The challenge: Aligning people and company goals to drive business results

As a contractor providing business process services to government agencies in several countries, Maximus employees are distributed across a variety of locations, often working in highly secure and regulated environments. Maximus treats each team as a separate business unit, making it challenging to effectively communicate with employees and keep everyone aligned around company goals and initiatives. To address these challenges, Maximus adopted an integrated platform that allowed the Internal Communications (IC) team and business unit managers to connect, align and engage with its 34,000 employees on a consistent and timely basis.

Our initial communications goal was to help improve the overall company performance by creating a stronger alignment between our business strategy and our people. We wanted to enable our leaders and business unit managers to operate at a higher level – and it would all start with how we communicated with our employees.”

— Jared Curtis, Director of Communications at Maximus

To ensure that the program was successful, Jared and his team opted to take a data-driven approach to Maximus’ communications strategy. They wanted a fact-based method to determine how, what, when, to whom, and why messages were delivered.

The solution: Using an integrated platform for scalable communications

Using Poppulo’s Enterprise platform, Maximus implemented a holistic approach to its internal communications program. This approach leveraged four key capabilities: effective governance, personalization, data-driven analytics, and multiple communication channels.

Using role-based security, integrated calendaring, collaboration, shared content, and template libraries, Jared developed a governance model that allowed his IC team to work with other departments across the organization while maintaining visibility and control over communications. The IC team built an ambassador network among leaders and managers across the organization to assist with driving change and encouraging interactions. This approach improved messaging alignment and increased the reach and impact of the central IC group.

Jared leveraged this model across two key comms channels: email and mobile devices. Mobile was especially important given the complexities of the working environment for many Maximus employees. And when the pandemic hit, it became clear that a mobile app would be essential to reach employees who were at home without access to the office email system, particularly for sharing HR-focused items.

In designing our communications platform, we knew it would be critical to offer employees the choice to receive information and engage with us on their channel of choice. We have 7,000 employees using our mobile channel now. We can specifically target those on the Poppulo Mobile app for communications or even send on a different schedule.”

— Jared Curtis, Director of Communications at Maximus

Content and tactics were guided by data, using in-depth metrics on time sent, open rates, and engagement levels across channels and departments. But this focus on data was not limited to just Poppulo data. “We knew a successful integrated communication platform that was driven by analytics and data would not be possible with just one data set. We needed to merge the Poppulo data with other components, whether it was Grammarly, Word, or other applications, to understand the readability, length, and other metrics of the emails. As a result, we have a holistic view built with the core metrics from Poppulo, enabling us to be more effective with our communications and guiding other team members to success,” said Jared.

Maximus uses this data to create communications strategies for larger campaigns.

We can set goals, metrics, determine audiences, mitigation steps, engagement tactics, and more to share with our leadership to set realistic expectations. Data is the key to how we communicate and take action.”

— Jared Curtis, Director of Communications at Maximus

This data-driven approach was integrated with personalization for greater impact. To accomplish this, Maximus wove together various data sources including integrating its Workday employee data with Poppulo to segment communications by business unit, level, location, and more. The filtering captured trends of what was popular among the different groups for accurate targeting of the communications. And the integration reduced the workload on the company’s IT team by automating the maintenance of up-to-date distribution lists. Additionally, the Maximus team built an ambassador network among leaders and managers to assist with driving change and encouraging interactions.

The results: Driving quantifiable results across all channels

The combination of governance, multiple channels, data-driven campaigns, and personalization has enabled Maximus to optimize its employee communications activities. The results have been impressive:

• An 80% open rate of its communications; with a 90% open rate among supervisors
• A higher than expected average reading time of three minutes and 30 seconds
• Insights that indicate Mondays and Wednesdays are the best days on which to share communications
• Connected one-third of employees and growing through the Poppulo Mobile application

Top takeaways for enterprise communicators

Maximus optimized the impact of its employee communications by:

• Utilizing multiple comms channels
• Personalizing content and messages
• Guiding programs and campaigns with data
• Extending the reach of the IC team by enabling a network of ambassadors while maintaining overall control