By Janus Boye
Kevin Hähnlein’s work is focused on what he sees as one of the biggest challenges for most organisations today: Reaching, engaging, and retaining their employees.
Reaching all employees and communicating successfully in this hybrid working environment has become a major challenge for companies.
Many have realised that just having an intranet or an employee app doesn’t cover it for internal communication as many employees are left out. Actually, it’s not just about reach, it’s also about engagement, and that’s even harder. To make matters worse, many internal communicators are struggling, understaffed and strained for time.
In a recent member call, we were joined by Kevin Hähnlein, Head of Product Marketing at employee communications and advocacy platform Haiilo. He shared his perspective on the future of internal communications, what a good employee experience strategy looks like and also how artificial intelligence will transform content creation at scale.
Kevin started with a brief intro on push vs. pull in today’s marketplace.
How to implement a multichannel communications strategy
While it might seem like stating the obvious, Kevin had an opening slide with the simple message:
“Employees have to be reached where they are!”
Not just a helpful reminder, it’s actually more true now than ever before, but also more difficult. As he said, today we have completely different ways of working and consuming content. Coupled with unparalleled flexibility in where, when and how employees work including the tools they use, it’s clear that you need more than just an intranet.
As Kevin said:
“The future is multichannel and brings internal and external communications together”
To illustrate his point, Kevin shared the below slide, where you can see how it all comes together.
You need a multichannel approach to reach your employees. Slide shared by Kevin during the call.
Probably it was the AI part which drove interest in the call, so Kevin jumped from the slides to show a live demo.
How AI will transform content creation at scale
Being pressured for time, it’s tempting for internal communications to use services like ChatGPT to help with creating content.
Using the example of creating a sustainability strategy for retail companies, Kevin simply wrote a very brief text as a prompt:
“Intro paragraph on why it is important to have a sustainability strategy for retail companies”He then marked the text, and then selected: Make longer. ChatGPT then worked its magic in the background and just a few seconds later created a longer text.
As you can see on the functions in the screenshot, communicators can also make a text longer, shorter, summarise it and generate hashtags.
After just a few seconds wait, voila, a longer and quite good text came back. This effectively puts the power of ChatGPT inside the internal comms dashboard.
Keep in mind that this is a relatively new live demo, but it shows the potential for saving time on content creation. There’s still work to do on the tone of voice and as recent developments show, e.g. ChatGPT banned in Italy over privacy concerns, it’s a legal grey zone.
We closed our conversation with a brief take on defining success and measuring impact.
How communicators can start measuring their impact & success
The problem is that while it’s not rocket science, as Kevin said, most communicators don’t have time to measure their success.
There’s this management saying that: what gets measured, gets done. Regular measurement and reporting does keep you focused, and thankfully modern tools can help with the measurement part. As an example, Kevin showed how Haiilo can help with rich quantitative analytics and insightful pulse surveys.
Without saying it directly, Kevin implied that automatic reporting and helpful management-friendly dashboards, will help make better decisions and provide a useful steer for internal communications. As always, the key part is measuring business impact, while also showing tangible steps that can be taken to further improve. Perhaps even supported by AI.
Learn more about the challenges facing internal communication
The conversation continues in our community, notable in our groups focused on employee experience and future workplace. You can meet Kevin in person in our Hamburg group.
We’ve written many posts about internal communications and keep following the latest trends, as usual with a human touch:
Back in 2021, Anke Maibach from TCS was our expert of the month and she zoomed out and looked at the megatrends.
Before the pandemic, Lil Sawyer in Toronto shared her story on the infamous Office 365 Adoption Challenge: “I barely have time to do my work. When am I supposed to find time to innovate?”. So, being overworked and struggling to find time is hardly new.
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and view the entire recording below.