Measuring the outcome of internal comms at Encompass Health

The Challenge

Prior to Poppulo, Encompass Health’s Associate Director of Internal Communications & Engagement Alyssa Hagan and the employee communications team were operating with tools that simply weren’t designed for internal comms; this presented a range of challenges, including:

1. The team had no way of measuring whether or how employees engaged with their communications.
2. Neither were they able to see how communications were actually helping to affect employee sentiment on important initiatives. “It’s hard to equate open rates with action so in looking for an email distribution solution, we wanted to go beyond this and track employee engagement,” said Alyssa.
3. Aside from the measurement challenges, the employee communications team also needed to address how they were communicating. “Prior to Poppulo, we used to send out a monthly 25-page PDF newsletter that took a lot of time to compile. We knew employees wouldn’t read the whole thing, which meant certain important updates would get missed amid all the noise.”
4. The absence of key communication performance data made it difficult for the employee communications team to prove meaningful business value to senior management.

The Solution

The introduction of Poppulo has helped the employee communications team transform the business value of employee communications and engagement at Encompass Health.

• The team can now use Campaign Outcome Surveys to quantify how their campaigns are delivering a change in employee understanding and attitude towards important topics, something not possible before:

For example, we ran a campaign around diversity. With Poppulo, we were able to take a baseline of employee sentiment before running our messaging. We re-ran the outcome survey post-campaign and could clearly see how our messages had helped to improve employee understanding across the company. Our HR and diversity departments were very impressed with our ability to demonstrate this.

Alyssa Hagan, Encompass Health

• Encompass Health has been able to extend this reporting to all campaigns. “We’re now using Poppulo to track the outcome of campaigns such as one that’s designed to create a better connection between employees and our company objectives, as well as another related to improving nurse retention companywide,” Alyssa said.
• Using Poppulo Insights has equipped the employee communications team with the ability to quickly and easily segment data to see how employees are engaging with communications across locations.
• This data led in part to the creation of employee persona examples, where appropriate communication tactics are designed and segmented for various employee roles.
• Poppulo has helped to dramatically improve the communications Encompass Health publishes. “We have retired the PDF newsletter and we now use Poppulo to publish a condensed weekly newsletter that has been well-received. We’ve also started using the tool to publish a variety of leaders-only emails,” Alyssa said. “The data we see behind these leadership messages has been helpful to guide other departments who request to send content to those audiences.”
• With content insights easily available, Alyssa and her team can quickly see which content is performing best. “For example, we can now see that our employees love to read about their colleagues, so we tailor and target more of this type of relatable content. This is just an example of the invaluable insights into employees’ communication preferences that we’ve been able to get through using Poppulo.”

Top Takeaways

1. Outcomes, not outputs: Encompass Health now uses Poppulo’s Outcome Surveys to quantify how their communications are directly helping to deliver a change in employee sentiment around strategically important topics and issues, such as diversity campaigns.
2. Better for comms; better for employees: Poppulo has helped Encompass Health to dramatically improve the deliverables of the employee communications team – ultimately, to the benefit of all employees.
3. Recognition from the top: The availability of email reporting has meant that Alyssa and her team now have highly relevant data to bring to senior management: “We’ve seen a noticeable shift in the recognition our team gets from senior leaders since the introduction of Poppulo.” It has also resulted in the internal communication function at Encompass Health moving from being a traditional ‘order taker’ to being recognized as a strategic driver in the company.