Cohesion

The Ideal Employee Experience, with Stephanie Briggs, Director of Employee Experience at ivanti

Episode Summary

This episode features an interview with Stephanie Briggs, Director of Employee Experience at ivanti. She has over ten years of experience in digital and social media marketing, where she puts storytelling at the forefront. Stephanie’s passion for storytelling doesn’t stop there. She is also a published horror author of the “Sophia Rey” series, in which the main character goes undercover in a cult. In this episode, Amanda and Stephanie discuss who owns employee experience in an org and how storytelling makes for powerful communications.

Episode Notes

This episode features an interview with Stephanie Briggs, Director of Employee Experience at ivanti. She has over ten years of experience in digital and social media marketing, where she puts storytelling at the forefront. Stephanie’s passion for storytelling doesn’t stop there. She is also a published horror author of the “Sophia Rey” series, in which the main character goes undercover in a cult.

In this episode, Amanda and Stephanie discuss who owns employee experience in an org and how storytelling makes for powerful communications.

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“Employee experience, overall, either you’ll have a subset of employees who are highly engaged and it really comes down to the level of passion that they have to not just do their day-to-day and collect a paycheck. But it’s really about having that passion, coming each day, and really feeling that impact that you’re making as an employee. And that’s a tough one because as employee engagement professionals, it’s really in our areas to help with getting employees to that point of ensuring that they understand and they’re feeling the impact that they make overall. And that’s not an easy thing to do.” – Stephanie Briggs

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Episode Timestamps:

*(01:45): Stephanie’s background 

*(03:37): Stephanie’s role at ivanti 

*(04:58): Segment: Storytime

*(05:37): Why Stephanie loves to tell stories 

*(08:11): Stephanie breaks down her Sophia Rey book series

*(13:59: Segment: Getting Tactical 

*(17:10): How Stephanie supports leaders 

*(18:20): How Stephanie worked across her organization on an intranet revamp

*(24:31): How ivanti maintains a global employee experience

*(30:40): What’s the ideal org for employee experience?

*(33:36): Segment: Asking for a Friend 

*(38:48): Biggest challenges employee experience professionals will face in the future

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Links:

Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn

ivanti

Amanda’s LinkedIn

www.simpplr.com/podcast

Episode Transcription

Amanda Berry: Stephanie, how are you today? 

Stephanie Briggs: I'm doing fantastic. Thank you so much. How are you? 

Amanda Berry: I'm doing really well. Thanks for asking. Thank you so much for being on today. It's really great to meet you. Get to know you. So I wanna first start off learning a little bit about your background. Walk us through your career journey and what brought you to ivanti.

Stephanie Briggs: Absolutely. Thank you so much. I do wanna state that my responses are a reflection of my experience and beliefs and not a reflection of ivantis. I attended university of California, Santa Cruz, and obtained a bachelor's of art degree in film and digital media. I came out of college and worked at NASA as a media intern, and always knew that I eventually wanted to be in marketing.

Uh, really wanted that balance of creativity and business acumen. Uh, and I had a few different marketing roles, but it really wasn't until I got into tech that I was able to make great strides within my role. Before ivanti. I was in corporate communications at a company called pulse secure pulse secure was then acquired by ivanti in December of 2020.

And I transitioned into ivanti and was asked to head up internal coms and employee engagement. And the rest is history. 

Amanda Berry: It sounds like a pretty common experience started in that external media relations. That's my background as well. You mentioned that it was through tech that you're able to make great strides.

What do you think that is? 

Stephanie Briggs: I'm I'm obviously biased. I, I love tech. I'm so grateful and glad that I. Have found a career in tech. I think it really has a lot to do with the culture of tech companies. Overall, there's just this culture of, for the most part of, of open mindedness innovation coming with with ideas and really being able to be heard and be creative.

That's not to say in other industries that that's not the case, but in my experience, uh, once I got into. It was just a game changer for me in my career. And I've been able to really thrive in the industry and within my role in marketing. 

Amanda Berry: Tell me about 

your current role as director of employee engagement marketing at Avante.

What do you do 

there? 

Stephanie Briggs: Yes, definitely. So my role is director of employee experience marketing. It's really one of the most human centric roles I have ever had and been a part of. And what I mean by that is I wake up every day with ivanti employees, needs and desires. Top of mind, I'm able to work with ivanti teams globally to make decisions right.

Based on how. Our employees can need and want to perform tasks. So it it's really about being a really good listener. It's a mindset day to day is again, coming ready to, to learn and to tune in to what our employees are experiencing. Now from a project perspective, within my role, my team owns employee engagement, strategy, internal employee campaigns, and we work collaboratively with different teams on how, what and why we communicate to employees.

Part of my role also is helping to balance executive and leadership. Voices while delivering the best employee experience. So really balancing those two areas. 

Amanda Berry: I've got a lot of questions about that. So I'm gonna move us into our first segment called story time. 

Welcome to story. Take a totally D

I wanted to take a totally different direction though. First. Okay. Stories is what you say. You, you do some of the best, right? Some of your best work. You do it in your current role, you've done it in your past roles. You've handled internal communications for a thousand employees. And just so our Lister know you're a published horror author.

I am a huge horror genre fan huge. I've grown up watching every possible horror movie from a very young age. So let's start with this question. Why do you love to tell stories? And then I wanna talk about your books that you've published. 

Stephanie Briggs: Stories are what resonate with people. When we tell stories and we tell them effectively and tell them, well, we are really able to tap into people's emotions and their values.

And that kind of goes back to being human centric. So I'm a firm believer that stories. They resonate most and influence people and influence behaviors. And, and I think that that's across the board, whether you're reading a fiction novel, or you're telling a story within an organization about a customer, um, or an employee, it's really how we are crafting those stories that resonate most with people.

Amanda Berry: What are some key components of good storytelling? 

Stephanie Briggs: I think some of the key components really it's there always has to be some kind of conflict. Like no matter what, if we're talking fiction writing non-fiction even within organizations, right. Conflict is key because then. We're able to find out how the characters in that story work to resolve that conflict and that conflict in fiction or in horror writing obviously can be something quite scary.

Right. But in an organization we are solving for pain points for our customers, right? Depending on the solution sets that we're offering to customers and those pain. Are essentially conflicts. If we're gonna tell a story about a customer, we would definitely want to deep dive into their pain points and how it's really impacting them individually from an organization standpoint.

And that's similar with employees as well. We can basically find out in here and listen to employees about some of their experiences in their day to day. That's kind of what our team does is understanding. We have employees who are, for example, volunteering. At certain organizations on their free time and that volunteer work oftentimes stems from certain concerns or conflicts that they feel in their lives.

And so they then take that to the next level of, okay, well, I'm gonna volunteer at X, Y, Z. Then we get tapped on and say, oh, how can ivanti support this effort? Right. So if I think conflict is key in any kind of story, That can look different depending on fiction non-fiction or if we're talking from a business perspective.

And then of course, character development, really understanding people. And that's really what character development is. 

Amanda Berry: I wanna talk 

about your book series, your, you briefly published book two in Sophia. Ray, tell us about the series and what the new book is about. Like I said, I'm a huge horror fan, so I'd love to hear what the 

book's about.

Stephanie Briggs: Yeah. So outside of my. At ivanti. I am a published fiction, horror author, as well as a portrait painter. These are two of my businesses actually outside of my career with ivanti. I'm a firm believer that my career is only one facet of my life. And I think it's crucial to develop other skills and constantly learn and challenge myself.

Just like you. I have an affinity for all things horror. So novels. Films documentaries. And so one day in 2019, I started to write a horror story and I published each chapter on my personal blog. So that's how it started. I was actually, I wrote one chapter, if you will, and then published that as a blog. I ended up getting a small fan base and folks were reading my chapters on my blog and reaching out.

This was key in what. Basically pushed me and motivated me to write a novel is the readers. I had folks reaching out to me on private messages on social media and they were excited. They wanted to know what happened next. They're like, I can't wait to see the next blog. I can't believe this what's gonna happen with Sophia Ray.

And so that's when I, I got really serious about turning this into a novel. So the Sophia Ray series, it centers around our female protagonist, Sophia rays, a detective, and she goes undercover in book one, she goes undercover into a cult and she attempts to save a young girl and whoever else she can potentially save and get.

Rescue, basically from this cult and I've watched so many documentaries and read so many books about cults. It's just, yeah. And the reason is it just fascinates me that because it's, so it's one of those, those scarier ideas, because it's so real, like cults are a real thing. They've been a real thing in our history.

It's interesting to me how an individual can basically rise up to that point of having control over a group. People and psychology of humans. And so that just fascinates me. It really does. So at any rate book, one is about Sophia Ray going and undercover into a cult it's, uh, it's book one's based in Santa Cruz, which is where I went to college.

I was able to really. Describe Santa Cruz fairly well, because that's where I lived for four years while I went to university there, book one, not to give anything away, but book one does end on a pretty great cliff hanger. if you will. And that's. Where I realized, okay. I, I need to write a book two because I ended it on, on a pretty crazy cliff hanger.

So book two continues Sophia Ray's journey. Now with the help of a Cove of witches. And there are three sisters in this Cove, and basically they pair up with Sophia Ray to seek redemption. And retribution 

Amanda Berry: and fangirling over here, but I feel like I could ask a million questions, but maybe for another time, I, I love all things, horror, supernatural.

I watched every documentary Jones temp, so I I'm right there with you. So I I'm gonna check this out. I'm I'm impressed. That's really, really cool. Does that have any influence on what you do at ivanti or, you know, or your career currently as a director of employee experience marketing or anything else you've done or how have they impacted each 

other?

Stephanie Briggs: It's interesting because riding horror novels and having a career in marketing may not seem like there's a lot of relationships there and connections, but connections can definitely be made. So first it really, it comes back to my core values in terms of again, challenging myself and, um, constantly learning new things and not being afraid to take calculated risks and.

Really when writing, uh, my two novels as well. Entering into my role as director of employee engagement. I really take these values to heart and apply in all areas of my life in terms of writing, in terms of my role at ivanti. Also having a career in marketing has really helped my author career in terms of having that creative mindset and that business knowledge as well.

I've met other indie authors, who they have a tough time with the marketing side of things. It, it doesn't come. Necessarily natural to them in terms of their author career. So really as an author or, and as an artist, it's been crucial to learn marketing skills. And for me, it's really helped to develop my reputation as both an artist and an author.

And it also kind of works the other way around as well. My fiction writing, it definitely continues to work out my creative muscles and really develop my creative muscles. And this comes in handy in my role at ivanti in terms of creative thinking, actually taking the time to just sit and think this is something I've learned very recently in my life.

And literally, I mean, sitting and thinking. In a quiet place, no technology. And I've learned this in writing. Sometimes you just have to sit there and not talk to anyone. Well, again, not be listening to anything, just be there with your thoughts. I've learned that in writing novels and now. It's really become useful in my role at ivanti as well, because that's really what stems innovative ideas, right.

That's where innovative ideas come from is when you're actually just sitting and thinking about, uh, a particular, uh, project in mind. 

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

I'm trying to figure out tactics and to be perfect, honest that 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? So 

you own the internal communications global strategy at ivanti. Can you walk us through the process of running a big global function like 

Stephanie Briggs: that? Running a global function. Really starts with my mindset. I really do believe that.

And it's really a mindset that all ivanti employees, including our executive leaders and senior leaders, our customers as internal comps professional. So in any company, as an internal comps, professional, your customer. Those are all the employees at that company and in any organization, the customer relationship is top priority.

Right? So organizations today, I believe they're truly realizing that employees are also customers and there's a direct correlation to the employee experience and the customer experience. Now, in terms of supporting leaders and employees at ivanti, a core component in what we're doing day to day is. And I said it earlier is active listening, and I continue to emphasize this because it's such a crucial part of, of being an internal coms professional, but also being successful as an internal coms professional.

Amanda Berry: That's just such a 

great call out. I just wanna emphasize to folks listening when you're internal coms. You need to understand the needs of your customers, which are the employees, just the employees need understand the needs of the paying customers to create better products. That's exactly what we do.

So thank you for calling that out. And I, I agree with you that the customer and employee experience have a direct impact on each 

Stephanie Briggs: other. Yeah. And besides the tactical every day, like how we, we support leaders and employees. Again, more important is absolutely that value and mindset every day. Right? And the reason why to me is internal coms professionals.

We come to work each day with the intention of providing the best employee experience to all employees and the how we do that ends up becoming a, a lot of endless possibilities when you have that intention each day. So to give a concrete example, a lot of my role is speaking with and listening to. A lot of the different departments at ivanti.

And another piece is the continuous building of relationships with employees and executive leaders. I think that's super important is that relationship building is what allows us as internal comms experts to connect the dots to the bigger picture and to. Others within the organization understand those connections?

I think that's key. We are then able to build out strategies and internal initiatives, employee engagement, campaigns with purpose because of those listening tactics and because of those relationships that are being built day by day. you 

Amanda Berry: mentioned leaders and earlier you had mentioned speaking in a leader voice.

Will you talk about your process or how you go about supporting leaders and learning their 

Stephanie Briggs: voice? Really, the key is to continuously foster relationships with executives and leaders that really looks like connecting with them. On a weekly basis and offering them counsel, but also listening to their needs as well.

I mean, that's a key component, right. Is for any internal comms professional, really building those relationships and not being afraid to make those connections with executives and senior leaders is absolutely critical. So not being shy in terms of, again, building that relationship, it is. Like a friendship, right?

With a friendship there's a continuous kind of back and forth, but you're doing your best in a friendship type of relationship to be the best type of friend that you can be. Whether that's listening, having a listening ear, providing counsel when appropriate, it's similar in a business relationship with executive and senior leaders.

Amanda Berry: last year. I know you managed ivantis intranet revamp. Can you talk about how you worked across the organization to get that going and get it implemented? 

Stephanie Briggs: Launching a new intranet. It was really one of the best projects I've ever worked on because of the large scale and the direct impact that it has had on all the employees at Avante.

So the first thing that we did. Was engage with key stakeholders out the gate. So that really looked like bringing in some of our executive leadership team members right away from the beginning, as well as leads from other departments. And this was really important to do, like I said, at the very beginning because of how large of the scope this project was.

So this really helped us to start off successfully and also. Launched successfully. It allowed us to hear ideas from these key stakeholders and concerns at the very beginning of the process, which then we were able to work together, of course, to solve any of those concerns that came up in the beginning.

So again, that whole building of relationships, building that rapport and bringing the right people in from the beginning so that they know that as internal comms experts and leaders, that we're really valuing their opinions, their ideas, and what they have to say about something like this on such a scale with a new intranet.

One of the biggest challenges that we did face with this particular project was from a timing perspective. So due to some internal circumstances, we ended up only having two months. To actually migrate over from our old intranet to the new one, as well as train department, site managers and launch the intranet with an employee engagement plan to back it up in two months, total time for all of it.

So the timing was extremely tight, but we ended up accomplishing this very successfully and it really. Through a lot of obviously hard work passion, but that collaborative, um, nature of bringing the right folks in and keeping the right folks involved that needed to be involved. 

Amanda Berry: When I've done internet implementations, the difference between I think it being successful and UN unsuccessful, bringing in a, you know, a group of people, leaders to listen to their concerns.

Honestly, there was like a, a switch that flipped when I did that, I brought people together at one of my previous roles. And there was still, you could feel the angst in the air as we were building, as we were implementing, just because they had so many concerns. And I was like, let's whiteboard, 'em, let's write 'em down.

Let's start, make sure that we solve for of them. It was. Switch that flips. So I'm glad you said that. Cause that's one of those moments in my, my early career where I've gone. Oh, that is so important to do probably for any project 

Stephanie Briggs: yeah, no, absolutely. The other piece too, now that you mentioned some of this, the other piece that was really important to our success.

So obviously bringing in key stakeholders is key folks that are gonna be highly involved in. Planning of and implementation of the new intranet, but the other very important component that we made sure that we weaved into the process was again, Our employees, right. Especially at ivanti, a key piece of our day to day.

And our strategy overall is not just talking at our employees, not just assuming that we know what our employees want, what they need, it's that listening piece. So we actually did a couple of. Really neat things to basically enable employees to be involved in the process as well. So we didn't just storm forward and say, we're switching over our intranet.

We did run a survey, an internal survey to understand the current pulse of employees at ivanti in terms of internal comms and how they're getting their information, how they wanna be communicated to, and also how they felt. The old intranet was that meeting their needs. Were they using it as their primary source to gather information about the company?

And so we took those findings from that survey early last year. And after assessing that, we realized that we wanted to, to move to a different intranet platform based on those findings from the employee responses, there was that piece of that listening piece. Right. And then we involved employees. In fun ways.

So for example, naming the intranet, right? Because we got to give our intranet, uh, a name. We did a vote, we actually had employees vote on the name and we chose the, the name, that one. So different things like that to really keep in employees engaged so that they know that they're part of the process in some way.

Amanda Berry: I was actually talking 

about this the other day with someone about this idea of getting employees involved to name. And I can tell you when I've done that, that seems to be some of the highest employee participation I've ever gotten was saying, what name would you give? And then people, you know, submitting ideas, then people commenting on those ideas and creating a lot of buzz.

I love that. Can you tell us what you went with for a name? 

Stephanie Briggs: Absolutely. We went with the name. Ivanti everywhere. And part of our mission as a company is enabling the everywhere workplace for organizations, right? Enabling that everywhere workplace in a secure way. That's really our mission. That's key, the everywhere workplace, of course, being able to work wherever you are.

And so ivanti is just in terms of walking the walk on that has, it's just been pretty amazing. And so that's kind of where that everywhere stems from ivanti everywhere. 

Amanda Berry: I know that Ivanti is globally. And are you all full-time remote? Are you hybrid? We are 

Stephanie Briggs: hybrid, honestly, we're a hundred percent remote, but employees who live near offices, they may go in during the week.

And right now we've been opening up offices and it's completely voluntary in terms of employees who do live near an office, if they want to go into the office for the week or whatnot, but we are a hundred percent remote. 

Amanda Berry: So, how are you building and maintaining that connection and, and creating that great employee experience for employees all over the globe.

Stephanie Briggs: Our intranet has been a key driver in helping to maintain connection, um, amongst the global workforce. And, and I gotta say, I really, I can't emphasize enough that the new intranet platform that we move to, it's pretty phenomenal. I mean, it's a key reason that we chose the Simpplr platform, which is the internet platform we use.

Is because of the two way dialogue that the platform is capable of. And what I mean by that is it's essentially truly an area where employees can log in each day and. Actually connect with one another via like internal feeds and, and really it's, it's helped to really build connection in community. And we do have some internal activities that we encourage employees to participate in on the intranet so that they can get to know each other.

Another piece though, besides the intranet alongside that we have recently, uh, reopened some of the offices assessing the situation in each location, but we started to reopen offices and. Have been having kickoff parties again on a voluntary basis for employees to welcome them back together. And again, build that community and connection.

We do have different internal campaigns that we run each year to help with building connection and community in terms of a remote workforce. 

Amanda Berry: I wanna just switch just a little bit and keep focusing on this employee experience, cuz it's in your title. It's not that the employee experience is new, but the amount of focus and attention it's getting is pretty new, right?

The pandemic sort of shifted into like, wow, we have to be focused on their experience while they're working. Cuz the world was in chaos for a while. So I wanna first start off by understanding how do you define employee experience? 

Stephanie Briggs: I define it as truly what an employee. Really feels when they are at an organization, when they're working at an organization in their specific role.

And for every employee, that's obviously going to be different, but it's really about how are you feeling when you get up each day and you are going to work and in your role? I, I think that's key. Employee experience overall either you'll have a subset of employees who are highly engaged and it really comes down to the level of passion that they have to not just do their day to day and collect a paycheck.

But it's really about having that passion coming each day and really. Feeling that impact that you're making as an employee. And that's a tough one because as employee engagement professionals, it's really in our areas to help with getting employees to that point of ensuring that they understand and they're feeling the impact that, that they make overall.

And that's not an easy thing to do. I have great 

Amanda Berry: conversations with people about employee experience. And one of the themes that I always feel comes out is that everyone's responsible for the employee experience. How do you feel about that statement? First of all, and what should the employee experience function do within an organization?

Stephanie Briggs: I do believe in that statement, something that comes to mind is leadership development. And what I mean is when you say that some folks will say, Hey, everyone at an organization has some kind of influence here on employee experience. I would say that is true. I would also say that leadership development.

Is a key component and it's tricky at organizations. If you don't have a, a culture at an organization that is open to not only individual contributors, getting development, career development, but also senior leaders and executives, it can really stifle the employee experience. So it. It makes me think about that because I really think that it starts at the top.

I think it's our job as employee experience professionals to continuously provide counsel to an organization, to the leaders in the organization on what is going to help. To develop the best employee experience. And I think leadership development. That's a big one because when you have buy-in from executives and senior leaders to develop themselves, then we're really able to start to.

Change mindsets of leaders, but provide them tools as well on many different areas on DEI, on human centric, leadership, empathetic leadership, just concepts that are, I think again, they're not necessarily natural to all leaders and it can make or break in organization and in employee experience. 

Amanda Berry: I absolutely could not agree more, honestly, if you would asked me that same question, I would've had a similar answer about leadership development.

I was at an organization that that was one of their primary goals and, and things is to develop people into leaders and keep developing their leaders within the same sort of paradigm, which was that empathetic leadership and how to deal with conflicts. And. there's just so many components and it just felt as if the majority of leaders did subscribe to that.

If not, at least all the ones I interacted with and it really changed the experience. That's such a good key component to call out. 

Stephanie Briggs: And I think as we listen and tune in at any organization at any company, as you listen and tune in to what employees are saying, uh, especially when employees leave an organization, this is not new to us that we continuously have heard over the years, right?

Employees, they leave mainly because oftentimes it might be the leadership, right? The leadership that is existent in an organization, and sometimes you lose. Fantastic employees and great people because of, because of that. So that's where I think, yeah, it's absolutely key. And, and again, that's totally part, the internal comp's role is providing that, that council and those ideas, bringing those ideas forward and helping to develop those kinds of pathways.

For example, in this case, right. For leadership development, let's. 

Amanda Berry: When I think about those sorts of conversations, it makes me wonder who should roll up into an employee experience. I hear HR themes. I hear internal comms themes. There's de and I in there. Like what should that org look like in your mind?

What's the ideal org for employee experience? 

Stephanie Briggs: I really do think the employee experience should be its own department. Rolling up to like a chief employee experience officer now. Overall though, I would say of course each organization does it a little differently, right? To your point. Some employee engagement roles are rolling up into HR.

Some are rolling up into marketing. In my case, I roll up into marketing and I would say, even though companies are doing it a little different, as long as the priority lies within again, That employee experience right? Being the key priority is employees. First, there will be success, right? Whether the IC team rolls up into marketing, HR, et cetera.

I do think though that it would be interesting to have employee engagement as its own department rolling up to a chief employee experience officer, even though we are very collaborative in and basically working with all departments at a company, but that's what I would say. What do you see is 

Amanda Berry: the future of the employee experience org?

It's starting to feel like it's really taking shape, really starting to develop in more companies. It's not uncommon now to me, to director of employee experience, which I think is a great investment for companies. What does the, what does the next five to 10 years look like? 

Stephanie Briggs: I'm glad you mentioned the word investment, because that's what I would basically jump to say that you're totally right.

That internal coms employee engagement has really moved into the forefront even more so now than ever. I know that the pandemic had some impact on that. I tune into a lot of internal coms podcasts and read a lot of employee engagement, literature, and the effect of the pandemic. It really did place internal coms professionals.

More in the forefront. I think the future holds some amazing things for internal coms teams, and that would be having a defined seat at an executive table even more. So companies are going to continue to realize that investing in their people, investing in employees is worthwhile in so many ways. It's already been proven that companies who.

Stand their employees in terms of employee engagement, employee development, those companies are more profitable. And that goes back to ex equals CX employee experience equals the customer experience, I think. Yeah. In five to 10 years, the future for employee. Engagement is going to be more dollars to invest in people to keep people at organizations.

It's a win-win right for everybody. Let's 

Amanda Berry: move into our last segment, asking for a friend 

Stephanie Briggs: who's for a friend. Hey, asking for a friend.

Amanda Berry: I wanna take what you just said there at the end about investing, we were talking about that. What would you say to a leader who doesn't still see the value in really focusing on internal coms and the employee experience, right? Things are working the way that they've been doing it. They're still doing, you know, one employee engagement survey a year.

How do you convince someone that this is really worth the investment? 

Stephanie Briggs: I would convince and influence using data and maybe. That sounds like a boring answer at first, but in my experience now with employee engagement and internal coms and with influencing leaders, senior leaders, executive leaders, data is really key and it's very telling, but I would say you gotta take it a step further and we can connect it back to some of our earlier conversation, taking the data and telling a story with that data.

That's crucial. And in my experience, that is a very successful way in helping senior leaders, executive leaders maybe influence them in a shift, right. To shift a mindset or to shift a little bit of the way that we're doing something. And when you have data to back that up, And then you're able to tell a story with that data.

It tends to resonate a and especially with leaders and, and they wanna know that they wanna know, okay, how is this important to the business overall? And it's not always easy, but you have to be able to make the connection to. The business goals, right? The larger business goals, like, okay, this is how employee engagement and investing in our people, how it's shown to impact the bottom line, because it does, it does impact the bottom line.

If you have a lot of turnover, let's say that is absolutely going to impact the customer experience. Right. And that's gonna impact. Your bottom line of sales and renewals, right? But if you have a workforce who is dedicated and loyal and passionate to your company and your vision that is going to translate over to the customer experience, which is gonna translate into sales, which translates into profitability, there's all those connections there.

Amanda Berry: Yeah, data really does show that return on investments. Mm-hmm absolutely right. Let me go back to one of the stories you were telling earlier. Let's talk about what advice would you give to an IC person or an employee experience person who's looking to invest and implement in a new intranet. 

Stephanie Briggs: First and foremost, get an idea of the current landscape of internal communications at the company that you're at.

So really understanding what are the avenues that we use at this organization to communicate to employees and try to get a pulse of the employee ex experience with those avenues of internal coms. Once you have that, then it's really about that baseline research of different platforms, but also pulling.

Key stakeholders in from the beginning. So I, I would say that's very important. Probably one of the most important is identifying the key executives or leaders of certain teams who you're gonna really need to have their input and their ideas and buy in on this journey. That's gonna really help right away.

And the reason is when you identify those key stakeholders that are gonna have some kind of influence on the platform, And how it's integrated into all the other systems. It really helps to avoid pitfalls later. I'm not saying that there's not gonna be challenges throughout the journey, but it helps to prevent some stopping points because now you have the right people that are involved.

They're asking questions from their perspective that you may not have, have thought about. For example, we identified some key executives and some of those executives were like our head of HR, our head of marketing, of course, because this was initiative run essentially out of the marketing team. We also had our head of it and security.

From that perspective, so important because an internal comps professional, we may not think about all the technical details of how is this platform gonna be integrated into our other systems? How is it gonna be done in a secure manner? There's all these technical areas that. Privacy and security teams are going to have a stake in absolutely.

You cannot implement a, a new solution and technology into your organization without working with privacy and your security teams to ensure that they're meeting all of the different regulations, the different policies. If we were to have brought them in way late in the game, you can imagine that could have caused a big halt in the project and a lot more work in the middle.

Of what we were doing. So I think bringing in the right folks from the beginning is probably one of my number one pieces of advice. 

Amanda Berry: Yeah. That's such a good call out for the intranet. Like you mentioned earlier, bringing in the right leaders, HR it to help bring up those concerns early. What do you think of the biggest challenges are that employee experience professionals will face in the future?

Stephanie Briggs: I think as companies continue to embrace remote workforces, right? Embrace the everywhere workplace. One of the biggest challenges will be how we as internal comps professionals will engage employees in meaningful ways. Let's be honest. We live in a world even in our personal lives where we are.

Bombarded by technology. You go onto social media. It's very difficult to grab someone's attention. You have a two to three second window to grab an a person's attention, whether you're selling them something or try whatever it may be. And so it's the same for employee experience is there's a lot of information that employees are receiving on a day to day.

in terms of their role, right? The actual work that they're doing in their role updates about the business, about the company that they're at crucial information, they need to know about their benefits. There's so many things. And so that continues to be a challenge. And I think it's going to be a challenge in the future is really trying to understand and figure out new ways of engaging employees and trying to think outside of the box on that.

That's great 

Amanda Berry: advice, everyone I know is trying to get better at their jobs. What does that look like for you? 

Stephanie Briggs: For me, that looks like being humble, having humility and really never assuming and always learning. It's very near and dear to my heart. I do live my life every day with these values and they're not.

Always easy, easy values to live by. Right? I mean, I think we can oftentimes in any role that you're in any career that you're in and that you have, it's easy for us to fall into a trap of like, okay, well I've been doing this for 10 years. And so you stay on that same path of thinking, Hey, this is the way it's done.

That is something for me. I'm constantly learning in different ways. I tune into. Many different podcasts. Podcasts are a thing that I just really got into in the last, like I would say the last three years, I never was a person to tune into podcasts. And let me just say, I mean, I can't, I, I am not kidding.

Like if I'm on a walk, if I'm taking a shower, if I'm getting ready, whatever it may be, I will take those minutes. To just be a sponge. I tune into internal comms and employee engagement podcasts. I tune into financial wellness podcasts. I tune into podcasts about motherhood and truly for me, that is, is me getting better at not just my job, but.

Getting better at being the best leader. I can be at ivanti, the best mother writer, artist, and it's really about developing my skills in those areas. So I I'm always learning that's key. I'm always reading books and tuning into podcasts and then adopting. New habits and behaviors that may seem different than the norm.

I think that's really important too. Getting better at my job means to me, not just doing the same old stuff that other people have done over the years or not just doing what I grew up learning. That's another way. We back ourselves into a corner and that's hard is you're taught a certain way growing up by your parents and family.

And we hold that dear to us. Right. It's okay to take in that knowledge and then go wait a minute. Maybe I can think about this differently. I think that's key is, uh, being open minded and, and willing to do things differently. 

Amanda Berry: Stephanie, this has been a lot of fun before I let you go. Would you let our listeners know where they can find you?

And if there's anything else you want them to know, listeners 

Stephanie Briggs: can connect with me on LinkedIn, Stephanie Briggs. And also if you are, um, interested in horror novels, or you have an interest in portrait painting, you can also go to my personal website, which is I. stir.com. So that's, I am S T E R p.com. And you can find my writing endeavors there and my portrait painting business as.

Amanda Berry: Thank you for joining me today, Stephanie, this has been 

Stephanie Briggs: great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time and the opportunity. Thank you again for listening to this episode of the Cohesion podcast brought to you by simply the modern internet software that simplifies the employee experience. Learn more about how Simpplr can help you build a future of your employee experience@Simpplr.com.

That's S I N P P r.com 

Producer: to all of our listeners out there. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode and want to hear more, make sure to hit subscribe, leave a review and head over to www.Simpplr.com/podcast. For more information. Until next time you are listening to the Cohesion podcast, brought to you by Simpplr.

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