This episode features an interview with Preston Lewis, Founder and CEO of Intactic, a modern communications company focused on creating human-centric experiences for people at work. Over the last 20 years, Preston has partnered with respected companies to develop and implement communication and behavior change campaigns. He is a sought after employee engagement, internal communications, and enterprise transformation expert and can often be found speaking about the future of work. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Preston to discuss the modern employee experience, investing in technology and upskilling teams, and how to create a human-centric work experience.
This episode features an interview with Preston Lewis, Founder and CEO of Intactic, a modern communications company focused on creating human-centric experiences for people at work. Over the last 20 years, Preston has partnered with respected companies to develop and implement communication and behavior change campaigns. He is a sought after employee engagement, internal communications, and enterprise transformation expert and can often be found speaking about the future of work.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Preston to discuss the modern employee experience, investing in technology and upskilling teams, and how to create a human-centric work experience.
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“We think of [employee experience technology] as a three-legged stool. And of those legs, there's one typically owned by IT, there's another typically owned by People or the HR function. And then a third, we can frame it as Communication, sometimes we frame it as Change. What we do know to be true is that if any of those legs are a little bit shorter than any of the others, that seat isn't flat. And that seat is where employees sit. We as employees are customers, if you will, for using that technology. When we think about employee experience, that's a nice visual we like to have. Not only in terms of one leg being shorter, but if one doesn't exist, then we can't do the right work the right way. What we've seen is organizations that subscribe to a modern employee experience philosophy, it just makes sense. There is a role for different functions to have and we're constantly tuning into which of those legs is as effective as it needs to be to balance out that experience for people.” – Preston Lewis
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:33): Preston explains the modern employee experience
*(11:35): Segment: Story Time
*(12:19): How Intactic is creating a human-centric experience at work
*(19:54): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(24:57): Key partnerships of employee experience technology
*(31:15): Segment: Ripped From The Headlines
*(36:18): AI use cases in employee experience
*(42:21): Segment: Asking For a Friend
*(42:36): What internal comms technology will look like in the future
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Links:
Connect with Preston on LinkedIn
Listen to TechVerified podcast
Listen to New State of Work podcast
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Preston, thank you so much for joining me today.
Preston Lewis: Thank you for having me.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, it's nice to see you outside of the conference circuit and just sort of hear to chat in person. I really enjoy that.
Preston Lewis: Yeah, I love the conferences because there's so many great people we have a chance to meet and so many great things to talk about, but it is nice to take a step back and just have a one on one.
Amanda Berry: Do some one on one. Well, let's jump right in because I've seen you present at conferences. There's just a lot here I want to ask you about, but let's start, let's sort of start on something very fundamental because it's going to lead up to a lot of questions I have. I want to talk about the modern employee experience and what that means to you.
Preston Lewis: Well, Let's even back up and talk about what an employee experience is first. It's a kind of level set, right? That's a good point. How's that sound? So, you know, one of my favorite definitions of employee experience is, you know, let's look at the words. We start first with employee and, of course, the experience.
Preston Lewis: An experience, in my perspective, is a collection of touch points. Inside, outside of work communicators and in many ways are experienced designers. And of course our focus, especially for those that focus primarily in internal communications or employee communications is communicating at work. So we look at the employee experience.
Preston Lewis: It's really important to take a holistic view, uh, even philosophically of all those touch points that influence someone's experience at work.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. How is that different from just employee experience?
Preston Lewis: It's such a. It's. Like basic, but important question because there's so many different answers. And if we are aligned that an experience is a collection of touch points in our employee experience, obviously that experience at work, when we say modern, what that means is revisiting everything.
Preston Lewis: Really constantly setting an expectation for the team, for the leadership team, but also for People, HR, tech, all those functions that influence an experience that someone has at work. Part of why we frame a lot of our work as modern employee communications is it suggests that we constantly need to be questioning, are we taking advantage of the latest technology?
Preston Lewis: Are we looking and thinking differently about how we approach our work as communicators? Our responsibility is to evolve our craft constantly as communicators. So, by framing... The work that we do is modern employee experience, design, activation, communications. It suggests that we're constantly really questioning, is there something we should or should be doing differently, knowing that technology is evolving, expectations are shifting for people at work, and expectations are shifting amongst leadership teams for the kind of work that we do.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, well, let's talk about that tech because it feels like tech is such an important component of the modern employee experience, right? Some people experience work only through technology, like, like myself, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners, where you work through your computer, you socialize through Slack.
Amanda Berry: So I want to talk about how tech can enable a modern employee experience. I'd love to get your thoughts on them.
Preston Lewis: It's so interesting when we dive into the technology that influences our experience at work. We as human beings, when I say interesting, obviously there's lots of points behind that. One of them is that what we find is that technology influences our work in very unconscious ways.
Preston Lewis: So you brought up Slack's a perfect example. And we're learning more and more about how a technology, I like to frame as an interloop technology platform, where work gets done like a Slack or Microsoft Teams. It's influencing how we. Conduct our business in a lot of different ways, and many of them, again, unconscious.
Preston Lewis: So, for example, there's this unconscious expectation that if your green light is on, or if your button says that you're available, that you really are available and you're going to be, you know, responsive within X amount of time. Whatever that time is, it's often unconscious. And what I love about that example is just your question.
Preston Lewis: It's a very specific example of how technology is influencing our work. And we're only beginning to realize what level of influence that has on digital well being, on relationships, on productivity and efficiency, and very importantly, people managers. Are needing to revisit philosophically what it means to be a manager, knowing that this technology provides access to people, unlike we've ever had, say even five years ago.
Preston Lewis: So that's just one example. Of course, there's many. We look at the emergence of AI and other technologies and how that's obviously influencing how we conduct our business.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I want to get into that. Every time someone says AI, a little alarm bell goes off in my head, so we'll get to that. But thinking about, like, the tech and the modern employee experience, who, in your opinion, should own it?
Amanda Berry: Because I, I think about this from an employee perspective. Like, I have my perspective of what an employee experience is from being in internal comms. But then if you take just the average employee and what they want the experience to be, it's almost sort of this seamless easy to use, not real clunky experience they want, and we're still sort of seeing it and, you know, we have internal comms tech, we've got IT that owns stuff, we have HR that owns stuff.
Amanda Berry: So who should really own the employee experience?
Preston Lewis: Short answer is it, it's a shared responsibility that should be Owned, and we'll talk about what that word owned means, uh, by, by a cross functional group or a group that has the remit, if you will, or the expectation of the organization upside and sideways for taking a very holistic look at, again, what that experience is.
Preston Lewis: You know, if we're designing as a collection of touchpoints, those touchpoints are owned by different functions. So you touched on some of the core, and we think of it as a three legged stool, and of those legs, there's one typically owned by people or the HR function, and then a third, we could frame it as communications, we frame this as change, but what we do know to be true is that if any of those legs are a little bit shorter than any of the others, that seat isn't flat.
Preston Lewis: And that seat is where employees sit. We, as employees, are customers, if you will, for using that technology. And when we think about employee experience, that's kind of a nice visual we like to have. Not only in terms of one leg being shorter, but if one doesn't exist, Then we can't do the right work the right way.
Preston Lewis: So what we've seen is organizations that subscribe to a modern employee experience philosophy, it just makes sense. There is a role for different functions to have, and we're constantly tuning into, we look at our listening strategies, for example, which of those legs is as effective as it needs to be to kind of balance out that experience for people.
Preston Lewis: Yeah, do you
Amanda Berry: have any opinions on what kind of technology we should be using to create this really good modern employee experience?
Preston Lewis: When we think of work tech stack, so work tech is a way to frame all the technology that exists at work that enable us to get our work done. And within WorkTech, there's multiple different categories, right?
Preston Lewis: There's HR tech, there's comms tech, and then there are others that sit above that. So, one simple way to begin to think about all of this technology and how we can wrap our hands around it, and it's connected to a who owns what, is there are some that are integrated across platforms. Like the typical workdays and other HRIS platforms that people tend to realize, well, of course, this is an integrated technology across other systems in our tech stack.
Preston Lewis: Then there are others that just fall into some of those categories. The comms tech stack, as we sometimes call it, that includes things like intranets or email. Platforms. Newsletters. Newsletters, right? That's what I love about the newsletter example is there's now an expectation that, well, of course, our newsletter, whether it's on the measurement backend or on the frontend creation side, well, of course, that'll be embedded into our intranet platform.
Preston Lewis: That's one of the distinctions when we look at modern intranet platforms. We tend to see more features and capabilities like intranets. But when we think about how technology is influencing our work, we sort of wrap our head around it. It's important to understand the purpose of different types of technology.
Preston Lewis: Is this built to be integrated into other or not? Who owns what? That measurement piece is important because we're also seeing with more modern platforms is we can integrate data sets to give us that experience view of how many times are we reaching an individual or a group of people across multiple different channels.
Preston Lewis: Of course, most digital. You know, the traditional passive, like signage, to active, to engage in an email or engage in a like or a comment on an intranet. We're starting to see modern communications technology have that ability to give us that view of how often we're reaching what people and is that a quality touch point or engagement.
Amanda Berry: I want to say you sound like you work for a company that I know very well near and dear to my heart. It has all of these cool features in one platform, it's Simpplr, but anyway, I digress. I want to back out. Let's kind of take a couple steps back here and talk more about you and what you do. This will help our listeners understand why we're talking so much about technology right now.
Amanda Berry: We're going to move into our segment, storytime.
Amanda Berry: I know you from many Internal comms events, I think mostly in New York is where we end up meeting a lot at different conferences. You're the founder and CEO of Intactic. What is Intactic?
Preston Lewis: Intactic is a modern communications consultancy and design agency. So both design in terms of visual, creative agency type work, as well as experience design work.
Preston Lewis: And of course we use that word modern in there because there's typically an expectation like we just discussed that we're going to be thinking about communications and ending.
Amanda Berry: Right. Needs to be meeting our needs for today. Absolutely. So I know that you're creating human centric experiences at work.
Amanda Berry: How do you do that Intactic?
Preston Lewis: Gosh, we've been in business as Intactic now for almost 10 years. And one of the things I'm most proud of is this methodology that we call this human centric strategy methodology. And it's exactly what it sounds like. It's an approach to creating strategy and plans. In a way that truly puts people first, and to be much more specific, six phases of methodology that we teach to leaders and communicators every day.
Preston Lewis: And we start first with audiences, and specifically, what keeps people up at night? And when you're falling asleep, as I love to share this specific example, we're falling asleep and you move into that worry space or stress space about work. Work, and family, and relationships, that one amount of work. Is it that you're curious if you're getting paid enough?
Preston Lewis: Are you concerned about not having opportunities to be developed? Are you concerned about your relationship with your direct manager or somebody on your team? We really need to surface, as we build strategy as communicators, what are those concerns of specific audiences that we're looking to reach? And general audiences, because what we know about human beings is until we address those fundamental concerns, No one's going to listen to anything else that we're saying, those kind of unconscious concerns.
Preston Lewis: When, what we know as leadership teams is when we can address those things, people align, people engage, and people start listening. And that's why the, we call it the human centric methodology, because what we know is that when we can address those concerns of human beings, then we move to phase two or step two of business objectives and people object, you know, those things that we need to communicate and discuss.
Preston Lewis: That are new and different that may be aligned with our business strategy and objectives, because we've already addressed those concerns, if you remember. And of course, then we move into tactics and a lot of the other design criteria and persona development, that stuff too, but that's why we call it that, and it's something that we're really, really proud of.
Preston Lewis: Yeah.
Amanda Berry: Well, what inspired you to build this company that has that focus? Is there a moment where you go, Oh my gosh, people need help with this?
Preston Lewis: I love telling this story. And this actually goes way back to a firm that we had before in Tactic for quite a while. And it was about 25 years ago. And I started my career as a graphic recorder.
Preston Lewis: So, markers in hand, and creating real time information graphics of meetings and conversations, and this was quite young, and what we found is that there are some that have this extraordinary skill and ability to capture conversation in real time and visuals. And then there are others that can also facilitate.
Preston Lewis: conversations. We often call those graphic facilitators. And so what happened is very early in my career, we found ourselves and I found myself in rooms where we're listening to often leadership teams and other groups of people talk about strategy and what's important to the business and what's important to our people.
Preston Lewis: And then we created these amazing graphics and murals and vision maps and values maps. And then come Monday morning, there was a big gap in terms of how we're enabling leaders and managers to effectively communicate What was discussed in that meeting or what that visual really meant and what people need to do differently.
Preston Lewis: And we're in a room one day with somebody from Hewlett Packard way back in the day, in the late nineties. And we had been working on this project for a few days and he was able to go home that evening from an off site and come back the next day. And he almost had tears in his eyes. And he said, man, are you okay?
Preston Lewis: What's going on? And he said, look, I've been doing this work for 20 years. Leaving in the morning, coming home at night. And until I was able to bring this visual home that you all created for us to my family, I never was effectively able to communicate to my family. What is it I do? And so we were able to do that last night as a family.
Preston Lewis: And I just wanted to thank you. And I started to truly realize there's power in visualization. And then that led to defining along with a business partner of mine, Gordon Rudow. He's really helped and led the conversation of how do we define a series of templates that can move through a strategic process that ultimately will enable organizations to visualize strategy.
Preston Lewis: And then that led to, okay, well then what do we do? And of course, we need to create a consultancy and agency to help companies deliver on those promises. So that's the long story of where I started and then ultimately how this methodology was shaped.
Amanda Berry: That's such an interesting story about the gentleman you were talking about from HP.
Amanda Berry: Why do you think he got so
Preston Lewis: emotional? One of the things I like to say is our job as communicators is to enable people, it's just built on that story, to go home and communicate to those that they care about. What is it that they do when they spend most of their time? Away from our families. If we can do that effectively, then the organization and employee communications, the communications that happen at work is going to be a lot easier if everyone's bought it.
Preston Lewis: They understand the why. And once we understand that it's important to communicate that to everyone that supports us in our careers.
Amanda Berry: I'd be remiss if I didn't talk about your podcast. You have a podcast called TechVerified. Tell me about it. Podcasts are fun, aren't they? It's so awesome to sit here and talk to people like yourself, like other experts, who I can learn from, our listeners can learn from, and just really get the people at the top level who are doing really amazing
Preston Lewis: stuff.
Preston Lewis: It's an opportunity to capture interesting conversation and share, you know, it's a creation tactic, right? And we have two podcasts now. One's called New State of Work, and it's a platform for friends and authors and other leaders to come in and share their philosophy that we're all interested in. And ultimately, we know contributes to the evolution of this craft that we discussed earlier.
Preston Lewis: And then the second one is called Tech Verified. This has been a lot of fun because, look, the work that we do at Antarctic and Subways can be quite complex. We need to look and partner with organizations that have a clear need and are looking to make a clear impact and address that need. TechVerified is simply an opportunity and again a platform for us to invite in our friends and partners like Simplr and other vendor organizations and technology.
Preston Lewis: firms to come in and it's not a demo thing. It's really share the philosophy behind the technology and give us a sense of where it's headed. Most of our work that we do, particularly with larger organizations, is help them choose technology and make those decisions. And those decisions are hard and there's many elements to those decisions.
Preston Lewis: And so we don't sell any technology, but we love partnering with technology vendors, other. providers that are aligned philosophically in terms of where our work and our industry is headed. So TechVerify is a podcast where we invite those people in and help tell the stories.
Amanda Berry: Great. You just started The New Way of Work.
Amanda Berry: What's the other one called? I've listened to a couple episodes of that, and it's really interesting. It's The
Preston Lewis: New State of Work. Yeah. And then, yeah, there's many more coming out. That's what's also nice about podcasting. It's not that difficult to capture, but we want to make sure that we edit it and frame it in a way that's, well, it provides a lot of value really quickly.
Preston Lewis: And then the other one is Tech Verified. Yeah.
Amanda Berry: I guess in my mind, I call it... The new ways we work because there's so much of that in there related to that. So it's a new state of work. My apologies. How's it going? How are those
Preston Lewis: going? They're going really well. I feel like in the work that we do, we have a lot of great conversations with people, but we can record it and capture it and share it.
Preston Lewis: It's just that much more interesting. The list is stacking with people I would love to invite in, and of course, we're sharing them with everyone approximately every couple of weeks. Yeah, that makes
Amanda Berry: sense. Well, good. Well, we'll keep tuning into those as well. I'm going to move us into our next segment, Getting Tactical.
Preston Lewis: I'm trying to figure out tactics, and to be perfectly honest, I didn't have to worry about tactics too much. Here I am in charge and trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics? Tactics. Tactics.
Amanda Berry: I want to really focus in on this tech, because this is really where the rubber meets the road, right? And using tech to create a modern employee experience. It's one thing to say... And I'm sure a lot of our listeners, whether you're HR, IT, or internal comms, you can say, we need better tech. I think we all know we need to keep evaluating, and we'd love to be able to go, well, this tech is better than what we have.
Amanda Berry: It'll meet our needs better, right? It's easy to say that, but then it's a totally different ballgame to have the money to do that. Especially considering right now when a lot of companies are tightening their ballots and spending less. I know one of the biggest issues I have faced, and I'm sure many of our listeners have as well, is taking that step to get better tech, right?
Amanda Berry: Getting the money. So we have to build like a business case to help outline our needs. I want to see, I want to talk to you about that because it's such a crucial step. I think we go from sometimes we just need that better tech and then it oftentimes falls flat or we can't get the money. So where do you start with building a good business case to get better tech?
Preston Lewis: We start first with a business strategy. Everything we do as communicators, tech or not, needs to directly link to what type of impact are we looking to make to implement the strategy that we know is core to our business and bottom line. So we start there first. Then we start... Pulling back the layers, right?
Preston Lewis: Well, this is our core business strategy. What is it that we can do as communicators or those that are responsible for facilitating this cross functional employee experience? How can we influence the key metrics that we know we can influence? to move that business strategy forward. Then, as I said, pull back the layers, once we're clear about where we have the opportunity to influence those key measures, we start first looking at our team.
Preston Lewis: So, when I say our team, it's really looking at our function. So, whether the function is people in HR with comms included, Whether it's marketing, corporate com, communications, and internal employee included. Keep going. But we start looking at this function that we have to communicate and engage people at work.
Preston Lewis: And then we look at, well, what are our systems and processes that enable our work? So, when we think about technology, particularly AI, by the way, I'll kind of bring that back in, because we're becoming So much smarter, so quickly, in terms of how we think about AI as a comms function. And one of the, when we think about AI and its influence on a comms function, three simple categories.
Preston Lewis: The first is creation. Second, insights. And then third is automation. So the first around creation is kind of, we tend to go first, as we're learning about AI tools. So, as I said, we need to look at our function, we look at systems and processes, and think about, well, how can technology, AI or not, help us create?
Preston Lewis: more effectively. So it could be using tools to spark ideas that are new and different, that help us kind of strike that right balance of business critical and surprise and delight that we know we're all trying to do with content. Is there something we could do to create content, written word, faster, more efficient?
Preston Lewis: How can we say more with less? There's lots of examples of how technology can influence creation, but you would ask, how do we do the work? How do we make sure they're worth? Really thinking about building the right business case. First, we look at our team assistant processes. Next, we look at skills and capabilities.
Preston Lewis: Do we have the right skills and capabilities on our team to implement our strategy that aligns with those business objectives to get the resources that we're asking for? And then last is the tactics. The thing about technology and how it influences our work as communicators is that it truly is faster, better, cheaper now.
Preston Lewis: We used to say, faster, better, cheaper, pick two. These days, when you build the right business case for technology as a comms function, or really any resources as a comms function, we can do things that we can use technology that has more features and functionalities than ever before. Like we just said, can we, you know, eliminate costs on this technology because this other technology has that capability embedded.
Preston Lewis: That's just one specific example. But... Before we think differently about budgets and resources, we do need to look first at systems and processes and skills and capabilities of the team. Because when we think about building a roadmap for technology, it's important to have real clear insight into not just the roadmap for technology, but how we're going to evolve our function.
Amanda Berry: There's a lot in there. Everything you said there, I have so many questions around. I want to just kind of back up because I'm thinking about Internal comms or myself standing there going, okay, who do I know I need to partner with on all of this stuff? Like IT will help provide the tech strategy or help with that.
Amanda Berry: And HR might be able to provide some data. Like who are some of those key partnerships?
Preston Lewis: You touched on some of the real important ones. What is important about building cross functional partnerships as part of that enrolling the right community of people inside an organization to do the work that we do, it's really important to remember that each of those functions has their own strategy.
Preston Lewis: They each have their own individual strategies, you know, ideally, right? I know the world's not perfect, but there's the, you know, the overall strategic plan for a company or organization. There's also those plans that nest within that for each of the different functions. So what's most important is to really have clear insight into, okay, IT, you know, what are your priorities as a function?
Preston Lewis: Are you looking to reduce cost on tech? Are you looking to streamline just overall workflow? So that you're able to optimize the investments already being made. For HR, we're often seeing priorities like improved employee engagement. What does that really mean? What are those key measures? Or another HR priority might be increased enrollment and important benefits or programs.
Preston Lewis: Great. We know as communications, we can directly influence those things by sharing the right messaging with the right people on the right channel. And you can see it all messes together and all links together. But most importantly, we need to have clear insight into different business priorities for different functions and ask communications, how we can.
Preston Lewis: As you
Amanda Berry: keep talking about cost, I think that's going to be one of the biggest maybe factors that's prohibiting people from just buying something that's really amazing or jumping in very quickly. I wonder if you would give some examples. I'm thinking about just my past and how I've had Like a homegrown intranet that I had to hire someone who can do development.
Amanda Berry: And then I would send them the content and we think, well, we had to have a person who just focuses on that. Whereas that person could be helping write communications and create newsletters. The cost sometimes of maintaining these and the cost, like you mentioned, tech can be so great that. We don't realize that we're actually spending more by not doing something more modern and streamlined and easy.
Amanda Berry: I wonder if you could just talk through a little bit about what you've seen out there. Yeah,
Preston Lewis: I'm, there's a philosophical point here that's really important. I think it just addressed first. So I'm a fan, however, this is framed. I'm a fan of the concept of agency on the inside. Let's just stay focused on the comms function for now.
Preston Lewis: It requires people, both leadership at the company level and of that function, to really begin to think differently about resources and time and money. When we say agency on the inside, what that suggests is that we are tracking our time. We are looking at, by person, how much time is being spent and then what is the value of that time.
Preston Lewis: And let's be really clear, you know, when we say value of that time, that's around learning and development. Are we upskilling our team at the pace that we need to? Are we giving opportunities for balance that are just required within that team, right? There's lots of important things. But it also says, well, here's how we're spending our time.
Preston Lewis: Here's what our measurement philosophy is, here's what our dashboard looks like, here are those hard costs, and here are those soft costs. We need to have a sense of all of that as we build the business case for investing in tech, because we do know that, staying on the AI example, we do know that there are technologies out there that will make the team more efficient and will give us the opportunity to have an impact unlike we've ever had before.
Preston Lewis: Having said all of that, we need to invest in upskilling and training of the team. We need to invest in technology that works, you know? So, there is that broader, kind of, longer term. philosophical point that I think functions and leaders need to align on that says, you know, we may be spending this this year and this that year, but eventually, we look at our overall tech stack and then resources, it will be, let's say, three years from now, a much different place than where it is today.
Preston Lewis: And we have a roadmap roadmap that will enable us to get there, both in terms of spend, upscaling and developing the team skills and capabilities. And of course, evolving our technology in the stack that will enable much more efficient systems and processes, and to reach hard to read audiences unlike we've ever had the ability to do before.
Amanda Berry: So thinking about that, the cost and the spend, what should the leaders that are listening to this be thinking about in budget cuts when impacting internal comms and their ability to be good communicators and create a better employee experience?
Preston Lewis: I think most importantly, leaders need to be giving more permission.
Preston Lewis: I'll even take a step back to that permission point. You know, when we look at modern leadership, to use that word again, again, what does that even mean? And as I said earlier, it suggests that we're thinking differently and open to new ideas and new technology and test and pilot those ideas and technologies.
Preston Lewis: To ultimately see the impact of thinking differently, right? So if, just to answer your question, what should leaders be doing? Well, first, it's having a philosophical conversation around how we think about our work and evolving our function to make a bigger impact. with potentially less resources, money, and people.
Preston Lewis: But to do that, we need to be aligned around that intention. And then secondly, give the permission that the people within that function, say, comms leadership, for example, needs to begin to test and pilot some of these new concepts, some of these new thinking, some of these new structures, because what we are starting to see, you know, the data says, we can do a more effective job with less resources, but it does require new ways of thinking.
Amanda Berry: I'm going to move into our next segment, Ripped from the Headlines.
Amanda Berry: We can't stop talking about AI. I've heard you mention it a bunch, so I want to move into that because I'd love to have your expert opinion about using AI, especially in the comms function. Everyone's talking about it. We can't escape it. I've had numerous guests and I love all the variety of opinions. So let's start with how are you using AI and Ntactic and what are you seeing from your customers, your clients, and how they're using it?
Preston Lewis: Well, my answer to this question three weeks ago would have been different than it is today. So, first, what's nice is that we're seeing more and more organizations acknowledge the reality of the influence of AI in our world. So, I'm sure you may have heard this from other guests, but it's not entirely different than the conversations we were having when we were starting to see the value of social media.
Preston Lewis: Yes,
Amanda Berry: we actually just had a conversation about that very recently with someone on the
Preston Lewis: podcast. Yeah, I thought I may have actually heard it because it's good. It's a really good example, and it's the right one because it's fairly recent, believe it or not. It's so clearly a part of our lives and a part of our work today.
Preston Lewis: And some of the fundamental conversations that we're having around the influence of AI at work are similar to the ones we were having with social media. A, we need to acknowledge it's a reality. That's going to be just a part of what we're doing. B, we need to constantly learn to educate ourselves on what we even mean by AI.
Preston Lewis: Just like back in the day, what is social media? And we also know that ultimately those that get it right and can move faster to have the right conversations right now are gonna set themselves apart from the competition. I mean, it's as simple as that. And when we think about AI and its influence on our work, particularly with communicating inside of organizations, just like social media, we had to build an infrastructure, a foundational philosophy, like have a policy.
Preston Lewis: Know where to go if there are unanswered questions. Share examples, specific examples. On how we're piloting and testing some of this technology in different parts of our business. For organizations that have made that blanket statement of, No, no, no, we're just not gonna do it. You were already starting to see some of those organizations fall a little bit behind.
Preston Lewis: And just as a specific example of what I mean by fall a little bit behind. There's one organization I'm thinking of that is in the insurance space, which also happens to be a technology company. And if we're going to espouse a philosophy and a business strategy that says, we are constantly going to deliver the best technology to our customers and our partners every single day, how does it feel to work for an organization that has taken a stance that says, we're not going to.
Preston Lewis: Innovate and acknowledge the reality of this technology in terms of how it can influence our work inside our organization. So it's the classic saying one thing but doing something different, whether it's to the market or to the organization. And what we're seeing is, it's time sensitive conversation because the slower we are to move on the things that we know are ultimately going to impact our work and our lives, the more distrust.
Preston Lewis: Builds and that gap between truly ensuring and supporting and trusting our leadership teams is going to grow. And that's not something we want to see.
Amanda Berry: I know some conversations I've had very recently about AI is companies need to be implementing it, but you can't go on autopilot, just implement it and let it run on itself, right?
Amanda Berry: You have to be sort of watching and checking and that'll help ensure nothing disastrous happens if you use it. Hopefully.
Preston Lewis: Yeah. As we just discussed a few minutes ago, we talked about who owns an employee experience and we talked about the need for a cross functional team that has clear governance and measurements and a clear remit, how AI influences our work as a general question for any organization is similarly does require, you know, a.
Preston Lewis: cross functional team of representatives that are looking at it from a variety of different angles, applying a variety of different lenses, because what we know to be true, there, there's some functions and parts of an organization that can be doing specific things right now using some of this technology.
Preston Lewis: And it's not, it's not as much of a concern as it is for other functions. So, you know, what's really scary are those blanket statements. No AI. When we know that that also suggests that we're missing opportunities, which is the worst thing in any business. Missed opportunities are just, are just the worst.
Preston Lewis: And this is just another one of those circumstances where we want to make sure that we're not missing these opportunities. Can you
Amanda Berry: point to and give us a couple of good use cases where you've seen it work really well? Mm hmm. Seen AI work really well?
Preston Lewis: Well, let's just stay focused on our audience and communicators at work.
Preston Lewis: So some of the best examples that we're seeing is. In a very, very secure way, being very conscious of, we keep using this word scrubbing, what that means is it enables us or requires us to take existing content, wherever it's from, whether it's existing on an intranet or results from a survey or something that a written piece of original content and ensuring that it's scrubbed, it's safe to be uploaded or cut and pasted.
Preston Lewis: Right? Let's keep it real simple. What we're seeing is the ability to take existing content, move it through, mostly just chat to GPT, but there's a lot of other great technologies out there, to give us back content that's in a better state than what we had, whether it's, like I said, shorter and more impactful, or it's written in a different type of tone that we know is aligned to where we need to be today, or taking content and surfacing specific insights that's going to save us.
Preston Lewis: Thank you. 12, 20, 50 hours of a team or someone's time. Time is money. So all of these examples of better result for less resources or time, hopefully is a clear indication of what organizations could and should be thinking about now in terms of using these technologies. But that's all in that creation category I mentioned, of how AI can impact comms.
Preston Lewis: A little bit in the insight category, as I was saying, of taking existing content and asking some of these AI tools to surface common trends or specific points of insight. This is stuff we could and should be doing now, at least understanding the process that it takes. So one
Amanda Berry: of the things we're hearing about when we talk about AI or the conversation that's happening within the internal comm space is AI taking jobs, right?
Amanda Berry: Taking those things we're used to doing, like creating a plan or writing a communication about a certain topic. And now that it has the ability to do that, the fear is that it's going to replace actual comms people. What is your reaction
Preston Lewis: to that? To keep it really simple, I'm a huge proponent of continuous learning and upskilling.
Preston Lewis: And short answer is, I don't think it's going to replace jobs. It absolutely is going to change how we work as communicators. So, if you're concerned about your job being lost, then the obvious, important question is, well, what is it that we can do and learn to be able to do the work that we do in a more efficient way using this technology?
Preston Lewis: That's the short answer. It's putting a little pressure, I think is a fair word, on some communicators to evolve faster. Which I think is a very healthy thing, in my opinion.
Amanda Berry: You were talking about it, I thought internal comms, a lot of folks had to go through a big transition when COVID hit, right? For a lot of people that put a lot of employees in their homes and now we have to do things a little differently.
Amanda Berry: And so this was just a really bigger Example of that, like continuing to try new things. Because I feel like for a while we were doing things in a very similar sort of fashion. You know, you do town halls the same. And then COVID exploded that and kind of threw out a lot of our playbooks. And now we're learning this whole new technology that I think is super helpful.
Amanda Berry: And it's, it's great to use it. I've been using it as well. Yeah, what's
Preston Lewis: different, and that's why I like to share those categories I shared a few minutes ago, is what's different is we have to be careful not to generalize. AI, losing jobs, you know, we do it all day, no one's fault, the superhuman. What's important is to also realize that with the advances of this technology, it's a gift.
Preston Lewis: We are constantly looking for ways to be more strategic. What better of an opportunity is there than now to ensure that we're doing the right strategic work? And part of that is making the right decisions on the technology that we use to enable that work. That's exactly what's going on right now. We should be thinking about our work differently.
Preston Lewis: We should be spending more time on creative concepts and in some ways helping use these tools for that. Bam. Thinking the same way we have for a long time, because we'll be able to truly sustain the momentum, to your point, that was created in this post COVID era. We are now tasked with doing more, tasked with being more strategic.
Preston Lewis: We had to change quickly. We need to continue to change quickly. And if anything, the advances in AI technology is really going to enable and sustain that evolution.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, absolutely. What concerns do you have about comm space?
Preston Lewis: Mistakes will happen. Mistakes will happen. There is an opportunity, unlike ever before, for trust to be influenced.
Preston Lewis: Just to give a specific example, some organizations that are not enabling people to use AI technology, as Mr. Shelfolt says very eloquently, you know, there's nothing to suggest that somebody isn't just using another computer. for concept or ideation or a lot of these things. So trust is one of my big concerns.
Preston Lewis: And what we know to be true about trust, if anything, we need to have the permission to have the right conversation, a very real conversation about the obvious. Who's doing what? How? Where are our priorities? What are givens? What are not so much givens? So one of the big pieces of advice I'm giving to all organizations is how are we embedding an expectation on our teams?
Preston Lewis: To have an active dialogue around what people are seeing and thinking or feeling about how AI tools and technology are influencing our work. Because like we know, if we're not talking about it, well the conversation is still happening somewhere else and we need to give permission to teams to talk about it now.
Amanda Berry: Let's move into our final segment, asking for a friend. Who's destined for a
Preston Lewis: friend? Hey.
Preston Lewis: Asking for a friend.
Amanda Berry: What is employee experience, or we can even just say internal comms, technology? What's that going to look like in 10 years?
Preston Lewis: I think we'll stop calling it internal and employee communications technology. It's one, one big answer. The way that we communicate at work is an essential business practice. And I think we're always going to call it communications is probably going to be a common word or common way of framing our work, if you will.
Preston Lewis: But what we're seeing are there's much more of a blend happening and communication functions between internal and external. There's the right kind of distinctions are being made around shared systems and platforms and strategy and messaging and organizational narrative. You look at some companies like Cisco, who's training all employees to be LinkedIn ambassadors, right?
Preston Lewis: Because like IBM did in the past 10 years, setting an expectation for every person in a business, aside from what function you're in. To be a salesperson or a brand evangelist, you know, those are some really good examples of how the lines are being blurred now more than ever. So 10 years from now, I think we think about how we conduct our business, how we create strategy and messaging and define the kind of remit for the function.
Preston Lewis: I think that's going to evolve quite a bit.
Amanda Berry: Reminded me of something I said earlier that I was thinking about employee experience from the actual employee and those lines. It needs to be a single place, a single system, a single experience and not, well, I got to do this here and that there. And it's really thinking about what their experiences and not like, like you said, it won't be internal comms technology.
Amanda Berry: It won't be HR. That'd be a more of a, from an actual employee centric
Preston Lewis: experience. The magic happens when there's integrity. between the customer experience and the employee experience. And the question is, what are we doing to create a platform for that magic to happen? I mean, it sounds a little, but really, you know, that requires alignment and connection on many levels.
Preston Lewis: But ultimately, that's where I hope we can all be.
Amanda Berry: Well, Preston, this has been a lot of fun today. I always enjoy talking to you, whether it be on the podcast or in person at conferences. Thank you so much for joining me today. Before I let you go, let our listeners know where they can find you.
Preston Lewis: I like to think I'm one of the easiest people in the world, and Intactic is one of the easiest organizations to find.
Preston Lewis: So, Google Intactic, that's I N T A C T I C, or... Preston Lewis, and I'm on LinkedIn or just reach out anytime. I'm quite available.
Amanda Berry: Great. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been great.
Preston Lewis: Thanks again.