These behaviors and interests can fluctuate over time. But Cerkl tracks associate’s engagement levels and automatically updates their content based on their current preferences.
The internal Communications team can utilize employee engagement statistics from the Categories dashboard to identify their most engaging content. In addition, it provides communicators with Content Opportunities to assist with developing employee newsletter content ideas that feed their content strategy. With previously using employee newsletter PDF, it was not possible to utilize these statistics.
Cerkl helps take the guessing out of content creation. Instead, it provides Sarah’s team with actionable data to prove their department’s true value.
Innovative Employee Newsletter
Greater engagement and the simplified flow of information are helping with associate retention, says St. Elizabeth’s Communications Coordinator, Chad Schwalbach.
“Since our use of Cerkl, our open enrollment engagement continued to increase.”
Chad Schwalbach
Sarah could tell that Cerkl was working just from the amount of time that she and her team had. They could focus on additional ways to increase associate engagement instead of laboring over a twice-weekly newsletter. Having sent over 35,000 communications so far with Cerkl, Sarah says it “allows us to make our employee newsletter a very reliable resource to our associates. The newsletter contains relevant information that they want to hear and learn about.”
Their stats definitely support that. With an open rate of 85%, they are eclipsing the national average for internal employee newsletters of 60%. Also, their click-thru rate of 32% more than doubles the national average of 15%. This change mainly happened as a result of replacing the static employee newsletter PDF.
Investing in your healthcare employee experience not only creates a corporate culture that attracts quality healthcare associates, but it can increase hospital ratings’ and profits climb. With an AI-powered email and intranet personalization, St. Elizabeth Hospital has everything it needs to make great-performing employee newsletters.
What’s next?
Improve internal communication with Cerkl Broadcast. Our AI-powered platform delivers personalized emails and intranet content to engage and inform employees. Join millions of satisfied employees who trust us to streamline their companies’ communication and improve employee satisfaction.
To learn more about improving employee satisfaction in your organization through internal communications, schedule a demo now.
