Introducing platform expansions to drive organizational change

Enterprises today are grappling with a ton of change. Planning a return to work, accelerating a digital workplace, and providing employees with more support are just some of the newer initiatives occurring in organizations today on top of their existing strategies.

Driving change and transformation is a constant in business yet it’s difficult to pull off. McKinsey found that only 30% of transformational projects were successful. These projects are incredibly complex, with a lot of interdependencies and technical components that need to fit just right. So what’s the biggest hurdle with business transformation? In one word: people.

Business transformation is really about people transformation. That same study found that most transformational projects failed because of a lack of employee engagement, alignment and accountability.

As the leader in workforce communications, we believe that successful change happens when companies can reach, align and mobilize all of their employees, from the corporate office to the frontline. We’ve seen how customers like Providence are using this approach with 120,000 frontline healthcare workers to improve patient care and employee safety in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. AT&T uses a similar approach which they describe as “know something, feel something, do something” to empower their 200,000+ employees as they work from home.

From communication engine to change engine

Reaching every worker is tough, but it’s also just the beginning. To create lasting organizational change and achieve a fully digital workplace, you need your people aligned with your objectives, and your entire workforce mobilized to achieve them. 

That’s why the latest evolution of Firstup takes the platform from communication engine to complete change engine. We’ve reimagined how organizations can more effectively communicate with their distributed workforce resulting in new capabilities for leaders, communicators and employees.

A new digital employee experience with assistant

Despite massive investments in technology, a digital gap still exists in most organizations. Corporate employees are drowning in information across too many applications while frontline workers have limited access to news and systems. 

Assistant solves this digital disconnect for all of your employees by highlighting what’s important, reminding employees about open action items and providing functionality to other corporate systems. Assistant is available on both mobile and web experiences. Key features include: 

• Smart Inbox. Core to Assistant is a Smart Inbox that personalizes the most important content and action items for an employee based on their history and actions. This streamlines the experience allowing employees to get caught up and productive in just two minutes a day.
• Command Center. Make it easy for all of your employees to find what they’re looking for whether they’re on a phone or at their desk. The Command Center provides one place for employees to find specific content, resources and access other corporate systems.
• Integrations to Corporate Systems. Assistant can also be integrated with systems like ADP, Concur, help desk, time management and more, giving employees the ability to execute common tasks like checking on the status of expenses without having to navigate to another application. Integrations improve your digital employee experience and increase the value of your tech stack by providing easier access to your most used applications. 

Employee polls built to reach every worker

Half of effective communication is listening. By gathering timely feedback you can make better adjustments in your communications and change initiatives while improving employee engagement. 

Polls are now available in Firstup and leverage the power of Studio so you can reach every worker to get timely, representative, and actionable data from your employees. Key features include: 

• Target Employee Groups. Just like you target your communications to specific employee groups, you can also use this same functionality with polls to get a pulse check on different employee populations.
• Follow-Up with Smart Campaigns. Boost completion rates by using a Smart Campaign to automatically retarget and follow-up with employees to complete a poll. With polls built into Firstup, you can remind employees not just through email but also through mobile push notifications and Assistant.
• Align Polls to Key Initiatives. Polling employees is another form of communication and can be tracked and measured similar to other communications. Assign your poll to a key initiative and measure how employees are engaging with the poll beyond just the poll results.

Measure and mobilize your workforce with analyze

Analyze is the Firstup analytics suite that helps companies measure the impact of communications across channels to drive business outcomes. With Analyze you can understand what’s working and what needs improvement in your change initiatives. 

We’ve recently updated Analyze with several enhancements:

• Track communications related to key initiatives. Enter your key business initiatives, then tag communications associated with these initiatives to measure how employees are responding. This will make it easy for you to see how your most important messages are impacting your company’s top priorities.
• Measure communications across all of your digital channels. Analyze now includes more in-depth data on how your employees are engaging with content in email, mobile push notifications and content amplifiers that syndicate to additional endpoints like your intranet or collaboration systems. This gives you a complete picture of your workforce communications wherever your employees consume content.
• Visualize, filter and group data for deep analysis. To make analytics actionable you need to customize your reporting for your needs. Use custom attributes for your organization then filter and group data to see how your communications are performing.

Communications that drive change

We’re excited to bring these new capabilities to market and help our customers drive change in their organizations. Want to see the expanded platform in action? Please contact us or reach out to your engagement manager to see how your company can take advantage of the reimagined Firstup Studio.