Webinar: Tricks and Treats for Building an Employee Experience Content Strategy

0:00:00.0 Lauran McHaffie: Excellent. All right, well, let’s go ahead and get started in the essence of time. Hi everyone. Welcome to our Halloween edition. I am Broom Hilda, and I’m here today with Ms. Scarlet and Sonny Crockett. And we are excited to share a great conversation with with them and also with WGs Super Cat Felicity, she’s Felix, the cat’s cousin. We’re gonna have a great conversation about employee communications today. But before we get started, let’s just share a few housekeeping. We, or we’ll try to keep this to 30 minutes. We encourage you to ask questions. You can do that at the Q&A. You can see that at the bottom of your screen. Fill out any question at any time during, and we will get to those at the end. If we need a little bit more time for those questions. Please stay, stick around if you can.

0:00:51.3 Lauran McHaffie: We have maybe stay on for another five minutes. And we will go from there. Today’s webinar is being recorded. A little bit about us. We are WG Content, a content agency with decades of experience building strong client relationships. We special in specialize in helping healthcare organizations achieve their marketing and communication goals. And one word at a time now about the webinar today it’ll be more of a conversation. We have three seasoned marcom pros and we’ll focus our discussion on how investing in employee communications can bolster employee experience. Please remember to put any questions in the Q&A and then without further ado, let’s meet our guests. First up is Erin Lickliter, Lickliter, Lickliter. Excuse me. Got the Is back.

0:01:43.0 Erin Lickliter: You got it. You got it. Yeah.

0:01:44.5 Lauran McHaffie: Lickliter. I did it.

0:01:47.5 Lauran McHaffie: She has over 25 years of multi-industry experience. Now she is the vice president of Associate and clinical communication for Bon Secours Mercy Health, which includes 48 hospitals and 60,000 employees. She is responsible for all employee, executive and clinical communication, as well as digital engagement. And kudos to Erin. She is named one of Reagan’s top women in communication this year. Next up is Andy Lyons. He comes to us from Roper St. Francis Healthcare in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina. There he is the newly appointed executive director of corporate communications and content strategy where he leads all communication efforts, crisis management, media relationships, and is a driving force for employee engagement. Andy he has 30 years of journalism news and PR experience.

0:02:39.1 Lauran McHaffie: He is award-winning reporter and has also received the Charleston Regional Business Journal’s Healthcare Hero Award and Roper St. Francis President’s Humanitarian Award. And here’s our WG Super cat, Kirsten Lecky. She is our EVP of Insights and Growth and has 20 years of healthcare marketing experience expertise, which she employs in her partnerships with healthcare leaders, not only understanding challenges, but certainly help build those custom solutions. You’ll also see Kirsten presenting at conferences alongside some of our partners this year and next and today she is our moderator. Take it away.

0:03:20.4 Kirsten Lecky: Oops. Okay. There we go. Alright, well, hello everyone and happy Halloween. Before we get started, I wanted to just a very special thank you to Andy and Erin for being good sports about the costumes. As soon as we had this idea, I was like, oh, yeah, we, I know who we need to ask ’cause I know they’ll be up for it, and I know they love to have fun. So thank you for joining me in this effort and having some fun along with me and with the costumes. So as Lauran mentioned, today’s webinar’s gonna be a little bit different and that we’re gonna have more of a conversation, but please know we are gonna summarize the conversation at the end with a slide of key takeaways.

0:04:00.5 Kirsten Lecky: So that will be coming as there will also be some follow-up information. And in the Halloween spirit, we’re gonna talk about the scary good, the skeletons in the closet, some frightfully effective strategies and a few magic potions to keep the workplace brewing. So I know there’s gonna be a lot of questions, so I’m gonna get started right away. So looking back over 2024 what are the events and stories that stand out to you that were scary good from a culture building and employee engagement standpoint? Erin, do you wanna kick us off, talk about this year and some of the scary good things that you’ve experienced in your workplace?

0:04:33.7 Erin Lickliter: Sure. Yeah. We were really excited to start a new communication strategy in 2024. And one of the things we did talk about was we wanted to share more good news. It was something we heard a lot from our associates that they wanted to hear about the good things that were happening within our ministry. So we started a good news newsletter that we send out every Friday at noon that we call Friday Feels, and it’s all good news all day. So we thought it’s a great way to kick off the weekend. What we’re also able to do is we do an individualized story for every market. So depending on where you work, you get content that is targeted specifically to you. So you’re hearing about your friends and your colleagues and the great things that they’re doing, as well as a couple of stories that cover some system-wide good news as well.

0:05:22.3 Erin Lickliter: And we’ve got some really great feedback on the newsletter from our associates. It makes them feel really good and positive about all the great things that our team is doing. And so, and honestly, it’s a great way to end the week when we’re reviewing it. It makes our team feel really awesome or reminds you why you do the things that you do. And so in general, we feel like that’s really been a great culture building. We’ve seen the name catch on, so people call it Friday Feels, they look for it, they’ll reach out and say like, Hey, I got a Friday Feels story. So that’s when, you know, things are really starting to embed in your culture when people are using the language and they wanna be a part of it and they are sharing things. So we’re really excited with how that has really taken off over the course of this year.

0:06:03.9 Erin Lickliter: And the other piece I’m pretty excited about is we kicked off our employee resource groups this year and we’re really excited to start those. And in particular, as you know, there’s so many observances throughout the year and but to have those really employee-led is a much different experience than it sort of being what the company’s message is. So in particular, when we had Women’s History Month, our women’s resource group really went all out and they had a really great panel. And so we did a video series where we had a number of top leader, top female leaders across our ministry that talked about their experience in healthcare, their careers, how they got to where they were. It was just such like great comradery and frankly bonding amongst the leaders that were in the videos. And that was probably one of the best videos that we shared all year.

0:06:54.5 Erin Lickliter: We broke it into several parts because it was so popular so that we could keep ing out more of that content. But that was something that we learned really from our employee resource groups. So again, our associates told us like, this is something that we want to do. And then to have those leaders really willing to step forward and be vulnerable and authentic, really took off and hit great with our audience. And is is really true to who we are at Bon Secours Mercy Health. We have really amazing leaders who are there because they want to serve others. And it really came through in the video. So we are excited about those two pieces.

0:07:27.3 Kirsten Lecky: I love those examples. And I think the whole Feel Good Friday. It’s when you’re looking for the good, then you’re looking for the good, right? So you’re almost like creating a behavior in the culture and in the organization that’s like, you’re seeking those things out and you’re observing and watching for them and then being able to share them not just in your own space, but with your coworkers. So that’s a great, great example. Andy, how about you? What’s some scary good stuff this past year?

0:07:48.4 Andy Lyons: I think one thing that was scary good, that comes immediately to mind and it’s really fitting with what Erin said, right? It’s making our own employees, we call them teammates feel good. And it was kind of a return to culture. We used to have this kind of system-wide party where we would celebrate anniversary years five, 10, 15, 20 years. And then it went away during the pandemic. It was kind of impossible. And then there was a change of leadership and something that was super popular just wasn’t being done. And we brought it back and it was for everybody. And then we had a VIP reception for those who were 20 years and above, and we had it down along the water and we had a yacht rock band play, and it was yacht rock themed. And everybody just got to hang out with their coworkers and with their supervisors and smile and have a good time.

0:08:39.4 Andy Lyons: And remember like what a great place Roper St. Francis Healthcare is to work at. And I think the one thing that we had never done before that was a huge win was we said thank you to our teammates and clinicians who had to work during the party. It was during a Thursday night.

0:08:55.9 Kirsten Lecky: Oh sure. Yeah.

0:08:57.5 Andy Lyons: So dinner was on us. We brought them comfort food in the cafeteria, really good food like barbecue and grits and fish and just like, oh, it was just an amazing menu. And even our freestanding ERs and our urgent cares, like they all were fed. And that was some of the best feedback we got. I had to work during the party. You fed us a really good meal. Thank you. And then, then another one that we worked on that was really excited about was, look, we know that the, we know that nursing is like the most competitive job in healthcare and we really doubled down our efforts on recruiting and retaining our great nurses.

0:09:38.0 Andy Lyons: And that started with a newsletter that went out once a month, that goes out once a month just for nurses. So that this content can be talked about during nursing town halls. And then, I always say one media story doesn’t change the world, but this one really was significant. We were able to show the local paper, the Post and Courier, the biggest paper in South Carolina, how we were retaining our travel nurses, right? Travel nurses during the pandemic came to work for us and they stayed and we gave them the numbers and we showed that like we’re bucking the trends, right?

0:10:16.1 Kirsten Lecky: Amazing. Yeah.

0:10:17.3 Andy Lyons: Nurses want to work for Roper St. Francis Healthcare and here’s the proof and that’s better patient care out of that. And they wrote the story just like that. And it was a real win. It was just something that we can always refer back to that tear sheet and say like, look, this was a big win.

0:10:33.3 Kirsten Lecky: Absolutely. Congratulations on that. And I think all those statistics around being a best place to will say, if I feel like I have a friend at work, right? That matters and that means something. And there’s nothing like making friends to a yacht rock band, right? Like that’s the best way to make friends, right? You really get to know each other when you’re at a yacht rock band. So I love that. Thank you for sharing that example. Those are great. And we will again, have little examples and summaries of this at the end. Some more to come. So the skeletons in the closet, so we have the scary good, but we might have some skeletons in the closet. So looking back over this year, what maybe didn’t work so well, what surprised you? Or maybe looking back, so Andy, why don’t you pick us off for this one?

0:11:11.8 Andy Lyons: It started off with like all good intentions and it was successful. And then it’s like, it made me realize throughout the year I’ve been thinking about like, when is too much content too much? How much, what is too much good content too much content? And so we had an interim CEO who’s beloved, Dr. Megan Baker, and she had this fantastic idea to film. She came in to then to to be our interim CEO during a time of like, when we didn’t have a CEO and we had a CEO search. And she said, I, it was a return to culture. Let’s talk to our teammates. Let’s give them tips. Let’s give them one minute bites of news they need. And we called it A Minute With Megan, we wrote a little jingle for it. We put them out every week and it was a really eclectic bunch of content, right?

0:12:03.9 Andy Lyons: We touched on safety behaviors and how to properly cap a needle without getting stuck. And if you’re working the late shift and you need a healthy snack, and we would even cut over to another expert and have them talk. We’d keep it in a minute. We did one once a week and it came out like out of the gate, lots of clicks, lots of engagement, everybody liked it. And I just, I think looking back now, maybe once a week was too much. It was hard to give it good play every week in the weekly newsletter. So then it’s running like as the fourth or fifth headline. And so I think now when you’ve got a good idea like that, maybe hold back a little bit. Make them want a little bit more and do it not so often. That was a learning lesson.

0:12:49.6 Kirsten Lecky: And so have you continued with it, but just less Kate, like less frequently.

0:12:53.8 Andy Lyons: We paused it and we’re thinking’s been talk of bringing it back at a less frequent rate.

0:13:01.4 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, we have big ideas, right Andy? And then it’s like, okay, well we need to kind of temper that a little bit.

0:13:07.1 Andy Lyons: That’s right.

0:13:08.9 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. But experience teaches us that. How about you Erin? What are some of the skeletons in the closet for you?

0:13:13.8 Erin Lickliter: Yeah, well I think along the same lines as Andy, executive communications can be hard and it requires a lot of trial and error. And sometimes that’s the group that you don’t want to try and error with because you really want to utilize their time in the right way, the limited time that they have. So in the same way, we decided to kick off a CEO Outlook video with our CEO this year. We settled on six times a year, so every other month that we would do it, and we would ask him a question like whatever was really topical or if associates sent in a question and ask him that. Our goal was to send out a two to three minute video with his update and increase his visibility. What happened was we could not get the videos down to bite-size.

0:14:01.3 Erin Lickliter: So we had a leader who had a lot to say, which was awesome. But when you’re trying to create short form video and you can barely get it shorter than 10 minutes, it wasn’t exactly, didn’t, wasn’t fitting into the communication strategy that we had outlined. So we made some adjustments because the thing was we put one out that was longer, it was between like five to seven minutes and we actually got a lot of views. They were just so hungry to hear from our CEO and they liked him tackling some of these meatier topics that they were watching the longer video, which we thought would never happen, that people don’t have this much time to sit down and watch a video. So we decided to just go with it. We’re gonna keep asking those complex, meaty questions, the things that he really wanted to lean into, and it seemed like our associates really wanted to hear from him.

0:14:51.0 Erin Lickliter: But to help manage the length, we did a couple of things. We added some tools with it, so we would send out with it like some short talking points. So if you can’t watch the entire thing, here’s a summary and here’s how you can talk about it in your team. We made suggestions. So we’ve heard a lot of teams will open their meetings by showing that video, so they watch it all together. So it’s not necessarily taking up a lot of their individual time, but they can walk up, watch it together, and then talk about it as a team and talk about what the CEO is talking about and how that applies to them and their work. So by making some of those adjustments to really that executive in his comfort level and the way that it was coming out, it is still ultimately I think has been successful.

0:15:34.9 Erin Lickliter: We’re gonna continue next year. We actually just met with him and talked about that and we’re gonna make a few more adjustments, but length is something that we no longer talk about because we feel like as long as we have a good topic that people are interested in, we can build other things around it to help make that content manageable and bite-size. So if you can only watch two minutes of it, that’s okay. We’ll give you a summary so that you know what’s happening if you do have, you know, we can make recommendations of how you can watch it and utilize multiple people’s time at once, whether rather than a lot of different people taking turns watching it.

0:16:09.2 Erin Lickliter: So making some adjustments there. And then also just being upfront, you’re gonna need 10 minutes to watch this video, so don’t start this now if you don’t have time to sit through. But being really upfront about the content too. But sometimes I think you just have to play to the strengths of your leaders. And when you have somebody who’s really passionate about something, you really don’t wanna stop them from talking. And then when they have that passion, it does really come across in the video so then it can help it be successful.

0:16:37.1 Kirsten Lecky: Well, and it helps people get to know those leaders too, but what you describe is really like the art and science of marketing, right? It’s like meeting people where they are, the way they wanna hear it and the kind of content they wanna digest it. And some it’s long and some is short and some wants to read and some wanna hear and some wanna watch. And so taking that really great format and content and that leadership passion and packaging it in ways that serve your associates in different ways is really a great example. So thank you for sharing that. All right. So let’s look ahead. So those are great. Now let’s look at 2025. We’re all in planning mode for the new year. What are some frightfully effective strategies that you guys are considering deploying or planning on for ’25? Erin, why don’t you kick us off on that one?

0:17:19.9 Erin Lickliter: Yeah, we’re super excited. So we are launching a new employer brand in 2025. So we have spent much of this year evaluating our current brand, our associate value proposition, looking at our associate data, what they’re telling us to really help improve their experience. And we recognize that there was a real opportunity for us to tell our story about BSMH being an employer of choice in a different way. So we are really excited to launch this new brand next year. We have a fresh new look, a great message platform. We’re gonna have tons of launch activities and games and ways to engage leaders and associates to get them really excited about the new brand.

0:18:02.9 Erin Lickliter: And more importantly, we’ve done a lot of research because we wanted to stand out and a lot of times you look around and it, everything looks the same, especially within industries and things like that. And so we’ve worked really hard to differentiate so that people feel a real sense of pride when they look at it. So I’m really pumped for people to, for our associates to see it next year and is, and excited for us to launch. Obviously from a comms team perspective, it’s an enormous amount of work to redo everything. Yeah. And come out with a new brand, but we’re all just so excited about where we landed that it makes it a lot of fun. So we’re really looking forward to that.

0:18:45.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. And that whole idea, that whole topic is one that we could spend hours and days talking about. I’m sure you’ll be on the speaking circuit after next year to share that story. ‘Cause it’s who’s involved who’s at this, which seats are at the table, what goes into it, what are you considering, what is the communication strategy, the launch strategy, all of those things. I think it’s just such an interesting…

0:19:09.0 Kirsten Lecky: And I’m excited to see what happens for you guys next year.

0:19:11.3 Erin Lickliter: Yeah, we do.

0:19:11.8 Kirsten Lecky: How about you Andy? What’s on your mind going into ’25?

0:19:14.6 Andy Lyons: What’s on my mind and what I’m excited about, and this might be a surprise, but I’m excited about taking more control of the signage inside of our hospitals in particular, that ensures that our teammates and our clinicians are safe. So, we have safety behaviors and processes that should be followed during patient care and we want to get that in front of our teammates. We also… Look, workplace violence is an issue in hospitals. It’s an increasing problem. We want our teammates safe. Nothing’s more important than that. We want our patients to know what we won’t tolerate.

0:19:51.3 Kirsten Lecky: Right. Yeah.

0:19:52.2 Andy Lyons: And so all this came from kind of a realization that when we send signage out and we ask them to print it and to hang it up, it doesn’t get hung up. It doesn’t get hung up all the time. Sometimes infection prevention was even taking our own signs down, ’cause it wasn’t done correctly. And so we just went on a tour of every single unit in all four hospitals, and we saw how signs were being used. Some were right, some were not. Some were being torn down. Some were like just looked old and tired. And we talked to the frontline, and they were just so appreciative that we were there, especially when it comes to their own safety and workplace violence and feeling protected. And I was really inspired by their stories. And so we have a whole plan on some short winds of like getting some magnets out. We can put things on refrigerators and break rooms.

0:20:44.9 Kirsten Lecky: Nursing… The hallways. Yeah.

0:20:47.6 Andy Lyons: Yeah. In hallways, in our ERs, waiting rooms. And we’re just making a piecemeal and it’s like, it’s not something that I honestly the office like had took complete control of, but we are now and I’m excited about because it’s a real purpose. It’s really important work.

0:21:04.7 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah. Well I think it’s also, it’s interesting ’cause marketing communications partners with all areas of the organization. Even now we’re working with legal around HIPAA compliance and stuff and now you’re working with the facility managers on signage. Right. So we’re, we touch all areas of the organization. I’m going to, we have about eight minutes, so I am going to go to the last question and then we’ll do a quick summary. And that is, what would you guys, just to kind of summarize, like what would you say are a few magic potions to keeping a workplace brewing? So if you had to get kind of the headline around like, just keep this in mind and this is really the magic potion to a good place to work, Erin, what, how would you answer that?

0:21:41.9 Erin Lickliter: I would say don’t lose sight of local. We’re a big system. And sometimes it’s hard to do things that are specific to facilities and locations, but local is what matters, especially to your employees. And so find ways to do that. So like we, what I described in our Friday fields email, if you can target or personalize content to those markets, make sure that you have beefed up content on your intranet specific to those local markets. But don’t forget the local touch and do it in a way that is scalable and that you can do with the resources you have. And where you can’t encourage you to create toolkits and training for those leaders to also carry forward your system message on their own.

0:22:29.3 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah, I think those, that’s great. How about you Andy?

0:22:31.6 Andy Lyons: I’m thinking a lot about good PR for PR. Right? It’s not enough to do the work. You have to talk and tell people the work that’s been done. So like for my direct supervisor who’s the best? Kathy Smith, I send her an email on Fridays, like six things Kathy needs to know, right? Because there’s always these little things that are out there that turn into big things. And you really need to, you need to send these lists out and keep people in the loop. Like in the middle of breast cancer awareness month of this month, we sent midway on the 15th. We’re like, these are the stories we’ve landed about our great breast cancer services that we offer. And we sent it to the VPs in charge and the doctors in charge. And they like that. You can’t just assume that everybody’s consuming every headline in your newsletters and they know where you are. And you kind of owe it to yourself to kind of tell your story. And I think it’s easy, it was easy for me to kind of get caught up in the work but not actually report back on the work that was done. So that’s what I’m…

0:23:33.1 Kirsten Lecky: And I think that, yeah. And I think that’s, it’s so challenging to synthesize. So some point you and I are gonna have to talk about that because I wanna know how you do that. Like how do you, everything that you’re doing. So, okay, here are the six things that Kathy needs to know ’cause there’s probably hundreds of things. So how do you know what are the six things? And so we’ll have to talk about that a little bit more. ‘Cause I would love to learn from you on how to do some of that summarizing and synthesizing to talk about work that you’re doing. So all right, Lauran, you wanna pull up our summary slide and we’ll go through real quickly and then I know we have a couple questions that have come in. So we’ll give time for those. So what we’ve heard Erin and Andy talk about is share the positive find ways to celebrate each other, whether that’s a rock band or a newsletter, but, or a good field Friday.

0:24:19.1 Kirsten Lecky: Those are all… Go a long way. Capitalizing on leaders who wanna participate when that happens, really take advantage of that video takes effort. So pros and cons to that, obviously, right? There’s a lot of value and advantages to video, but it’s a lot of work too. It’s a heavy lift. So keeping that sort of effort versus value in mind around video. Provide resources for teams to watch and learn together. I love that example. ‘Cause it’s really about these big, you guys are big organizations. How do you make that world a little bit smaller? Bring your teams together to learn and network and communicate with each other. Localizing your stories. Every community has a nuance and so being able to do that is important. And then that creating a discipline around sharing, it’s okay for all of us to do a little bragging once in a while, right? We got to tell people what’s happening and what’s going on. So those are great. We can move to questions. Lauran, I think that’s next. Is that, oh no, these are the examples. So let’s do these real quick. Erin, do you wanna just real quickly share with us what we’re looking at here? These were some of the things you talked about?

0:25:19.8 Erin Lickliter: Yeah, so on the left there’s a quick snapshot of what our Friday feels, email looks like. And then if you want to follow us on LinkedIn on our bonds Core Mercy Health page, this is a snippet of the, Women’s Leader Series video series that we did. So you’re able to watch it as well.

0:25:38.6 Kirsten Lecky: Great. Thank you. And I think Andy, we had a few examples you shared?

0:25:42.8 Andy Lyons: Yeah. On the left there is that post and courier story about the traveler nurses who are now full-time nurses. And then we’ve got some pictures here from that party at the Point event, the Employee Appreciation event that knucklehead up in the top right corner, that’s me up playing keyboards for the Yacht rock band. One cute little thing like everybody in the band dressed in Roper St. Francis healthcare colors red and purple special for this, special for that event. And then this is just an example of that nursing newsletter that went off. We’re all about keeping the nurses that we have and that’s the handoff and it’s been a huge success.

0:26:20.6 Kirsten Lecky: That’s great. Love it. All right Lauran, I think you’re up with…

0:26:25.8 Lauran McHaffie: Awesome. All right. So we do have a few questions and if you still have one, please feel free to put it in the Q&A. We have just a couple minutes that we’ll get to these. Let’s see here. Well here’s a good one for you Andy, just because you just spoke about this. Any tips for getting leadership involved in the employee events, like the the yacht party? What’s your magic sauce?

0:26:49.2 Andy Lyons: Yeah, I would say like, so first off, this is like a no brainer, but like, make sure it’s on their calendar. [laughter] Like it’s not enough to just that they’re going to remember that you have this big event and that they need to be there and then actually come up with a duty, right? And then check back on them. One thing that I’ve learned, we have a tight knit group of leaders and they’ll kind of like, then they’ll have their duty at the event to greet people in one particular area, but they gravitate to their other fellow leaders and then they’re kind of hanging out. But you want them with the front line, right? You want them with the people who do the work and want to meet them and maybe never met them for the first time. So kind of like, you need kind of like somebody who’s kind of roaming around the event and making sure the leaders are connecting with the people. Seems kind of simple, but see it through.

0:27:36.1 Kirsten Lecky: So important. Yeah.

0:27:38.2 Lauran McHaffie: That’s great. Here’s one for you Erin. And this probably could be its own Webinar in itself, but our listener wants to know a little bit more about the new employer brand. So how does that level up to the external? What was the reason for the change? Those types of things?

0:27:53.6 Erin Lickliter: Yeah, so it does fall under the umbrella of our external brand. So I think that’s really the key to success of having an internal brand. And the internal brand that we have today really was created separately from our external brand, which you find does create problems. ‘Cause you really want to have consistent messaging inside and out. And if you don’t have that alignment with your external brand that’s really important. And I think the other piece that we focused on, we partnered really carefully with our HR team and as they were building out the associate value proposition and what we would actually deliver for our associates. And so that was something that we wanted to hone in on and why… And that really drove the need for the change as well, because we had evolved since the seven or so years ago when they introduced the last internal brand. It’s a much different place than it was there. Our employees are different. They expect different things and it really needed to be refreshed to meet the needs of our employees that we have today.

0:29:01.5 Lauran McHaffie: And this is not one just you both mentioned having, developing new newsletters and we’re curious about just how that, if that decreased resources elsewhere? If you had to increase resources, how did that come about for both your teens? Andy, you wanna go first? Or sorry, Erin?

0:29:22.2 Erin Lickliter: No, I would say we don’t just add the add, so you do have to be thoughtful in what goes away. So when we add something, we do talk about what are we no longer doing or does it replace something? And if it’s not, we do have to have a real discussion around can we actually do it. So with, when we introduced some new newsletters this year, it was a consolidation of a number of pieces. So we were actually doing more and we did less and we’re more focused and deliberate in the kind of messaging that we did. And there were some that we just went away entirely. ‘Cause they didn’t, we had the data that showed they didn’t have the data, the following that they really needed to validate the number of resources. So I’d encourage you to really look at your data and don’t just try to do more, be smart about what you’re doing and focus on the highest value things.

0:30:12.0 Kirsten Lecky: It’s hard letting go, isn’t it?

0:30:14.3 Erin Lickliter: It is, and a lot of them have, yeah. They’re usually tied to a person who wanted to start it. And those are hard conversations to have, but that’s where like, you can’t fight data. So if you can show the data, that’s really where you can drive that conversation.

0:30:28.0 Kirsten Lecky: Yeah.

0:30:30.3 Lauran McHaffie: Andy, do you have any thoughts on that?

0:30:31.3 Andy Lyons: I would just really echo Erin’s excellent answer. There’s sometimes when you put something out like the nursing newsletter and then everybody wants their own newsletter and we just don’t have the bandwidth to do that. And so we had a, we have already before that a good physician newsletter and then the APPs wanted their own newsletter and we thought like that really needs to be folded into the physician newsletter. And that was a solution and it didn’t really take extra FTEs.

0:31:00.1 Lauran McHaffie: All right. We have one last question. So both of you mentioned CEO videos. Are there any, you gave some great tips, but are there any additional tips for making them more engaging and then really how do you help prep the CEO to stay on message?

0:31:16.9 Erin Lickliter: Yeah, I would say for me to be engaging, you really need to get to know your executive and lean into their personality. ‘Cause sometimes if you try to force something that is just really outside of their comfort zone, that’s when the content just stinks. So I think if you can lean into who they are and spend some time with them and get to know them, that’s when you really see the success of those relationships. And especially in the videos. And sometimes it’s not a video. I’d also say I have a number of leaders that we work with that just aren’t comfortable on camera, but they have really great things to say. So we’ve found other ways where they are comfortable, like they like to be with other people so they are comfortable in a town hall format and like to have discussions or we do written pieces. Because they really wanna be focused on what they’re saying and things like that. So I’d also say it doesn’t always have to be a video, but really talk to your leader and their comfort level so it feels true and authentic to them as well.

0:32:13.7 Andy Lyons: I have kind of a, I had mixed feelings about teleprompters because I felt like you could see the leader like reading it, but I got to tell you, it’s like it puts the leader such at ease to know that the words are right there in front. And it’s almost like you can do a run with the teleprompter and then like, let’s try it without, and then they may be able to do it. They may not have the teleprompter there by the teleprompter. Use an iPad, put the words up there. There’s just a comfort in knowing the words are there.

0:32:42.2 Lauran McHaffie: Yeah.

0:32:43.8 Lauran McHaffie: Good call. Thank you so much. We’re gonna go ahead and wrap it up. Thank you so much for your time and your energy and your insights today. We really appreciate you Erin and, or Sunny and Ms. Scarlet [laughter], your today’s recording will be sent to you along with the companion white paper. And as you leave the Webinar, there are just three super simple questions for surveys. We really welcome any feedback and suggestion for future topics. Again, thank you. Happy Halloween everyone, and hopefully you’ll join us on November 12th for our next Webinar with Easterseals Redwood. Y’all have a good day.

0:33:22.8 Kirsten Lecky: Thanks everyone. Happy Halloween.