This episode features an interview with Pinaki Kathiari, CEO and owner of Local Wisdom, a digital communications agency. Pinaki’s experience spans two decades serving global Fortune companies, startups, and multi-industry agencies. He’s also the co-founder of Resource Hero, Vice President of Professional Development for the IABC Tristate Area Chapter, and a Business Mentor for WOMEN Unlimited, Inc. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Pinaki to discuss his communications team maturity model, the ROI of employee recognition, and the value of a digital communications presence.
This episode features an interview with Pinaki Kathiari, CEO and owner of Local Wisdom, a digital communications agency. Pinaki’s experience spans two decades serving global Fortune companies, startups, and multi-industry agencies. He’s also the co-founder of Resource Hero, Vice President of Professional Development for the IABC Tristate Area Chapter, and a Business Mentor for WOMEN Unlimited, Inc.
In this episode, Amanda sits down with Pinaki to discuss his communications team maturity model, the ROI of employee recognition, and the value of a digital communications presence.
-------------------
“If people don't know how they're actually, or really making a difference, then they kind of lose sight of why they're here. So we all do that. It feels like being in a conversation with two other people who are speaking another language. Kind of like, ‘why am I here and how am I even contributing?’ [...] I think leaders want to quantify investment into recognition systems and programs. And that I get, because that takes some funds and investment and planning. But I also think that recognition doesn't have to take a large investment. Like I said, simply adding a topic to your leader's speaking points; it's the littlest thing you could do that doesn't cost really anything. Because at the end of the day, we work better as friends and friends show appreciation to each other.” – Pinaki Kathiari
-------------------
Episode Timestamps:
*(02:12): Pinaki’s career journey
*(10:02): Segment: Story Time
*(10:58): How Pinaki quantifies the ROI of employee recognition
*(17:16): How leaders can institute employee recognition
*(22:41): Segment: Getting Tactical
*(23:07): Pinaki explains his communications team maturity model
*(29:37): Must-haves for a good internal comms team
*(34:15): Metrics internal communicators can use to show ROI
*(38:40): Changes to the communications team maturity model
-------------------
Links:
Connect with Pinaki on LinkedIn
Connect with Amanda on LinkedIn
Amanda Berry: Pinaki, how are you doing?
Pinaki Kathiari: No, I'm doing well. Thank you. It's getting colder out. Winter is hitting. Yes. Thank you. How are you doing?
Amanda Berry: I'm doing well. Winter is coming. I'm in Wisconsin, so winter is coming here too. We are. We are knee deep in it almost with just with not a lot of snow yet. But thanks for joining me today. I wanna first start off and understand more about who you are and what you've been doing. Can you talk about your career journey and how you got to where you are today?
It's kind
Pinaki Kathiari: of a little deep, but Yeah. I'll, I'll explain. So growing up, I, I wanted to be an engineer because that's what my dad was. Then kind of like in the middle of like high school, I got into drawing and art and writing and doing all exploring my creative side. So by the time college came around, I was thinking of pursuing something in the arts and my dad was like, no, you're gonna go into engineering.
And so that's where I started and I ended up going into computer science because the. It just started back then. I'm kind of dating myself, I guess. And software seemed to be more interesting than circuitry to me at the time. Right. So, and at the time there was also no way to take both art or design and computer science courses together.
So I couldn't minor in art. . So I ended up minoring in psychology. So I graduated when that like tech bubble burst and I, I found myself at this like office manager position at this IT consulting company and it, it was a great experience. I learned a lot about the ins and outs of small businesses and basically dealt with just about every job function in that role.
So that's where I met the founders of Local Wisdom. There were a group of friends. I had during college and we had studied together and things like that. So after we graduated, I, I kind of found myself working on the side with them because we saw this need in the market where there were companies that did great design and companies that did great technology, but none that did both really well.
And so that's what we set out to create a, a company could. To do that. So I guess you could say we were born in digital communications and I was part of that co-founding team, but back then it was di a a basement operation. I always laugh cuz I say in the west coast, startups happen in the garage. Well the east coast startups happen in the basement
Amanda Berry: Cause there are no basements on the west coast. That's
Pinaki Kathiari: right. And it's out here. So you know, it was my co-founder Michael Alfaro's house and working with Local Wisdom was really like pro bono and it just allowed me to practice and learn and build up a portfolio. So with that portfolio, I, I found myself joining Johnson and Johnson at an in-house shared communication team.
I was essentially helping to build their first digital team. Within this communication team. And so we managed like over a hundred websites, both internal and external. And I found myself going from web developer to senior designer and then at some point I hit this kind of like design project that totally made me rethink design.
And it, it was, it was interesting. It was at the beginning of the entire user experience movement and it just kind of like diverted me into kind of going from creative. To user experience design. And so for a little while, I, I joined Avenue A Razorfish, which was a global digital agency. I was at their Times Square office as an information architect, which was tons of fun.
I got to work on Ford Motor Companies corporate website, the Microsoft Sync MyRide product. Worked on few projects with Merrill Lynch, and throughout the time I, I kept, With my friends at Local Wisdom and I got a call back from them with an offer to join as a partner, which was really cool. So I, I saw K Cam on to build up the user experience practice, and so I did that.
I moved to director of production. Kind of moved around a little bit and swapped roles and got into marketing and sales, and then ultimately became the C E O. And throughout all that, our core remained the same. It was all around technology, design and communication. So, you know, we not only help build communication channels, but we structure teams to help manage the everyday production.
Of communication. So it's been a really great journey. We've been through some great times. We've been through some tough times, we have to find ourself, but I'm super happy to report that we have one of the best teams that I've worked with throughout this time. All clients are happy and I'm seeing exciting things in the future.
So I'm gonna knock on wood here. And about the time when I was in marketing and sales, we also launched a bunch of digital apps and products, one of which is called Resource Hero, and it's a Salesforce app that allows service teams to forecast and track time of their, of their people really easily. It's a five star app and that's doing really well.
So yeah, that's kind of overall the journey. I'm happy to be here with you, Amanda. And so yeah, that's the quick semi abridge
Amanda Berry: story. I love that. I feel like I, I, I hear it from a lot of people who I talk to, like leaders in communications space. Nobody has, almost nobody has a traditional, I started in communications and I'm in communications.
Everyone has such a interesting background and story and, and I'll be honest, I didn't know a lot of that about you in your background. I mean, I know you from like IABC. So to hear that like, I love that story. Can you just talk a little bit more about Local Wisdom? I'd love to know how they got the name, Local Wisdom, but help people understand what Local Wisdom is and what, what y'all do.
Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's a great story. Yeah. So the name Local Wisdom was something that a prior owner had said it kind of. The domain name was available, so they just kind of went with it. And so it, it, it's interesting. It kind of happened before I joined and I actually never got to speak with the person who came up with it.
What was interesting was it was a while ago, several years ago, one of our creative directors had found something very interesting about. To name Local Wisdom. So Local Wisdom is actually a term used to describe how knowledge is passed down generation to generation within an indigenous tribe, specifically in Australia.
So and so we aim Local Wisdom to be that, right? So Local Wisdom is wisdom that's passed down and added to. And pass down an attitude and so on all around digital and digital communications. And I think that's why we kind of set up our values to include, learn from doing and share that wisdom. Because if we're not here to really, you know, help each other out, help each other grow and be better and be successful in some form, or the next generation to be successful, then it's kind of like, why are we here?
Right? And all that goes into the experience also of what it's like working with Local Wisdom as a client, I'm. Really happy to hear that with us. Like the client experience doesn't really feel like an agency client relationship. It's more like a cultivated one team mentality because you know, I think like great things come from great teamwork, so I think the name is very fitting.
I'm glad we have it. I'm glad we captured that domain name. As far as what we do, we are a digital communications agency and our mission is essentially, Enable our clients who are communicators, both internal and external, to have the time and head space to be strategic leaders in their organization. And we do that by taking on the tactical nuts and bolts of their strategy.
So many times they're doing so much and it's hard to kind of take the step back and be strategic. So we wanna give them that leeway to do so. And the services that we have, we have three main services that. Adapt to their needs. Uh, one is a project service, which we typically use to like launch a communication platform or evolve it.
We have a subscription model which gives clients access to incremental talent as they need, mainly to handle everyday communications. And we have a studio model, which we will actually kind of place an in-house comms production team to really ramp up volume of communications in an organiz. Well, I
Amanda Berry: feel like I have like a thousand questions based on what you just said, so I'm gonna try to remember a lot of them and sort of dig in deeper.
Yeah. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move us into our first segment story time.
Welcome to Story Time.
And
Amanda Berry: we're gonna start diving into those questions, but I wanna start, because like I know you, I've, I've met you at conferences, we've chatted. You're a very gracious and easy person to talk to. You're, you're a very kind and I know something that that's, that is very important to you is employee recognition.
You just recently wrote a blog about it. It's on your website and we're at that time of year. It's end of year, beginning of year where employers are handing out bonuses. Employee recognition is ramping up. People are probably submitting all sorts of nominations to recognize employees for the the work that they've done over the year.
You are very clear about the importance, importance of employee recognition. The one thing that. sticks with me as it feels like it should be an everyday thing and not an end of the year or beginning of the year thing. And you talk about the ROI of employee recognition and how you get so much out of it.
And I'm wondering if you can talk about that, like what that means to you to have an ROI based on employee recognition. How do you quantify that?
Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, absolutely. Well, well thank you for the, for the compliments. I, I. Appreciate that and it's things like that that gonna really keep me going. But yeah, as far as like ROI recognition and things like that, I, I, I could say I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, especially in business.
And I think one of the drawbacks to like, I guess like a highly ambitious personality like myself, is to really not take the time to thank people for their work. It's kind of, , you go from one thing to the next because we're on a mission, right? You know, you're based on some goals that you're trying to hit by the end of the year, and there's no time for all of this stuff, right?
So I, I realize though that if people don't know how they're actually, or really making a difference, then they kind of lose sight of like why they're here, right? So we all do that, right? It feels. if it was like being in a conversation with two other people who are speaking another language, like kind of like, why am I here and how am I even contributing?
Right. So at our monthly team get togethers, we, we take time. Literally as long as it takes to thank each other for specific things that we've done for each other throughout the month. So we call it kudos, and we've been doing it for years now, and it's, it's, it's so magical and wild to watch. When we have guest speakers at our meetings, they're, they're just kind of like wowed by it.
Like, I've never experienced that before. And it makes a ridiculous impact when a new hire comes on board and sees it as. And so I, I think it's important for us to take the time to like acknowledge specifically why we are grateful for each other. It kind of warms the soul, I think. And I guess if you want to get all.
Psychological about it. It, it fosters, you know, positive behavior through repetitive reinforcement, really. Right. It becomes a habit and, you know, I kind of think about it, you know, you talk about like ROI and things like that, and I, and I think about it in terms of like these habits. What if people like, , take it home with them, right?
Like, whoa, maybe I should stop and, uh, tell my daughter how proud of I am for talking to her manager and asking for that raise and getting it, you know, so I'm really thinking about how businesses can be more humans and how corporations can make a positive social impact, right? So with something as basic and as little as a thank you, right?
So tactically, , I, I do things like in my templates for announcements and things like that. I have a little section that's dedicated for Thank you. So I specifically see this heading and I have to write something every week of what I'm thankful for. So like, I think like last week I was, I thanked everyone for allowing me to take a week off, which I was really grateful for.
I'm glad you also mentioned that blog cuz quantifying it is a whole interesting thing. We called it the ROI of employee recognition and it, it was, purposefully. A little bit of a bait and switch actually, cuz I, I know leadership needs to have data, but it's really difficult to quantify feelings, right?
Like, how do you calculate the ROI of a relationship? It's strange. It's something about how it feels, right? So the real question I kind of start thinking about is why do we have to quantify employee recognition, right? Like, Do you not like to be recognized for something you do? Like, thank you for recognizing me.
For some of the things I did, it made me feel really warm and happy and wanted, made me wanna keep doing it right. So I think leaders want to quantify investment. Into recognition systems and programs. And that I get, because you know, that takes some funds and investment and planning, but I also think that recognition doesn't have to take a large investment.
Like I said, simply adding a topic to your leader, speaking points, right? It's the littlest thing you could do that doesn't cost really anything, right? Because. . At the end of the day, we work better as friends. Right. And friends show appreciation to each other. Right. And I think if a, if a, like a, the way I quantify that is like, do people in your organization band together to get you through the hard times?
Right. Would you feel confident in that? And how would. people band to get together, to get you through the good times.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. I, I think about this and I, I think about like leaders who I know who do this really well, and then leaders who maybe haven't prioritized this. And I can tell you knowing like the sea of the company I work at now, he always starts off with gratitude on what he's grateful for and in turns it back to employees.
And it's, and it's sincere. It actually isn't scripted. And I think about my boss who, you know, is, is always grateful for the work we do. . It really does make me want to stay there and continue doing good things for them because they are grateful and they express that gratitude, and I think that's a huge roi.
Just even, even that like, you know, you talk about Local Wisdom and, and learning and then adding to it and passing it down like. It, it just feels like the reach of that can be so big when you, when employees stay because they feel valued.
Pinaki Kathiari: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you kind of talk about employee ambassadors and things like that, just, you know, by saying what you just said and it being the truth from you.
It just makes me wanna work at, you know, your organization.
Amanda Berry: Right. Yeah. Yeah, we, we actually just did a big season of gratitude where you just went on and thanked any employee in every polo you wanted, and it was a huge success. Like people were just coming up from the woodwork thanking employees. I was thinking people who I, you know, had projects with when I first started and I was trying to do like one or two a day, and it was just really, really well done.
I think when people saw that they were being appreciated, then if they made them wanna go, appreciate other people.
Pinaki Kathiari: Absolutely becomes like infectious.
Amanda Berry: Yes, absolutely. The good kind of infectious. Last year, , I was thinking about this when I was reading. You're a blog that I would work on. I worked at a Place Pride, my prior employment or the C-Suite.
I would sit down with them and they would each bring a couple employees, um, from their departments and talk about them. And then other C-Suite leaders would reach out to those employees like, Hey, your leader mentioned you did this. Maybe it was sort of minor, but I'm really thankful that you did. That was wildly successful.
That's part of the way that they would show gratefulness to employees out, say outside of their department. So what are some ways that you can think of how leaders can get involved, people, managers, leaders, and just non-managers can be doing this to get this rolling at organizations?
Pinaki Kathiari: Absolutely. Uh, you know, and, and I think your story was a great one actually.
I think the, the first thing that comes to my mind is just making sure it's like absolutely genuine, right? And I, I think the way you said that story with, they would talk about it in the C-suite. So it's, it's like I'm talking about you almost behind your back, but it's all good stuff. Been the best way possible.
Yeah, it's, it's kinda
Pinaki Kathiari: like, it's like positive gossip, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's pretty wild. That's a, that's a. Great and interesting idea too because I, yeah, like, like I said, I think it just has to be genuine and if it's not, or if it feels forced or contrived, I think that's gonna come across too. Cuz I think people are trained to see things like that.
You know, I'm an entrepreneur so I try to think like, what's the kind of most I could get with the littlest investment in that way? So it, it's, it's kind of really about like finding just those small trigger moments to say thank you, and that way it doesn't even. Feel daunting either, right? Rather than kind of creating some kind of big and arduous recognition program.
So it was just, like I said at the beginning of meetings, just thank someone or recognize someone or recognize the team. Put it in your speaking points. Applauding little things like work anniversaries and project milestones would be great. You know, I, I also kind of not only celebrate the, the good. Uh, or the end of it.
But I also celebrate the in between and, and potentially even low milestones or low moments in the project because they needed most at that point. Right. Just kind of like gifts and being mindful over people's workloads. So beyond just. Kind of saying thank you and gifting things. We're just trying to forecast ahead of time.
Like when, when are we gonna have pain? And trying to be mindful to like circumvent that. And just like you said, kind of carving out time to just connect with people on a human level. Like even as a leader, there's so much to do, so many things to communicate to so many people. Just trying to find one little way to just carve out time and say, Hey, thank you for this.
And or just like your story. Hey, in our last leadership meeting, So and so mentioned this, so to really appreciate your work there, right? There's those little things I think cuz you know, I think, you know, we're friends or both of our friends, right? We're not friends because they give us like a great Christmas present at the end of the year.
We're friends because all these like little, you know, interactions and things like that just make us feel good being together and, and that's the way you should think about it as opposed to kind of incorporating it. here every day, as opposed to like a once a year or every so often thing.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, I love that.
And I, I, I do wanna point out, I don't know if, if you can speak from experience, but this is such a good practice to taking your home life. You'd mentioned your daughter, you're proud for asking for a raise in getting it spouses, partners, children, family friends. I know, like, I'm always extremely grateful, like when my husband vacuums and I don't have, you know, like, and you know, we thank each other all the time for that stuff cuz it makes a huge difference outside of work too.
Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. It's, it's really like those little things. Yeah. And, and you know, it's funny, you know, you asked about like kind of results right? And feeling valued and, and I actually think like the word results could actually stop us from thanking each other, which is pretty wild. If we kind of stop producing and take a moment to breathe, then you know, the results will slow down and we can't have that.
So we have this like cycle of. , we need results. So we have to move fast. So there's no time to appreciate or make people feel valued, but it kind of works the other way around. Like making people feel valued actually makes them faster to then bring you results, right? So, you know, we don't need employee recognition programs as much as we need just people to be good to other people.
Yeah,
Amanda Berry: that's actually a really good point. It's important just to have people recognizing people and not just this once a year recognition program. You know, I, it's funny. I used to help run the annual, I met price previous employer, the annual employee recognition. You know, it was like top award, you know, six employees wanted or whatever, one for each value He.
I forget they did cash bonus and all this other stuff. And I did a lot of sort of research and I asked a lot of employees there like, how do you wanna be recognized? Would you love the c e o to interrupt your meeting and say you won? How would you feel the most valued if you were to win this? And time and time again, it did not fail.
People said, I would love for my manager to do it if I, if I were to win. And I think that was a learning moment for. because that's, that's the person you'll work closely with. They give you reviews and, and all that stuff. And having them involved and not, not so much the ceo, but having your manager be involved in that.
Is such a key part of employee recognition and feeling valued.
Pinaki Kathiari: Absolutely. I agree. And I, I think peers as well. Yes. Even that just cause like it's validating to people that you work with on a day-to-day basis. It's rare that a CEO O will work with. Someone on a day-to-day basis, and so the c e O could speak to their appreciation for work on this project, but you didn't know it firsthand or you didn't work with them firsthand.
So best you could just say is like, I, you know, heard from an employee, or heard from a client, or I heard from someone. You did a great job, so thank you.
Amanda Berry: Yeah, that's a really good point. I'm gonna move us into our next segment, getting tactical.
I'm trying to figure out
Pinaki Kathiari: tactics and to be perfectly honest, and I didn't have to worry about tactics too much, here I am in charge of trying to say, why did you sleep through tactics,
tactics.
Amanda Berry: So I wanna sort of back up, cuz you all do a lot of communications work. You know, you walk through your three, three offerings. But I wanna talk about communication team, maturity model. Cause I, I, you know, that's on your website. It's something that people can sort of look at and figure out where they stand.
And I'm wondering if you can help us understand what that is and how you walk through it. Like how people can go to your website and take this to see where they score on this maturity model.
Pinaki Kathiari: I'll give you a quick, I guess, the origin story. Just give you kind of context as to like what this is. It was like 2020, you know, it was during the pandemic and quite honestly I was, I was playing a video game
I was playing the Butcher three. My wife and I saw the Netflix show with Henry Caval. Heard great things about the game and it, it is a family's game. Do you play video games, Amanda, or
Amanda Berry: do you I'm, I'm more old school like my husband and I have an old school, Nintendo. Nice. And so like, we'll play like Super Mario three or Dr.
Mario or Excite Bike. I think we also have an Atari, an old school Atari Excite Bike. Yeah. We go, we go old school and we play video games. . That's,
that's awesome.
Pinaki Kathiari: That No, no. Awesome. And it is very cool. And so Witch three is like an open world video game, open world. It's, it's kind of like if you ever. First Zelda game on Nintendo.
I do. Yes. Right? Like you're just in this world and you could go any direction. You don't even know what exactly you're doing or whatnot. You know, you have to beat up this guy Gannon and save the Princess or find, find Zelda and whatnot. So I'm playing this, this game and it's interesting. The good part of like an open world video game is like you could just explore it in multiple ways and approach it in different strategies.
The bad is that there's so many options, difficult decisions and things. you do that would either lock or unlock other parts of the game. So, you know, I don't have much time to play video games and I wanted to get the most out of it. So every now and then I'd go online and look at a strategy guy, . Right.
And like Right. You
Amanda Berry: know, back in, I get it. Yeah. Back the day you could buy the books or talk to a kid in the class who had already beaten it. Exactly.
Pinaki Kathiari: You know? Yeah, exactly. So in video games, we have strategy guys, and people give you ways to, to beat the game. But at some point it hit me that building a coms function is a lot like an open world video game, right?
There's just, you're just plopped into this organization. There's so many ways to approach it, and what you do has an impact into the future. But there is no simple, easy strategy guide on how to. So that inspired me to create one, and that's where the model came from. So I took my kind of 20 years of working with comms teams, development teams, and creative teams.
I brought in insights from the people that I work with at Local Wisdom. I brought in experts and consultants and strategists to get their take on it. So, spoke to Rachel Miller about this. Chuck Ghost, Sarah Jackson, Jason Anton, Ethan McCarthy.
Amanda Berry: Hey, I just, I just
Pinaki Kathiari: absolutely love. So all of these people, Thought really good things about it and kind of propelled it forward.
So what we created was an internal communication team maturity model, and it's a model where you can take an assessment, see where you are today, envision where you want to be based on the model, and then kind of map out a plan to get there. And really the, the main kind of use case here is it helps everyone by setting expectations around.
Work experience, the kind of internal structures that you have in your comms team, the skills and talent that you need, the work volume you have, and the business output that you're looking, or the business changes you're looking to create in the organization. So it helps you to see where you have potential misalignments of expectations, because that's when things get frustrating, like maybe.
you don't have enough team members to handle the work volume, or maybe you have the team members, but your comms channels aren't, right. So this, this model will help people see that. And that's, that's kinda how we
Amanda Berry: So helps you see kind of where we maybe your weak spots are. Mm-hmm. . Okay. Absolutely. So it's on your website, I believe?
Yeah. Can you kind just walk me through it just a little bit?
Pinaki Kathiari: Sure, sure. Yeah. You could access the the website from any browser at URL maturity dot Local Wisdom.com, and that'll take you to an assessment. It's like a nine multiple choice questions assessment, and it takes less than five minutes to actually fill out.
The results will give you insight into the specific level you're at, and it'll also give you a link to the entire model so you can see where you fit within it, but the model. Is kind of fits on one page. There are six columns that we call levels of Maturity. So column one is level one, and column six is like level six.
And each level is described by five attributes, right? So we have five rows under each column. And each row describes Workday, which kind of describes a typical day in the life of the. Achievements, which lists milestones or achievements that you should have accomplished. And there's a specific sequential order to them, and these are the like internal structures that help you run your team, like comm strategy or editorial calendar, things like that.
The other attribute is team, so these are the key roles that you need on your team to. basically move forward and, and kind of how much time you'll need from these roles throughout it. We have work volume, which is a visual depiction showing the relationship of like the amount of work versus the team you can take on.
And then we have business outcomes, which is also another business depiction that shows that there needs to be a relationship on ROI with everything we do. Right. So give your insight, like level one kind of looks like a startup, right? When you're a level one comms organization, it's like one or two passionate people just kind of like thrusted onto the team, and it's like a pandemonium of tactical communications with either poor or non-existent communication platforms.
By like level three, the team has gotten into this rhythm of communications production and just shaping leadership and shaping comms. And like level six, you have multiple comms teams, corporate and at local levels, all kind of like working in tandem really to drive business outcomes.
Amanda Berry: Wow. That's cool. I, I know I've taken it, and I highly, I will highly recommend it to our listeners because you, you get a lot of good information out of it.
You can just, like I said, see where your weak spots are and maybe where you might need some investment. . Yeah, absolutely. You'd mentioned different teams. Can you talk about what a good IC team looks like? You know, going into 2023, what are some must-haves for a good IC team or even an employee experience team?
Let me, let me just broaden that up a
Pinaki Kathiari: little bit. Yeah, thank you. I think they do go hand in hand that way, and I think the first main thing I. Is really helpful or essential is like leadership buy-in. Having someone in the leadership position that understands what we're trying to do and can back it up to like other leaders in the organization.
With relations to the maturity model, I think this is an undocumented level zero because even to get to like level one or whatnot or even grow if, if you don't have leadership buy and then it starts. Feel like you're going uphill. Right. And the other thing just to mention, just cuz I, I mentioned like levels.
Of this thing. Like I say this, when I kind of talk about the model, I, I never want anyone to feel like it's a competition. Like you have to get to level six. You don't, you just have to get to where you want to get to, right? It's more like a map than it is a competition. And to answer your question, like the key roles that we have in the model include comms director.
So this is someone who can work with leadership, influence leadership, and kind of be the voice of the comms team for leadership. We have a comms manager. , who's actually building the comms team, working with the team and working on those structures that keep the team productive. We have a comms strategist on the team, and this is the person who is creating the campaigns.
To get to business results and measuring against them. We have a content specialist who's working on producing and publishing the content. And then we have roles that help kind of support the content production, which is like writer, designer, developer, things like that. And the other caveat that I'll add to this is when I say roles, the model doesn't mean that each role always is a different person, right?
Like I said, level one is like a startup. So sometimes, playing multiple roles. Sometimes you're creating strategy and actually like writing the copy.
Amanda Berry: I'm sure a lot of listeners can, can identify with that. Cause I feel like a lot of teams are one person. Mm-hmm. , I, I hear that a lot. So maybe they're the director, the writer, the designer, and the leader.
We
Pinaki Kathiari: see that a lot as well. And I think that's kind of one of the impetus for this model is, is just to kind of realistically show you that you cannot. realistically scale that way. Yeah. You know, and so if the expectation is like your leadership is having an expectation that you'll kind of create business outcomes of like, I don't know, You know, making employee satisfaction even better or whatnot.
It's just so much one person can do. Yeah. With regards to all that, you know, and
Amanda Berry: especially if they're already pretty tied up in tactics, right? I mean, yeah. I, this a friend, she's actually been on the, the podcast where she said outcome's, not tactics, but if we're forced to, we got a newsletter, we gotta get up, we got the internet, we've got talking points for the town hall.
We've got like all these 15 things that have to be done and not really thinking. about how can we then just improve. like employee experience, like what role can we play? But we're so focused on the stuff we have to get out the door. Yeah. How do you account for that? Like how do you help leaders see the bigger picture and not these tactics?
Pinaki Kathiari: We've kind of like try our best to kind of go down The approach of seeing is believing in that way. So I could try to sit here and tell you so. Ways to like pitch it and, and kind of get it. But until you actually like see, all right, hey, we bring in Local Wisdom to help you handle your kind of staging of content and just publishing anything, just simple as that.
That shaves off hours of time from your employees and then they could do things that actually. Consultants and vendors can't do, do things like scour the organization for great stories, right, and kind of talk and cultivate these relationships with different partners in the organization so you can communicate better.
It's better having your employees spend time doing things like that. than it is to just simply like QA a newsletter and like upload the distribution list and send that out to every,
Amanda Berry: you know, like Yeah, yeah. You're giving me flashbacks of a, of a time when I had to do that . Yeah. Yeah. It just sends servers down my spine.
It, for those listeners out there who have to do that right. Getting lists from HR and uploading 'em and sending these messages, I feel that pain and there's just a lot of, a lot of work involved in that.
Pinaki Kathiari: Absolutely. And, and that's what we do. That's what we want to. Allow you to concentrate on what's important to your role in the organization.
Amanda Berry: I feel like one of the things LE leaders will grab their ear and get them to listen is roi. I mean, you mentioned the ROI of employee recognition, so what are some metrics, internal communicators, Can be using to show value show r o roi, that would get their leaders' attention. I think
Pinaki Kathiari: what's important about ROI is that I guess comms does need to take accountability for making business changes, right?
And in order to take accountability for it, we just need to know what that is. And a lot of times I, I think our clients and communicators kind of struggle with that. Or even like leaders struggle with kind of creating a really concrete. Outcome that we wanna strive for, or there's too many outcomes and you were trying to do too much at once.
So I think the key metrics will always kind of net out to like, did we produce the outcome that we wanted? So what are we going after? Are we trying to reduce turnover? Are we trying to increase productivity? Are we trying to reduce injury in the workplace? Are we trying to increase employee satisfaction?
Things like that. We wanna really hook ourselves onto. . We really need to understand if we do do this, how do we know that we're making a difference? So it's important to be able to know that, and it's important to be able to like decide how many of these things we're gonna tackle within a given period of time, right?
So the outcome should always be measurable, and that's important. And now I think a lot of people kind of find themselves measuring the. Or the campaign strategy for those outcomes. And I think that's important too, but we do need to hook on to an outcome. So once you do have an outcome that we're trying to affect, we measure the effectiveness of the campaign.
I always look at like four things around that, right? So do people. do what we wanted them to do in order to create that outcome, right? Did people engage with our communications, right? Did they like it, comment on it, things like that. Did people understand our communication? Right? Did they actually take the time to read and absorb that communication?
And then finally, did people see our communication, right? Did they see the email? Did they click on the link? Things like that. Those are kind of ways to kind of set up almost a conversion funnel. to the outcome that you're trying to change. Right? So that kind of takes some marketing aspects and brings it into internal
Amanda Berry: comms.
Yeah. I love that you're pointing out like, cause I feel like sometimes we can get really caught up in how many opens, what's the open rate. Mm-hmm. , when the, the follow-up question should be, well, did they understand it? Which I love that you called that out. I'm really guilty about this. Like I'll open email.
just to make it red, but I may not read it. Yeah. Or I may read it and I don't understand it. Yeah. Or you know, I might read it, I understand it, but I'm very unhappy with it when I work on internal communication. Now that's been a focus like, well, how do people feel about it? Cause I feel like that's such a big part Yeah.
Of employee experience.
Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah. So it's important I think, to have some level of understanding metrics along all of. Kind of, yeah. Pathways and I, I try to also recommend not to look at too many metrics along those Yeah. Because the more you have, the more difficult it is to create. So it's just like the key things that allow me to know if this conversion or this kind of campaign worked.
And if something is looking off, that's when you could dig deeper into more metrics along those paths. If we see that a lot of people saw it, but data just didn't spend time on the site. For us to feel that they properly absorbed it, then we can follow up on that.
Amanda Berry: Yeah. Are they, I love So you pointed out like they saw it or they, we think that they read it cause they, they opened it, but they didn't act on it.
Mm-hmm. they didn't follow through, they didn't, whatever it is Yes. Register for benefits or recognize an employer, whatever it is.
Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and kind of like marketing conversion, it's not like you're really interested on the metrics, you're interested on the fall off or the trend of the metrics.
Right. Okay. Yeah. So as long as you're kind of measur. Same things over and over again. You get to kind of start seeing where things go offline or if you're just not making a difference in that overarching outcome trend. Yeah,
Amanda Berry: it's been a wild couple years, especially for like employee experience and internal communications.
We talk about like leaders who I saw are value during the pandemic and, and all of this. That it just, it was wild, right? Throwing out our playbooks because now. A lot of our workforce is remote or they're not here, or, you know, it just, it was a huge shift for employee experience and in internal communications.
And I'm wondering if you have any thoughts as this maturity model, any changes that have been made because of what we experience past years or, or any you're looking forward to making in the future?
Pinaki Kathiari: Yeah, absolutely. Uh, so like, like I kinda mentioned, the model was created in 2020 and like you. Our worlds have changed very much
So, so it's, it's been a fascinating ride launching this and kind of observing it and seeing how, how the world has changed. So we, we found a few things that, that are changing and we're, we're looking to implement these changes coming into 2023. Some of the new roles that we're seeing emerging are roles like community managers, right?
Like people that. To online communities, we're seeing a heightened importance of community ambassadors, especially while we're virtual, like how do we know what's going on in different locations and how people are feeling. I think it's time to add data specialists into the team because I think we need our own numbers person, especially as we get into like the.
Higher levels and kind of higher volumes and you know, it wasn't there originally, but I think video production is something that is going to become increasingly more important. Video, audio production, because we need to be able to do things like create videos and content and then being able to like edit, slice, and dice them into smaller chunks of content.
I've also found that people are struggling. Those kind of milestones or those achievements, those internal structures. So I think one of the, the things that we want to do to elevate the, the offering is to offer more resources within the assessment. So once you take the assessment, the results give you kind of some tips on what to do next and how to move forward.
Well, we'd like to add some more resources and templates that actually like help folks actually do.
Amanda Berry: I wanna broaden this out just a little bit cause I'm, I'm, I'm forward thinking and as, as I'm thinking about what you're gonna do, maybe do the model and the way teams should be structured. I wanna talk about this idea of digital communications.
That's what y'all do at Local Wisdom, but I wanna talk about people who maybe are very early in the development of a digital communications program for any number of reasons, right? They don't have funding. Maybe they have a lot of frontline workers who aren't desk bound. And I'm wondering if you could just speak to that a little.
how could people begin to be more digital? They don't feel like they're there yet.
Pinaki Kathiari: One good communications doesn't have to be digital, right? Like we talked a a little while ago where a thank you, you know, in words is helpful. Adding something to a speaking point for someone. You know, I think town hall meetings kind of regular live meetings and get togethers also fall into.
like campaigns or, or content strategy and and things like that as well. There's some places where print and things like that still also make a difference and are necessary, right? So I think what's really important, and kind of back to what we said earlier is like always start with the business objectives and understanding of the people and your employees, right?
You should always. Those company objectives that we're striving for, like I said earlier, and on top of that, you should also know how the employees are doing and, and what's working, what's not working, you know, what's broken. Kind of similar to what you said, Amanda, I really like what you said of like, I'd go and talk to people and say like, how do you like to be recognized?
And things like that, right? So I think that's monumentally important. It's. super difficult, especially if you're like, have so much going on, like how am I gonna carve out time to like talk to all these people and, and things like that. It could be really daunting. So I also suggest prioritizing those employee populations that are the largest and have the most impact on the organization.
So we could start prioritizing and kind of. Approaching it bit by bit and, and a fun little thing. I, I created a, a, a tool, a template, a while ago on like com strategies and campaign strategies. And so I, I, I've come up with like five questions that I always think about when I'm coming up with a com strategy, and that's one, what is the outcome we're trying to achieve?
We talked about that. Two, what is the action that we want people to take that's gonna lead to that out outcome Three, what is the belief that we want people to have that's gonna lead to the action? Four is what is the experience that's gonna lead to that belief? And five, what are the communications channels that are create that experience?
Right? So I think if you like answer these questions, Inevitably come up with a comms plan that'll help you meet your end all objectives. And I don't think it necessarily all has to be digital, but I think there are digital aspects
Amanda Berry: to it. I feel like I could continue this conversation with you forever.
You're fun to talk to and you have a lot of good insights. So I, I wanna thank you so much for joining us today. Before I let you go, will you let our listeners know where they can find you? You
Pinaki Kathiari: could find me on LinkedIn Pinaki Kathiari, you'll find out how to spell that when you get this, I guess podcast link.
But there are no other Pinaki Kathiari out there, .
That's
good to know. . And if you meet another Kathiari out there, they are related to me. Okay. . Um, yeah, you, you could always find me on Instagram. My handle is @theonlypinaki on Instagram and on Twitter, and you could always find me on what we're doing at Local Wisdom, localwisdom.com.
Amanda Berry: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Pinaki. This has been great.
Pinaki Kathiari: Thank you, Amanda. Thank you so much for having me. Likewise. I share the sentiment. It's so fun chatting and conversing with you and I I think we could. Kind of going for hours, so I appreciate
Amanda Berry: it. I, I wish we could . Thank you so much.
Pinaki Kathiari: Be well. Thank you.