Digital Employee Experience: From Access to True Connection

Colin Sarafin: Good morning, Lisa. How are you?

Lisa Riemers: I am very well, thank you. How is it where you are?

Colin Sarafin: You know, New York this time of year is absolutely beautiful. How's London?

Lisa Riemers: I don't know whether you can tell from this video, but it's super gray today. It's really dark outside. And I find that I get this time of the year every year. I'm already missing the sunny evenings and the bright mornings. At least we can put jumpers on. It's nice and cozy.

Colin Sarafin: That's true. That's true. We're getting there. We're getting there. Well Lisa, thank you for joining us today. And to everybody listening, welcome to this week's episode of You've Got Comms. Lisa, I will not introduce you. I will let you do the honor of introducing yourself. Please.

Lisa Riemers: Thank you. Well I am an independent digital person. I'd say digital generalist, but that's not really true. I help organizations improve the way they communicate through their internal platforms like their intranets and their broader digital workplace. And I also help organizations improve the accessibility of their information, whether that's talking to people inside their organization or their customers and other stakeholders.

Colin Sarafin: All right. Awesome. Thanks. Again, thank you for joining us today, Lisa. So, to start off with hard-hitting question number one, are you ready?

Lisa Riemers: Okay. I'll give it a go.

Colin Sarafin: Okay. So as an expert, Lisa, how would you describe the digital employee experience in a few easy digestible sentences?

Lisa Riemers: That's a good question. And I think today the digital employee experience is how people actually experience their organization. It's very rare that we have an experience that is only face-to-face nowadays and isn't actually facilitated by technology, but it's how people experience their organization via technology, really. From the recruitment process to their onboarding, managing everyday tasks, and then if they leave, it's the sum total of all of those touch points. And for some, it's probably the very way that they work as their entire working experience. It's done via these digital channels now.

Colin Sarafin: So, can you elaborate a little bit more on what you mean by making experiences accessible for employees?

Lisa Riemers: Sure. When we think about accessibility in the workplace, I think a lot of people might immediately think about ramps, so the colleagues in wheelchairs can get into their office and maybe a lift to get up to their desk. But when we're thinking about an accessible digital workplace, it's also making sure that people are able to access the information they need to do their jobs and that they're able to understand that information when it's presented to them.

Colin Sarafin: Awesome. Thank you. And I would have to assume that comms, HR, IT are the teams most invested in DEX. I guess, what are their specific roles in your eyes?

Lisa Riemers: I think the consultant's answer on that would probably be, "It depends." It depends on the organization, but the digital employee experience normally sits somewhere between the three. I've worked in some organizations where it's owned by IT, others where HR take the lead, others where communications teams have the overarching responsibility for it, or the head of professional services that sits above those three departments. And I think whatever the actual setup, the most successful organizations have a really strong working relationship between those departments. They might have a digital workplace working group or a change board or a board that oversees the delivery and the overall management of that experience with one person actually ultimately owning it as the service owner who might sit in IT or might sit somewhere else in the organization.

Colin Sarafin: Yeah, it's interesting. We obviously work with clients that operate in different ways when it comes to that kind of technology, I guess. Based on your experience, what kind of relationship have you seen work best, or what kind of structure have you seen work best?

Lisa Riemers: I think one person needs to have overall responsibility. And actually, one person needs to be overall accountable, but then there needs to be at least one person, if not a whole team of people, that are actually responsible, have the time and resources and the mandate to be able to manage that experience. They need to have access to the right colleagues. They need to have the time to be able to make sure that the platforms are running as expected and to have that employee-centered approach. I think making sure that employees are at the heart of this. When we're talking about a digital employee experience, digital is part of it, but it's all about what that individual employee does experience, so I think organizations that know who their employees are, will be the most successful.

Colin Sarafin: It's an interesting cat and mouse, isn't it? One of the ways to best get to know your employees is to effectively communicate with them, yet the only way to effectively communicate with them is to know them. So, it's a bit of a finger trap but thank you. I appreciate the thoughtful answer. On to frontline. So, frontline employees often don't have the same access to intranets, to desktops, corporate email. So, what unique challenges do you see in delivering a great digital employee experience for them?

Lisa Riemers: That is a really good question. And again, it does depend on the organization, but I think something that's almost universal, wherever I've worked, whether I've worked in-house or working with organizations, I think the biggest challenge for frontline staff is around the identity of who they work for. A lot of the time you'll find that people really closely identify with their team or their local branch or their office, or maybe it's their business unit, but there's a bit of a disconnect between them as individuals and the broader organization. And I mean, 9 times out of 10, that probably is okay because most of the time those are the people that they're interacting with on a day-to-day basis, but when they do need to access, whether it's information about their payroll, whether it's corporate news, whether it's being able to book their holiday, those digital experiences do need to work. Otherwise, that kind of broader organization is seen as a bit more of a headache rather than something that's a benefit to be part of. And I think something else, so another challenge that frontline staff have is the actual physical access of it. How do you get on an intranet when you're actually not at a desk? It might be that people are expected to bring their own devices, which has its own challenges, because encouraging people to actually download apps to their own devices can be a bit of an uphill struggle. They might not be able to access all of the systems they need from their own device, and they have to go and find access somewhere else, or they might have a corporate mobile or corporate laptop or corporate tablet, which might also be locked down, so they can't actually use it to do a lot of the other tasks that they need to do. It might be limited, or it might be something that they just don't want to be caring about, or they can't be seen to be on their phones while they're doing their jobs. So, trying to find the time for people to be able to access those internal systems, whether it's in their breaks, whether it's if they've been given dedicated time during the week, or whether they're being expected to look at stuff at home, thinking about how staff are working, I think it's really important when you're thinking about communicating with them. And I think there's one more point on that, actually, is where they are doing that job might be super noisy. It might be a really busy concourse in a station. It might be a really loud factory. It might be that they're up a mountain and they've actually got really poor internet connection.  Or if it's a noisy environment, that information can't be presented via sound because it just won't work for people. Apps that rely on someone talking, or if there are audible notifications, or if there's a video, there needs to be a way for people to access this without being able to hear it.

Colin Sarafin: Yeah. And I think one of the things that you've brought up a few different times now is access, right? And when we think about convincing a frontline audience to download something to your phone, which is a point that you were making before, sometimes that's a tougher sell than one might think. Even though it's something that has a lot in it for that end user, what kind of strategies have you seen effective in convincing a frontline that this is a technology that will ultimately be helpful to you?

Lisa Riemers: I've seen it work a few different ways. The first thing would be actually making sure that there's something in it for the person that's downloading it. You know, there used to be a standing joke many years ago that the most visited page on our intranet was what was on the menu in the staff canteen that day. Now, I don't know how many offices still have staff canteens, but is there something that people really want to know about and are they able to access it via that platform? I think, also things like being able to easily do logistics, whether it's scheduling or rotas or being able to book annual leave or being able to see how much holiday allowance you've got left, looking at your pay slips. If you're able to access things that you need to do your job using these apps, there's a natural incentive for people to then use it.

Colin Sarafin: Yes. I can tell you one thing for sure, I log into my intranet, and I look at my pay data. That is number one for me, and that's what's in it for me, but thank you, Lisa. I appreciate that. All right, on to the next question, shall we?

Lisa Riemers: Sure.

Colin Sarafin: What practical steps can organizations take to make sure frontline workers feel connected and supported digitally even if they're not sitting at a desk?

Lisa Riemers: Oh, practical steps is a brilliant question . . .

Colin Sarafin: And of course, there's a little bit of overlap between this question and the last, but I guess how would you actually do it? How would you make . . . what's a good analogy here? How would you bake the cake?

Lisa Riemers: So if we're talking about a cake, I love that as an analogy. Let's see. So the ingredients for a great employee experience, you've got information that is well-written, is only the amount of sugar that you need and you're not using too much of it. I think people are busy and they are overwhelmed and they have lots of notifications and there are lots of things that people need to be thinking about. So particularly if you're frontline, I think front-loading, I'm going away from the cake here a bit, but I think front-loading your content with the key information. What is the stuff that people need to know? Make sure that that information is up front and not buried at the back of the oven. 

Colin Sarafin: I think that works. The cooling tray? Into the center of the cake? I'm not sure.

Lisa Riemers: Yeah. I think where it's possible to do this, and it might be outside of your influence, but having single sign-on where possible. I know one of the biggest frustrations a lot of people find is having to reauthenticate multiple times a day, which can be a real barrier to getting information, so making the actual physical sign-in process as seamless as possible would be something that I'd work with the technology team to make happen. And I think also making sure that you've spent some time with the people that are accessing your information, getting out, doing some user research, following colleagues, actually shadowing them to see what their day is like, to help you understand at what point they're able to access this information, I think it's really valuable. Something that I noticed working with a recent client is that whilst in the head office lots of people had big monitors, they had their laptop hooked up to a large monitor, but actually, if you were just getting your laptop out in the break room, if you had a laptop, the resolution of the screen meant that those beautifully designed pages on the intranet actually showed up in a completely different order because it was already a break point from a mobile point of view. So making sure that you've tested your content and your comms with the people that are reading it and making adjustments where needed would be the biggest thing, I think.

Colin Sarafin: Awesome. And obviously, I work in a corporate culture, I have for a long time, and you brought up the analogy with the cake of not having too much sugar. And I guess, from my perspective, I'm just curious to hear your thoughts, how do you find the balance of noise versus not enough information? How have you found that balance in the past, especially with a frontline audience or an audience that otherwise doesn't have the same access as everybody else?

Lisa Riemers: I think the balance is always a challenge, and it works better in some organizations than others. I think asking for feedback and testing, seeing what lands, looking at your analytics, seeing what resonates, seeing where you're getting the responses to things, where you're seeing people opening stuff, where you're getting the engagement can help you make better decisions in the future, but I think also being able to target information to the right groups is great. Most people say, "I get too many emails," or "too many notifications," and then they say, "But nobody told me about this."You know, it's kind of basic comms of the right information to the right people at the right time, using that targeting that's available to you, not just relying on managers to cascade things but giving them the tools that they need so that they know what to say to who as well. And the other thing, I guess, is having shorter messages, and if people need more information, either going onto the intranet for more information or to a roundup bulletin. Assuming that you've said something once doesn't mean that people have read it, so I think having multiple touch points and making sure that information is presented to people, whether they see it now or whether they see it at the end of the week, is a way to make sure that the message gets through.

Colin Sarafin: Yeah. The marketing . . . What is it? The marketing rule of seven? It takes seven touch points to potentially convert someone. Lisa Riemers: Oh, seven. I don't know if I've heard that one. That's lovely. Thank you.

Colin Sarafin: Is it seven? I thought it was seven.

Lisa Riemers: I mean it sounds legit. I just don't think I've heard it before.

Colin Sarafin: I sounded confident when I said it. Maybe it's right, but probably not. I don't know. I guess we'll find out. Thanks to the marketing team that's going to edit this. We'll see. We'll see if it makes the cut. Thank you. I'm sorry for the ad hoc questions. I genuinely wanted to hear your perspective, so I appreciate that. Oh, boy. We're at this question. This is the question of 2025 and probably the question of the decade. So, Lisa?

Lisa Riemers: Yes.

Colin Sarafin: How do you see AI shaping the digital employee experience in the next few years? Will it help? Should we be cautious? What would you say?

Lisa Riemers: Yes.

Colin Sarafin: Yes. To all of the above.

Lisa Riemers: It can help. We should be cautious. We're talking about AI, and we're particularly in 2025, thinking about it from a generative AI, large language model point of view. I feel like over the last few years, a lot of the time we've been using AI without realizing it, whether that's using PowerPoint's built-in AI designer option, which has some suggestions for how you're presenting your information, or using something like Hemingway or Word's built-in editor to get suggestions on how to write more clearly. I mean, Word's editor and Hemingway are excellent to help you write more clearly and accessibly for your users, and I think there are tools already available that can help us provide clarity. I think we should also be cautious when we're asking a chatbot or an LLM to provide factual information. So, a use case I've seen lots of people investigating but not really having success with, is deploying internal chatbots to provide definitive answers from their intranets. If it's using generative AI, it's guessing the best result based on previous questions and based on the information it's been trained on. And I worked with a client last year who had built an internal chatbot, and you could ask it . . . and it was based on, I think it was based on ChatGPT.  And you could ask the same question on different days and it would give you a different answer. And that's because it's not like the chatbots that we were told about 5 or 10 years ago, which after some training only gave answers based on the information available to them. You can use things like RAG, which is the retrieval-augmented generation, I think it stands for, to limit the sources and limit the answers that your AI will give, but I've seen lots of challenges with this because if it's using generative AI, it's generating answers each time. It might point to a source, which is great, but it also might generate a source, unless you've specified upfront not to do that. So, I think anybody that says, "I have an AI chatbot for you and it will answer all the questions and you'll be able to significantly reduce the number of requests that come through to your HR or your IT service desk," I'd approach that with caution because it really depends on the specific cases you've got in hand. And I think something that I've seen that's been great is, so, PowerPoint as an example, and now it's also built into SharePoint and some other tools, is helping you with your accessibility, so images should have alternative text. It should have a description if you're not able to access that image. And AI is now able to give not a bad first guess at the contents of that image. What it can't do, though, is it can't guess your intent very well. So if you imagine you've got a photo of, let's say, the Statue of Liberty, and it's a photo of the Statue of Liberty on a sunny day. If your office is in New York, you might be using that image to say, well, it's a sunny day here today. If you're using that image to illustrate a news article from a global perspective, it might be giving the context of the New York office. So AI can really help you with writing alt text and suggesting this kind of information. It's better than nothing, but you need a clear starting point, and you need to check it to make sure that the answer it's given you has the intent that you have for that picture.

Colin Sarafin: Awesome. Thank you. No, I appreciate that perspective. It's funny with AI, it's become the buzzword. It's like, I want that thing. It's like walking, not to use cars as like a good proxy, but you walk into a car dealership and you say, "I want car." It's like, okay, well, what do you want the car to do? Do you want it to create a PowerPoint presentation for you? Do you want it to surface HR data? Do you want it to automate XYZ process? It's almost this universe where we've gotten stuck in the idea of the thing versus the outcome that we're driving towards. It's fascinating.

Lisa Riemers: Yes, for sure.

Colin Sarafin: It's a fascinating time that we're living in with agentic AI. But thank you for your expertise. I appreciate it. So, if a comms team only had 90 days to fix their world, what are the first two to three things you would change first?

Lisa Riemers: I think the first thing I'd want to do is understand who I'm talking to and how they're receiving that information. I'd want to go out and speak to users, do some research, go out on site visits, do a survey, and really try and understand what people's pain points are. Because if you know what people need, not just what they say they want, like they say, "Well, I want a faster car, obviously," you can identify what your users need and then put together a bit of a roadmap and hopefully have some really quick wins as well as some of that bigger picture stuff. You might not be able to solve everything in 90 days, but I think showing up, asking people what it is that they need, and then having something you're able to deliver soon. It might be that people don't know about some key information that's available, so maybe there's something else you can add on your intranet or add some guidance.

Colin Sarafin: What are some examples of quick wins? What are some examples of quick wins in your experience?

Lisa Riemers: It's a really good question. So, the quickest wins, or at least the most visible wins, might be an update on your homepage. I saw an organization who the homepage, over time, had built into this massive mess of links off to things and people had added things and nobody ever wants to take anything away. So I think taking a look and seeing what no longer serves your organization's needs and taking it off and helping free up some space, helping give people a bit of a clearer journey can help. I think also providing a page of . . . when I say a page, it might be that it's just a box of useful links. It depends what people define as useful. Useful is a weird term, isn't it? But I think being able to signpost people really helps them find the information they need.

Colin Sarafin: Absolutely. Thank you. Appreciate it. Fun question. I like that question. It's a tough question. So, for our listeners out there, what's the first step that they can take to improve the digital employee experience across their organization?

Lisa Riemers: Apart from listening to your users, I think regardless of the platform that you're using, something that is within our control, particularly if we're communications people, is to check our language. Brilliantly accessible platforms and experiences are only as good as the content that's on them, so make sure that your information is as easy to read as possible. I like to talk about plain language, which is the language that your audience understands the first time they read it, so spelling out acronyms, avoiding jargon where possible, and making sure that headings and labels are nice and clear, so that busy people can understand what it is that they need to do right away.Sometimes that's a bit of a, it feels like an unlearning from the way that we've been taught to write in the past, and I know that a lot of the time senior stakeholders will say, "Well, we've got an organization full of people who are all well-educated. We don't need to dumb this down, Lisa," which is a terrible term in itself, but it's making sure that . . . everybody is busy. There's research that suggests that even lawyers prefer reading stuff in plain language and making it as easy as possible for people to get what they need so they can carry on with their day. I think that's the number one step I'd ask everyone to take.

Colin Sarafin: Preach. Tell you what, I've read a lot of corporate emails, a lot of corporate posts over the years. To all the communicators out there, as an end user reading communications on a daily basis, that is great advice. Thank you, Lisa. Finally, Lisa, we're coming up to the end of our time. Thank you again. So, where can people connect with you and learn more about you?

Lisa Riemers: I am very online. You can find me on LinkedIn or on Bluesky or on Instagram @lisariemers. My website is lisariemers.com. I've got a book on accessible communication. It's been co-written with the wonderful Matisse Hamel-Nelis, which is available to order now on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Please do connect with me. I'd love to talk.

Colin Sarafin: Awesome. Well, Lisa, thank you very much for your time today. And to everybody listening, thank you very much for your time. We hope you walked away with something valuable today, and I hope you all have a great rest of your day. Thanks again for listening to the You've Got Comms podcast. Thank you, Lisa.

Lisa Riemers: Thank you for having me.