Tailoring the Employee Experience: Why One Size Never Fits All

Amelia Dahmer: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the You've Got Comms Podcast. Today, we are talking to Preston Lewis, the SVP of Communications at Segal Benz. He is a thought leader in all things HR and internal comms when it really comes to communications tech. So, they work with companies all over the world to improve the employee experience from a digital communications standpoint. Preston, how are you doing today?

Preston Lewis: I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

Amelia Dahmer: Yeah, of course. You have been right at the intersection of comms and HR, and how to work together to elevate the employee experience. So, to kick us off, can you tell us a little bit about your journey and what drew you to this space in the first place?

Preston Lewis: I grew up in this space, so, of course, I'd love to share the story. I actually started my career as a graphic recorder, so, high-end whiteboarding, as some people say. So, markers in hand, the opportunity to travel with some really talented consultants and capture group memory, take notes, if you will, in real time up on whiteboards or sheets of paper, big butcher paper, as conversations were happening, mostly leadership meetings. And I had an opportunity to get a bit of an insight into all this great conversation was happening. And then I started to realize, you know, for those that aren't in this room or those who are not involved in this meeting, what's going to happen next? So, that's where I started my career, and since been on this journey of, with all this good insight, direction, and strategy, how can we most effectively reach and engage people to actually implement some of this thinking and see through some of the strategy, if you will. So, that quickly evolved into the world of internal communications.

Amelia Dahmer: Yeah, that's awesome. I mean, in internal communications, you're talking a lot about — and we've known each other for a while now — about orchestrating comms and HR together to improve the employee experience. So, you gave us a little bit about your background, but today, what does your day-to-day look like now in 2025?

Preston Lewis: How things have changed! This was almost 30 years ago. This was before the internet, when I was writing with markers on paper. And then the web came, and then intranets became a thing, and the world of digital workplace communications quickly evolved. It's fascinating when you think about the evolution of not just the technology, but communications inside organizations and how technology enables more effective communications. We went from vision maps and murals, illustrated by hand, that were moved through architectural drum scanners into digital graphics, and then we printed 5,000 of them for Hewlett-Packard when they were trying to share the vision, mission, values for the organization in the late '90s, early 2000s. That was internal communications. That was visual communications, for sure. Now, we are using better, faster, cheaper technology to do similar things, and it's fascinating to see how the science of connection and communications and engagement has evolved. Importantly, we're still in the behavior change business. So, we talk a lot about the relationship between change management and change communications, and as internal communicators, we're often responsible for that communications element of change, but bringing you back to your question, these days, it's so much fun because, in the context of behavior change, we have more data that is provided to us by these technology platforms to tune into how to reach and engage people in different ways, and there's different answers for different people, right? So, the long and short of it is part of what's fun about our work today is we're all now data geeks and scientists, and everyday, all of us are continually looking to see how we can do our work differently to make sure it's that much more effective.

Amelia Dahmer: Speak for yourself. I don't know if I would call myself a geek, but definitely would call myself interested. Geek, I don't know. But you've really seen it all, like you said, from the whiteboard to technology to, knock on wood, AI is all the rage right now. For everyone listening, what's the practical advice you've got for people changing their technology strategy? You've really gone through that, and it's an expectation shift and a behavior shift, like you mentioned, but there's still a learning curve to it. So, what would you practically advise people when they're going through "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," but it's time to fix it?

Preston Lewis: You know, it's a great question. Taking a big step back, I think it's unrealistic to suggest that communicators, specifically in any role at any level, are going to quickly become the tech experts. As much as that may happen for sure, as somebody who likes to pride myself in as techy as I am with a written word, as a communicator or as a visual designer, something I'm also really proud of, it's important to understand that it's not going to happen overnight. We're not going to all become data geeks to the point I was making earlier, or IT people that really understands the intricate elements of technology-enabled user experience design. I think that where people should start, again, communicators at any level, is to really be thoughtful about our identity in an organization. What I mean by that is, we may be an internal communications manager, or we may lead a function of 50 internal communicators globally. Identity today is something that I think that most communicators don't spend enough time defining and framing. So, in the context of AI, for example, it's interesting, I'll be at a conference and I'll ask for a show of hands of "How many people are leading the AI transformation in your organization?" This is me talking to internal communicators. And you get a lot of hands going up. It's because some leadership teams and organizations realize that internal communicators are often in the position to facilitate change and adoption of technology, including the use of AI, unlike other roles or functions. So, back to communications, we can do things pretty easily now with AI technology, really quickly, to make a big impact in communications efficacy, and it demonstrates the value of AI really quickly. Success begets success. So, that's part of the reason why I think a lot of internal communicators are being chartered with facilitating change in the context of adopting AI tools. So, back to the identity piece, that's where I think people should start, is to really define our identity and opportunity, and role in the context of what AI means in an organization. And, rather than being responsible for the success of AI, because it's just unrealistic, position ourselves and our identity as the facilitators of change so we can constantly identify, illustrate and then surface examples of effective use of AI tools and technology throughout the organization.

Amelia Dahmer: Yeah, and Preston, something you had said about not only the communicators adopting the new technology, but the employees as well, it's also a behavior shift. So, using an example of how AI helps the audience in their day-to-day is great, but what one audience resonates with might not affect the day-to-day of another audience at all. So, when we think about hyper-targeting and content personalization, these are always the key topics when we're talking to internal communicators, and it's becoming more and more popular among those departments. So, can you share some examples of how companies are using tools effectively to share examples, and what kind of impact that's had on the employee experience?

Preston Lewis: Absolutely. Communications, functions, or teams, or even individuals in an organization that own internal communications, we're all at different stages of adopting AI tools to help improve internal communication. So, the most basic or simple level, there is a lot of great work that can support hyper-targeting and personalization in the context of list management. It may be as basic as, "Here's a distribution list to send an email out to a group." It could be an announcement. And now, what we can do is take that list, compare it easily, if not download the open rate list, and those that opened, those didn't open, and then target the communication or a different version, i.e., different messaging to those that didn't open it. So, AI tools to support list management is basic or easy. Copilot can do this, Gemini can do this. We don't have to have a paid platform necessarily. Now, side note, important warning about uploading lists into external AI platforms—do not do that. But, for most organizations, there is a paid secure version to help to support these kinds of tasks or activities. Another example is supporting content creation. So, in the context of, we have this framework and the first stage is creation of topics for audiences and that are aligned with the concerns of those audiences to support messaging and topics that align with those concerns or subject lines or version 1 of content that, again, aligns with the preferences or communication objectives for that specific audience. So, the most basic level, there's a few simple things that communicators can do. Then we move to different levels of maturity around hyper-targeting and personalization. So, we spent quite a bit of time working with organizations to build out employee personas. There's very simple personas to super complex personas, and AI tools enable us to be pretty sophisticated and complex with our personas these days. And once we do that work using AI tools for assistance, of course, we can target a specific list group or audience and individual that aligns with that persona like the last example, not only target messaging to address concerns or target lists to those who may have opened or not opened, but we can even make specific requests or include content within that email communication, as an example, or that intranet post that is very relevant or that aligns with elements of the persona. It could be as geography, role, function, tenure. Secondly, within those personas, we often identify different moments that matter, and we can configure, if you will, our AI tools to make recommendations and then include certain relevant content that not only aligns with that list or group and or person, but for example, with a tenure example, we can target content to make sure that that communication pays attention to the fact that somebody who is in New York in the marketing function who's only been in the role for less than three months, we can hyper-personalize target based on that data. So, those are just a couple. Then we get into really complex stuff like personalized benefit statements and recommending specific rewards programs or benefits opportunities or other programs that are available to different people in different geographies and different roles or functions, or at that specific moment in their career or in their life. We often talk about this vision of creating a more consumer-like employee experience. And for many years, that was easier said than done. But today, we are able to realize that vision like never before.

Amelia Dahmer: All right. Well, companies are rethinking their approach to benefits, and now a lot of the benefits require the employees to take action. So, whether that is picking your health insurance or what bike perk you want, or mileage, things like that. So, how can you communicate and guide employees through this new landscape to make that process as simple as possible, and that they actually feel supported in understanding their options and thinking what's best for them?

Preston Lewis: Part of what I love so much about HR communications and benefits communications, the context of benefits in HR comms may not be the sexiest content, if you will, for internal communications, but what's important to realize is, of all the things that we communicate to people at work, benefits and total rewards enables us to measure the efficacy and impact of internal communications, unlike a lot of other things that we're communicating. So, for example, benefits is a good one, particularly for the employees that are residing in the United States. We know how many employees there are, we know where they live, we know what we're spending or investing in as an organization to offer benefits and total rewards. We know how often we're communicating, how we're communicating. Long and short of it, it gives us an opportunity to measure the return on investment of offering all the different things that may be available to somebody to work for an organization. And when we can fine-tune how we communicate about open enrollment and why it's active this year and not passive like it's been in the last few years, we can directly correlate more effective communications, reach, and engagement to increasing participation, and then illustrating return on investment. It's this context of internal communications that, when we're very thoughtful and sophisticated, it enables us to gain trust based on return on investment with leadership, unlike a lot of other things. So, of course, it's the soapbox I like to stand on, but I'd like to remind internal communicators that this is an opportunity that some teams or functions or people may be not taking advantage of. It is a specific place where I'd recommend focusing a bit more. There are other specific examples in the context of HR and benefits comms, where we have partners that we may be working with to offer a program or to provide a certain type of healthcare benefits. Sometimes there's budget in those partner relationships that can be spent on more effective communications that communicators don't know about. So, this expertise or specialization around HR or benefits comms is a thing. And every day, I begin to realize what might be some of the opportunities in internal communicators really need to know about and be familiar with to, again, increase value in comms.

Amelia Dahmer: To add a hat on a hat there, benefits are something that come around once a year, and if there's a change, maybe throughout the year, but people expect it. Like you said, it's a great way to measure how well internal communications is actually doing. But when rolling out new technology, you mentioned that you're going to use internal comms as a segue to promote these benefits. What if you're changing your internal comms channel, or you're changing your HR platform altogether? So, for employees, that's a big behavior shift to get from point A to point B, and you're probably changing the channel that you usually use to communicate that on. So, any advice when making a change like that, when it comes to technology, to make that adoption smooth and effective?

Preston Lewis: It's important to remember the fundamentals of our craft and, more specifically, fundamentally what effective communications looks like. I remember beginning of my career, and I still employ this thinking to this day, when we're communicating something. I love the example of technology adoption. People orient to campaigns. So, for example, it's like launching a new movie. So, when Hollywood, if you will, is thoughtful about launching a new movie, we start with pre-launch communications, building awareness. So, of course, this aligns with the traditional change management framework of awareness, understanding, and action. When we're launching a new technology, we can't just say, "Enroll now, sign up here, go use this." We have to build interest and excitement about something that's coming and the value that it brings. So, pre-launch communications three times, three different ways. Get that right. Then we move into understanding or even launch communications, addressing the why. So, we're rolling out this new technology because this is the value it brings to you as an individual in your role and to our organization. People are selfish. We do need to focus first on what difference it can make in someone's life versus the whole organization. And then thirdly, upon launch, it's "This is happening, this is what we're seeing," and then post-launch, "This is some of the impact that it's having to people in your role or to our organization. And we're listening, and we hear you. We see that that didn't work on launch, so we fixed it," or "Look at where our numbers are with adoption and how they're increasing. And here's a small success story around the value of this technology and how it's impacting our organization and this specific team." So, I'd love to remind everyone that, fundamentally, in the context of technology, launch and adoption, it's a behavior change exercise. Just like we're trying to get some butts in the seats at a movie theater, we're trying to increase awareness and buy-in, for lack of a better word, for using a platform. Have a lot of fun with it, just like you're launching a movie. It's not always easy, and you can't always be that creative, but at least I like to set the expectation that technology launch is an opportunity to try. Let's bring our creativity to the table and let's have a lot of fun.

Amelia Dahmer: Might not have the launch budget of Barbie or Wicked, but you can try. 

Preston Lewis: But that's a good point around budget. I'd like to think that using assistants like AI-enabled tools and technology, this is a good specific example of where we can partner with tools and technology to get some insider ideas, weigh them out, compare them, and then we'll hopefully have a little bit of time to do things faster, better, cheaper. Like I touched on earlier, using some of these tools.

Amelia Dahmer: Yeah. And your answer earlier, it sounded a lot like the four steps you'd outlined to me earlier around orchestrating the employee experience as a whole. So, I think that was defining shared ownership, co-creating the vision, activating the strategy, and nurturing the feedback loops. For those of you who don't know those four, can you walk everyone through each of those steps and explain why those are so critical?

Preston Lewis: Of course. We talk about developing and implementing communication strategy. I often hear myself say that the process of building the strategy can often be as valuable as the strategy itself. So, first, we need to align guardrails and expectations. And so, that's the defining shared ownership. What does success look like for IT in this strategy? What does success look like for HR? What might success look like for comms? And we each have our own strategies for our functions. Together, we need to understand, within our success measures for our function, what one or two things, what one or two goals might we enable within our strategies with a shared vision for employee experience. Understand not just shared responsibility, but opportunity and goals, and then guardrails and roles for the employee experience, so that we can go to leadership and say, "No one owns the employee experience, but here's the role that comms has, here's the role that IT has, and here's what success looks like." That's the first step. Then once we've enrolled that community of partners to build employee experience or communicate and communication strategy, we define what success looks like. We may have already done that in the shared responsibility we've defined, but we really put a stake out there and say, "This is what future stake could be, and this is what you want to be excited about." Then we move into strategy, development, and activation as that third step, and that's where we have a playbook for human-centric communication strategy. And in that playbook, it maps out, when you have cross-functional group of people, not just that represent different functions, but all the different audience groups that we're looking to impact and engage, this is how we can build a sophisticated and thoughtful strategy — strategy being a decision-making framework that evolves based on feedback — and planned. Timing, tactics, and so on. And then, last, we need to sustain rhythm, if you will, and nurture feedback loops. So, this is, again, trust is the lifeblood of any organization and particularly how confidence in effective internal communications is built and sustained. And so, the only way to build and nurture trust is to play back, "This is what we're seeing. This is what's not working and we're focusing on. We'll get back to you. This is what is working, and look at what we're hearing from everyone in these feedback loops and channels. Look at what we're hearing from everyone in terms of what's working and how we want to continue to do more of that." So, that's a quick overview of the four. But of course, there's levels of detail and thinking within each.

Amelia Dahmer: Yeah, and it's interesting because you mentioned taking ownership, but then it's a bit of IC, a bit of HR, a bit of IT, and they do all need to take ownership, and in your exact example, they need to work together. So, do you see, typically, that one department over the other often takes the lead, and then there's a really successful idea of collaboration, or do they all equally play their part? What does the best layout for that ownership look like in your opinion?

Preston Lewis: The short answer to that great question is the answer typically lies in the leadership, and no surprise, but it's who is bold and collaborative enough. We talk often about what makes a modern leader versus a traditional leader. And this is not going to be a surprise, but what we find to be effective in "modern," I'm doing air quotes, leadership, are those that are truly effective at defining vision and collaborating to see that through. So, sometimes it is IT. And it may be a modern IT leader that really understands digital employee experience and understand the value of partnering with HR to implement that or to build that type of strategy. Sometimes it may be the head of comms. Sometimes there may be a chief communication officer where internal comms may report up to chief communications officer because that person is in a better position based on the nature of the business and the size of the organization, to see that strategy development and activation through. Sometimes it is HR. Back to the HR example, we can tune in pretty quickly to HR leaders that may be a little bit more operational versus strategic. Again, I think everyone knows what I mean. But in order to really be seen and to build the trust and confidence of building a modern employee experience strategy, we find that those that are more strategic people or HR leaders are in a better position to lead the way. So, the answer really depends. But the truth is that we can tune in pretty quickly because of the hundreds of organizations, not just that we've worked with, but I think a lot of communicators and other people in organizations can determine pretty quickly who should be leading the way. And having real blunt conversations about that early and often is traditionally one of the biggest success factors, if you will, on developing and implementing any vision for modern employee experience.

Amelia Dahmer: That's awesome. Now, modern employee experience is constantly changing. So I do not want to hear you say AI. But one word that you think describes the future of the employee experience? You cannot use AI?

Preston Lewis: Personalization. I think that it's not just because of AI. I think that personalization is what enables us to move way beyond that old comment that we hear from especially large manufacturing organization where someone feels like a number. We can personalize content and experiences because we have better, faster access to the data that matters that lets us know what's working or what's not working. Or better tools, easier tools, cheaper tools to listen more often and more effectively. Modern employee experience isn't an organization. When we're working with an organization that has interest or objectives that include facilitating a modern employee experience, typically that's not an organization that's doing an employee engagement survey once every two years or even once a year. Modern experiences require input and data, and personalization does as well. So, in order to facilitate a modern employee experience, we need to make sure that we have mechanisms in place to provide us the insight and feedback in real time so that we can adjust and evolve and we can personalize content within our channels the right ways and in an effective way that reaches people unlike ever before.

Amelia Dahmer: What are those mechanisms? You don't have to say Staffbase, but what are you doing, whether it is a tool or whether it is a survey or just word of mouth? How are you measuring whether those actions you've taken in the employee experience are actually making a real difference?

Preston Lewis: There's the classic qualitative and quantitative answer to how we're measuring effective communication channels. That's the short answer. To the point I was making a minute ago, when we're able to build a dashboard and we have the macro metrics and the micro metrics, so macro metrics might be trust, confidence. Micro metrics might be very channel-specific, so open rates of an email or clicks into a certain piece of content on an intranet.When we define the dashboard that's realistic and sustainable, not super sophisticated and complex and not sustainable, but when we can define that, and we have enrolled a group of people, i.e., back to that cross-functional group of people that may be responsible for the employee experience, when we do that the right way, together, we're looking at the metrics. We're looking at the data. And we're making important decisions on what one, two, or three things — not more than that — we can do to improve the experience. So, maybe it is focusing on improving content on an intranet so that we're reaching more people with the right messages because the intranet is an area where we can hyper-personalize content. That's a really good specific example. Another different example is maybe it is the marketing function and the product function that are the two functions based on the data we see where we really need to improve trust in leadership. So, what can we do to hyper-personalize content for the people in those two organizations so that we can build trust in leadership? That's another macro metric, but a very specific area of focus that we just need to drive a truck through because only then can we make the biggest impact in the business that will enable us to sustain our level of success for communications because leadership sees that we're being very strategic and only focusing our time, energy, and resources on those things that have the biggest impact on the business.

Amelia Dahmer: Yeah, and we're running up on time here. So, to summarize everything you've just said, what would be your biggest piece of advice, or best advice you've ever received? Something you want these listeners to walk away with about internal communications.

Preston Lewis: The advice I like to give to communicators is the same advice that I share with my children, my two daughters, in the context of social media: don't be stupid and make it good. Not being stupid is reference your strategy, use the channel that's effective for that audience, be creative, take an opportunity to try something new, be bold with the imagery versus not, make sure that anything that you're doing is directly in line with what value looks like to the organization, meaning moving a needle on important business measures. And then make it good is take the extra time to be creative, be memorable, pull on those emotional strings. Create something so that the measure of success is, "Oh, I remember that email," or, "I remember that article. It was awesome because I learned something new." We hopefully have more time and a higher level of expectation to be very good, and be very creative, and create engaging communications unlike we ever could before.

Amelia Dahmer: For sure. And for those of us who want to learn more about this, any books or resources that have influenced you that you would recommend on whether it's comms or the employee experience? Just anything for us to go deeper on this.

Preston Lewis: Yeah, I'll go way back on this one. One of the most influential pieces of content, and experiences, and books, and training programs actually that I ever experienced was very early in my career. And it's a great example of thinking that, although it's decades old, it's more relevant and meaningful than ever. As a graphic reporter early in my career, I dove deep into the world David Sibbet and others at The Grove Consultants created. Their focus to this day even on graphic recording, facilitation, and visual communications specifically, including presentation design and others. Learning the fundamentals of facilitation in its truest sense, and how to visualize data and information to align people, teams, and organizations, is something I'd always recommend any communicator do.

Amelia Dahmer: Well, that was great and supportive, and if people want to maybe follow you and learn from you, before we wrap, where can our listeners connect with you and learn more? Anything that you want to plug for yourself, Preston?

Preston Lewis: Well, please just reach out and say hello. I'd like to think that I'm the easiest person to find, and I am a very, very easy resource to get a hold of. I love connecting people to information, to data, to templates and frameworks, or to new opportunities. Of course, I do have the luxury of working with organizations across industries in all shapes and sizes, some of the biggest, most interesting brands in the world, to improve internal and HR communications. I also am involved with quite a few conferences and training programs. Anybody can reach out to me directly on LinkedIn. LinkedIn chat is something I actually do pay attention to. Email is really easy at plewis@segalbenz.com. Please, I will follow up and I will respond. So, if you are interested in learning more about our business and what we do or how we approach our work, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Amelia Dahmer: Awesome. Thanks, Preston. This has been amazing. Thank you for sharing your insights, thank you for chatting, thank you for teaching us all about how comms and HR can truly work together to transform the employee experience. From all of us at You've Got Comms, thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Preston Lewis: Thanks for having me.