Cohesion

Building a Better Employee Experience for Frontline Workers Through Mobile-First Technology with Hannah Bolte, Director of Marketing & Communications at Lozier Corporation

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Hannah Bolte, Director of Marketing and Communications at Lozier Corporation. Starting as a print and television reporter, Hannah uses her journalism expertise to craft internal, external, and crisis communications strategies and content. In this episode, Amanda and Hannah discuss Lozier’s mobile-first employee experience platform, reaching deskless workers, and intentional communications.

Episode Notes

This episode features an interview with Hannah Bolte, Director of Marketing and Communications at Lozier Corporation. Starting as a print and television reporter, Hannah uses her journalism expertise to craft internal, external, and crisis communications strategies and content.

In this episode, Amanda and Hannah discuss Lozier’s mobile-first employee experience platform, reaching deskless workers, and intentional communications.

-------------------

"The bulk of our employees work in a manufacturing facility. They don't have email access and their jobs are in the plant, it's not sitting at a desk. We approached the intranet in finding an intranet that would work for us with a sense of, ‘We can't reach those employees right now,’ aside from all those things that you said, like a flier in the break room, providing information to supervisors to say at startup meetings. But, how do you engage them beyond their day-to-day? How do you make them feel like they're part of something bigger? How do you make them realize their impact on the company, on the community? So, mobile-first was a non-negotiable thing for us. We had to make sure that it was accessible by all of our employees at any point in time." – Hannah Bolte

-------------------

Episode Timestamps:

*(01:47): Hannah’s background

*(08:09): Segment: Story Time

*(09:13): Why Lozier created a mobile-first employee experience platform

*(11:58): Segment: Getting Tactical

*(12:27): Hannah explains the ins and outs of LozierLink

*(29:30): Segment: Ripped From The Headlines

*(32:49): Segment: Asking For a Friend

-------------------

Links:

Connect with Hannah on LinkedIn

Connect with Lozier Corporation on LinkedIn

Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn

www.simpplr.com/podcast

Episode Transcription

Amanda Berry: Hi, Hannah. How are you? 

Hannah Bolte: I'm great.

How are you?

Amanda Berry: I'm doing really well. Thanks for asking. Thank you so much for joining me today. I wanna start off and get a little bit more of an understanding about you and your background. Can you talk about your career journey and how you got to where 

you are today? 

Hannah Bolte: Sure. So right now I'm the director of marketing and communications at Lozier Corporation, and Lozier is a sheet metal manufacturing company.

We're headquartered here in Omaha, Nebraska. We make the store shelves that you see in. Almost every store retailer, gas station that you encounter. We also do the warehouse shelving and a lot of the warehouses. And another area that we are in is the checkout counters and self checkout counters that you see in virtually every place that you shop.

So I came to almost two years ago and I'll kind of back up with my career journey. Started my professional career as a television journalist, so I worked in Des Moines, Iowa, and at a couple stations here in Omaha, Nebraska, and you know, had a number of different. Experiences and opportunities as a on-air television reporter.

And from there I moved out of television reporting and got into the corporate communications sector and have worked for a couple of really large publicly traded companies and. Have learned the other side, if you will, of communications in the business. So I was able to take my collective experiences from television and from working for Fortune 500, fortune one 50 companies and learning the ropes of internal communications, external communications, public relations advertising, coupling that with my on-air experience as a reporter, and was able to bring that here to

and really stand up a communications team. 

Amanda Berry: Was there something in your career that took you from that pivotal moment of TV news, TV reporter to that pr, marketing communications? Was there something in that that convinced you to make that 

switch? 

Hannah Bolte: I loved being a reporter. It was almost like a calling for me, being able to tell other people's stories and being able to have that impact on the community where I.

Was a really big deal for me, and I loved every minute of it. It was wonderful for me professionally, I learned a lot. Every day was a new adventure and you had to become an expert within a few hours and be confident enough about that to talk about it on television. Quite frankly. I met my husband on the job.

He was a firefighter, I was a reporter, and we decided to have a family and. Hours of being a reporter who primarily covered crime and. With the occasional community as well, and then the firefighting hours were just not really conducive to having a family. So I ended up leaving the journalism industry to ultimately have a better schedule.

So that's why I got into corporate. . 

Amanda Berry: Awesome. Great. 

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people that I talk to on this podcast don't have a traditional, like I started, you know, in communications and it, it's a lot of times you take those skills from other areas and are able to utilize them in a role like marketing communications, 

external.

Hannah Bolte: I think it definitely brings a different approach. I would say it's very non-traditional. Right. But it's, it's a different form of diverse background where you can take your collect. Experiences and bring them into an industry that's really kinda open-minded and well, let's try it. And that's a different approach and maybe that different approach is what sets us out in the crowd.

Amanda Berry: Yeah, I love that idea 

of 

Amanda Berry: writing news stories and then bringing that along in employee communications. Cause it's, it's a very similar sort of style. It is what works 

Hannah Bolte: really well. Yeah, it is. And it's honestly, it's how people. Their news and the every day, the day to day. So why wouldn't you want to create that consistency in how they're consuming company news?

Right. Well, 

Amanda Berry: tell us a little bit about what you do at Loger. I know that you, you know, marketing internal comms. Can you just sort of give an overview of what you 

Hannah Bolte: do at Lozier? Sure. So I oversee all internal, external communications, marketing, advertising. One of the first projects I had when I came to in 2021 was they didn't have a true intranet platform.

And the way that we think of an intranet platform, the way that our workforce is divided between five different physical locations that are separated by states, Thousands of miles and the bulk of our workforce works in a manufacturing facility, uh, of factory. So the work that they do is not sitting in front of a computer reading email so that they're connected to the company the way that the company has communicated with them.

Previous to my joining the company was a printed newsletter that was mailed to their homes quarterly, and that newsletter was, HR really kind of led that effort because that function just wasn't within the company at the time. So HR led that effort and relied on folks in each facility to be reporters and to give content to be included, which was.

Challenging is what I was told. So when I started at er, one of the first projects was, all right, let's stand up a true intranet so that we have a mobile first way of. Communicating with our employees in relatively real time, which was, you know, light years ahead of a quarterly printed newsletter that by the time it reached their home was pretty outdated.

So that was one of my first projects. Other things that kind of fall under this umbrella are. , our external communications, our work in the community, community outreach, community engagement, employee engagement, public relations, media. We also have a customer facing communications with trade shows and collaterals.

So our team is very talented. We have graphic designers, we have videographers, we have content contributors, and then we have the community outreach and engagement folks that are. Talking about our company career opportunities and whatnot in the schools and in the community every day. 

Amanda Berry: You really just peaked my interest.

I have so many questions about that, about the story you just told. I'm gonna move us into our first segment story time. 

Speaker 1: Welcome to story time, story time, story time. Lemme tell you your story. 

Amanda Berry: I feel a lot of passion around this idea of. What we would call desk lists or frontline workers, right? I've been in internal communications for a company that hadn't had that challenge, and so I, I know that we spend so much time in internal communications trying to reach people who may not be sitting at a desk with access to email all the time, access to an internet, you know, on a desktop.

Slack teams, the whole deal. Right? There's a lot of challenges in there. And then just hearing your story, we spend a lot of time around printed newsletters, maybe digital signage, posters in break rooms, right? We're constantly trying to create ways to communicate them. Yeah. Work with their manager, so on and so forth.

Right. And this isn't just specific to manufacturing. It can be pharmacies, it can be flight attendants, it can be, you know, medical devices. It can be a whole lot of different industries that. This, I wanna really dig into this, so I wonder if you could just talk about what led Lozier to go, we need a mobile first app because the old ways aren't cutting 

Hannah Bolte: it.

Sure. The printed Quarterly newsletter, there was really no way to tell, Hey, this is successful, or it's really not. There's no metric associated with that. The metric would be did it get done? Did it get mail? great. But there was no real feedback mechanism on that, if you will. , when we talk about employee engagement, when we talk about retention and just generally like feeling good about where you work and feeling like you're part of a bigger picture team, you are not just Omaha, Nebraska.

This isn't just like Lozier and Omaha, but Scottsboro, Alabama is connected because we are all one team. We just have multiple locations. So the newsletter wasn't necessarily bridging that. . I wouldn't say that it wasn't effective because there wasn't a way to tell if it was or not. So as a company, we realized the need to kind of broaden that scope and realize that we're all part of it, right?

We're all one company, we just have multiple locations. They realized we needed that. So when we were looking for an intranet, there are a lot of intranets that look cool and they're flash. But they're really tailored more to your desk worker. Someone who sits in an office or is on their computer all day every day, and it's bam right there on your homepage.

There's a lot of that, but that's not the sector of employee that we are having a hard time reaching and really engaging the bulk of our employees don't do. , the bulk of our employees work in a manufacturing facility. They don't have email access and their jobs are in the plant. It's not sitting at a desk.

So we approach the intranet in finding an intranet that would work for us. With a sense of we can't reach those employees right now, aside from all those things that you said, like a flyer in the break room, providing information to supervisors to say at startup meetings, but how do you engage them beyond their day-to-day?

How do you make them feel like they're part of something bigger? How do you make them realize their impact on the company, on the community? So mobile first was a non-negotiable. Thing for us, we had to make sure that it was accessible by all of our employees at any point in time, and that's kind of how we found Simpplr.

Wow. 

Amanda Berry: I'm gonna move us into our next segment, getting tactical. 

Speaker 1: I'm trying to figure out tactics and to be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much, here I am in charge of trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics, tactics.

Amanda Berry: I feel like there's so much we can dig in here that I know personally, like I said earlier, I've had this experience and just constantly trying ways to make things work. So I wanna dig into your brain a little bit here and have you open up your playbook and understand sort of how you've done it and, and been successful.

So let's first talk about as you were designing the internet and thinking. What kind of content we're gonna put on it for our employees. How did you start to figure out what kind of information you wanted to have available to your 

Hannah Bolte: employees? I mean, they're the obvious ones, right? Like, what are our company objectives and how are we doing making progress toward those objectives?

Those are big things From uh, content perspective, I would say that it's been a little bit of trial and error. So when you go to your favorite news, , you don't just see things that you are interested in, right? You see a little bit of everything. You see some hard news about, maybe some breaking news about something that happened overnight or something that's going on right now.

You're gonna see some sports, whether you care about sports or not. You're gonna see some weather, whether you care about it or not. And then you're probably gonna see some more human interest type of things that some people really enjoy and others it's not their jam. . When we were designing the intranet, I kind of made the same approach.

So my background is journalism, so I believe in providing kind of a spice of life, if you will, a little bit of everything, because all of that is reflective of our culture. So we're not just gonna share the hard news of here's our company goals and here's how we're doing toward them, and here are these big projects that are going on to make, you know, strides in the long.

Those are great and those have a place and those are important to include, but we're also going to include what have we done in our communities? Is there someone who's done something really cool and unique? Well, let's talk about it. That's more of a human interest story. Is there an example of a team that's lived one of our core values and how they've done it well?

Could you then write about that or tell that in a visual way that might inspire another group within the company to do something similar? , those are the great things to talk about. Is there a spark of innovation that's happened within a different department or a different team that could start that ball rolling for someone else?

So from a content strategy perspective, I'd say it's a really big balance of hard news. With company goals, company initiatives, long-term planning, updates that impact our business, how we do work, and then it's balanced and coupled with the intentional culture that we're trying to create with our community, involvement with our softer stories, if you will, of impact in the community or interesting human interest type of stories.

So it's a fine balance, I would say, between all of that. Just exactly like you would find on any news website. I 

Amanda Berry: wanna talk about rolling it out. So you created your, you know, your categories or types of content. How did you roll this out to employees who, again, primarily don't sit at a desk or have email, those sorts of things.

How did you plan to roll this out and how did you roll it out and get people to download the app and use it? 

Hannah Bolte: So I think it's really important to understand how we communicated with our employees about big things like we are in the Midwest right now. There's a nice sheet of ice out there. 

Amanda Berry: We have that up here.

I'm in Wisconsin. It's, yeah, it's 

Hannah Bolte: natural. You guys have it worse than we do, but I think it's important to understand like where we were at from communicating things like impacts to work schedules before and the. That had worked prior to having a true mobile first intranet. Was it? There was a calling tree.

There was a voicemail that you could call into to see, Hey, is this shift delayed? Because we have three different shifts as manufacturing. Nobody in the plants are working eight to five, or the production folks, they're not working eight to five. So there was a number you could call to see, or obviously if you were in a building, there's the overhead PA system.

My group, HR senior leadership, it all partnered together and we put it folks in the plants and we communicated the benefits of this platform. So it's not just about making everybody feel connected. That is a goal, but that's not a hard metric type of a goal, and that's not a hard reason for you to download this app on your personal device and engage with it.

So what are the competitive advantages? Why should I have this? And I think that's how we approached our communications from a supervisor level. I met with a lot of people and said, here's what it is. Here's why it matters, and the why it matters. And the plants is. Now you don't have to come into work to find out that your shift got canceled.

You don't have to risk your own personal safety to drive on that icy road to see if you have to work or maybe dial into this number. Now you get a push notification like any other app on your phone, and bam, now you know, okay, we're delayed by two hours. now I don't have to leave. Or it's not a matter of, well, I was never told, so there's that.

The other thing that's a real. Selling point, if you will, to in the manufacturing facilities, and I would say even in the office, is all of your benefits information is right in one place. So we use a number of different tools for our benefits that all have different URLs, different logins. So we aggregated those into like one page, one story to where now if you're on mobile, you can go access your 401k, you can go access your flex spending and all of.

Is living in a central place on the internet. So how we rolled it out is we partnered a lot cross-functionally, internally to talk about the what's in it for me. And those were big things for a lot of people to have in one spot. No, that's funny you mentioned 

Amanda Berry: that as, as you mentioned, like the benefits, having like all that at your fingertips, I'm old enough to remember working at companies that didn't have intranets and you'd have to save the booklets of um, you know, your health insurance benefits and then you'd have to call H R F.

You couldn't find that or sit there and flip through or find it. Right. Find it not your files. That is such a great advantage of having it 

Hannah Bolte: all digital. And we had, I mean, all of our benefit. There are URLs associated with them, but it's a matter of, is it just on the kiosk that you log into at work? Do you remember what that URL is when you're trying to pull your information to meet with your accountant or whatever for taxes?

If you're having a conversation at home with your significant other and you're trying to pull that stuff up, do you remember what it is? Well, now you don't have to. Yeah, you can just click on it. Right. , 

Amanda Berry: you had mentioned, you know, employees having to download the app on their phone, and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of those concerns you heard coming from employees with this new technology within, you know, an employee experience platform, things you were hearing maybe from employees, you know, supervisors and company leaders that you were having to sort of mitigate and 

Hannah Bolte: discuss.

We didn't make it a require. So our intranet is available if you wanna log in on your computer, on your tablet, whatever, from home. But we didn't make downloading at a requirement. It's a benefit. It's a significant benefit to you if you do, but we didn't set any parameters around. You have to do this. It is your personal device.

And we take into consideration people's concerns about that, and they're entitled to have those concerns. You know, we communicated a lot that this is a third party app. We didn't create the app. This is a third party. And again, we didn't make it a requirement. And I think that was the biggest thing is. , if you want to download it, it's to your benefit, but if you don't want to, you can still access that information.

We have it on the kiosks in the plant, the computer kiosks, and now we have the digital signage on the TVs as well. So they are exposed to that, whether they have the app or not. And then, you know, some folks would just wanna log in from home and see it too, which is perfectly fine. We just wanted to make sure it was accessible, but we didn't wanna.

A mandate around it. Yeah, 

Amanda Berry: that's great. How are you driving traffic to the app? Like how are you getting employees to log in and look at 

Hannah Bolte: stuff? So, as part of our new employee orientation, our employees go through a class when they first started about welcome to Lozier year. And as part of that, The folks there share that.

This is our one way of communicating with people. We're getting away from the mass email for office folks and for plant folks, this is the one way we're going to communicate schedule changes with you. We put together a video about here's what your link is and here's why you should use it, and here's how you download the app.

And then our app is branded and it's not publicly available in the Apple store. So we have different QR codes that we have as a stack and they scan. and get help downloading that app right away in new employee orientation. And that's definitely helped for sure. But when we rolled it out, it actually went to every facility and had like a help desk session and a break room where they would help people download the app.

As your, 

Amanda Berry: as employees are logging in, you're driving traffic, do you find that there's a kind or a type of employee that employees respond to the most and more people will log in 

Hannah Bolte: to? I would say I use the content notifications and alerts very sparingly because I don't wanna ever it to ever be a situation where we're over inundating someone with things.

So when we do send notifications, I want it to rise to a level of that was worth interrupting someone's time for. So I would say we run our intranet probably differently than. Of Simpplr customers run it. The communications team are the primary authors of almost everything. We partner with different business units to create content on their behalf, but have a consistent tone to those articles, to those pieces of content.

When something is authored from our ceo, Andy Loger, that gets a lot of. Because he is our ceo. But when something is related to an employee engagement event, for instance, or a company goal, so we announce our company goals, then we publish regular updates on here's how we're doing, and once it gets toward the end of that goal, period.

There's a lot of eyes when we publish something that's like, okay, we're really close, or, yep, we marked another one off and now we've got one more to go. People are really interested in things like that that. You know, you've got an end goal in mind, right? Are we gonna be there? Are we gonna make it or we not?

We all play a role in achieving these. So I'd say things that are authored by our senior leadership team, our exec, our ceo or company goals. But employee engagement events get a lot of interest too, which is great. You just 

Amanda Berry: mentioned, uh, in the beginning of this that you don't mark everything as like an alert or notifications, and then you know that a notification gets pushed to someone's phone.

Look at like a push notification. Yep. This is something that comes up everywhere, right? Everyone thinks their content is important, whether it's a quick video message from the c e o about congratulations. We made our goal to, hey, open enrollments, you know, if you're in the United States, open. Period is ending.

Can you just talk about your criteria for pushing out a notification or an alert, because this gets, I think, unfortunately, kind of abused across the board, and then employees stop responding. Sure. And stop paying attention. 

Hannah Bolte: We do a little bit of an internal gut check, so there are three to four people that contribute to our intranet from a writing perspective or just sheer content.

and we'll do an internal gut check of does this make sense? So is it impacting your work schedule? Is it an emergency? Those things are alerts. You can't dismiss those. We have our setup from a hard coded perspective of you can't shut that off. Every user will get those. You cannot opt out. So work impacts emergencies or something crazy happen.

That everybody needs to know about and it's impacting people and the way that they work. Those are high, high priority alerts, and those are used very, very sparingly from a content notification. Folks have the option of opting out of those. I don't have the data to say that the majority have. I have anecdotally heard of a couple people who have opted out of the push notification, but they get the.

But I would argue most people, if we send a content notification, they still have those alerts enabled. So from the content notification perspective, kind of the round of gut check that we do is, does this tie to our corporate strategy? Does it tie to one of our six month goals? Does it tie to our three to five year goals?

and what impact is this having on the organization? So we have a number of goals, short term and long term. Some of those are related to our culture. So from an like an employee engagement event, for instance, we have them throughout the year in different locations. If we're announcing that we're having an employee engagement event and we need you to sign up for it, that's something that is really important that people see because if they don't see.

they won't sign up. So that's a content notification one time in that week. We're not gonna barrage people with it. If it's something that's related to our company goals, like, hey, we check the box on one of the three. That's a content notification that's not worth an alert. because it's not monumental news.

It's not impacting how you work or what you do or your schedule. So we gut check it on. Are we crying wolf or do we just want people to know? We try to make a very intentional effort that we're not sending more than one of those a day of a content notification. and then at the end of the week, because we are a primarily desk-less workforce, we put together what I call a top five stories.

So we pick five of the best stories we published. Three to four pieces of content, sometimes more every day. So we'll pull together five things that we wanna make sure people saw, and then we'll put it together as a separate article, and then we'll send a content notification that just says, these are the top five things.

And we don't feel like that's a crying wolf because people can opt out of that if they want. But it definitely does drive traffic from the sense of people are reminded to go out there and look. And then once they're. , they're looking at more than just what we sent the content notification out for. Wow, that's great.

Amanda Berry: So what overall, like what are employees saying about it? This is kind of a two part question, like what are they saying about it and can you talk a little bit about the adoption amongst your 

Hannah Bolte: employees? Our intranet, we call those year Link, and it turned one in September of 22. And so we did this big splash internally of Itlo Link's first birthday, and we pulled the people that.

The most amount of likes on articles, and we interviewed that highest person from each of our five locations, and we just very anecdotally and transparently said, why do you like it? What would you say to others who maybe haven't adopted it yet? And a lot of the feedback they gave us was, I feel connected to the company.

I feel connected to the communities. So let's say someone works in Joplin, Missouri, but they see all of the things that we're doing in Omaha, Nebraska. That makes 'em feel good because they're part of that too. They're part of JE and Luger's represented in a lot of different places. There were other people that are managers in our plants who lead people, and they said, I feel more equipped to do my job.

like I feel more in tune with what matters to the company right now from even a goals perspective, or how do I talk about this within my team? I feel like I have the content to do my job and to lead more effectively. And then other people said that, you know, anytime I see Andy, our CEO published something, like I'm the first to read it because now I feel like I'm just in the know.

So I would say it's, it's a mixed bag. , it all boils down to being an engaged employee, so they feel more connected to the company and they feel like they understand where we're going and what is mattering to the company from a goals perspective. And then from the community perspective, it's strategic, not one-offs.

Yeah. I'm 

Amanda Berry: gonna move us into our next segment, ripped from the headlines. You hear the news, xray. Xray. Read all about 

Speaker 1: it. Our stories ripped from the headlines. Ripped from the headlines. The headlines 

Amanda Berry: just listening to you speak about. The whole sort of purpose and, and part of the reason that LO Link came into existence is related to employee experience, right?

Making employees feel connected, keeping them know, giving 'em ACC, access to their benefits. So much of that makes up employee experience. And I wonder if you could talk about the importance of employee experience at lo. You'd mentioned earlier this was a cross-functional effort. You'd worked with IT and hr, so I wonder if you could talk about the importance of employee experience at Laure given that cross-functional 

Hannah Bolte: cooperation.

I would say the employee experience is vital to any company right now. It's not just manufacturing, it's not just luxury, but when you look at the labor market, it's one of the strangest signs we've ever been. Employee engagement, employee experience, it is so critical to retaining your employees. So you wanna make sure that your employees feel like they're part of something bigger.

They realize their impact that they're having, not just in their area, but on the organization as a whole. And then ultimately, you know, even bigger than that, what impact are you having? Space. So I know for instance, if you were to ask anybody that works in the plant, Hey, what do you do when you walk into a store?

I've asked probably 50 people that, and I just say, finish this sentence for me. When I walk into a store and every single one of them, oh, I look at the shelves, it drives my spouse crazy, , I look at the shelves. But they're so proud of what they do as they should be, but you know that employee experience is connecting those dots.

The work that you do may be very tactical, but it's part of something bigger for your area. It's part of something even bigger for the company and beyond that, it's part of something bigger for the industry and it wouldn't happen without you. So I think the employee experience in any organization, in any industry is really critical right now.

Amanda Berry: I think that that's the really great way to make that connection between the work they do. I mean, since, since I've learned this story about Lozier, I know I'll walk into Walgreens and go, huh, I wonder if they made these shelves, , and I'm sure everyone on our listeners can identify with that. Like you go in the grocery store, those are shelves likely 

Hannah Bolte: made at Lozier.

Well, and I mean, it's a product that you very rarely ever think of, right? It's holding the product that matters to you. But if that shelf wasn't there, what would. I, I will make one 

Amanda Berry: suggestion hand if I might. I'm a short person. I'm like, five, four . Maybe just don't make 'em higher so that I can't grab things.

Sometimes I have to climb up on them to grab, you know, whatever's at the top of, they're pretty, they're pretty sturdy. They're pretty, I, I am, and I, firsthand can tell you that's jaw grab one, pull myself up on another and then grab my product. So they 

Hannah Bolte: are very sturdy, although we wouldn't recommend it. Uh, they're very stur.

Yes. Engineering feet. So 

Amanda Berry: that, that's another thing you can tell it's how the employees larger that they, they keep some of us shorter people, safe out 

Hannah Bolte: there, . I'll share that. I'll share that. Yeah. 

Amanda Berry: I wanna move into our last segment, asking for a friend who's destiny for a 

Speaker 1: friend. Hey. Asking for a friend.

Asking for a friend.

Amanda Berry: Given your experience with this mobile first, can you talk about the business value that this has driven for your employees at 

Hannah Bolte: Lozier? I would say the business value has been great. Not only are our employees connected across five states and united in that teamwork perspective of the work I do impacts the next facility, the next facility, the next facility.

We can't do it. Without everyone working in the same direction. But one of the things we've been able to do with the LozierLink platform is we stream our town halls. So we started having quarterly company-wide town halls and we livestream those. Through the LozierLink platform. So I mentioned we're manufacturing, we work three different shifts.

There is never a perfect time to say, okay, we're gonna have an all hands meeting right now and expect attendance by all. There is not a perfect time in a day. Some people might be sleeping if they're working third shift, other folks might be working. We might have business critical projects that we can't stop operations to meet, but it's very important to us as a business that we're all aligned strategically and working in that same direction.

So we started live streaming our town halls and then it has a playback so, , everyone is hearing the same message, the same tone. It's consistent. If you could imagine having your senior leadership team bounce around five different cities to get the same message, you know what? If you're tired? What if you're jet lagged, but you're still gonna miss people?

The tone of that message changes. So by live streaming our town hall, , everyone is having access to that information at the same exact time. And if you are unable to attend because you work the off shift, or there's a business critical project where you can't stop things to do, it's available on playback and you're not going to have a different context or a different tone to that message.

You will hear everything exactly as it was presented. So I would say Link has made that possible for us. It's created a consistency. and, uh, regular cadence of communication, of presence, of updates about things that matter to our company, to every layer of employee. And it's not reliant on email. It's available at someone's fingertips when they have time and when they are able to sit down and watch it.

So it's level setting that playing field, I would. From office folks that sit in front of an email all day to production employees who are in the plants. It's been a really big move for us. What advice 

Amanda Berry: would you give to someone who's out there needing to improve their employee communications with a large group of people who are not at their desk, the sort of that desk bus or that frontline worker?

What advice would you give someone who's just sort of struggling 

Hannah Bolte: right now? The best advice I would give would be give it time. It takes time for change. Change is hard, even though change is a good thing. Change can be very difficult. So keep doing what you're doing and looking for new ways of communicating.

Looking for new ways to reach those folks. Go into the manufacturing facilities, go into the areas where you're hoping to increase engagement or adoption, and oftentimes a conversation can really help of, all right, tell me what's the beef with it. What's keeping you from using this and really understanding their mindset, and it might help change yours to cater to that, or maybe they have a complete misconception of what it is or why it matters.

Talk to 'em. And one thing that we did learn in our organization is, People are naturally reluctant to change. It's scary. It's really hard to change. So if you're rolling something out, you might be feeling like you're running into headwinds constantly. Just keep running. Eventually that headwinds is gonna be a slight breeze at your back.

Amanda Berry: I like that. Hannah, this has been a lot of fun. Before I let you go, let our listeners know where they can 

Hannah Bolte: find you. We are on all of the social media platforms. Lozier Corporation, L O Z I E R. They can find me on all those things too. LinkedIn, I'm Hannah Bolte on LinkedIn, B O L T E. Great. 

Amanda Berry: Thanks so much, Hannah, for joining me today.

This has been great. 

Hannah Bolte: Thank you so much. 

Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Cohesion Podcast, brought to you by Simpplr, the leading AI powered employee experience platform. We are on a mission to transform the work experience for billions of people across the world. Organizations use our products to deliver personalized experiences that inspire and engage their employees.

When work is good, life is better. Learn more@Simpplr.com. That's S I M P P L R.com. 

Speaker 1: To all of our listeners out there. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, make sure to hit subscribe, leave a review, and head over to www.Simpplr.com/podcast for more information.

Until next time, you are listening to The Cohesion Podcast brought to you by Simpplr. See you in the next episode.