Phillips 66: Doubling employee engagement with intelligent content delivery

A constant stream of notifications making it hard to concentrate. Five different employee platforms, all with separate logins. Digital fatigue is a well-documented problem affecting almost every aspect of today’s workplace, from productivity, to employee wellbeing, to onboarding and retention. 

Laurie Madden, Sr. Advisor, Corporate Communications at Phillips 66, recently told Firstup how intelligent content delivery helped improve the digital employee experience for Phillips 66’s 12,200-strong workforce, spread across more than a dozen oil refineries and other facilities around the world. 

“Our initial thinking was, ‘we need to send an email on Tuesday at 3 pm to everyone,” Laurie said. “But when asked ‘why?’, I couldn’t come up with a good answer. It made me step back and re-evaluate my thought process around how we send communications. Is there a smarter way to share these?”

Read How Phillips 66 doubled employee engagement with intelligent content delivery

Laurie and her team decided to take advantage of Engagement Boost, a feature of Firstup Orchestration. Engagement Boost uses machine learning to enable intelligent content delivery. Rather than blasting a message to every employee at the same time, Engagement Boost intelligently serves notifications to each user based on a personalized formula that factors in their preferred format, as well as the time of the day or week they are most engaged. 

Engagement Boost also helps to reduce digital fatigue by tracking how many messages an employee is scheduled to receive on a given day, and will temporarily delay delivery until a better time for that user (the option remains to deliver critical updates instantly when necessary).

Take, for example, a 30-day benefits campaign. Does that first notification need to blast to everyone at the same time? An employee might already have three critical communications scheduled to arrive on Monday, but none on Tuesday, meaning on Tuesday there is a higher chance of engagement. Say one employee typically engages with push notifications on their phone at around 9 a.m., while another is most active on Teams at 3 p.m. Engagement Boost knows this, and delivers the message accordingly, allowing you to stop guessing and start automating the flow of notifications across your organization. 

“Our team is learning to consistently allow the platform to decide on the right time, right place to send notifications,” Laurie said. “The communicators saw a rapid change in results — sometimes more than double our  normal engagement rates.”

Now every Phillips 66 employee can be engaged through MyRoute, Phillips 66’s custom-branded Firstup intelligent communication platform, whether they check the desktop site from the head office in Houston, or scroll the mobile app while out in the field at a remote pipeline in Wyoming.

“As communicators, we’ve got to try new things,” Laurie said, “because the world has changed so significantly around us.”