ICYMI: Discovery Inc., Smile!, and Qs for McD's?
đ€© Greetings to our newest subscribers in Atlanta, Austin, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, and Switzerland!
Donât forget to sign up for:
The Executive Communication Councilâs Employee Communication Summit (June 22-23)
Raganâs Employee Communications & Culture conference (July 29)
đș And hereâs a replay of a webinar I recently participated in on using employee comms to drive business outcomes, sponsored by Poppulo.
In case you missed itâŠ
1. How Discovery Inc., Uncovers Great Ideas
Most innovative ideas seem to come from the smaller, quieter parts of Discovery Inc., says Stephen Lee, VP of EMEA product strategy and innovation. The challenge, he says, is how to crowd-source innovation, create a culture that encourages people to submit ideas, and then have a process to collect and give feedback on these submissions.
The company uses Workplace from Facebook for internal comms.
To capture ideas, Discovery has integrated Sideways 6, a chatbot for collecting ideas.
Employees post an idea to the platform, which kicks off a conversation with the chatbot. The bot asks questions like âWhy is your idea great?â and âHow many resources do you need?â
The idea is then routed to the people making decisions and is scored.
The submitter receives an email on the status of their idea.
Irene Scardia, EMEA innovation and internal communications senior manager, notes that while an innovation tool generates intangible results, some things can be measured, such as the volume of new ideas being submitted through crowdsourcing and employee satisfaction.
đź It took at least three years to create a culture of innovation at Discovery, according to Scardia.
Read more (Computer Weekly)
2. You Know We Can See You, Right?
A Microsoft study finds just how often remote workers multitask during videoconference:
especially when the group is large and the meeting runs long,
multitasking happens far more often in recurring meetings than during ad hoc meetings
meetings held in the morning have higher rates of multitasking than at other times of day, and
multitasking takes place six times as often in video meetings lasting more than 80 minutes compared with meetings that take fewer than 20 minutes
~15% of survey respondents say they believe multitasking makes them more productive.
But at a sacrifice of quality because the smarties know that multitasking is a myth.
Nearly four in 10 respondents said they had to work during meetings to cope with the proliferation of virtual meetings on their schedule as they transitioned to working from home.Â
Whatâs the remedy?
Fewer and shorter meetings.
Bonus: How Videoconferences Make It Harder for Employees to Collaborate (WSJ)
đ Trending on Mister Editorial
Interview With Spotifyâs TK Breuer, Manager of Internal Communications
Six Steps to Develop an Editorial Strategy for Internal Communications
3. Industry News
Pyn, an Australian startup, raised $8M seed to bring targeted communication in-house (TechCrunch)
Poppuloâs Maturity Model (Poppulo)
Modern Intranet Best Practices (Gartner via Simpplr)
Forget Going Back to the OfficeâPeople Are Just Quitting Instead (WSJ)
Glassdoor announced the CEOs who won the 8th Employeesâ Choice Awards (TechRepublic)
4. What Do You Want to Know About McDonaldâs Internal Comms?
Next month I will interview the internal comms manager for McDonaldâs in the U.K.
What do you want to know about?
The difference between franchisee and employee comms?
What the intranet looks like?
How the team is organized?
Whether they want fries with that?
Reply to this email with your questions!
đ Thanks for reading! Have a lovely weekend.
Iâd like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to editorshaun@gmail.com.
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Disclaimer: Besides running Mister Editorial, I work in employee comms at Splunk. The views in this newsletter are my own.