Using polling technology to gain fast feedback via email

Welcome to Melcrum's Social Media and Intranets Newsletter.

It's a common problem for internal communicators: how do you get a critically important company message out to tens of thousands of employees, many of whom have varying access to computers? Complicate the issue with the need for employees to act on the news and you have a very stern challenge.

At US-based oilfield services company Baker Hughes, such a challenge came in the shape of communicating benefits of the Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP): employees weren't participating in the program and the deadline was approaching for enrolment in the 2008 scheme.

To tackle this challenge, the Baker Hughes HR team launched a multi-channel and multi language communications campaign to increase ESPP enrolments. The campaign included:

• "My espp": A new, hard copy and PDF brochure, written in six languages and printed and sent to employees. The brochure was also placed on the intranet.
• Face-to-face meetings: to help answer any questions about the "my espp" brochure and the ESPP program, face-to-face meetings were held between employees and HR.
• Weekly emails: Complementing the meetings were weekly email reminders that were translated into different languages and sent out to ensure message frequency and consistency.

Innovative polling
On top of these traditional comms tools and approaches came a new tool for Baker Hughes - email polling by PollStream.

A total of 35,600 global employees were sent an interactive poll via an HTML email. To satisfy the language requirements of its global employees, Baker Hughes emailed the poll to 9,650 global employees in 6 languages other than English.

The poll was carefully designed with multiple "branches" and "endings" to help engage, educate and inform employees in a measurable two-way dialogue, designed to be a rewarding exchange that drove employee action.

Measuring employee take-up
As a result of the multi-channel campaign, 1,700 new employees (an increase of 16.4% from the previous year) signed up for the ESPP program and 925 previous participants decided to increase their contributions.

The purpose of the poll was not to obtain insight, it was to drive action (employee sign-ups) and influence behavior.

By distributing communication in 7 different languages, the company experienced an international (non-US English speaking) increase of 13.9%.

In terms of the campaign’s final push, over 1,400 employees interacted with the 4-question poll and 444 of those employees declared that they either wanted to increase contributions or start participating with the ESPP. Specific employee declarations prompted the poll to serve up relevant content to educate employees about the best method to increase their contributions.

The purpose of the poll was not to obtain insight, it was to drive action (employee sign-ups) and influence behavior.

Using PollStream’s prompt for comment feature, employees provided more than 300 comments to help the HR Communication department better understand general perceptions of the ESPP (why employees aren’t contributing or increasing their contributions), allowing them to better position the program in the future.

Employee feedback provided from the prompt for comment feature told us that employees who lived "paycheck to paycheck" found it difficult to sacrifice even part of their earnings to the savings program.

In response, Baker Hughes are now planning a communication program around how employees can save money in general.

Members of the Internal Comms Hub can log in and read the full Baker Hughes case study.

Best regards,

Until next time,

Alex Manchester
Senior Consultant
Step Two Designs

Blog: www.alexmanchester.com

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