Innovative approaches to employee communications can transform a team from simply executing manual tasks to driving meaningful business impact. By shifting focus from tactical efforts to delivering strategic value, communication teams can align more closely with leadership expectations and contribute to the overall success of the organization.
Tarek Kamil, the founder and CEO of Cerkl, discussed this powerful concept in a Fireside Chat at the Advanced Learning Institute (ALI) 3rd Annual Innovations in Employee Communications conference in Chicago recently. Cerkl sponsored the event, and Ali Mallett, Senior Communications Strategist at Paycor, was a speaker at the conference. They were joined by Valarie McCarthy, Senior Manager, Internal Communications at Paycor. Their conversation centered on the challenges the company faced before adopting Cerkl Broadcast and how the platform has since empowered them.
Highlights From the Conversation
Paycor has evolved from email and Intranet to personalization across the enterprise powered by A.I. Broadcast also provides them with essential analytics.
- Paycor no longer creates email in Outlook, instead they use drag-and-drop email creation functionality built into Broadcast.
- Instead of submitting tickets for distribution list creation/updates, Paycor internal communicators use Dynamic Segments, allowing them to work faster without needing to wait on IT or HRIS.
- Vital analytics guide and inform decision-making by providing actionable insights from data.
- The IC team has more time to invest in strategic initiatives benefitting Paycor and its associates.
- Instead of building newsletters by hand, they leverage Broadcast’s News Digest feature that builds a news recap for every employee based on what they need to know and want to know,
“Cerkl Broadcast takes us from just being a tactical communication team to being a team that can be more thoughtful about how we are making an impact on the business and hopefully providing the strategic value that our leaders expect from us.” Valarie McCarthy
About Paycor
A global company with about 3,000 employees, Paycor provides HR and payroll solutions that empower leaders to build winning teams. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Paycor is a completely virtual-first company. This shift happened with COVID-19, when they had a 180-degree transition from everybody in the office to nobody in the office.
While most employees are in the U.S., there are also people in Canada, Israel, and Serbia. Positions range from sales, product design, and customer experience desk jobs to those that involve fieldwork or spending the entire day on the phone.
“So, it’s really important for us to be able to meet our employees where they’re at when it comes to communicating,” says Ali.
Communication Tools: Then and Now
There’s been a paradigm shift between the communication tools Paycor used before and after 2022.
Old Style Communication Tools
Prior to 2022, the Paycor IC team used Bananatag and Outlook as email marketing tools for internal comms. There was a lot of manual work, including submission forms. When it came to targeting and segmentation, they were forced to rely on the HR and IT departments for spreadsheets and distribution lists (DLs).
Valarie says they were inundated by email at Paycor! “Our associates were getting so many emails from Internal Communications that it was overload for them to sift through business-priority messages, versus company ‘inform’ messages.”
“You shouldn’t be handcuffed to other parts of your organization,” says Tarek. “You should have the freedom to go build your own audience your way.” The fundamental Cerkl philosophy is that “you should be delivering a consumer-grade experience inside your organization.”
He highlights typical communications younger generations use today, including Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and X (previously Twitter), and asks why any workplace needs to look like it did in 1997. What Paycor was doing “is pretty common,” he says. “Microsoft stack hard analytics, or no analytics, within email, building everything manually. You’ve got to build a newsletter that you’re hoping will resonate with 3,000 people. That’s crazy hard. That’s like logging into Netflix and everyone has the same experience. They’d be out of business tomorrow!”
How Has Paycor Overcome These Challenges Using Cerkl?
Being a tech company, they like to embrace different kinds of technology to do their work, says Valarie. They still use basic Microsoft tools like Outlook and Teams, and their intranet is their virtual front door. That’s where employees check in to get the information they need about the company.
Then there’s Cerkl Broadcast, which they use for Email Blasts and News Digests.
Email Blasts
“We love Email Blasts,” says Valarie, “because they allow us to push business-critical information and high-priority leadership messages to our associates in a highly-polished, simple way.” She adds that they are easy to create and are branded with Paycor colors, pictures, and so on. “We can ‘set it and forget it’ when it comes to scheduling.”
Another major benefit is that they allow the internal communicators to “put focus on critical information and drive people back to our intranet.” She cites a recent example of them using a Blast to drive people to event information for their annual all-employee culture event, Playcor. This is where they could get login instructions, information about the event, and see teaser videos.
News Digest
Broadcast New Digest is automated internal newsletter software that is AI-powered for content and distribution. It is “really, really important,” says Valarie. “It ensures that associates stay connected to everything going on around Paycor, at a time that works perfectly for them since they are able to choose when they want to receive communications. The Broadcast platform feeds Email Blasts from the Paycor intranet, and employees decide whether they want to receive them weekly, daily, and at the time of day that suits them. These, she says, are now two of the key tools they use. Additionally, they hold various meetings to help deliver information.
Ali gives an example of an employee who wants a news Blast to arrive at 8 am on Wednesdays. Their content requirement is to get company news, and IT updates, and to learn what the Young Professionals employee resource group is doing. The key is that they are getting what they need and not information they don’t need and will ignore.
“However, as an internal communicator, if we have a big story that someone may not be subscribed to, we can push that so they’re still getting it. It helps cut through that noise. You’re not sending a bazillion emails a week on every little thing you have.” Ali Mallett
All the internal communicators have to do is make sure the message or post looks right, has the appropriate tags, and it pulls through automatically.
This has made a huge impact.
The Power of News Digests
Tarek, who considers himself to be an internal communications “nerd” rather than a practitioner, is ultimately a problem-solver. As such, he considers audience management, email design, and analytics to be very basic requirements for the consumer-grade experience Broadcast offers. Intranet content is pushed automatically to Broadcast so that the content sits in a repository, just as it does on Netflix. When you subscribe to Netflix, they ask what sort of movies you want to watch or want to see. It then “makes intelligent recommendations about what’s in the repository that you either need to see and haven’t seen or want to see based on your behavior.” That’s also what News Digest does.
Paycor’s News Digests are called Paycor News. Built by AI, they personalize news for all 3,000 employees. Even the subject line is created for individuals, based on what they need to see, haven’t seen, or want to see.
Ali explains how important this is to her. Before Broadcast, they were producing manual newsletters that “took me forever to compile.” She needed a submission form and then had to search their intranet for events and blogs. It took her more than an hour to complete. Now it takes her only minutes to complete the process.
“You can be very specific about the reach. Who’s going to get it, how long it runs, so you still have total control. But the idea is the pattern that Netflix follows, Amazon, everybody follows this pattern. We should be doing this internally.” Tarek Kamil
And this is exactly what every organization using Broadcast News Digest is doing.
Other News Digest Benefits
The other important advantage is that users have access to templates for their Email Blasts. They can also develop their own custom templates.
Valarie says that they “love” News Digest templates. “We’ve got templates we’ve created for every one of our leaders, functions, and certain segments of the business.” That amounts to 50 different templates, which means that they can flip through them very quickly, accommodating different needs.
This means that fonts, brand colors, and general brand presentation stays constant.
The other important benefits, as Tarek highlights, are that employees get to choose the language they want News Digests in as well as the time they want them delivered. “We are making a lot of assumptions about language, day and time, the stories, the headlines… No consumer-grade platform that you use treats you this way. And so, when we talk to communicators, they’re like, I don’t know how to do it any other way.”
He adds, “That’s where I get excited because that’s exactly how technology can help you.”
Impact of Analytics on Paycor
It’s the figures that matter.
Email analytics from 2023 to September 2024 show:
- 614k Email Blasts have been sent so far
- Average audience size has been 1,412
- 34% click rate
My Paycor News for the same period show:
- 285k sent
- 68% audience reach
- 32% click rate
- 247 Segments
- Top categories are employee experience, career development, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)
Benefits of Cerkl Broadcast
Ultimately, Ali and Valarie agree on the many benefits the Paycor switch to Cerkl has enabled. For example, Broadcast:
- Saves a lot of time
- Makes their jobs much easier
- Produces on-demand analytics via Eblasts
- Gives communicators more control
- Provides employees with the messages they want to read
“What I love about Cerkl is how our data feeds into it. And I can create a message that is personalized to each associate with custom fields of information we have about them. So if I want to say, please confirm your birth date is x, I can because that data is in the system, I can actually put a custom field into my message and it gets directly to the right person.” Valarie McCarthy
Ali adds that it used to take days to get distribution lists from their internal support team. When they needed a last-minute quick turnaround, this simply didn’t work. The same would apply when she needed a list of associates in another country. “Now, I can go onto Cerkl, create a custom Segment, and then export it so I have that entire list. It honestly saves so much time and back and forth.”
In terms of analytics, they are able to assess how they engage employees. They can also identify what interests different people.
What Do Paycor Communicators Do with the Time They Save?
“We’re able to invest a lot more time in those things that take a lot of time,” says Valarie. This helps them to make sure that they are more intentional about the content they are creating.
Ali says that it enables them to redesign communication methods. She shares that Paycor has a Leadership Corner, which is a microsite for leaders that she has been able to completely redesign. This offers a toolkit for leaders along with development opportunities, and it is updated twice a week.
“I think the bottom line is it allows us to be more strategic in our communications,” she says. “So, instead of spending the time writing, which is very important, it helps us be more thoughtful and critical about what we are doing and who the people that we’re working with are. Then, we can have more meaningful conversations with our partners and create the right communications for them.”
What’s Next
Cerkl Broadcast can improve your internal communications strategy just as it has for Paycor. The program can boost employee engagement, information flow, and ROI, and help you optimize your analytics. Want to know more?
