This episode features an interview with Ephraim “Phrai” Freed, Customer Growth Manager of Reality Labs at Meta. Phrai helps growing companies create impactful experiences through community, productivity, and performance while enriching the lives of employees. His digital strategist and communications expertise has been shaped at companies like Magic Leap and Riot Games. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Phrai to discuss AI’s impact on internal communications, the value of cross-functional relationships, and why an equitable employee experience is critical.
This episode features an interview with Ephraim “Phrai” Freed, Customer Growth Manager of Reality Labs at Meta. Phrai helps growing companies create impactful experiences through community, productivity, and performance while enriching the lives of employees. His digital strategist and communications expertise has been shaped at companies like Magic Leap and Riot Games.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Phrai to discuss AI’s impact on internal communications, the value of cross-functional relationships, and why an equitable employee experience is critical.
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“You should be spending time in your stores, in the back room, watching people work, observing what they do, how they do it, seeing the problems they face, seeing how they get the information they get. You should understand in great detail how those people work. Step one is for communicators, IT people, executives to actually be there in the field, in the situations and context of these hands-on workers and observing them so that they can build empathy, build insights, and destroy any assumptions that they have about what those people's lives are actually like.” – Ephraim Freed
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:13): Why Ephraim thinks the employee experience is broken
*(05:25): Ephraim’s career journey
*(06:50): Segment: Story Time
*(13:07): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(18:03): Creating an equitable employee experience for hands-on and on-screen workers
*(32:02): Segment: Seat at the Table
*(32:36): How cross-functional relationships improve employee experience
*(37:09): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(37:23): The rollercoaster of AI
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Links:
Connect with Ephraim on LinkedIn
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Phrai. Thank you for joining me today.
Amanda Berry: We are kicking off season two with this episode with you today, so I'm really excited to have you here.
Ephraim Freed: Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm such a big fan of what y'all do, and really grateful for the opportunity to chat.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I'm so excited to have you here. I gotta get this off my mind cuz I've been thinking a lot about this the last time we talked.
Amanda Berry: I know you said something to the effect of the employee experience is broken. What do you mean by
Ephraim Freed: that? What I mean is if you go to virtually any company, big or small, the employee experience is a mess. Whether it's their new hire experience, whether it's their day-to-day experience, it's inefficient.
Ephraim Freed: It's splintered. It's just a hot mess. And I'll give you an example. The day somebody starts, or as somebody's joining a company, right? They're gonna get some seemingly random sequence of emails from a variety of different departments. They're gonna fill out the same information over and over and over again.
Ephraim Freed: They're never gonna know what's next in the process. And then when they start, maybe they have, you know, a nice onboarding day or week. But then when they get to their team, one team's onboarding experience might be so different from another's. And then when it comes to accessing their digital tooling, who knows what that's gonna look like at one company where I started, I mapped and then I took every digital tool I needed and I mapped out, when I found out about it, when I got access to it, how long it took, what was the method of getting access, and they took at least three months.
Ephraim Freed: From the day I started for me to get access to all the digital tools I needed, sometimes I had to request it. Sometimes my manager had to request it. Sometimes it took a week, sometimes it took a day. It was insane. And when I say employee experience is broken, I mean that from the moment people start their everyday work to the moment they leave, employee experience can be janky and it can be hard to find information.
Ephraim Freed: And it's just so far from being optimized, that's what it looks like from my perspective most of the
Amanda Berry: time. Yeah, I'm listening to you and I'm like, yes, because I know I've started jobs during the pandemic and the new, new employee experience was literally nothing there. There was no new onboard. Yeah. I opened my calendar and there were just a ton of meetings and there was no like helping me understand who does what and how the.
Amanda Berry: Company was set up. It was very messy and it was not a great experience at all. That's what we're gonna dive in today. I wanna talk to you about employee experience and there's so many components to that, the just different ways of talking about it. But I wanted to point out to you, I've run across your content, your podcast, all the stuff you do.
Amanda Berry: One of my favorite internal comms folks is Victoria, do love her. She's outstanding. She's been on this show before. Yeah. But when I went to her, we talk mostly about dogs. Stuff, but also about communications. And I said, would you recommend anyone? And without hesitation, she said, you, she said, Phrai. Wow, you, you gotta have Phrai on there.
Amanda Berry: He's, he just knows what he is doing. He knows what he is talking about. So you come highly recommended from one of my favorite internal coms folks.
Ephraim Freed: Well, that is really kind and humbling. I love Victoria. I think she is fantastic. I rely on her to. Keep my own sense of what's going on in our industry and what people are getting right and what they're getting wrong.
Ephraim Freed: I rely on her. So I can keep up to date with that. Yeah, me
Amanda Berry: too. I wanna talk a little bit more, cause I know she's really big in employee experience as well and she has a great definition. Yeah. And I just really respect her, but can you just tell me a little bit about yourself, your career journey, and how you got to where you are?
Ephraim Freed: Yeah, sure. It was a series of good fortunes and pivots that I think got to me to where I am. I didn't necessarily think I was gonna start in this road of employee experience. What happened was in college, I had volunteered with this nonprofit based in Boston that I absolutely loved, and I fell in love with it volunteering.
Ephraim Freed: So I decided when I'm done with college, I'm gonna move to Boston where I've never lived, barely been, and get a job with them. And it turned out to be hard. And I got this bottom of the barrel job with his nonprofit. Slowly got like one contract after the other, a job here, job there, and then. I became the executive assistant to the president, and in that role I inherited an intranet and I started to work on internal communications.
Ephraim Freed: And when I inherited that intranet, I started to see how. Technology, communication and culture kind of had this meeting point within an organization. And it was fascinating for me. And I also started to see how in this beautiful global organization with brilliant people all over the world, a lot of people were completely digitally disconnected and had no presence.
Ephraim Freed: And, and we didn't know what they were doing and we couldn't learn from them, et cetera. And so it was without intending to, I kind of inherited some employee experience stuff and became obsessed with it. So that's how I got started.
Amanda Berry: Love it. Well, let's move into our segment story time. Welcome to story
Ephraim Freed: time, story time, story time.
Ephraim Freed: Lemme tell you your story.
Amanda Berry: I wanna take just another step back from that because I feel like one of the pitfalls I know I have fallen into and sort of without questioning it, and then I started questioning it was, what is the employee experience? Now I was talking about Victoria. Do I think she has a fantastic definition and a and a.
Amanda Berry: Pyramid, like it like really rang true. And I think we used culture in the same way. Like what is it? How do we fix it if we don't really know what it is? So I'm wondering if you, from your perspective, you're an employee experience expert, can help us define what is the employee experience?
Ephraim Freed: Oh boy. I love that.
Ephraim Freed: It's a tough question. I've thought about it a lot. So, I think to a degree, it's first most helpful to see employee experience as a lens that helps us deliver employee facing things better than any lens that we've had in the past. Now, you'll hear in the HR realm, some people will say that employee experience is basically like the new word for HR stuff.
Ephraim Freed: Right, and I think that rebranding it in that way is not very helpful and it's very reductionist. I think that on the IT front, people will rebrand digital workplaces and intranets as employee experience. Again, that's not very helpful. And then in HR, some people will kind of rebrand the moments that matter, hiring, promotions, recognition, things like that.
Ephraim Freed: As that's employee experience, again, I don't think that's very helpful. I think what employee experience does is it takes this whole world of. Employee facing stuff and asks us to look at it through an experience lens, through a cross-functional, cross moment, cross-platform lens that brings us out of the muck of the silos we're in, of the tools that people are using.
Ephraim Freed: And it asks us to look at the experience overall and how it fits together, and it gives us a much more cohesive language and method for trying to improve what employees go through every day within the organization. Now there's not a succinct definition. I know, but that's how I see it. I think it's a lens that helps us take a much smarter, better approach to building great organizational cultures where people love being.
Amanda Berry: You mentioned that you really started to see that through that lens when you were working for, as the executive assistant for the president in Boston, which is great. Is that when your first experience with like really having it hit, like I'm interested in the employee experience.
Ephraim Freed: It is. And there's this one moment that I remember that stands out so many years later.
Ephraim Freed: So I remember I'd been there maybe two years. I was in this executive assistant role and the HR team, they would put on these monthly managers meetings that people absolutely couldn't stand. Managers would drag their feet going there, they dreaded them, and the HR team would put together their agenda and then lots of presentations and words being said at people.
Ephraim Freed: And at one point they asked me to help plan one. And so what I did was step one. Go to managers and say, what would you like to hear about at the next managers meeting? And we collected some topics and then we went back to 'em and said, on these topics, are there any people within the organization that you'd like to hear speak about these that you think you know are good in this space?
Ephraim Freed: And they gave us some people and so we went and got Nancy and some other people from the team and we worked with them to prepare. We had the meeting and managers walked away, raving best managers meeting they've ever had. And it completely transformed just the approach of putting on one of these meetings.
Ephraim Freed: But it helped me start to build this sense of what I now refer to as doing employee experience, the way that Abe Lincoln would have of the people for the people and by the people you're not doing in internal communications. You're not launching digital platforms, you're not. Pushing that at people.
Ephraim Freed: You're not throwing it at them. They're not victims of it. They're collaborators in bringing this stuff to life and making it happen. And that really fundamental perspective has been something that's shaped everything I've done since then and how I go about my work.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. It's funny you say that. I feel like I say that to myself a lot and I say it to other people when I'm talking to 'em or representing on it, is if you wanna know how they feel about it, employees feel about it, ask 'em.
Amanda Berry: Right. Well, the numbers show that they're not logging the internet. We can't figure out why. Well just ask 'em. Yeah. Now, granted, you can, you can't do a survey every day. I mean, I guess you could, but it's just important to ask them to help change it. And with that in mind, I, I have a question for you. How much of the employee experience should be driven by leaders?
Amanda Berry: Of the company and driven by the employees. For me, work from home is a great example, right? You have people who wanted to go in. You had people who were like, I'm not going back into the office. And that's just for people who can work from home or work from a different location. So how much do you see that is driven by leaders and how much that should be driven by employees?
Ephraim Freed: Well, I love that question. I think that a company can have a great employee experience when the Seniormost leaders believe in it. And it doesn't mean that they necessarily think they know exactly what the employee experience should be, but they believe that they wanna have a great employee experience, and they believe that they can get there by listening to their people, by including their people.
Ephraim Freed: I've seen some leaders who are actually just. Afraid of asking their employees questions cuz they think it's gonna open a Pandora's box. And then they'll have to do everything employees say, and that's not the case. It's just leaders need to be able to listen to their people. And so I think that without a leader, Who's willing to listen and create an environment of listening, then I don't expect much from employee experience.
Ephraim Freed: And I don't expect that employees will be able to play a very significant role. But once you have a leader that creates the right environment, it becomes the onus of the employees to actually help build it right, so that the executives have to open the door, but then the employees need to willingly walk through, I think, and that's kinda what I've seen work and be a critical factor.
Amanda Berry: I'm gonna move us to our next segment, getting tactical.
Ephraim Freed: 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: You said a few, a few things about like people being disconnected when you inherited the intron and, and just hearing your story now about, you know, they don't, they don't wanna have to do all of those things that they think employees are going to ask for. And there's a part of that where I see at the crossroads where we have a pretty big challenge in employee experience.
Amanda Berry: It's actually probably one of the biggest ones facing a lot of employers is this idea of what most people call like frontline or desk. Right. I particularly am not a fan of those terms cause I don't think it really embodies who those folks are. But I read something that you wrote, which I really like, and you're calling 'em onscreen and hands on employees and I feel like that really does a better job of.
Amanda Berry: Helping us visualize who these people are. Either they're on screen working at their laptop, they can go onto the internet or check slack or email all the time, and then hands on which they're doing something else with their hands, and so they're not really on a computer like that all day. I wanna start there knowing that you know about what 80% of the workforce is that.
Amanda Berry: Again, people are traditionally calling desk list. How did you come up with those terms? Cause I feel like we've struggled as an industry to come up with better terms. Let's start there and then I've got a ton of questions for
Ephraim Freed: you. Yeah. Oh, I love it. Well, I'm so glad that resonated with you. Step number one is I heard this dichotomy of knowledge worker and frontline worker, and I thought, no, that doesn't work.
Ephraim Freed: And specifically, some of the most important knowledge about your business sits with people who are at the frontline, customer facing, building your products, et cetera. And to use a dichotomy that makes us that 80% of your workforce. Has no knowledge that's valuable. You're just shooting yourself in both feet.
Ephraim Freed: And so I, I can't stand that particular dichotomy and the way it frames most of the workers. So that was step one. And then step two was just kind of thinking through what Frontline doesn't necessarily capture all of the people that don't do. Desk office work, typical kind of in-office work. It's not a good overarching term manufacturing workers, right?
Ephraim Freed: They're not customer facing. They're not out there talking to customers. They're not in a restaurant or a retail store, but they are doing hands-on work. And so I just started thinking about it and I think also I've been thinking a lot recently about the role of virtual reality in work, and I started realizing that the delineation in my mind is actually more.
Ephraim Freed: Is a person's work mostly on screens. They're typing, they're on Zoom calls, they're interacting with people and content via computer, or is their job mostly where they're using their hands to do stuff and they don't actually have a lot of time on screens, and it just all of a sudden I thought, oh, that's a major difference.
Ephraim Freed: That also I think, in a way really elevates and adds dignity to all the roles that aren't on screen jobs. It's not a tiered, classist way of delineating between different roles. It's a way of actually respecting all of those roles equally. And if you think about how you're providing tools, information, and resources to your people, knowing that.
Ephraim Freed: Some of them will be on screen a lot, and so they have access to screens. Maybe they have time that they can spend choosing what they wanna do on their screens. Well, that means you can reach them one way, but if you have a lot of people that have very limited time on screen, they're using their hands mostly.
Ephraim Freed: You need to think very differently about how you're gonna reach them, hear from them, share information they need, provide the tools they need. And so I think that's the mental journey I went through to get to this new dichotomy of hands on work versus on screen work.
Amanda Berry: I love it. I'm gonna start using those.
Amanda Berry: That's, that's my goal. It's probably gonna confuse some of the people that I work with and talk to about this stuff, but I, I think that they do help us understand those jobs. I mean, a doctor is hands-on, right? So as someone who installs windows, so as a flight attendant, right, they're probably a bit more hands on.
Amanda Berry: My doctor when I'm in there sits on a screen in types, but he is not on the intranet, you know? So, yeah, I think that makes a lot more sense to me. You know? And it makes sense that those on-screen folks are easier to reach, right? They're able to go to Slack and go to their intranet, hit those traditional IC channels.
Amanda Berry: How do we start to improve and think about this differently? You know, if you're in employee experience or in internal coms or hr, or even it to an extent, let's just say we have these two big types of employees. How do we start to think about creating an improving than a go a good employee experience when you have those two?
Amanda Berry: You know, I know I've worked at a place where 80% were hands on, 20% were screened, and it feels like we were creating employee experience for those on screen. And, but you know, still trying to reach hands on. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
Ephraim Freed: I'm gonna tell you my thoughts on this, starting with one of my favorite stories about a product.
Ephraim Freed: Have you ever opened a can of tomato sauce? Yes. Yes. Right. So you take your traditional can opener, you, you twist, twist, twist. And then when you make that last twist, the top of the can, Dip in the tomato sauce, and then you have to stick your fingers in and figure out how to get it out. Next thing you know, you've put your fingers in the tomato sauce, you have sauce on your fingers, you're pulling this thing out.
Ephraim Freed: It's like a process where every single time you do it, it's broken. The system is broken. And then I discovered this amazing can opener where it's a traditional can opener with the little things sticking out over the edge with the magnet on it. And now when you twist the last twist, the magnet catches the top of the can and you just lift it right off and drop it in the sink.
Ephraim Freed: Boom, right? It solves this problem, but I guarantee you the way that somebody figured that out, they spent time in a kitchen. They watched people cook, they watched people open cans, and they noticed over and over the same problem. And they said, well, how can we solve this? How can we make it so people don't have to fish their fingers in?
Ephraim Freed: And pull this out. And I remember I was at a meeting recently, I explained this and somebody said, I almost lost to finger because of this problem on the edge of a can. So it's like a R, but the way someone figured that out was they watched people working in the kitchen. And so that's actually step one.
Ephraim Freed: If you're an internal communicator working in a retail company, you should be spending time. In your stores, in the back room, watching people work, observing what they do, how they do it, seeing the problems they face, seeing how they get the information they get. You should understand in great detail how those people work.
Ephraim Freed: And so step one is for communicators, IT people, executives to actually be there. In the field, in the situations and context of these hands-on workers and observing them so that they can build empathy, build insights, and destroy any assumptions that they have about what those people's lives are actually like.
Ephraim Freed: Well,
Amanda Berry: let's walk through an example. I know one of the reasons I was connected with you is Victoria Du recommended you and then she said he did this amazing job working within a hair salon, helping them create an employee experience. Would you mind walking me through that? I think that's so interesting to hear more about and how you actually did that work.
Ephraim Freed: Yeah, absolutely. So in this situation, I worked for a company that bought a thousand hair salons from a much larger hair salon company, and there were about 10,000 employees and a thousand hair salons. And we decided to roll out a platform called Workplace. In essence, it's like a social intranet there, uh, a variety of platforms out there, but that was the one that made the most sense, and we rolled that out and.
Ephraim Freed: One of the things it did was it made it so that every single one of these 1000 salon managers all of a sudden had a face and a voice. We could hear from them quickly and easily. We could reach them and I could reach out to a salon manager if I was traveling to Ohio and say, Hey, is it okay if I swing by your salon tomorrow?
Ephraim Freed: And I'd go into that salon and I'd get to know them and I'd spend time and I'd ask questions about what they were doing in the back. I'd ask questions about how they found X, Y, Z information. I would observe what they were doing. And so I think that what we did there is we launched a platform that actually gave, at first every frontline manager, but then I guess every hands-on manager, but then every hands-on worker in the company facing the voice and ability.
Ephraim Freed: To hear and see what was going on in the company, and also to give their feedback and input. And this might sound like it's a warm, fuzzy sort of thing, but what it actually did was it. Rapidly sped up the pace of our operational information flow. So if we shipped a new shampoo, we might find out the day that shampoo gets in the salons that there's some defect in the bottles that is leaking in the packaging, something like that.
Ephraim Freed: And then we can immediately go and fix it. Whereas if you don't have this immediate channel where, where people can share their insights and things like that, then who knows how long it takes. To get that information. Who knows how many wasted bottles of product. So we use this platform to make it so much easier for us to connect, for our people to connect and to capture real time insights at the same time that I was going into locations and spending time with people and posting those photos on workplace so everybody could see that I was there getting my hands dirty.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. So I feel like for anyone listening, I think there's probably a lot of people who are struggling with this same issue of, of creating that back and forth channel. It feels like when we put in some opportunity, like for it to create an intranet or a way to, to get to a communication, to, and from a store like that, sometimes the adoption of it is more difficult, which can sort of hinder the process.
Amanda Berry: I wonder if you have any thoughts on that, like how did you get those thousand stores to. Start using it and adopt it pretty immediately.
Ephraim Freed: One of the most important things is that leaders need to believe in it and they need to model it. So we actually started by getting all of the field leaders on it.
Ephraim Freed: Then we had them help us get all of their managers, their location managers on, and then the location managers, once they were comfortable, they helped us get all of our hourly workers on. And so at each stage, the leaders needed to really believe in it. Another thing we did though was when I started at this company, I did everything I could as quickly as possible to learn about how were communications taking place right now.
Ephraim Freed: How is the business being run? What were the communications? And you discover things like a district manager every Monday would post the results in like a chat message somewhere to the managers for the previous week. And they might say, congrats to this person for doing the most hair color at the highest volume of business last week, and here are our goals for next week.
Ephraim Freed: And so we discovered that the business was operating in its very kind of geographic way. They're operating on a certain kind of cadence. So we built out the communications platform to actually match the shape of the business, the cadences of the business, et cetera. And we provided. A way to continue doing the existing communications, but in new, faster, easier, mobile way that really modernized company and brought us all together.
Ephraim Freed: So it was two things. It was the leaders at every level need to buy in and believe and model it. And then the second piece is, Building the communication infrastructure to kind of match how the business operated so that you could just slide right into it.
Amanda Berry: What were they saying once
Ephraim Freed: that took off? I mean, I'll tell you the honest truth.
Ephraim Freed: Some of them were like, whoa, why do I need this? Right? Yeah. That was something we encountered and so be it, right? You can't please all the people all the time, but there were other people who were actually just ecstatic to be part of something bigger by having a voice and being part of something for the first time.
Ephraim Freed: It developed their faith in the new company and the new management pretty quickly. Right. And they felt like they were part of something and because those people actually had direct access to people in corporate. It felt like they were more connected to us. They didn't feel so much like second class citizens.
Ephraim Freed: I remember going into salons at one point, and people would use the word, oh, well something, something corporate. Corporate said this. And I said, oh, who's corporate? Oh, I'm corporate. You're talking about me. I'm corporate. No, I'm a guy that actually really cares about you and wants to work with you. And so what people said was when we had this tool, they started to feel like they were really part of it.
Amanda Berry: So I wanna see if there's any lessons to learn from that. When we think about this idea of work from home versus in person and this sort of hands-on versus on-screen, is there any lessons we can take from that when we're thinking about creating a good, equitable employee experience or even improving the employee experience for the work from home?
Amanda Berry: In-person dichotomy as
Ephraim Freed: well. Yeah. Oh boy. It's funny, I, I, it seems like I'm talking to folks about this pretty much every day. It's been a while that we've been dealing with this. The very first thing that comes to mind is that there's not just one audience of people. There's not just one segment of employees in a company related to work from home.
Ephraim Freed: Typically you see things like maybe younger employees, they wanna be in the office more for socializing purposes, for mentorship opportunities, maybe even to find, you know, romantic partners or it's for the free food. But then maybe older employees who have kids and live in the suburbs, they don't wanna waste time driving in.
Ephraim Freed: They only wanna go in the office if it's like really important. And they really value that flexibility of being able to work from home, have more time to work, more flexibility, be able to see their kids, et cetera. And so what you end up with is actually different audiences and segments and populations with different needs.
Ephraim Freed: And I think the reason I'm saying this is that the only way you know that is by asking. By listening, by gathering data, by looking at the feedback that you get by talking to people and starting to see that there are patterns and there are different patterns. And so I think that that listening, capturing data, gathering data in specific ways, I think is actually a really key part of trying to address this.
Ephraim Freed: You know, return to office work from home dilemma people are facing.
Amanda Berry: I know in your past you've also helped improve HR processes for employees, which has a big impact on employee experience. Can you talk a little bit about
Ephraim Freed: that? I've worked with HR teams throughout my career in a lot of different ways, and I mentioned one previously about the manager's meetings, but there's just other example that actually really has stuck with me so much.
Ephraim Freed: It'll lead into actually this idea of how do we. Actually address employee experience needs and build for better employee experience. And the story is that we started at this one company with this question of, well, we need to improve the HR intranet. There's something wrong with the HR intranet and we need to improve it.
Ephraim Freed: And obviously, yes, HR intranets, like I could see there's a problem. But the way that we started about it was doing discovery work, observational research, and gathering more data and information. We did this by creating a list of tasks. Kind of generically worded, but specific tasks, things like, imagine you're planning to go away with your family and you wanna know some upcoming days off.
Ephraim Freed: How would you find this information? And what we did is we went to people's desks, we sat with them in their contacts, and we would say, you know, Hey Nate, I'm gonna give you these list of tasks. I'm just gonna sit here and watch you complete them. There's no right or wrong answer. And can you just narrate to me what you're doing and how and why you're doing it?
Ephraim Freed: Just tell me about what you're doing. And what we saw over and over again was that these employees, when they were trying to accomplish these HR tasks, they actually weren't going to the HR internet. That wasn't where they were going. They were going to their email inboxes, and they were looking for the name of the person in the HR that sent all the informational emails.
Ephraim Freed: And then they were searching among those for some keywords like holiday calendar. And what we realized was that. We needed to step back and not see the problem as the HR internet, but look at the problem space more broadly, as in employees are having trouble finding HR information easily in a consistent manner, in the same place, et cetera.
Ephraim Freed: And what we wanna do is make it easier for people to find that HR information. The intranet will be part of that. But what we can actually do is go to this woman in HR named Kim, who's sending these emails, and let's help her send better emails, great headings, keyword, optimize. Really good, clear links.
Ephraim Freed: Always link back to the right section of the HR intranet. And if we can help Kim send better emails, we can make it easier for everybody who's receiving those emails to find this information in their inbox. And we can solve for this problem space at least in like a valuable increment. And what this illustrates is that in the realm of employee experience, we actually all need to collectively be able to step back a little bit from this tool or that tool, this page, that page, this content, that content, and say, what is the problem space that we are trying to address, right?
Ephraim Freed: It's a problem space that might span multiple tools, a lot of people, different experiences, but what is the problem space? And then how can we find incremental solutions that we can apply maybe quickly? That we can learn from, build on, et cetera, and not just jump to, well, let's solve for this tool, let's just make this tool better.
Ephraim Freed: Right? And I think that perspective of finding the problem space and looking at that is so important for delivering better employee experiences.
Amanda Berry: Oh, I love that. So rather than you even just ask, I mean, you ask, but you observed, and you'd mentioned that with the hands-on employees going into seeing how they interact and where they walk to and what they walk by and who they talk to.
Amanda Berry: That's such a great way to be thinking about that, just to interact and be a part of that space. I'm gonna move into our next segment. Seat at the table.
Ephraim Freed: First. Get seat the table. Get seat at the table. You want a seat at the table?
Amanda Berry: We've been talking about broken employee experiences. That's really how we started this.
Amanda Berry: A key part of that, which you've already mentioned, was, you know, this isn't owned by internal comms, it's not owned by hr. It's a cross-functional experience, right? It, hr, internal comms, maybe finance. We all need to come together. Look at that new onboarding experience and say, here's a better path forward that we're all involved in.
Amanda Berry: Can you talk about any other opportunities that might occur might happen because of a more cross-functional relationship with fixing the employee
Ephraim Freed: experience? Yeah. Well, I guess I'll start by just saying I kind of developed this formula in my head a while back. I used to work with a lot of intranet teams from Fortune 500 companies, and what I saw was that the more.
Ephraim Freed: Mature intranets, right? The more valuable ones, the more advanced ones were led by internal comms leaders who had great relationships with their IT stakeholders, their IT counterparts, and that you could predict the quality of an intranet program by the quality of cross-functional relationships. That's the formula that I think is really important, and I'm yet to be dissuaded from it, so I think that.
Ephraim Freed: To your point, the cross-functional relationships and collaboration is absolutely critical.
Amanda Berry: Well, let's start with how we do that, right? I know that I've always had an HR business partner and a close relationship with it, but sometimes internal communications employee experience, it isn't a top priority for folks, right?
Amanda Berry: They've got all of these priorities. They have to meet these OKRs, these objectives for the quarter. So I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about how you go about building those relationships.
Ephraim Freed: In the corporate world, one of the things that speaks most strongly a lot of the time is data.
Ephraim Freed: Data presented in the right way to the right audience. And I think a lot of internal communicators struggle with data and finding data and metrics and roi, and that speaks to one of the gaps in the typical communicators toolkit. So a lot of communicators. Don't really have much experience with employee research, employee experience, user experience design.
Ephraim Freed: But when you do UX stuff, you usually are able to capture data, right? Oh, this internet page is not getting used at all, even though it thinks it's really important. That's a piece of data. People aren't reading this communication, but they are reading this one. What's the difference between the two? That's a piece of data.
Ephraim Freed: I did user testing in the cafeteria with 10 employees, and they said that they couldn't find any policies in the policy library. That's a piece of data, and so I think that one of the things that communicators need to do is actually build up their capabilities around user experience design, ux, and their ability to capture data through different mechanisms and then bring that data to the table to explain how.
Ephraim Freed: Improved employee experience can actually solve problems for these busy cross-functional stakeholders. So I think that's kind of part of how I see the solution here.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. One of the pieces of data that I like to use or that I tell people is work with HR and it, you know, ask them how many people are reaching out to your service desk?
Amanda Berry: The HR service desk, the IT service desk. Oh, yeah. Asking what are the paid holidays in 2023? Or, uh, how do I find my benefits information? Right. Just, yeah, what are those top questions that they're getting that employees should be able to self-serve to get that information? And let's see if we can find ways to get that down.
Amanda Berry: But we have to work together to do
Ephraim Freed: it. Yeah. Well, I absolutely love that. That speaks a little bit to this idea of addressing a problem space and not just a tool or a platform. So a lot of internal communicators probably get stuck on, well, the only data I have is intranet views or newsletter opens or something like that.
Ephraim Freed: But there's actually a lot of other data out there. I remember at one company what we did is we actually analyzed all the help desk requests, and we found that. A very small set of help desk requests are accounted for a huge number of the total requests that were made. Right. And we figured out that if we could make it easier for people to find this information and submit tickets like in the right way for this information, then we could make it the lives of people in HR and it much easier.
Ephraim Freed: Right. And that, those tickets, the calls that they're getting, the emails that they're getting the requests, that's a great source of information about kind of, What people can't find, what they're struggling with, et cetera. And so I love that you mentioned that. Cause I think that's, That kind of speaks to this idea of let's figure out what's the problem space and where can we capture data about how this problem is being experienced?
Amanda Berry: Yeah, absolutely. Let's move into our last segment, asking for a friend who's Destin for a
Ephraim Freed: friend. Hey, asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: I just read. Something you recently wrote, Phrai, it's called Pace Yourself for the inevitable AI chat rollercoaster, and it's such a big topic. I feel like I would be remiss if I didn't ask you a couple questions about that when I just saw the title. The one thing that really stood out to me is you used the metaphor rollercoaster.
Amanda Berry: Did you use that intentionally? I mean, I'm, I'm sure you had to, but like why rollercoaster and why not explosion, which is what it's kind of starting to feel like.
Ephraim Freed: It feels like an explosion. Well, part of it is there's the technology hype cycle, which actually looks like a rollercoaster, right? It's inflated expectation to the trough of disillusionment, and then you eventually get the plateau of productivity.
Ephraim Freed: And so that curve. The technology hype cycle resembles a rollercoaster, and I've been around long enough to see a lot of new technology get introduced, and I've seen the hype initially and I've seen people throw money at it and explain that this is the next big thing that's gonna transform everything.
Ephraim Freed: And then I've seen a lot of that technology not necessarily fall by the wayside, but it takes years for it to become actually useful. And you know, a great example is when you think about. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is 14 years old this year, and when it first came out there was a lot of hype about cryptocurrency and blockchain and Bitcoin.
Ephraim Freed: Only a small percentage, like 4% of the global population has participated in cryptocurrency ownership, right? 14 years later. And so there's just a reality to how new technology gets adopted. I've never seen something explode as much. As chat G P T and large language models, et cetera. But there's two things.
Ephraim Freed: First is they're not as new as people think because they represent an evolution of AI technology over the last several decades. The other thing is there are gonna be regulatory concerns. Copyright concerns, legal concerns, misinformation, concerns. There are gonna be so many issues. You have companies that are banning use of chat, G p T.
Ephraim Freed: There are other ones. You're creating guidelines and policies around it. We're finding out that pupils good names are being besmirched by hallucinations. By chat, g p t or chat, g p t makes up fake references to prove a point about something that's not true. So, There will be a rollercoaster of, oh, chat.
Ephraim Freed: It's great. Oh, it's not so great. Oh, it's great. Oh, it's not so great. Oh, there's this hurdle. Oh, there's that hurdle. And it will be a while before we can really rely on this technology to be helpful. And also we're gonna see a lot of scams. We're gonna see a lot of criminal activity related to it. We're already seeing that even in, you know, like Apple and Google Play app stores.
Ephraim Freed: So, It's gonna be, there are gonna be a lot of ups and downs, and that doesn't mean don't touch it. It just means kind of take a dose of reality with the hype and strap yourself in and be ready for it. And, you
Amanda Berry: know, I've been thinking about that in terms of employment and employee experience and internal communications.
Amanda Berry: Right? It's, it's one of the ways that I'm seeing this could really have an impact. I'm like you, I, I've seen enough technology come out, you know, email is supposed to get rid of paper, but somehow my desk is still full of paper. You know, you know, there's supposed to be a lot of changes up there. So I'm sort of just sort of waiting to see what happens, but also sort of enjoying it while it's here.
Amanda Berry: But I'm wondering, you know, the idea of employee experience, what we should be doing now to prepare for what could be, you know, a a, a big technological advancement for internal communications. Yeah. Or employee experience. I just wonder what thoughts you had on that.
Ephraim Freed: I think every company should be, Exploring and testing new technology.
Ephraim Freed: Right? I don't think that people should be writing it off. We just need to do it carefully. Most technology advancements have done kind of two things, right? Digital technology has moved in the direction of becoming more human and. Automation technology has taken manual, wrote repetitive human tasks and taken those over and offered people the opportunity to do higher level work, right?
Ephraim Freed: So that's kind of part of what's happening. And so I think that those are the kind of the lenses that we need to take of, well, where are people doing work that. Is repetitive. They don't like it. They don't wanna do it. It's not necessarily worth putting a, a human heart and soul against this work. Is there an opportunity to use this technology for it?
Ephraim Freed: So I think that's one thing. I think the other is paying a lot of attention to it, right? Don't let your employees get scammed by it. I think that's another place where people need to be putting plenty of attention.
Amanda Berry: One final question for you, Phrai. If you had every company leader listening to you right now, what would you say to them about employee experience and improvement?
Amanda Berry: And I, I know we talked about listening and observing and I love that, that I'm taking with me. I've always said ask them. I love the idea of observing. Observing. I think that's interesting. But what would you say to every company leader if they were listening to you right
Ephraim Freed: now? I think I'd say that you as the leader of a company, you're the DNA of this company and the way you operate and the way you lead your executive team are gonna get replicated through the rest of the organization.
Ephraim Freed: So think about what are the things that you, through your behavior, want to be replicated throughout your organization so that the entire company operates in the most effective way, so that the culture is built in the most effective way and. Build an executive team environment that you would like to see replicated in every single team within the organization and use your everyday behavior to do that.
Ephraim Freed: I think that's what I'd like to say.
Amanda Berry: Well, Fred, this has been a lot of fun. Before I let you go, if people wanna get in contact with you or find you, where do you live online?
Ephraim Freed: LinkedIn is the easiest and best these days. I'm also there on Twitter in both cases. I'm there as Fream jf, E P H R A I M, jf, you know, I like LinkedIn as a place to connect with people about professional topics and really enjoy using that.
Amanda Berry: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Phrai. This has been great.
Ephraim Freed: Thanks so much, Amanda. Absolute treat, and I love hanging out with nerds of a feather.
Amanda Berry: I like nerds of a feather. That's good.