Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to a new season of Fresh Perspectives. It's not just a new episode. It's a new entirely new season. Look at us, David.
Jarbas:We are here back. I'm Jarbas Horst , senior product manager for Fresh Internet. We have a new season starting with a theme, something we haven't had before. The theme is about ownership, and David will be giving us some more insights on that because he came up with the idea. We also have great guests as we had in the past, so we are going to continue inviting very great people to join us.
Jarbas:People here for internal communications from tech still covering the aspect of AI in telecommunications that doesn't disappear. It's it will present. Some surprise guests as well from different sectors just to give a bit of a flavor of what's coming. But, yeah, David, please go introduce yourself.
David:Thank you. Thank you, Jarbas. Yes. Brand new season, a fresh season, if you'll pardon the awful dad joke. Yeah.
David:So this season, we're gonna be talking gonna be talking about ownership. You know, really important topic, become something of a past time for me to think about. You know, ownership means being accountable for something. Right? And for what happens in the space for which you are accountable, comms, IT, HR, your team.
David:And, you know, I think ownership is something that over time ends up collapsing down into addition, right, adding things, doing more stuff, more technology, more channels, more information, more content. And, you know, that happens because it's counterintuitive to think about ownership as subtraction, right? Taking things away, doing less in some instances. And ultimately, having ownership should mean being able to say no to reduce, remove. And, you know, we created a report earlier this year called the Employee Attention Session, and the findings from that report say that that counter counterintuitive position on ownership of subtracting is one of the things that is really gonna help.
David:And, you know, so I'm interested in this season on this topic of ownership, to see if subtraction fits naturally. Is this something that people think about in terms of their role, the things that they own? Do they think about that as reducing, doing less, or taking things away?
Jarbas:Yeah. I'll go straight into the report and and some numbers because one of the things I read there got me thinking actually. You know, we have 12% of the employees reading kind of communications in full. So, you know, from from all of the employees in organization, we have 12% of the people reading a piece of content end to end. And, you know, I'm I'm wondering, like, is that a symptom of people not saying no?
Jarbas:Right? Is that is that a reason here?
David:It's certainly in there. You know, I think the the interesting thing about the outcomes from the report and conversations I've had with people about it since, it's a it's a compounding problem. Right? It isn't just one thing that is contributing to this. But, you know, certainly, the amount of content information, news, updates, announcements, alerts, pings, contributes this feeling of people being overwhelmed or inundated with content and information.
David:And, you know, the number one reason that people weren't reading internal communications was because they felt, you know, the cumulative volume of content was a problem for them. You know, it wasn't judgments about quality or relevance. It wasn't a comment on who'd sent it or, you know, what the subject header was, though those things are important, obviously. It was a you know, came simply down to there has been too much content that I have had to consume, and there is a line, and I have now gone beyond it.
Jarbas:So we have a situation where everyone is trying to communicate. Right? So in in usually, in an organization, you have the telecommunications team sharing content across different channels, but we also have other people from different departments depending on the organization structure. Maybe anyone's allowed to publish a piece of content, And we also have the the different channels where we have more content being published across all of these different places. So we have information overload as a as a challenge here.
Jarbas:And the the problem that people are not reading everything in total because of the distraction and the noise that we see there. So is that then leading to the employee attention recession?
David:Yes. Yes. You know, absolutely. The, you know, the idea of an attention recession is something that already exists in the kind of general world of marketing, right, where a segment or an audience has just been completely overloaded with content information about that topic, and there is no new value to be found there. So, you know, the idea of an employee attention recession is borrowing that concept and applying that to the world of digital communications within an organization.
David:And, you know, obviously, the role that this affects significantly is the internal comms team. You know? And we we've seen the kind of compounding effect in organizations where there are higher legislative or compliance, you know, where as well as news content and information being consumed about the organization, its product services, strategy, changes, engagement, those kind of things, there is this additional layer of compliance with policies, documentation, mandatory training. All of these things are draining the attention for employees.
Jarbas:You know, referring back to the report here. So I had the opportunity to read the report end to end different, like, or aligned with 12% of the employees that read content end to end. So I'm one of those. And I think this, you know, is a very well structured report. A lot of insights, hypothesis backed up with data.
Jarbas:How did you came up with the idea of creating this report? When did you start noticing these signals?
David:Well, you know, we go to a lot of events, right, internal comms events primarily, a bunch of IT events as well. And, you know, I'm there as a vendor. We've got a stand there, branded up with Fresh, with some giveaways, stickers, stress balls, those kind of things. And, you know, your main role when you're at these events is to talk to people. Right?
David:Find out about their challenges, find out about the organization they're working in. And given that we're, you know, we have an Internet product where they're trying to identify, you know, challenges, themes, trends, You know, we're looking for ways into conversations with people about this stuff. You know, what I found is that people are happy to share, right? You know, they are happy to tell you about the difficulties they have managing a stakeholder group that sometimes wants to talk, sometimes doesn't want to talk, the challenges of getting employees to read and consume content. And obviously, you know, one of the other things that I'm looking for in those conversations is ideas, updates, features, new new product that we can create and drop in and, you know, help people solve some of those problems.
David:And, you know, we're starting to pick up consistent themes in this area. And late last year, early this year, I had an opportunity to run some workshops with a group of internal comms pros at events. These were popular, oversubscribed on this idea of the attention recession developing in an organization. And, you know, I saw those at the time as being kind of, you know, market research, product research, those kind of things. And they were interesting discussions.
David:People clearly liked talking about the things that I wanted to talk about, so it was, you know, a good amount of content that came out of it. What was interesting though is the main theme that came away from those conversations was that people were struggling to get employees to read content, right, regardless of the, you know, techniques they were using to make the content more interesting, use different types of content, people simply were not consuming it. They could see that in things like the, you know, kind of basic metrics like page views, but they also, you know, it was recognized that the things that they were trying to communicate out to people weren't landing. They weren't having the impact that they needed to have. The result of that was, you know, business slows down, people aren't getting the information at the points in time when they need to, you know, and all became it all became apparent that people were using different terminology to describe what I could see was a fairly consistent problem.
David:And the idea of creating the report came from this idea of giving some labels, context, terminology to something that, you know, people were using different ways of describing.
Jarbas:Right. So then we we walked closely with a research agency. We shared all these findings, and they talk like a thousand people across The UK and The US. What are, like, you know, interesting data points that they found there?
David:Yeah. Well, you know, look. The probably the most depressing of those statistics was that one that you already cited, about 12% of employees that we surveyed read internal communications in full, with others choosing to use things like AI, skimming it, reading headlines, ignoring it completely. You know, 12% of our employees in our survey said that they were responding in full. So that was kind of one interesting area.
David:You know, I think for for me, the the one of the most useful statistics that came out of this is this central paradox, right, where particularly around the use of AI to consume internal communications, where 95 of the employees we surveyed felt that AI accurately captured the key points of internal communications. Right? They were comfortable that it was giving them what they needed. They were getting what they needed to know out of the kind of AI compressed versions of the of the content. 95%.
David:92% of the internal comms pros that we surveyed were concerned, worried that the AI generated summaries that people were reading were distorting the meaning or tone of their communication. So we've got this kind of central paradox, these two groups that aren't necessarily talking to each other or validating each other's position, saying opposing things, right? You know, one other statistic that came out of this, again kind of adding to this paradox, is that around a third of the internal comms pros that responded in our survey had any meaningful statistics to back up, you know, the kind of validation of the sentiments being expressed by employees. So only a third having some form of measurement of the impact of the internal communications that we're having.
Jarbas:I'm impressed. How many numbers you can keep in your mind here? I'm not I'm
David:Reading them. They're on the screen here. Smart.
Jarbas:So the well, one thing that I have been thinking, has something surprised you from from these findings?
David:Yeah. Well, look. Lots of lots of surprises from the data points. However, you know, I think the reason that we created the report in the first place is that these were basically things that people were saying to us in these conversations. Right?
David:You know, people were worried that employees are using AI and that meaning was getting lost. We were hearing from people that leaders weren't as involved in internal communications as they would like to have been, you know, the data point from the system. One in three organizations have leadership largely or totally absent from internal communications. Know, none of these things, the stats on their own, weren't particularly surprising. It was validating sentiment, things that we'd heard.
David:You know, I think what was was interesting, though, and what was surprising is some of the paradoxes. Right? You know, that that that point about the, you know, 92% versus 95%, you know, being able to compare these two quite different surveys kind of having some of these paradoxes. What was also useful, though, was seeing the amount of validation that our findings had elsewhere, right? Organizations like Gallagher with their employee comms reports, surveys from Gallup, the Microsoft Work Trend Index reports.
David:You know, there was a lot of overlap that we could see from those surveys and the one that we had created.
Jarbas:We like this paradox. We call that the intent gap, or we identify that as intent gap, which is exactly that. So employees say everything is fine, but I'm getting all the message, and I see saying, well, that's not actually the case.
David:Yeah. And there's a variant of this that existed pre AI, right? Intent gap isn't something that is brand new. It's not something that's caused by AI. For organizations where team managers are the primary communications vehicle for their content, right?
David:You know, comms is going to team managers. Team managers are then passing that information along to their teams in meetings, updates, you know, newsletters, whatever it ends up happening to be. But there is a, you know, there is a there is a visibility and an intent gap there as well, right, where the what the manager receives and what they end up conveying may not necessarily be the same thing either.
Jarbas:Well, I get a lot of energy from you here, like, talking about this topic, so something you have been following for a few months now and working on this report. So I think, you know, we have identified the we have have affirmation confirmation on the hypothesis we had. I'll have data backing that up, which is, you know, is a is a great way of, you know, now we we have identified what the problems are. Is there a fix for it?
David:Well, you know, fix fix is probably the wrong wrong word to use. Right? You know, for me, this has always been about naming a problem and providing people with some insight into what you know, what some of the levers might be. Right? Something that has resonated really well in in conversation, we're talking to people is thinking about attention as a budget.
David:Right? You know, the idea that the organization's attention, the the available time that people have to consume content is a budget, right? And every piece of communication that we distribute is drawing down from that budget. And, you know, I think that what I've seen in people's faces and their reactions when I describe in that way is that that's a really useful framework to have. Because saying no to people, particularly when you think about, you know, internal comms as a function, their main stakeholders are the people that own the budget, right?
David:They're the people that are resourcing them, funding them, and the idea of regularly saying no, declining things that they want to distribute in the organization is tough, right? So, you know, providing something the way you could change the conversation a little bit, right? For example, organizations that are going through a reorganization, as many organizations are at the moment, content and narrative supporting those in a very sensitive time, and then, you know, one of your main stakeholders has been off to a conference that week. Simon Sinek was the, you know, lead speaker or something, and they're very excited about the outcomes from this conference, and they want that to be something that's being communicated. You know, turning down what feels like it could be a good news story in the middle of, you know, what could be a series of, you know, sensitive, tough conversations with people, that's a hard thing to do.
David:But describing that as, you know, look, we have an attention budget of about five minutes per week for employees of this type. I'm making numbers up, by the way. You know, what do we want to spend that budget on? You know, that becomes a, you know, a negotiation rather than a flat no, right? You know, we're using this terminology to describe something, package it up for somebody, and allowing them to make a good decision.
Jarbas:It's the power of money, David. You know, as soon as we start translating problems in a word that contains something related to money, that's always useful. I'm I'm noticing that here in my in my house. Like, I'm my my daughter's, like, in the first grade. I'm ditching her mathematics now, and they all have the connection with money.
Jarbas:And sometimes we use, like, some points to help with the calculation. The part that she loves the most is when she gets to keep the learning. Right? But always always useful. Swirl is useful.
Jarbas:Oh, yes.
David:Sounds like you've got a future in finance.
Jarbas:That's it. It's a good point. I'll need to keep that in mind. There you go. So going like to you know, we we had some I think we've called that solutions is a is a a bold term here.
Jarbas:So some levers, some things that we had to find that people can maybe use to help manage the the situation. The first one being subtraction is strategic where Yeah. We have the situation actually right now as as we started mentioning at the beginning. Right? It's very easy to say yes.
Jarbas:You you just keep adding. Right? You keep adding more content. You keep adding campaigns, trying out different formats, video, podcast also being kind of a a trendy format now that people are using, like, to summarize content, share that as a podcast in the in the Intranets. What what's the point here with subtraction is is strategic?
David:Yeah. Well, you know, again, back back to the kind of overall theme of the podcast for this season that, you know, ownership implies that you can say no. The challenge is it does come at a personal cost. Right? You know, people don't wanna hear no.
David:It is easier to say yes. Easy to say yes, return to your desk, click send on that all company email, have a little cry before, you know, getting back to the getting back to the rest of the job Because, you know, you've just done the thing that you know that you didn't want to do, and that thing chips away at the respect that people have for the, you know, internal comms mailbox that, you know, you work so hard to set up. So, you know, the challenge on ownership is, can you subtract? Can you say no? Because it becomes very important, right?
David:You know, one of the other kind of key outcomes from the report is this idea of the Goldilocks syndrome, right? The idea of the Goldilocks syndrome here is that there is no one lever to pull. We asked internal communications professionals about which were the top challenges. 2.6 percentage points separated the top six. Nothing wrong in a kind of leading position.
David:Everything wrong at the same time. You know, no one thing that you could go after. So again, this kind of counterintuitive process of, you know, what can we take away? What could be subtracted? Because that is the only thing that we can do to solve a cumulative volume problem.
Jarbas:Yeah. Saying no is hard. Right? I mean, it always comes back with some maybe conversation we are going to have and justification. Right?
Jarbas:Why why so the next question that would be is someone challenging you, so why not? Why do not do that? Yes. Moving, like, to to the second lever, which is about building your content for mediation, like, knowing that AI is going to consume that content. So how can we prepare our content so that when it's, like, translated or summarized by AI, I'm keeping my my intent, my meaning?
Jarbas:What's the idea here?
David:Yeah. So, you know, I think we one of the stats in in the report, one in five people using AI to summarize or compress internal comms content. And this is a survey that we ran towards the beginning of this year. So, you know, that that problem is likely to be building. Right?
David:More people are using AI, the more people are going to use AI for compressing, summarizing content that they're being that they're being sent. So it's not something that is going to go away or disappear or start reducing. This is something that is gonna a challenge that's gonna get bigger. And knowing that, building content, anticipating for some level of mediation, you know, a very long wordy piece of content that's gonna get compressed down into a couple of bullet points, you know, is is the main gist of something that is a long a long waffle y document isn't gonna get preserved in a neat way. Right?
David:So clear intent, being brief, keeping content to sort of short, punchy, making sure that any key attributes of that content, you know, if you expect people to read it in full, be clear about it. You know, it it may not survive a mediation process, but if you don't explicitly state that, it certainly won't be carried into any any form of compression. So, you know, the of the key thing here is writing and creating content in a way that can survive mediation. And again, these aren't brand new rules, right? This is a practice that's been around forever.
David:Right? People know that it's a good idea to be creating content that has clear intent and purpose, that it's not a good idea to send kind of long, waffly content and making sure that you have if there are specific actions that you want people to take, make sure they're clear and easy to easy to understand and hopefully somewhere near the top of that piece of content as well.
Jarbas:Mhmm. Yeah. There there was, like, the Swoop SharePoint benchmark report that Swoop Analytics released, I think, two months ago. And one of the findings there is that, no, a good piece of content has between 200 to 600 words. Anything above that means people are really not going to pay attention and not going to read that in full.
Jarbas:So, like, keeping that brief the information brief is helpful. And I think there's also a space where vendors, right, like organizations like ours, you can contribute. Because I mean, I think right now, if you just take the default options that are there with AI, there's nothing built in that rule how protect your intent.
David:Yeah.
Jarbas:And I think, like, solutions could include things like I want to flag. I have a tag that says this content should not be mediated by AI. Should not come in a in a summary. Or if it goes in a summary, I want explicitly to have the information in that summary that you should rediscount that in full. Right?
Jarbas:So it'll be a part of the 12% here of the the invoice that reads something end to end. So I think that's that's something that vendors could do there.
David:Right? Yeah. Well, and, you know, I think that there is a there is a responsibility on people for creating the content here as well. Right? You know, I I don't think we should be outsourcing our responsibility to the to to to the robots and the machines on on this stuff.
David:You know, if you're writing a piece of content and there are some very specific things that you want people to do afterwards, name them, specify them. You know, those kinds of very clear indicators are exactly the sort of things that AI will go looking for, right? You know, the more clear you are about the intent of the piece of content, the better the outcome is going to be if and when it is compressed. Know, again, I think internal comms professionals working in this area, they know all of this stuff. This is not new information to them.
David:You know? And those same people are the ones that are frustrated that they get asked to do stupid shit like posting 2,000 word monologues by email or on the Internet because they know no one's gonna look at it.
Jarbas:And what are you from where to see now? Note for Copilot. Right? So this let's see how that goes. Third lever, it's a is a this is about governing interpretation, not just public publication.
Jarbas:Or in terms of publication, I think from, you know, a tooling point of view, there are many options supporting content creators and publishers. We have approvals. We have scheduling. We have editorial calendars all contributing here. For the well interpretation, I think less options.
Jarbas:But, like, from the report, one thing that was interesting is that we have 98 dot 6% of employees using AI to interpret content. And we have and we have, in that case, like, aware that that's happening. But then on the other hand, we have IC just at Abel here. 35% of Internet communicators are able to monitor and really have visibility of which content is being surfaced in AI, which con content is being clicked. So that is a a governance gap, a governance issue that we see.
Jarbas:What's your your point here? What do you have, like, you know, from the report? Yeah.
David:Yeah. Look. You know, agreed. I think the AI in the public Internet works very differently to the way that it does in an organization, right? You know, public AI has things like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Reddit, a whole host of other systems that have good authority signals in them, right?
David:You know, these are systems that are good at pointing out the truth. These platforms have all been trained at the point of production, you know, memories embedded, enabled in these systems. The same thing is not true in organizations' use of this stuff. And, you know, if you have content in your intranet and your content stores that is ten years old, still available, still being published and accessible by people, guess what? It's going to get included in the results somewhere.
David:So, you know, governance is the, you know, hot topic that sits behind all AI conversations. For organizations, you know, it may feel like the more content that you've got, the better. You know, actually, a smaller set of data that is more accurate, better written, better constructed, is going to produce way better outcomes for people.
Jarbas:Yeah, content governance, I think we'll never stop to listen to that as a good companion for AI. Right? So where you have AI using data, you should have a good content governance in place. Also, like other instruments, we we are adding now in our own solution, AI analytics, that gives visibility for entire communicators on how which content is being surfaced in AI, which content is being clicked when it's surfaced. I think really helping demystify that that and which helps you also, like, improve your content when you're doing that.
David:A good cheeky plug for the product there, Jarvis. There we go.
Jarbas:It's it's part of the of the game, isn't it? Yeah. There we go. So, you know, bringing this year to an end, David, we someone who will listening to this podcast at their commute, what is the one thing that, you know, people could do where they get to work with all of this knowledge that the report contains?
David:Yeah. Well, look. You know, I wish I had the the the silver bullet. You know, unfortunately well, I think if I did, I'd probably be recording this from the the beach in The Bahamas somewhere. So, you know, it's a complicated area, and it's it's too I think it's probably too complicated to have kind of easy fixes or, you know, a single action that that that people could undertake.
David:You know, I think it's always it's always important to point out as well. You know, I'm not a practitioner. I don't have any experience operating or working in internal communication, so it feels wrong to start providing people with too many solutions. And I think, you know, people that are recognizing themselves in the report data, they are kind of seeing themselves in some of the outcomes that we found, and, you know, that want to own that problem of subtraction, right, that the report isn't intended to provide a fix. It's that there's a shared vocabulary, some terminology, some data points that, you know, hopefully help to kind of begin those conversations somewhere above zero.
David:And, you know, look, I'm as I said in the opening, I'm really interested in continuing to explore this theme, this topic for the rest of the season as well.
Jarbas:Thanks David. Always great to talk to you. And if someone wants to read the report, be part of the 12% of people who consume content end to end, the link is in the description. Please take a look. Ask questions.
Jarbas:And thank you. Keep tuning in! Cheers.