 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's webinar Express which is colleagues as consumers with our guest speaker Dr Eloise Leonard Cross and which has been organised by the CIM Northeast Group. If you're a university student attending today's webinar then you may want to sign up to the CIM Marketing Club. It will keep you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. All you need to do is hover your camera over the QR code you can see on the screen and that will take you to the marketing club sign up page. So I'd now like to introduce our guest speaker for today's session Head of People's Strategy and Experience at Northumbrian Water Group, Dr Eloise Leonard Cross. Over to you Eloise. Thank you so much. So welcome everyone, I'm delighted to see so many rejoining us today for this session and so this session is on colleagues as consumers as you'll have seen. So just in terms of my background and where this kind of grew from I'm a psychologist by trade and what I find really interesting is how we can bring science and understanding people to real life settings. I love organisations and think they offer us so much richness to get a lot more curious and actually what I'm going to talk about today is focus on a specific project where we really did that. We really got really curious about how to do things differently, collaborate on a piece of work that was the creation of our living well concept and resources to really enhance wellbeing. It's subsequently been award winning and it's been great to be able to share some of the insights from this, the learning from this programme. This piece of work and was done in partnership with my colleague Steph Wood who's also on the call today and be on hand to answer any questions but what's really important is this was a piece that grew out of the people function because we knew something was needed but actually was collaborated on with our comms colleagues, marketing colleagues and innovation colleagues as well so a real collaborative piece. I've always been interested as a psychologist complete my doctorate in how we use data and information so what you will find in today's session is that I'll talk about how and what data we used at different points. I think it's quite interesting to make sure we share that with one another as professionals because sometimes we want to look at ways we can kind of replicate learning other people have had and applied examples. So I really want to take you into a bit of a deep dive into what we did, how we did it and bring some of this stuff to life and delighted to take any questions either at the end of this session or after the event. So where did we start off? Well, first of all, I guess it's a spot the difference game and really for us, it's even more than overlap the most businesses. So 97% of our colleagues are customers before they join us and remain customers even if they leave us and throughout they're working with us. So we work in the water industry. So Northumbrian Water serves supplies water in the Northeast as Northumbrian Water and in the Southeast as Essex and Suffolk Water. So people who work in our business tend to work in our geographical areas serving our communities but also consuming our product and paying for that service as well. And when I joined the business two years ago, what really struck me at Northumbrian Water was wow, that's quite a unique model when you've got that overlap. And it really took me to the Virgin Media Research for a number of years ago, which looked into how the impact of the colleague experience on whether they retained their membership of Virgin Media when they left the business, and it's really impacted by that experience they had with the business and those touch points. And that's always stuck with me and informed how I work and how I approach things that I do. So what we started thinking about when we joined this business and this new role is how can we understand that better? And how can we serve those groups in a more consistent way? So my role as head of people's strategy and experience has an exact mirror and match on our customer side. So we also have a head of customer strategy and experience and they're linked by our internal commons manager and our marketing managers. So we have those kind of links between us that really works across. So in a lot of ways, I guess you could say for this piece of work, there was always already a frame for success in that collaboration and that connection was already in place in business. And I know that's not always the case. And a number of years ago, I read this book, The Future of the Professions, and what that really got me thinking about, and this talks about actually how many similarities are in terms of the challenges that face our core professions. And although this was about looking at professions, what it really got me thinking about is we have a lot of professional services, we have a lot of departments that serve organisations, particularly internally. And we're often serving the same customers, the same internal group. But often we're not using the same tools, and we're not doing things in the same way. And actually, there's a temptation for us to be structured in quite siloed ways. What we started to talk about was actually how could we start sharing our thoughts, our ideas, our tools and our resources, an awful lot better, and start to make that really impact for our internal colleagues. In 2016, I took on a role in educational establishment and looked after comms, as well as the people and OD side. And for me, that really opened up that opportunity that different professional areas have tools and resources that really apply and sometimes the exact thing we need, but we don't need, we don't know we need at the time. So for me, my sort of relationship with CIM has gone through that through completing my qualifications, and really being able to start to maximise that overlap between between the professions. But I think what I would say is this work is a start point is that kind of intersectionality that support and that relationship and something we've tried to garner and drive a lot further as we've as we work through this piece of work. So let me get onto a project and tell you exactly what happened. Well, we started off with quite a clear ambition. So this work started in the summer of 2020. So we'd like many organisations had swiftly navigated and put in place what we thought was going to be quite short term interim processes support for health and well being and colleagues working in different ways when the pandemic hit. But what we were starting to see was actually this was going to be this was going to go on for longer. And you know, we were facing a real challenge in terms of what how could we make sure we're serving all of our colleagues in the right way, given this different way of working. So what we would set out to do was to deliver one single clear well being offer. And importantly, that has to work for all demographics. Now, as an organisation, our business is primarily male, about 70% of our business are male. And a lot of our majority of our colleagues work in operational roles. So they're out on the front line and serving and supporting our customers directly day to day. And what we what we were finding was that a lot of things we put in place actually didn't serve that demographic as well as it could. And things that were actually appealing to our corporate or office based colleagues wasn't wasn't working the same way. So what we knew going into being really clear, first and foremost, this has to work for a different different demographics, and we have to reach and land this. So, you know, we really need to understand those consumers in this piece of work. The other thing was to make sure that people were accessing this proactive health, well being resource. Now, what was really important, obviously, our business is 24 seven, you know, the water keeps flowing. And what's really important is that we preserve the health of our people because healthy people may have less accidents, they're more effective, they are more efficient in how they work, but also so tend to be more proactive in the way they spot opportunities or things that need changing. So we knew that if we could start getting reaching people stop engaging in some of the resources that were available to them, many of which were, you know, already there, but people weren't using. How could we do that? And we had a target of reaching at least 75 percent of our colleagues within six months from launch. And the other thing that we were faced with was a number of mental health crisis events. So people in real critical mental health states and, you know, taking taking action that would really damage their health. And our intention was to reduce that and and not experience those during during the pandemic. So actually compensating for some of the challenges people were facing. We had quite tight timescales for this piece of work. So we started off with this ambition, you know, as I said, this was the end of summer 2020. We knew that we were had to have something in place ready for the start of the winter. And I'm going to talk to you a bit more about some of the data and drivers we analyzed, just to give you a real clear picture of how we showed our kind of our due diligence, our picture we built up of of the consumers and their current the current position they were in. So in terms of where we started, we always talk about heart and minds when it comes to our colleagues. And we always say, right, have we thought about both of those elements and work we do? And it's really simple, but actually it gets people or whoever sat around the table to work on a piece of work, really drawing in the right kind of thinking and flipping it between the two needs. So first of all, when I joined the business, I was really interested to understand what matters to our people. At a glance, you know, we've got very different demographics here. We've got primarily male operational workforce, much more heavily female corporate workforce. What connects them, if anything, what do we see that sort of that links this group? And what can we understand? The thinking from this comes behind the work that I've done in mediation. And when you are trying to bring people together, you try and chunk up to the first level, you can get the connects people. So I always look for what is a common connection point? And that's a great way of when you get humans together, starting to create that sort of that shared, that shared approach you can use the work for all. So what we start by doing was analyzing what mattered to our colleagues. So by that, we were looking across our different channels, across different posts, across different things people responded to. What do they comment on? What did they like? What do they interact? That might be through Yammer, through responding directly things to articles they're interested in through posts that we're putting on social. Our colleagues were interested in. It was it was just really across across the board. And what we found was there was three things that matter to our colleagues. And this it doesn't this was consistent regardless of age, tenure, gender, location, they worked in type of role. And those were pets, family and the outdoors. Now, what it's probably not surprising to see those things, but those things were really quite important to our people. And if you think about what we do and why we do it, actually, you can see why people be drawn to our organization. You know, on that basis, our brand is quite well known in the regions we operate in. And we often employed multi generations of people. So that family, you know, that connection to family is absolutely strong and something that is, you know, live and breathe by our leaders in the business. So that kind of wants you belong, you know, we do take care of our people. The outdoors and the pets element, you know, we have these leisure, these fantastic reservoir locations, you know, these things are interest to people and, you know, that they're an interest beyond the work they do. So giving us that as a start point really start to help us understand, right, OK, those three things really matter to people. How do we start to use that to inform what we develop on what we shape? The next thing we wanted to look at was what was going on in people's minds, what was impacting on them. And there was three things we really pulled on to help us as a start point. So obviously, there was the virus, there was COVID and there was great fear. But also it really restricted what we could and couldn't do. And people knew that, you know, they were facing a far more restricted lifestyle, you know, they couldn't do holidays, you know, they couldn't meet and get together with people. So this was this was really at the peak tough time. The other thing was connection that we looked at. So how easy was it for people to participate and access things? And this is where Steph and her team particularly start looking at who has easy connectivity, who doesn't, you know, where are things straightforward on devices? Where aren't they? You know, so this has been a big piece of work for our internal comms function who've been looking throughout how do we create equality in access to information, communications and resources. And the third one that we knew that was really impacting on our people was looking down the barrel of going into winter, which is quite scary. So what for me as a psychologist, a lot of the literature was saying this is going to be a critical point where we're forecasting a bad winter, a cold, quite bleak winter that was going to start quite early. After going out the lockdown in the spring, we knew that people who'd kind of been coping by being able to do nice things outdoors would suddenly be potentially quite isolated, but also quite impacted on the sort of the restrictions that were being put upon them. So taking all those into account, what we started to say was, right, that's where our people are at. How do we start to design up and out with a blank sheet of paper? And what kind of concept do we do we sort of think about in terms of how we position this? I think one of the key things that you know, the things that interests our people is we wanted to go really quite non corporate with this. And our business has always had a fairly quite a corporate or structured approach to project programs and things we've put out. And what we got to when we had people around the table as I say, we had our comms colleagues, our people colleagues, and we also had people from our innovation teams and other networks ambassadors. And what we got to is we want something that feels fundamentally different because people will then notice it. But also we've got to be respectful of the kind of business we are in the culture we have. So how do we find some middle ground? One of the concepts that that came out quite early when we started to look at this and actually we started to be referred to in some sort of external literature was this concept of hugar. Now, hugar is not really it's not really a business concept. It's very much a personal health concept, but it really fits well with those top three those those parts that were impacting people's hearts, but also could really apply to people's minds. I'm going to come on to describe what hugar is for you in a moment. But the the although it's been around for many years in Danish, Hispanic countries, what we've seen is from about 2016 there's a number of books written on the topic and actually brought it into mainstream. In 2016, I was going through a double bereavement and it was a concept for me that had massive resonance when the world went crazy. I was able to pull something back by living through this. So actually it was something we could bring to the table quite authentically through lived experience and say, this is what we think our colleagues need. So let me tell you how we started. So we started by first of all, at our leadership conference, taking our leaders and asking just to pause and take a moment, using an image very similar to this. And we asked them to just imagine they were in this place, place of calm, a place of tranquility. And they've got space. The day to day isn't swirling around them. They're looking out on space, calm, fresh things we can things we can all enjoy. And we did this because actually we know that sometimes getting people to switch off from the normal day to day and sometimes seeing something that's fundamentally different can really help us think in a different way. This is a really important bridging action, although it seems small, it immediately started to get our leadership team thinking in a slightly different way. The physiology changed even though we were we're doing this actually digitally. And the comments started changing and people started asking questions on right, what is this? I want to know more. Yes, I like that feeling. And if you think this image, what it what it was about is, you know, you don't have to have lots of stuff and things around you to be able to seize a moment to be able to start thinking about health and wellness. So we then introduced them to this concept of Hugo. First of all, we'd pre warmed our most senior stakeholders, our exact team on this, who are passionate about our business and our people, but also up for trying new and different things when it's when it's sort of got makes sense. And they really like this as a concept, that it was different. And you know what it wasn't corporate that felt right at this time, they wanted to do something different because our people needed something. So Hugo, as I say, is the way we describe it is very much that ability to be able to enjoy the here and now and small and simple pleasures in the absence of the big things. And the Hugo manifesto, which is from the Mike Viking book is very much about things that people could do. And all of those things were possible, even in a really restricted way of living. So, you know, facing lockdown, people not able to get out, you know, they're not able to experience certain things that worked. And people responded to it, they really like this idea of making it human. And they could see how that fit the profiling we had of our colleagues. So at that point, we got we got sign off quite a lot of support and what I'd also say a hell of a lot of interest as well from our leaders, which was quite interesting. So I was getting messages about people saying, this is different. I really like it. What are we going to do here? So we started off by talking to our people about it. And we actually worked with Mike Viking, so the very famous Dane Mike Viking, who is also, you know, sort of the real ambassador of happiness and living well, and worked with him to introduce it to our people, because what we needed to do was say, actually, these are about smaller things. This isn't about preaching to anyone, this is about telling anyone how to live their life. So this is about listening to people who live, you know, in Denmark, obviously, the hours of sunlight and things like that, they live with quite a lot of restrictions. It was overlapping with some of the restrictions and challenges we were facing, so it fit. And people were watching this and starting to get an idea of it. But in the background, we were in about an eight week period building and developing resources ready for launch at the start of November. So what did we do for our consumers? Well, first of all, we kept in mind continually, what is Hugo? Hugo is simplicity. Hugo is, you know, making it visual over words. Hugo is about, you know, making it easy on yourself and also, you know, being quite honest about things. And so we really thought that, you know, when we started to build this together, we kind of really took the psychology of what people needed and those insights we had. What we'd found is there's a lot of stuff in our business already. And I'm sure many of you have something similar. There's lots of good stuff all over. But actually how people access it in that experience, that front door is actually key for your internal consumer. So we split ours very simply into mind, body and social. Again, it's really informal language. It's simple and one words. And what it means is you can find everything you need by entering one of these three areas. And throughout the the platform we're building, and it is, it is a site and it's a site that we should really have those images the other way around because actually what was really important and Steph in particular championed all the way through is we've got to reach our colleagues who are in the front line. They have a mobile device. This must work first and foremost for our for our colleagues on the front line. So everything had to look beautiful and work really effectively on a mobile diverse first and foremost. And we work really quickly with an external partner on this, just a small local agency. Well, actually they're growing now, but they were great. And they totally got how clear our analysis of our consumers have been and what we knew we needed for them. So living well was born and built and our leadership teams really liked it from proof. They sort of they really kind of got behind it and said yeah, I totally I totally see that what was really important. The first time we've done this for a building for a colleague based platform was it was built on Google Analytics. So this is the first one to go with that. But this means that we can continue to see where is the interaction? What are people looking at? What's working for them? And you know, where are people spending their time? And, you know, I make no apology for saying we were committed to understanding our consumer to make sure we're making it as easy as possible. And actually, people are ending up on a two click site a lot and spending a lot of time there. Actually that two click site needs to become a one click site. So, you know, bringing things forward and really trying to understand that and keep it as simple as possible. We have rules around no overwhelm on here, you know, and it's the rule of three, which is a psychologist rule of three is really important three is a beautiful kind of balancey figure that we split things over. But actually humans respond well to that simplicity. And that's what we found they could suddenly find things and the language was written very much with the colleague in mind. And what started to happen? Well, this, this, this, I realize this slide looks a little bit scabby and a little bit all over the shop. But actually that kind of reflects the essence. To my mind when you start to get, you know, this things right for the customers you're serving, what you're starting to get is ownership of the concept. So we started to see actually they were starting to grab screen grab stuff from living well and put it into their local newsletters in our directorate. So that's in our in our operational areas. We had colleagues. So there's a little screenshot of our colleague Andy there talking about he talked about living well, but also mental health. So we had a lot of very visible ambassadors and people supporting us in the background because we kept checking with those people who are already passionate about this stuff. Does that work? Is it appropriate? Do you think that will engage people? And then little things like this message I was often getting messages like this where people started living it, you know, they started. It was it was a tough winter that one, you know, but for those of you thinking back, you know, and we had colleagues all over who were lighting candles, uploading pictures of, you know, maybe those moments they had those who go moments. There's lots of ways for our colleagues to engage in health and well being beyond the stuff we made available. So we introduced things like online GP, which is a doctor for basically our colleagues and people who live with them so they could get a GP support within 24 hours, which was amazing. So, you know, we introduced a lot of things around the physical health space, but also around our mental health, really promoting our mind mates provision, but also the additional EAP support and things we had that were available to people. It was about making things easier in just a few clicks in one place, which was the most important. So accessibility at speed was key. And what we found was people were sharing their moments. You know, we asked in the essence of who go we had a gallery and we weren't sure people would interact, but we said, you know, send us a huger moments. And we were in and date with beautiful pictures of people out taking a lunchtime walk or having that great coffee. They decided to use their proper grinder to make. So it was really multi sensory and and that was definitely definitely a different feel. Have we had an impact? Well, this might explain why we went from awards for this. We really did. And so we reached over 90% of our colleagues within the first six months. So that was monitored by unique colleagues accessing proactively the living well resources. So with 3000 colleagues within the first six months, we had three male early diagnoses. Now this was through our online GP. So if you think back to understanding our demographic, we knew our males wouldn't always come forward for health support, but by offering a digital GP that was removed from their own community, actually bringing these tougher subjects forward and getting onward referrals. So actually capturing those health conditions early has been immense. And that continues. But this was in our six month period. Zero mental health crisis events, which based on what we were facing at the start of the winter lockdown, we really concerned we'd see was fantastic. And we also saw an increase in use for EAP, which is our employee assistance program, which is basically the phone line for counselling support. But we saw people using it once we positioned it right and gave our customers what they needed in a clear place. We started to see people using it. Average use is about 35% of weekly users via mobile. That's something we want to continue to work on, but was massively better than we'd ever had before. People were using this. And our overall good business engagement went up nine percentage points, which was a huge bounce. And we saw a lot in our engagement data that people were talking about this investment and how they felt about our business. So actually working on this is one unique project that started to permeate far, far further than just our health and well-being. For us, better never stops. Obviously we were delighted last year to achieve our first best workplaces ranking. So up in that top super large organizations and get excellence and well-being status. They've since been updated to be where now in the well-being top companies list and still in the best workplaces list. But things like better health at work. So that's a program sponsored by the TUC, the Union. And, you know, we got that to ambassador status, which basically puts us sort of at the top of what good organizations are doing. So, you know, we knew we were leading the way, but actually doing it in a real simple and accessible way that other businesses can replicate to it. And, you know, that was what was particularly exciting. We did things like re-engineer our language. So we kept thinking about what people want and didn't want. So going back to that, what, how do they want it? They want it simple. We got rid of mental health first aiders as a term because actually people started saying quite, quite rightly, well, you go to a first aider when you've cut yourself. Do I have to wait to see a mental health first aider until I'm having some kind of mental health challenge? Absolutely not. So we mental health first aiders are actually called mind mates and just someone you chat to if there's something on your mind. It's that small step to simplify language and take out that corporate feel, which really helps. And we work with a company called mates and mind who we did find actually after we'd named the programme, but they work really well because they're more focused on construction. So again, really thinking about a demographic and campaigns like December to remember, which is about fun stuff, bringing people together. You know, we did things like virtual pantomime. So families, you know, family was important. We made sure we scheduled them at a time when and asked colleagues to step away from work, sit down with their families and participate in the Panto, watch a professional Panto. We did lots of little things like that and that first Christmas in particular, which has continued last year as well because it was so popular. We tried to find ways to connect people, but by continually going back those three things that connected our customers, our consumers internally, those things that matter to them. So factoring their family, factoring pets and factoring the opportunity to be outdoors. So it continually goes back to that throughout. And what also people told us that this feedback came afterwards, they started saying, right, we love it when you are, you keep stuff that's really relevant to us and relevant to what we do. We love what we do. We're passionate about water and, you know, sort of the environment. But we've still got quite a few different tools that managers use. This was developed mid last year and this is our wellness reservoir. It's based on the Roberts and Cooper model, but really simply allows every manager or mind mate with a colleague just to have a chat about what's going on that's kind of topping up your resilience, your reservoir levels and what is draining you out. But I think yet again, it's an example of we try and get it to keep challenging yourself to get down to the least words and the most visual and, you know, this whole outdoors feel this sort of simplicity. How could we keep linking stuff back to things our colleagues will use and talk about the same things over and over again? And that absolutely has worked with with this people. People pick it up and use it. We just make it really accessible. We share externally, you know, it's something you're interesting, you know, use a version of, you know, this is this is good stuff to have. But for us, it's really pertinent because it absolutely speaks to what we do and what we're passionate about. And then just we took learning. So living whilst being fantastic, winning awards, you know, is great. And what it does when you do apply for these awards, what it does allow you to do is really tell your story and really hold yourself to account in terms of metrics and defining the journey. So we've won awards in some of the common space, the culture space, as well as the people space, which is brilliant. It's a real collaboration piece. But we've continued to use this thinking and it's really serving as well. So two areas just to touch on before I wrap up. We applied a similar kind of thinking to what do all people need and what do we understand in terms of attraction and recruitment? And what we got to was actually we started to see there was a lot of people felt inside the business. There was this sort of general vibe of, oh, jobs are going to those. You know, how did people get that job? You know, and what we said was actually, well, how do we how do we debunk a lot of these myths? How do we make it transparent? So things we did was we developed a micro site within our existing site with a branding of hydro shifted more from jobs to opportunities because we make sure so comments as well as structured learning programs go on there. But this is very much about for people saying, right, this is these are not just the jobs. This is what you might be asked for. This is, you know, this is how you go through the process. So little things we introduced include, you know, CV or application clinics. They can be done group or one to one depending on people's preference. We outline what we do at each stage of selection and why. You know, so again, hold ourselves up to account. You know, sometimes HR is sort of seen as, oh, it's all kind of going on behind the doors. Why? If we need to serve our consumers, you need to feel confident in what we do and why we do it. And we've really we don't have that kind of noise around that. But what we also did was we use that thinking on a design sprint and really said externally, what might make people feel stressed when they apply for jobs with us? And one of those things was waiting for references to come through. And do I accept? Do I not? Am I going to get the job? So on that basis, we removed standard employment referencing. It creates paperwork and stress and actually adds very little value in this day and age. Standard checks and right to work, of course, that still stands. But I'm talking about those sort of those one page as we get back saying, yes, such and such worked in our organization. Those little things about continuity listening have really helped in that space. And we'll keep doing that. One of the other things that's really been useful to us is starting to build on the work that Stef and a team have been doing around looking at personas. So high level really understanding our business through groups of personas. We've taken that one step further and said, how do we do segmentation based on sentiment? So how engaged people are? So what we found is we can basically map our colleague groups through to how many super enthusiasts we have and how we define that right way through to our colleagues who are potentially disconnected in terms of engagement. And that works growing because what's interesting is it starts to give you ways of again looking at we're rolling something out, we're looking at trying to pitch something or getting our business to change or adapt to something. How do we help people? How do we help people get on the right bus with this? But also understand we have very different groups in this business and how do we do that? And things like starting to work with a company called Word Nerds, so artificial intelligence organization who we've worked closely with since they started up. But making sure we have really great quality sentiment analysis when people give us qualitative feedback. Because again, I think if you want to understand your consumer, it's not just the actions they take. It's what they're saying and how we really take that sort of those words and feedback right the way through to depth of understanding. So I could talk about that all day, but I'm going to stop now and say thank you so much for listening. My contact details are there. If it sparked interest or anyone's doing something similar I'd like to share. Obviously I'd love to hear from you and also Steph's details are there as well. And I think we're going to now pop over to have some question and answer. Brilliant, that's great. Thanks very much, Eloise. And as a user of your services in the Northeast, it's quite interesting to hear from an outside point of view what you've been working on. So we're now going to have a short Q&A session. Before we dive into the questions, I would like to also welcome Stephanie Wood, who has worked with Eloise on this project. And Stephanie is the Internal Communications Manager at Northumbrian Water. And she's worked closely on the project. So welcome, Stephanie. It's good to have you with us. So let's take the first question. What research methods and tools did you use to identify the topics which were pets, family and outdoors that meant the most to your colleagues? And I can see how they would to the users living in the region as well. So yeah, absolutely. So so that wasn't very close with Steph's team, but we already had Yamath, which was an informal kind of colleague conversation platform, but actually weren't, you know, using that to sort of have those conversations, but actually hadn't really pulled together the sort of, you know, well, what are people talking about? What are the themes? So so we use that quite quickly and Steph joined the business just after I did. So we sort of we kind of grown together in this role as well. So we both have the same curiosity with that. So we're like, well, what can we pull from that? The other thing is we previous internet, we started to go through and look at what do people use? What do they click on when we pop stuff up? What pages are most interesting? So what I would say is there's nothing, nothing particularly exotic or complex in any way. We started just looking at, you know, what what are those things when we put of events, what, you know, in sports and social things, what were interests to people when our colleagues were posting so say on our external social, we could start to see where our colleagues were engaging with things as well. You know, if we're putting stuff up about wildlife preservation, there was an immediate interest there. I mean, if you've got dogs up, you know, everyone went crazy. So I think, you know, it was about trying to say what are all these touch points we have? And what can we pull from each one to understand? Because as I said, the start my interest is always organizations actually have a lot of this information. Often they're just not asking themselves the right question. So they're not opening the right cupboards to look in. And that's that's what we did. Steph, I don't know if you've got anything to add on that because you did a lot of the looking around. Definitely. Because as I always said that we joined the organization at a very similar time. So this was a brilliant project for us to understand. Well, consumers and our colleagues were at the exact same time. So and I always touched on some of the channels there. But one of the first things that we did start to do was to pull on the channel that Louise mentioned. But also everything else that we had in our toolkit in terms of comms. So all of our kind of live sessions with our CEO any interactive sessions. And we're able to pull together this wealth of information and colleague voice from the business that we thought, how can we do this? How can we put this together? And when Louise mentioned earlier about word nerds. So word nerds is something that we use regularly in the customer space. So we get a sentiment report regularly to say what are our customers talking about? And it was just that little moment of why we never used this with our colleagues before. It was that kind of light bulb moment of how do we start to use these tools to really understand our colleagues? And it was it was to massive benefit for this. So at the same time I was doing this project. I was selfishly looking at also building a brand new intranet for the company. So this was a brilliant, brilliant platform to stop pulling all of that together and start to use some of this information inside which you get. So always always look at how do we try to understand our customers and how can we make that relevant for our colleagues? OK, next question. Someone saying that they are in their current business, we are facing quite a lot of frustrations around the subject of internal promotions. Can you highlight the top three things you implemented? Because you said three was a key number there, didn't you? In the recruitment process for roles that improved sentiment around applying for opportunities. Yeah, OK. So the first one was one location for all roles and opportunities that was accessible both in work and outside of work. So that was really important. We housed us using our external website rather than the intranet we had at the time. And the reason for that is you can access it anywhere because a lot of we know sometimes the close you are to a corporate head office, the more connected you feel like, yeah, I know what's going on there, I know how that works. And actually we knew the people whose sentiment was actually coming from with the people who were slightly more removed from that. So one location that was totally accessible inside and outside of work because we're an operational person, it might be hard to look at those at certain times. So one location, the second one was about being very clear and transparent on your processes. If you don't state, you know, we use, you know, sort of scenario based into interview questions. These are this kind of thing. We use them because what your, you know, assessor is looking for. So we played out a lot around the process. So being very clear on when you apply for a job, what is the process and what are some of the tools we use. And it might vary depending on job, but you should still detail them all and say, you'll be asked to do this. Potentially these things are maybe this. So put it out there. And then the third thing is around helping people make that jump to that gap. We want good people to be able to get our jobs, you know, and we all know we will all know how people who are great, but they maybe just don't come across particularly well when we're going through certain processes. So as a business, it makes total business sense to me to say, if we can help people jump that gap, how would we do it? So for us, it's offering that support, be it group or one to one to help everyone get sort of trying to level the playing field when it comes to either interviews, work tasks, selection, you know, sort of regardless of the tools you're using, how do you help people bring themselves up to that level? So they'll be the three things, location, transparency and process and, you know, helping give people some of the skills and tools to be able to participate fully will be key. So as well as you've used this as a two-aid recruitment and promotion opportunities, have you been able to monitor retention levels within the business? Yeah, so so so we have we have really strong retention levels, you know, we have a lot of long tenure given the nature of the business we are. So actually, we've never had high levels of turnover. And in some ways, sometimes, you know, any organization needs to find that sweet spot of positive turnover. But, you know, it's remained in a really good place. We've still got quite high levels of, you know, people stating they intend to work here for a long time. So so, yeah, we are we're continually tracking that and and building on that, you know, for me, the insight starts to come from with our DNI strategy. We're now really tracking different groups to say, what does that look like at, you know, people are interested in the advert, people applying, people going through selection, people being appointed. So we're continually trying to go, how do we understand that from from the perspective of so many different people at every step of the way? So you've been able to track it with staff satisfaction surveys that this has been in the positive on a long term basis. Yeah. Yeah. So the next question is, how did you use this learning to identify and implement any training? And if so, what training did you implement? Yeah, OK. So I think there's a couple of things there. I think it was it identified a couple of things. It identified where we didn't have people who could access and participate and I'll let Steph talk about that in a moment because she's done quite a lot, making sure people have the devices they need to work in the nature of the work they do. So I think that was important. It wasn't always training. It was about do you have the right tool to participate in this easily? I think in terms of training, some of the key things we haven't needed to train people in using Living Well or any of the resources because we designed them with that whole kind of, you know, that answer mindset of you're never going to fail to complete a transaction if you want to with Amazon. It's so straightforward. And that's exactly what we try and do with Living Well. We always said, how do people at Commitscape get to what they need? What we have had to do is work more with our managers in terms of saying, don't forget, you know, to remind people about this stuff, don't forget to be talking about this stuff, the wellness reservoir, you know, bring it up, have the conversation or talk about health and wellbeing and work. Some people find it very easy. Some people find it really difficult. And actually we know that the differentiator is often the manager and leader and how much they do that. And, you know, we early on are senior leaders of absolutely role model based, you know, I can think of so many examples always stick in my mind and hard, you know, where exec members got up and they would just talk about, you know, actually, I've been finding this difficult. I go out for a walk to the beach and that's my hugo moment. So I think for us, as much about training, it's about throwing light on sort of expectations and what the key people do to enable some of this stuff, the uptake and things to happen has been key. I don't know if she's going to add because it was obviously a real value add bit that you did. Well, so to build on that, I mentioned just a few minutes ago that in the background, we're starting to build a brand new corporate intranet. So our current one was eight years old, completely not fit for purpose, only fit for desktop users. None of our field based team had access. So living well was a real game changer and the fact that it was something that was available anytime, anywhere, anyhow, on any device. But that wouldn't serve the purpose as an intranet. So I think that's maybe where the training angle could come in a little bit. So as part of the profiling that we talked about earlier, so you'll always start with your data and where are your people based and most directors that Eloise talked about. But we started to really drill that down a lot further to find out kind of the commonalities between people, the discrepancies. And we did find a group of people we classified as disconnected users. So we did have some people out in the field who didn't have a device. So they couldn't even connect with the hope and with our corporate information. So one of the little things we needed to do was get them access, you know, we couldn't guarantee that they would be engaged and they would get involved. But we gave them access. So there was a little bit of kind of a learning journey and that's gone down amazingly, the fact that they can take part in live events and feel connected. The second part of that is once we kind of got people on this digital journey to replace the old internet, we didn't carry any information over. So we started from scratch and we got the buy-in from the business. So from Heidi, our CEO, down to director level, we start from the very beginning to say, what do you need? And we've got content owners now right across the business who own the content on our brand new internet called The Source that is out there. So they maintain that, they own that and they've had training in that. So going hand in hand with those content editors that work really closely with my team to get that brilliant organic content out in the business. And we also have digital champions. So it would be really comfortable if anybody wanted to reach out to talk about what we do in either those spaces, but those digital champions in particular are people that are quite keen and quite eager in this space to take colleagues on that journey with them, share best practice and really start to make use of all of the tools that we have at our disposal. So it's been a really big journey over the past 18 months or so. And again, if anybody wanted to have a little chat about what we do and share best practice would be very open to that. Great. We've got quite a lot of questions still and I think we're running out of time now. So I'll just have one final question to both of you. Would you recommend that HR and marketing teams work closer together and more in business? Are you laughing? Yeah, no, no, I'd say no. From my point of view, I've been talking a lot to HR professionals. So I have a role with CAPD, which is the professional body for HR and basically HR is crying out to learn from marketing. I really, I really do believe I think there's I think there's learning both ways. But I do think actually, you know, if we use more of that marketing mindset to, you know, approaching the people proposition, how we communicate things, you know, we see stuff on the media all the time that has been done to an internal workforce that actually if you were doing to a customer group, you would never ever do. So for me, I think, you know, it's just an absolute, it's an absolute no brainer, but I'm a great believer in actually all professional functions in a business can learn from one another. And if you're not connecting and working across on projects, that's going to be a failure point for your business, ultimately, because you're missing something. Even if it's just great learning and insight and firing up that innovation, you know, you're missing something. There's two collaborations. I would say one of them primarily has been with the HR function. I remember two weeks before I joined the organization, I had private messages from Eloise and LinkedIn trying to solve some of these problems already. So, you know, those relationships can blossom and it's been brilliant to work in that space. But I also would say that the relationship between communications and marketing and IT or IS to build on all of these platforms and collaborate and do it in the right way. So that journey is in the right way for our colleagues and our customers alike. But it is about those corporate functions as Eloise and how we can all work collectively and collaboratively. Well, I think that's quite a positive note to end on beginning of the marketing function as well. So on that note, I just like to thank Eloise and Stephanie very much. That's some really sound advice and some very interesting tips that our viewers can take away and develop perhaps in their own organizations. Sadly, that's all we have time for for our webinar today. I'd like to say thank you to Eloise and Stephanie for joining us and to the CIM Northeast Group for organizing the event. We do hope you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile. We'll go back again with our next webinar express, which will be the importance of placemaking in the future of retail with Donna Howard as the speaker on the Thursday, the 30th of June at our usual time of 1pm. You'll find further details about the webinar on events page where you will also be able to register for the session. So that just leaves me to say a thank you to you for joining us today and hope that you've enjoyed our webinar. Take care, everyone, and we look forward to welcoming you again to our webinars in the future.