From Newsroom to Boardroom: Transforming Global Communication with Gerard Meuchner

David Burnand: Hi, everybody. Welcome back. We are here with another episode of the Aspire to Inspire Podcast. My name is David Burnand. I’m the Chief Marketing Officer of Staffbase. Today it is my very great pleasure to introduce Gerard Meuchner. Gerard is the Chief Global Communications Officer at Henry Schein. Henry Schein is based in Melville, New York, and it’s an American distributor of healthcare products and services with a presence in 33 countries.

Gerard’s background is as a long-term communicator. He started as an editor, reporter, and a founding member of Bloomberg News, which is obviously a huge global brand known to all of us. A brand that I think most of us would encounter every day. He spent a decade in communications and public affairs at Kodak, and now he’s a pioneer of the Global Communications team at Henry Schein. Gerard, it’s so great to see you and thank you for agreeing to do this.

Gerard Meuchner: Thank you, David, for that very kind and generous introduction. I’m really delighted to be here. As you know, I’m a big fan of the work that Staffbase is doing, and I’m happy to have this discussion.

David Burnand: Oh, well, we’re thrilled to see you. Obviously, we’ve known each other for a little while now as well, but for the benefit of our audience, Gerard, could you just give us a little bit of background on your journey through the field of communications, from those days at Bloomberg, maybe, what were the things that led you to ending up as a global CCO at Henry Schein?

Gerard Meuchner: Well, I will tell you, it was never by design. Like so many things in life, it was a function of serendipity and good luck and good fortune. I always enjoyed reading and writing growing up, so when it came time to go to college, I knew I wanted to study journalism and so that was my initial career path. I grew up in New York and was always an avid reader of newspapers, in particular, so I had every intention of becoming a journalist, which I did. I worked for small newspapers and in some smaller financial news outlets when Bloomberg came calling in the spring of 1990. That’s when Mike Bloomberg decided to create his news organization as an additional offering to the Bloomberg Financial Data Platform.

I was extremely lucky and fortunate to be working with someone who just joined Bloomberg, and he said, hey, you got to go come over here. He connected me with the editor-in-chief and I was interviewed one Friday morning and offered the job that Friday afternoon and then that was it. In those days, Bloomberg was looking to accelerate the creation of a journalism department and perhaps they weren’t as choosy as they could have been, so they hired me. I was very lucky to have been, I think, employee maybe number five or six of Bloomberg News.

It was such an incredible experience, a wonderful, wonderful time, and I had no intention of leaving Bloomberg. I was there 10 years and thoroughly enjoying working at Bloomberg when unexpectedly, Kodak called me up and they were looking to recruit someone who would eventually become the Chief Communications Officer at Kodak. This was at a time when Kodak was obviously going through the challenges of transitioning from analog and film to digital. I thought it would be a remarkable experience to be involved in leading communications at one of the world’s great global brands as it was transitioning to digital.

We all know how that story ended, not as we might’ve liked. Again, fortune came my way and Henry Schein, which is a wonderfully successful company, called me up again. I was literally interviewing with another company with the CEO on the final round of interviews when Henry Schein called me up and I was intrigued. Henry Schein, of course, is healthcare and healthcare is a wonderful, wonderful industry to be a part of. After having been through the challenges of Kodak, one of the many things that attracted me to Henry Schein is that healthcare is a business that has a stability to it and it’s not going to be disintermediated by technology in quite the same way that Kodak was.

I was, again, really, really fortunate to have been hired to be the first chief global communications officer at Henry Schein. That was 12 years ago. Since then, we’ve been doing lots of work to advance the tools of communications within Henry Schein. As you well know, late last year, we agreed to bring on the Staffbase platform and we launched our intranet, which we call MySchein, on March 25th of this year. We’re a little bit more than four months into being live and it’s been a wonderful experience. That’s the history of my journey from being a kid in New York City who liked to read newspapers to where I am now.

David Burnand: I don’t know what it is about New York. I think it’s just a city that lends itself to news. When you think about New York, you just think about big media titles, don’t you?

Gerard Meuchner: Well, it certainly is. There’s an electricity and an energy about New York that is really unique. I think for those of us who enjoy journalism, it really is a wonderful place to be.

David Burnand: Definitely. Definitely. Tell me, when you were making that shift from Bloomberg, which obviously had gone on a tremendous journey, I don’t know, did you imagine when you joined Bloomberg that it would become what it became? Did you see the early signs from the get-go or was it –?

Gerard Meuchner: I did, and that’s in large part because of two people, Mike Bloomberg himself, and then the person he hired to be the founding editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a gentleman named Matt Winkler, who was a very energetic, dynamic person. Both of them were extremely energetic and dynamic. Mike was really interesting in the sense that he was really directly involved in everything. In the early days, he literally hand-signed and hand-delivered the paycheck. Once a month, Mike would come to my desk and hand me my paycheck. He was entirely accessible.

It was really an unusual experience for me because here is this fabulously successful gentleman sitting out in an open floor where anyone could approach him. Among the many things Mike pioneered, he was an early adopter of open seating and open plans and this whole sense of the ability to engage anyone on the team at any time. It was really remarkable for all of us to be able to walk up to Mike’s desk anytime we wanted to engage him in conversation. Not that anyone did that regularly or took advantage of that luxury, but it was a really powerful statement that the guy whose name is on the door made himself so accessible to everyone.

Matt Winkler was a very prominent journalist at The Wall Street Journal. He had led coverage of credit markets, which of course Bloomberg really made its name in the credit markets. One quick little interesting aside, the competition that Bloomberg was facing was Reuters and Dow Jones. Reuters was really strong in the currency markets and Dow Jones was really strong in the equity markets, but no one had really carved out a presence in the fixed-income markets and the bond markets until Mike Bloomberg came along.

There was a simple real estate issue. You couldn’t have that many machines on a desk in Wall Street. You’ve seen in the movies, these banks of computer monitors on a Wall Street trading desk. Mike created the news business in part because to get Wall Street to buy his data terminal, he needed to have news on it. That way a Wall Street trader could then justify getting rid of one of the other terminals because they simply couldn’t have too many terminals. It was a real estate issue.

Mike hires Matt Winkler and he’s the gentleman that I referenced earlier. I interviewed with him on a Friday morning and was offered the job Friday afternoon and so that’s how it began. Because of the energy and the vision of Mike Bloomberg and Matt Winkler, Bloomberg really became an extraordinary news organization. Obviously, we now see how prominent the company is. Again, I never planned to leave Bloomberg. I was perfectly happy there, but the Kodak opportunity was unique, not only professionally but personally, and so I made the switch.

David Burnand: Yes, that’s, it is quite the pivot though, isn’t it? I’m curious to know how you felt about moving from an industry where you obviously you made the news to a sector where actually you were trying to shape the news and shape perception. How did you feel about it initially and what did you learn?

Gerard Meuchner: It was not an easy decision. I will tell you that there was always this running joke among journalists that anyone who left to go into public relations was going to the dark side. It was the equivalent to going from being the prosecutor to the defense attorney.

I think that overstates the case, but it is a fundamentally different role. I had to get my head around leaving a profession that I loved and was doing pretty well at to go into a line of work that was in some ways very different, but also in other ways, there’s a commonality, which is that we’re all storytellers. Today I tell the story of Henry Schein. Before that, I told the story of Kodak in the same way that when I was at Bloomberg, I told the story of the markets or the companies that I was covering. The basic tools and talent required to be a storyteller, I think, cuts across all of these disciplines.

In that sense, I felt good about being able to apply whatever skills and talent I might have as a storyteller to Kodak. Obviously it was very different in the sense that Bloomberg was a private company, Kodak was a public company, Bloomberg was thriving, and Kodak at the time I joined was thriving, but was obviously facing a great challenge in the evolution of digital imaging, along with a whole host of other challenges that I don’t think we have time to explore here.

What was also particularly appealing to me is Kodak was one of the world’s great brands and the opportunity to be a part of the transformation of one of the world’s great brands, admittedly it didn’t end as we might’ve liked, was really, really appealing to me professionally. Then personally, my children were young, we had a family in Rochester, New York, where Kodak is based, and so there was a personal motivation to leave the New York City area and to move to upstate New York, which is just a lovely, lovely place to live. Rochester is a wonderful small city, and so we enjoyed our 12 years living there.

David Burnand: Yes, it’s quite a switch for you personally, and also this big professional switch. You said we won’t go too deeply into Kodak, but I am curious, as you came into Kodak, did you feel like we’ve got a big job here in terms of that storytelling, or was there already an awareness of a huge shift that the organization had to undertake?

Gerard Meuchner: Absolutely. Everyone was aware that there was a huge shift that had to occur. Kodak had a wonderful communications team, and that team grew up in the analog world, in the film world, and so we had to start building a team and a mindset that was prepared for a digital world. Of course, when I joined in 2000, social media really wasn’t anything of any note. One of the things we had to transition for was a world that communicated digitally and through social media and wide open channels that everyone could have a voice in a way that was very different than what Kodak was used to.

It wasn’t only a transformation in the product line at Kodak, it was also a transformation in how one speaks to the market. One of the things that we did in my time at Kodak was create a blog series. Now, again, in the early days of digital communications and social media, blogs were a really big thing. We created a blog called A Thousand Words because of course a picture is worth a thousand words. It was written by the employees of Kodak and it pioneered a means of communicating where we would encourage the employees who were all very much into photography to take pictures and then tell the stories of the pictures that they had taken and we would publish these for the whole world to see, and so A Thousand Words became really popular.

Then we had the idea to feature the great work that was happening in the research and development labs at Kodak because we had all these brilliant scientists. I came up with the idea to have a companion blog called A Thousand Nerds to go along with A Thousand Words. If you’ve ever been to an R&D group, they’re very irreverent people and they’re just wonderfully entertaining. I remember the chief technology officer saying to me, we’re not nerds, we’re geeks. I said, yes, but nerds, it doesn’t rhyme.

David Burnand: With what?

Gerard Meuchner: Excuse me, geeks doesn’t rhyme with words and nerds rhymes with words, so allow us to call it A Thousand Nerds. We won awards for these blogs. What we did with A Thousand Nerds was to have the scientists tell the story of how they created products and how they thought about innovation. We were really pleased with our early entry into social media at Kodak. Then of course, we know how the story ended there.

Like so many others, I was open to other possibilities, let’s just say that. I was literally, I had walked out of an interview with another company that I won’t mention. The CEO had offered me the job and we were just working out the details when I received a call from a recruiter from Henry Schein. I knew of the company. Henry Schein was one of Kodak’s largest customers because back in the day when radiographic film was in wide use, Henry Schein bought a lot of film from Kodak that we sold to dentists. When Henry Schein called, I said, hmm, this is interesting. The company that I was interviewing at also had some of the same challenges that Kodak had. The day of reckoning just hadn’t happened, but you knew it was coming, and so began a discussion and very quickly accelerated with Henry Schein and here I am talking to you.

David Burnand: Yes, you started that journey, and we’re what, a decade later, you’re still going.

Gerard Meuchner: 12 years. I was with Henry Schein, it was 12 years in January. It’s been a wonderful ride and many more years to go.

David Burnand: It’s pretty, yes, pretty amazing journey so far. You mentioned earlier when you were talking about the shift from journalism through to this poacher-turned-gamekeeper situation, you mentioned the importance of storytelling, regardless of whether you’re a journalist or whether you’re on the side of a manufacturer or another large company in media relations and comms.

I’m curious, obviously for you, that’s your bread and butter. You’ve always been in storytelling regardless of which side of the fence you sat on, but for other people, for leaders in HR or leaders in, or executive leadership, business unit leaders, whoever, CEOs, they perhaps aren’t, for them, it’s not been their profession and their craft that they’ve gone through all through their careers. I’m curious to know, based on what you’ve seen, do storytelling as something that is like comes naturally to people and it’s they can either do it or they can’t, or do it as something that can be learned and shaped over time? I think we all recognize the importance, but how do you see it?

Gerard Meuchner: Right, well, I certainly think storytelling is fundamental to the human experience. We all have memories of the wonderful stories our parents told us or our grandparents told us about their lives. There is an eternal human thirst and hunger for stories and storytelling. That will never go out of fashion.

All of us know that the most effective communicators are great storytellers. It’s not enough simply to say, I have a set of facts here, and you need to understand these facts. The ability to put facts in context, and particularly if you have the ability to weave those facts into a story, will be far more effective. We know from all the research that people remember information much better if it’s presented in the context of a story rather than just a set of bullet points on a PowerPoint site. That is, I think, absolutely undeniable.

To your point about the ability to tell a story, well, obviously, some people are more naturally gifted than others but I do think everyone can learn the basics of storytelling. That doesn’t mean everyone will become a master and that everyone will be gifted at it. We certainly know when we’re living in a particularly interesting political time that the most effective politicians tend to be the ones who are the greatest storytellers because they have the ability to captivate the audience. While we may quibble with any one person’s command of the facts, no matter what their political beliefs are, your ability to convey, in a story, your view of the world is obviously an extraordinary skill to have.

I do think it can be taught to a point in the same way that you might be able to teach someone the technique of shooting a basketball or hitting a golf ball, but that’s a very different thing than mastering some athletic talent or even the basics of teaching someone how to play a guitar versus someone being a virtuoso. I think it’s incumbent upon all of us who are professional communicators to work with our teams to make them better storytellers because I think everyone has some ability to do it. Obviously, some are more naturally gifted than others.

David Burnand: Yes, yes. You think about those, like the 10,000 hours of the athlete.

Gerard Meuchner: Yes, exactly. Exactly. If you do anything long enough, you can’t help but get better at it.

David Burnand: That’s very true. That’s very true. Thinking, though, about everything you’ve said, storytelling, obviously, in and of itself, as you say, is this thing that you can learn and become better at. It’s something that has come to prominence more and more in recent years. There’s so many books about the power of storytelling and the power of narratives and all of these things. I always think it’s slightly underrated in terms of the ability of great communications to move people’s hearts and minds and deliver business goals. I’m curious, since you’ve been at Henry Schein, have there been times when you’ve looked and you thought, wow, our team did a great job on the comms for this, and it resulted in this happening for the organization?

Gerard Meuchner: I’m so glad you asked that question because one of the challenges all of us face in communications is the very intangibility of what we do. I’ll draw a distinction. If I’m a sales representative and I go into a customer’s office and I persuade that customer to purchase products from Henry Schein, there is a direct cause and effect to that activity, and it’s measurable. We didn’t have the customer one day, I had a conversation with that customer, and tomorrow, for the first time, that customer is buying from us. That’s very tangible, very measurable.

A lot of what we do in communications is intangible. No less valuable, but intangible. Part of the challenge that every chief communications officer has is to help people understand that the work we do, though perhaps not as tangible as selling product, is absolutely necessary and in many ways supports the organization’s commercial interest. I say to my team all the time, if the business leaders ever think of us as overhead, we’re dead. We can never be thought of as overhead. Rather, we have to be thought of as their partner in telling the story to their customers of why Henry Schein is the best partner to grow their business. If we’re not doing that, then we’re not living up to our obligation to the company.

It is extremely important that we demonstrate this each and every day. I’d like to think that we do that very effectively at Henry Schein, and among things we have done, for example, is a video series with customers where we have customers tell their stories, and this is where the journalism skills come to play. We’ve done any number of stories with customers where they’ve had particular business challenges and they’ve worked with Henry Schein to address those business challenges. We use our team, both the communicators that are on my team, but we also have this extraordinary creative services department. They are our visual storytellers.

The real magic there is it’s the customer who’s the storyteller. We’re just the ones who help shape that story, extract that story, package that story for maximum effect so that other customers can see it and say, oh, I had that very same business problem, and look how they helped this customer. Maybe they can do the same for us.

David Burnand: Yes, so you’re creating it, giving them that platform and then crafting and helping them to tell that story. Then ultimately, what you’re hoping with that is you convince a whole new group of stakeholders of like the power of the things that Henry Schein does. Yes, that’s great. That’s really powerful. Thinking about your role, though, obviously you’re working externally, hugely, of course, but then you’re also working internally as well. You’re helping as well to craft the culture and communicate out the strategy of the business. I’m curious to understand from you, what are the ways that you go about ensuring that all of the communication that you and your team does aligns with and reinforces the culture and communicates the strategy? 

Obviously, at Henry Schein, it’s quite a broad-based business, isn’t it? I’m curious to understand how you ensure that you could do that communication and make sure that it’s really relevant and tangible for your internal audiences as well.

Gerard Meuchner: I firmly believe that internal communications should be a priority for every organization, and I’m very much a believer in this notion that to win in the marketplace, you have to first win in the workplace. If the team most likely to accept your story does not accept it, then why should you believe that externally anyone should accept it? I put a huge priority on internal communication because I think it’s really important that the team understand and accept and believe and become evangelists for the company’s story. That way, when one of our sales representatives walks in to a customer, they’re able to convey the Henry Schein story. To me, it is vitally important that companies put great emphasis on internal communication because that’s where it all begins.

Part of the reason we were happy to work with Staffbase and to bring on your platform is up until that point, we didn’t have a single intranet that reached all of our more than 25,000 Team Schein members. One interesting fact about Henry Schein, we’ve grown considerably over the years, and one of the ways we’ve grown is through many acquisitions. Since the company went public in 1995, we’ve done something like 300 acquisitions.

Now, these are primarily small, privately held companies, but it also means bringing all of these companies together and making them feel part of the broader Team Schein. One of the things that is so gratifying about the Staffbase platform for us is precisely because it’s browser-based, it’s SaaS, we are able to make it available on an equal footing to all of the many entities that make up Henry Schein in the 33 countries in which we operate. That is one of the really important ways that we’re able as a network before to drive a single message about what the company is doing, what our strategy is, what our outlook is for the markets we serve.

I would encourage anyone listening to this to ensure that internal communications is the priority because for me, that’s where it all begins. There’s no reason to believe that a customer should become an advocate of your business if you are not first your own advocate for your business.

David Burnand: Yes, that’s so true and so powerful. I guess as well, as you’re acquiring all these companies, as you said, a lot of the companies must be quite small in size, if not in terms of market impact. I guess for the people who are in those companies who you’re acquiring, it must be quite daunting for some of them to go from a quite small organization to one as enormous as a global leader like Henry Schein. Communications must be a really important part of convincing them to come on that journey and stay with the new, bigger business than, and in the bigger journey, that’s right.

Gerard Meuchner: That’s always a challenge in any one of these instances. Also we’re a publicly traded company. Almost all of the companies we buy are privately held. Now there’s also a challenge where they have to become acclimated to the governance of a publicly traded company and all of the reporting and disclosure requirements publicly traded companies have in the United States versus a privately held company. There is always a cultural acclimation that has to occur.

Now, the good news is we spend a lot of time getting to know companies before we acquire them. We spend sometimes years getting to know the leadership of the companies we acquire before we ever acquire them because to us, the culture matters so much more than the finances. You never want to acquire a company where they may have great, great finances but the people aren’t a cultural fit because that eventually becomes an unhappy experience. We spend lots and lots of time getting to know the leadership of the companies that we acquire.

The other thing we do that’s unique is we rarely buy 100% of another company. We tend to buy a majority stake because we want the existing management to stay with us because they’re the ones who built the business and they’re the ones who know the customers. They’re the ones who have a much greater, a much more intimate knowledge of their market than we do. We see that the optimal way forward is to acquire a majority stake but to retain the leadership of the acquired company. Because we get to know them so well, the companies that we invest in have the same culture and the same values that we have. That’s why we spend all the time we do getting to know these folks.

This is something that we’re transparent about with our shareholders. Our CEO has said repeatedly that the people and the culture of the acquired companies are primary to merely the finances of that company because it’s really important for us to understand who are the people that achieved that financial performance. That then lends itself to a broader effort to communicate to the newly acquired entity, this is Henry Schein, this is what we are all about. There’s a really interesting dynamic where the companies we acquire essentially continue to operate for the most part under their brand as they are.

They benefit from being part of a larger organization that can introduce them to customer sets that they might not have had a chance to reach and we benefit from what they bring to us, and so communications is absolutely vital to achieving this acclimation.

David Burnand: Yes, that just really underlines the huge business impact of everything that you and your team do. It’s pretty incredible, especially when you, consider the number of acquisitions, the sheer scale of the acquisitions that you’ve undertaken. That’s pretty amazing. I’d like to, if you don’t mind, I’d love to change gears again and move to a topic that’s a hot one for all of us, especially this year at the moment. I think, obviously, you’re in the US, I’m here in the UK. I think it’s a hot topic in both countries right now, which is around misinformation and disinformation.

I’m curious to get your view and how you see this in terms of a business challenge. Is it an issue that you also find yourself having to deal with right now? Also, where do you see the positives and negatives of technologies like AI as a potential help in that battle, but also potentially as a hindrance as well? Love to get your view on that.

Gerard Meuchner: Well, that is a very huge issue and we could spend hours discussing it. There’s no denying that with the advent of digital communications and the explosion of AI and before that, the internet more broadly, that everyone now has access to communications in a way we didn’t before, right? Everyone has a chance to grab the megaphone. Everyone has a chance to provide a point of view to the world, whether it’s been checked for accuracy or not. We can’t spend a second thinking, oh, let’s go back to the old days. That’s never going to happen. The future is what it is. We all understand it.

What’s been interesting is that in a world that is increasingly fractured, in a world where trust is not what it once was, we understand from all the research that people tend to trust those that they are closest to. That includes their companies and within the companies they work for, their immediate supervisor. The challenge of all of us in corporate communications is to make sure that we are communicating factually and in a non-partisan way to our own teams.

There’s no denying that there’s a greater burden now on companies to be communicators to their own teams as never before. That’s in part because employees of any organization are more likely to believe what their own employer has to say about how the world is working than they will be all of the folks who populate all of the social media platforms around the world. That’s a reality we just have to accept.

It also creates a really interesting challenge and dynamic. When should a company have a point of view? When shouldn’t it? When should it speak out? When should it not? This is increasingly challenging because there are extremes to both approaches. You don’t want to be the company that is constantly saying something about everything. Conversely, you can no longer be the company where you’re absolutely silent about everything, right? The world just doesn’t accommodate that approach. We spend a lot of time thinking deeply about what to communicate to our 25,000 Team Schein members. When should we communicate to our Team Schein members? When should we be silent? When is it appropriate for Henry Schein to have a point of view on a particular social issue or not?

When I joined Kodak back in 2000, we hardly gave any thought to this. Now I can assure you that I spend a lot of time talking to my counterparts at other companies about this very issue. Are you speaking out about this issue and what are you saying about this issue? This is a constant source of deliberation inside our own company and among the communications profession.

The relative good news, and I stress the word relative, the relative good news for those of us who are corporate communicators is that the work we do is increasingly vital and it’s also increasingly understood. I think this is something that Staffbase is well aware of, that the role of internal communications is increasingly important because employees everywhere are looking to their leadership to say, help me understand how I should think about what’s going on in this world. I think if you present your point of view in the context of what it means for your business, that’s the best way to do it.

We’re in healthcare and so we try and discuss our view of the world within the context of a company that believes in expanding access to healthcare. We firmly believe that everyone should have access to healthcare. We’re not prescriptive as to how that should be achieved, because every country is different, every economic system from country to country is different, but we certainly believe as a fundamental human right that everyone should have access to quality healthcare. That becomes the foundation from which we think about the world and can address issues when we believe they’re relevant for us to address them.

David Burnand: Sure, sure. Are you finding that you’re having to go back and review how you approach that when do we speak and when don’t we speak more often?

Gerard Meuchner: Absolutely. I assume everyone who has the responsibilities of the role that I have has created in their organization some kind of process, some kind of decision tree that says if it’s A, we do this, if it’s B, we do that. Whenever there’s an event that happens that is of national or international importance, whether it be a war or some other event that is of such a magnitude that you can’t help but take note of it, there is a group of us at Henry Schein, as I’m sure there is at every company, that gets together and says, okay, here’s what has happened.

What, if anything, should Henry Schein say? Is it relevant to us? Is it not relevant to us? Do we feel that we have something to add to the discussion that is meaningful to our first audience, which is, of course, Team Schein, and then beyond that. Sometimes we’ll make only internal statements about issues. Sometimes we’ll make internal and external statements and everyone is unique unto itself.

David Burnand: Yes. I think this is a real dilemma that every single one of us in communications is going through pretty much every single day, right? I know we’ve had debates just on some of this stuff as well. Gerard, I could literally, I think we could probably do three or four episodes of this podcast just based on your discussion, this discussion with you, because your experience is just so rich. I did want to ask you just one more question before we wrap up. That’s around employee engagement. I would just love to know, thinking about the digital communications channels that you use, obviously, because you have such a broad employee base, what are the strategies that you and the leadership team at Henry Schein as a whole have found to be successful in keeping employees engaged worldwide? I understand, for example, that you have an extremely popular company dog page. 

Gerard Meuchner: It’s more than dogs. I’ll get to that in a second, but I’m glad you mentioned it. When the pandemic began, like every other company, the team worked from home. We found it to be a very effective ways of being productive to the point where we are now essentially a hybrid company. Now, of course, even before the pandemic, we had a very large sales organization that by definition worked remotely. These are folks who left their homes each day and visited customers. They weren’t specifically in an office every day. We had some experience with managing life in a hybrid or remote environment.

Now we are essentially fully hybrid and we have a whole host of folks who work permanently from home. We have some folks who enjoy coming into the office, but since the pandemic, we’ve done a lot of work in minimizing our real estate footprint because we’ve learned that our team enjoys the flexibility of hybrid work. We think that our productivity is every bit as effective as it was prior to the pandemic because there are certain things about hybrid life that lend themselves to productivity. With that comes a great challenge, right? We no longer have the ability to see everyone in the office every day. We have to find ways to engage people using digital platforms because there’s no other way to do it.

Early in the pandemic, we created a newsletter that we would distribute digitally called Rise and Schein, a little play on words there. We were looking for fun things just to engage folks. We said, hey, send us photos of your pets. We had no idea what we would get. We were overwhelmed with photos of pets to the point where we started running one a week. Then we started running two a week. We literally had a year’s worth of photos of pets and dogs and horses and parrots and you name it. What we learned is people absolutely love their pets.

Four months ago, when we launched MySchein, our new intranet, we have a whole page devoted to Team Schein pets where people can upload a photo and they say, this is my dog and this is Buddy and he’s a golden retriever. They can even post a video of Buddy splashing through the water. The other great thing about this is now that it’s on an intranet, people can engage with it. Now you have people going back and liking the photo or commenting on it. When we were emailing a newsletter, it didn’t lend itself to engaging.

Now that we have a global intranet that is mobile and browser-based so that all 25,000 TSMs, and in any language because there is a built-in AI translation tool. Someone can post something about their pet in Thai and I can read it in English. It’s just wonderfully engaging, not to belabor the use of that word. What we have tapped into is a universal love of animals that we humans have. It’s just really, really fun to see this grow.

Now, it may seem something that is lighthearted and not all that serious, but I would argue the point that the challenge of a large company, particularly a large company such as Henry Schein that acquires lots of other smaller companies, is how do you make this big company feel small? Things like this Team Schein pets page is so successful precisely because what we’re finding is that we get submissions and people do it directly themselves, right?

It no longer has to go through corporate communications. They can upload it directly. Obviously, we trust everyone to behave and we’ve not had any instances of any issues. What’s really gratifying is to see where all of the submissions come. It’s not as if they’re all from New York or all from the United States. They are all over the world from large businesses we have to the smaller, more recently acquired entities. That to me has a really, really important cultural benefit because it makes this big place seem a lot smaller.

I encourage anyone creating an intranet to start a pets page. You’ll be shocked at how successful it is and how easy it is and everyone at every level of the company engages on it. It’s really great fun.

David Burnand: I love that and it creates that connection. Of course, in bringing people back all the time, you’re also then creating a platform and an opportunity to engage with them on other stuff as well.

Gerard Meuchner: Exactly. They go to look to the Pet page and then they see all the other stuff that they need to read as well.

David Burnand: Exactly, exactly. Well, Gerard, thank you so much. You’ve been so generous with your time. We really appreciate it. I’m sure everyone’s going to learn so much from all the insight that you’ve shared. Yes, thank you very much for doing it. Of course, we’re so glad that you’re a customer of Staffbase and a friend of ours. Yes, thank you again.

Gerard Meuchner: Thank you for the privilege of spending a few minutes with you and your audience. I am forever at your service. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

David Burnand: Thank you, Gerard. Thank you to everybody who’s joined us. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Aspire to Inspire and be sure to join us again and subscribe on all of the usual channels. Thank you.