Comcast: Using Viva Engage to educate, excite and engage nearly 100,000 employees by investing in a culture of employee ambassadorship
AMER | Viva Engage Festival 2023
At Comcast, Viva Engage is used to provide resources and foster communication that cultivates a positive and engaged workforce. Find out how Darnell McAlpin who is Sr. Employee Communications Manager at Comcast uses Viva Engage as a strategic tool to educate, excite and engage nearly 100,000 employees by investing in a culture of employee ambassadorship.
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I am Darnell McAlpin. Darnell and I have recently been promoted to the director of 360 Moments and Ambassadorship, and today I'm really going to take us on a journey.
So I love space. I am a space fanatic, but I really wanted to be inspired by that by saying that space is known for being really known for the endless possibilities. And that is exactly how Comcast has been thinking of Viva Engage when it comes to engagement amongst our employees.
Really leaning into a platform that can take our engagement from our leaders to one another to really just celebrating a true culture of engagement to that next level. So I'm going to take us on the journey, the Comcast journey, as I would say, as we launch to Viva Engage in our organization. First, I'm going to talk about launch.
I'll take us all the way back to July 2021, up into its first year. But we'll really dive into some early insights that we saw, how our employees were adopting to this platform. It was completely new, and just how that was going to then take us to our second portion, which is navigating.
We really wanted to set a North Star for our employees in terms of how to use Viva Engage with a shared purpose. And, of course, it wouldn't be a success story if I didn't talk about the last portion, which is orbit, and really being inspired by we really use Viva Engage to be a seamless platform, as seamless as planets orbit around the sun. So that is enough with these space analogies today.
Let's talk about launch, and let's take it all the way back to July of 2021. To set the stage for everyone, Comcast is about an organization of nearly 100,000 employees. And before we got to this point, we didn't have a platform like Viva Engage.
There was not a space for our employees to connect with each other, to engage with one another, like they do outside of Comcast on social media, but for our organization. So this is completely new. It was a concept that we really had to adopt as an organization and really lean into it.
So on this next slide, I really want to talk about just findings from our first year. This is from July 2021 to October in 2022, about a good year and some change in terms of organization. And again, this is the first time that we've ever had a platform like this.
And looking at the numbers, you might say, hey, not too shabby, not too shabby. We had just under 40 million seen or read posts on Viva Engage. And of that came from over 200,000 posts and then, of course, over 600,000 reactions.
Loving the reactions, loving the excitement, but in true Comcast fashion, we said, we can do better. And what's the success? And we really wanted to look at what this meant for our organization. At a first glance, you would say, okay, over 100,000 employees, 200,000 posts, everyone posted two times on Viva Engage, success completed.
Not quite. And we really wanted to dive into what this meant for our numbers. So, again, we had some early insights in our first year.
And we really found three core themes in terms of digging deeper into what this meant for our organization. First and foremost is that Viva Engage, formerly known as Yammer, appealed to a very niche audience. So, unfortunately, everyone in our organization did not post two times.
It was actually a very small group of early adopters that loved and lived and breathed Viva Engage, which is great, but it was, again, that very small group. It wasn't as expansive and isn't adopted as we thought it was, looking at the numbers initially. And for some, it was like, yes, I love social media.
Makes sense. I'm in. Tell me no more.
And then you had the folks that were saying, I hate social media. I don't even have TikTok. I didn't even download Facebook.
It's not for me whatsoever. And in a sense, we just had some employees that just didn't get it. They were saying, hey, in true transparency, I'm just here to do my job, clock out, go home.
I'm not trying to post or share or see what somebody across the country is doing. And we really had an opportunity to build that and incorporate it into our Comcast culture. Secondly, and I really, really did try to look for a different word other than random, but I couldn't think of one, activity was just that.
And some people would say that's great. And in some senses, it is great. But we saw some posts.
We have some very active users that say good morning and good night literally every day on Viva Engage, which I love, you know, but there was no engagement. They weren't getting a lot of likes or people weren't commenting back. We also saw in some senses of terms that since this is a new platform to Comcast, our employee communicators were also looking for those new ways to use the tool.
How do we do it? How do we keep it organic? How do we make sure that it's not forced but we're still using this engagement platform for two-way communication or engagement that we knew that Viva Engage can get to? And then overarching, activity was not consistent. So, of course, we saw spikes around holidays or really big events when it came to Comcast. But we also saw some drastic dips in engagement and activity that was not consistent.
And we were really looking for a world where Viva Engage wasn't a situational use case. It was really part of our culture that was continuous and organic and wasn't something that we had to ignite or light the fire under as employee communicators. And lastly, and I promise, promise, promise, Microsoft, this is a good news story.
I will get to that point. But our leaders just didn't get it. They weren't engaged.
A vast majority did not see it as an incredible channel for them to connect with their peers or for two-way communication. In some senses, they were just like, no, thanks, I've got enough, old-fashioned, or they just didn't want to add something new to their organization or to their processes and procedures. So set the stage.
That was year one. Some opportunities there, obviously. But going into year two, we had a plan.
We are not going to settle for mediocre engagement. We knew the possibilities of Viva Engage, and we really worked to set a north star to help our employees navigate for these three focus areas. So one, of course, we wanted to build that desire.
We had that organic group, those early adopters, and that was amazing. But we wanted to expand the love, the Viva love, in Comcast by building that desire across our organization. Secondly, we have to, have to, have to tackle our leaders.
And it wasn't saying, hey, post on it, just have visibility. It truly was a channel that our leaders could have to recognize, but also just to interact with their leaders. We heard from our employees that, hey, we really want more opportunities to connect with leadership.
And what better place than Viva to take two seconds, post an announcement, this is what I'm doing today, and with a like, a click, a comment, et cetera, you can connect with a leader just like that in an effortless manner. So really getting our leaders on board. And lastly, we really wanted to correct our, announce a shared purpose.
We wanted to not tell our employees necessarily what to post, but we wanted to have a collective reason of why we go to Viva, what it was for. That way, it didn't feel random. It didn't feel like an ad into our organization.
It was a way for us to celebrate one another, but, of course, engage and connect. So on this next slide, I'm going to talk about our answer, or one of the answers of how we boost or plan to boost engagement in our second year of having Viva introduced to Comcast. And the answer was employee ambassadorship.
So I'm going to take a couple steps back and really talk about how we define employee ambassadorship at Comcast, but also how we were planning to incorporate this into Viva. So in short, the definition of an ambassador is on the screen, but we really wanted to have our employees be connected to the business in everything that we did. Not necessarily just saying, hey, talk about our products and services in your communities.
Well, yes, that's definitely a part of it. But also celebrating it, being empowered by it, being motivated by it, and lastly, celebrating everything that they do every day to power our business. In short, I will say employee ambassadorship was looked at as a key tactic of how Comcast is going to fiercely compete to win in our industry.
Studies show that the way that we think about advertising today is not how it was a couple years ago, five years ago, ten years ago. In fact, 85% of our consumers are more likely to buy a product or to try something new based off of word of mouth or trust or relationship that they have with somebody that they know versus seeing a commercial, an ad, or a billboard that has that disconnect. Today's society is looking for those personal connections.
They don't trust what they see on the Internet. They think everything is, you've got to accept cookies, or the Internet is watching us, or that it's not really for me. It's just something that a business wants to do.
So we really look at employee ambassadorship as a key tactic to leverage our employee voices, leverage the work that they already do every day, but empower them to be ambassadors in their communities and use those voices to expand our reach in the communities in our footprint. So on the screen here, you see our six goals. This is our goal for this year.
We wanted to maximize the impact. We wanted to reward our employees for being employee ambassadors. We wanted to incentivize them and really bring them into what we do every day as a business.
We wanted to, of course, then leverage their voices. Employee storytelling is a key tactic, and you'll see later in the presentation that we do lean into that when it comes to Viva Engage. We, of course, wanted to celebrate our wins and really celebrate our culture of fiercely competing to win.
And another caveat, we also wanted to celebrate on Viva Engage. It made it very easy for us. And lastly, we wanted to empower and integrate employee ambassadorship into everything that we do.
We all power Comcast. We wanted to celebrate that and equip our employees to, again, celebrate that and be empowered to talk about it in anywhere that they sit. And lastly, in true fashion, leaders love a number.
So we wanted to incorporate our leaders, our employees, to have 35% of our employee base engaged in our employee ambassadorship program. And I cannot say that enough, that in another tease, we achieved this goal, but we could not have achieved this goal at all if it wasn't for Viva Engage. And if it wasn't for the reporting that Soup Analytics helped us share with our leaders to even get this number.
So with that came the creation of LevelX. All the leaders looked at me. They said, Darnell, we need an employee ambassadorship program.
And I said, I got you. And, of course, it was in partnership with my team. But LevelX became a true part of our culture, and it was really, again, a way for us to celebrate our employees, activate them in our communities, and really just be empowered by everything that Comcast does for not only ourselves, but our employees and the communities that we serve.
So break it down for you. We're coming back to Viva, I promise, I promise. But LevelX does three things for our organization.
It empowers our employees to be enthusiasts, knowing about our Xfinity and Comcast business products. I like to say, if you have any Harry Potter fans on the call, it's being our Hermione Grangers. Know about it.
Be the know-it-all. Know what you're talking about. Go out there and talk about it.
We also empower our employees to be influencers. And the way that we think about influencers externally, of course, TC, like a Kim Kardashian on Instagram. But the way that we think about it for Comcast, no bikini photos, but we are encouraging our employees to boost our competitive spirit internally.
If there's something that I know that a peer knows that they don't know, we can use employee voices to spread that message. That sentiment that I shared about that 85% trust factor for consumers also applies to word of mouth internally when it comes to employee communications. And then lastly, kind of self-explanatory, we want our employees to be ambassadors in the communities.
Talk about everything that they know with the communities that they serve. But for today's presentation, I'm going to talk about influencer and the relationship between how our employees were able to use their voices to connect with their peers on a platform across. If I was in Florida, I can connect with somebody in Seattle and vice versa to share those messages.
And, of course, to boost that competitive spirit. Let's talk about how we measure this with Viva Engage. We created a hashtag.
We love hashtags. And it's hashtag level X. What better one? But we said that to say it really had that North Star, that shared purpose. When employees used or saw that hashtag, it was an easy way for us to associate, okay, this post is about employee ambassadorship.
It was ways for our leaders to promote employee ambassadorship. And selfishly, it was a way for us to track how much our employees were utilizing that hashtag and engaging with hashtag level X. Secondly, we needed to minimize the noise. Now, I can't emphasize enough.
We do not want to tell our employees what to talk about and how to use Viva Engage. But by creating moments, a trending topic, if you want to use that term, we were able to see a boost of engagement around a shared sentiment. We're all talking about X product.
We're all celebrating SWOOP analytics together. And we then in turn saw a peak in an increase of engagement when it came to Viva Engage. And lastly, delegation.
This is an essential tool of how we got our leader voices pretty active and prominent on Viva Engage and how we were able to incorporate them into this model. SWOOP plug. I hope all of my SWOOP counterparts are proud.
And they did not ask me to do this. I promise. But I could not tell my story and track any of these metrics if it wasn't for the SWOOP's analytic platform.
My colleague, Araceli, she's in the chat. She connects with Jim and Coco all the time. And the partnership is truly essential to how we track success.
So just wanted to plug and say thank you for that. But let's talk about Orbit. How we got to the space of really creating a seamless culture of using Viva Engage to connect with one another.
I said at the top of the engagement or I said at the top of my presentation, we wanted to use Viva Engage to educate, excite, and engage our Comcast employees into everything that we do through employee ambassadorship. And I'm going to show you some examples of what we saw on Viva Engage and in our platform. First, this is a screenshot from SWOOP, another SWOOP plug.
But these are the metrics that we saw from October 22 to now, October 2023, in our second year of having Viva Engage. And these are all associated solely to Hashtag Level X. And in our first year, we saw over 12,000 unique users in our organization interacting or using Hashtag Level X. Those came from over 2,500 posts. But what I really want to tell the story here is that even if we only had 2,500 posts, which is a lot, let me not say only.
We had over 16,000 replies, which is meaning while we might have had some, that's like 2,500 influencers that were connecting and having conversations that literally increased eight times with their peers. So we saw so much engagement, so much activity in the comments and really utilizing our employee voices and personas to start the conversation. And that 6,000 plus number is really showing us that the conversation was happening actively on Viva Engage.
And, of course, 73,000 plus reactions like can't even say it enough. So on the screen, you can see some examples. This is a post that I posted on Viva Engage.
And it's really a space that our employees were able to learn about, our employee ambassadorship program and the point system, but also comment with each other. And the way that our program is designed is that by engaging with more peers, you can earn a point for every peer that you engage. So you can see here there was over 330 comments in one thread.
And that was our peers and our employees communicating with each other, interacting with each other, asking questions, and also encouraging each other to help each other raise points. And then on the right-hand side, this is just a normal example, purely just seamless. It was a part of our everyday employee culture.
We have an event called CTJ, and we blended Level X there. And it was a way for our employees to celebrate an already existing campaign while using hashtag Level X for something that they would have years and years before we even introduced Viva Engage to Comcast. Another example is how we were minimizing the noise, going to that second goal.
We created what we like to call surround sound moments for our employee culture. That really helped, again, create one moment where we can all celebrate, engage, and interact and dive deep into without being distracted by a whole bunch of other things happening in the organization. And this is a key strategy that we saw that really boost engagement within Viva Engage, but also helped our employees focus on the moments that truly mattered.
We used Tony Murphy, our SVP of sales and marketing, getting our leaders in there, get in there, to promote our Black Friday deals. Hopefully, everyone had a chance to take advantage, but it was a way for us to say, hey, comment, yes, hashtag Level X. And in the comments, we had almost 90 employees saying, yes, Level X, I'm ready, I'm geared up, and I'm ready to go loud and proud about our Black Friday deals in their communities. Another example, and one of my personal favorites, is in the top right-hand corner.
You can see some drawings of our Super Mario Bros. characters. This summer, we released a movie, the Super Mario Bros.
movie, in partnership with our NBCUniversal environment. And we created a surround sound moment to say, hey, let's tap into this nostalgic moment. Share the ways that you remember touching or playing Super Mario Bros., whether it was early on with the Nintendo, on the Wii, Mario Kart, et cetera, and come in here in an organic way, just for us to celebrate this moment that we were doing from a pop culture perspective.
And this was someone's child who drew Super Mario Bros. character, and this employee just shared it on Viva Engage. And it got over 1,200 likes, so many comments, and it was a way for us to talk about the business, but in such an organic way that our employees were driving on their own.
We did not ask this employee to share it. This is just organic usage, and this is exactly what we wanted to see when it came to Viva Engage. And lastly, another pop culture moment was Oppenheimer versus the Barbie movie.
And Oppenheimer was another one of our NBCUniversal films, and we just took advantage of it. We put a poll on Viva Engage. Very easy.
No paragraph. Vote. Are you seeing Oppenheimer? Are you seeing Barbie? And we had the hashtag Barbieheimer.
And so many times in so many meetings with our SLT, I had to describe what Barbieheimer was, but I'm glad that I see some laughs and engagement on the chat. And it was just an easy way, again, for us to interact with our employees, let them vote, and go on about their day and about a minute of engagement. Some of my final examples would just be more examples of how we leveraged leader voices on Viva Engage.
Tony Speller is our SVP of tech ops and engineering, and he is by far the leader with the most, let's say, Viva fame in our community. If he posts, we don't have to post it as an announcement. We don't have to post it or do a communication to point people to Viva.
He's going to get the engagement. And what he does is he really leans into the power of engaging with his employees. On the left-hand side, we launched our Xfinity 10G network, which was a huge moment for our business, and it was really part of just celebrating the evolution in technology.
We were the first in the world to launch this technology, and Tony really wanted to celebrate that and lean into it. But what I encourage him and applaud him for is that he also had experts on his team that were ready in the chat to answer any questions that our employees had about this moment. And that was just saying, hey, we used a leader voice to create a surround sound moment.
We got the engagement, but he really leaned into that two-way communication. If anyone had a question, there were people on standby to answer it immediately, and that chat was visible to everybody in the business. So it was just a way that we were utilizing Viva Engage to, again, spread awareness and education, but letting our employers connect with employees for anyone that had a question.
And then secondly, just a fun one. We have an event, and he posted it in literally maybe a day. It had almost 10,000 views and so many likes and comments, and I just want to applaud Tony for being our Comcast celebrity through Viva Engage.
If you need an internal influencer, Tony is the guy to reach out to. And my last example as I reach out with this, please forgive the blanked-out names. Just for privacy reasons, I blanked out the names of our employees.
But this is just an example of an organic post that we want to see on Comcast. An employee took time out of his day to share a story from one of his peers. It wasn't even about himself, and this is how one of our technicians started with a troubleshooting call and ended up turning into this massive, really good moment for our community.
They went into their house. They got them set up. They gifted them a television after really connecting with one of our customers, and it was just a feel-good story that wasn't forced.
It wasn't something that we planned. It wasn't a PR stunt. And just by sharing the story, it got over 40,000 views.
It was seen, and it was shared across the enterprise. One story that happened in Chicago is being celebrated in Miami, in Colorado, in Denver, in California, Washington, you name it. And these are the kind of organic engagement that we were looking for, that we knew that Viva Engage can bring to us, and that we are continuously striving for to see within Comcast and Viva Engage.
So let's talk about it. At the top of my presentation, I talked about our first-year numbers, and now I talked about our plan to boost engagement and to see more of that organic culture. So this is from July 2021 to October 2022.
This next slide I'm going to show year-to-date October 2022 to October 23. Let's see the jump. Drum roll.
Boom. Don't want to pat ourselves on the back, but we saw a huge jump in engagement. We saw over a 44% increase in the amount of messages that were seen, reaching over 73 million views.
We saw a 47% increase in the amount of posts, and we also saw a 48% increase in terms of reactions, over a million. And the biggest thing here is that we saw a 72% or 73% total Viva Engage engagement increase across the board, and really just getting into that testament. We're two years in.
Sure, we still have things to learn and things to implement in our Comcast culture. But it just speaks to itself. If you give your employee base a North Star, or it could be multiple North Stars, give a shared purpose and really lean into the power of leader voices, you can, too, see an increase in engagement.
And it would go out without saying, I just want to say some thank yous really quick before we get into our Q&A. I thank Jemma and Coco for coming down to the OANA office and helping us really lean into the power of soup analytics. But I cannot take credibility for any of these numbers that you see on the screen solely in partnership to Chris Herrera, Kirsten Culberson, Stephanie Beard, Jason Lohr, RSLA, Kamachu.
I can list off names and names and names in the Comcast space, but we could not have seen these numbers without their partnership and their expertise. And I will end with saying, this is year two, and we have plenty of more years when it comes to partnership with Viva Engage. And to this day, we're seeing more and more engagement, and I'm happy to keep you all along the journey.
Thank you for being on that journey with me. Of course, it wouldn't be a true presentation if it wasn't for Q&A, and I wanted to make sure we had enough time allotted. I think we have about six or five minutes for Q&A, so please, I wasn't looking at the chat, but let me see what we can do.
That was absolutely amazing, Darnell, absolutely amazing. Just thank you. And as you said, obviously, Coco and I had the chance this year to come and see you, and we were just blown away by the team, obviously working with Chris as well.
You're doing some incredible stuff. So thank you for taking the time out to share. Yeah, as you said, we have five minutes for questions, so I'm just going to go through the Q&A.
But it would be great if you could just continue answering any of them, but we're not going to have time. Lots of conversations happening in chat. So let's go with, I'll see, Susan Harmony's popped in a message.
Are users or leaders taking advantage of storylines? Are you using storylines at Comcast? Great question. We are likely using storylines. And I think the thing that we saw within Comcast is that storylines are most effective when someone has a lot of followers on Viva Engage.
So currently we're working on getting into that following culture and encouraging our employees to follow certain leaders. I do use storylines and I'm seeing some early engagement, but definitely an opportunity as we look into our third year with Viva. Absolutely.
Sally's asked, does Comcast communications team post on behalf of certain leaders or do you encourage them to post? I would say a mix of both. I am very transparent, so I post as a lot of our leaders. But I think we use that as a tactic for them to see just the potential in terms of engagement.
And since then, there are plenty of leaders that have taken the rights, the will, per se, and they are posting and commenting and engaging on their own. So a mix of both. Brilliant.
Thank you. And I think was there one there? Albert here. So he had a question on the surround sound moments.
So are you exclusively using Viva Engage for them? Would you? I think because Albert's saying his challenge would be that the news would be delivered on email or intranet. So folks, he just doesn't feel like people would go to Viva Engage. I see what you're saying.
No. So I would say Viva Engage is the way that we look at surround sound moments is from a communications team's perspective. Those are going to be moments that are being driven by our employee comms team, not necessarily the only things that are being posted by employees or leaders.
But we look at surround sound moments of using Viva Engage as a channel. So, for example, when we launched 10G, yes, there were emails and yes, there were other channel communications. But we also had a tactic for Viva Engage for us to talk about those moments so that an employee experience would have a full surround sound moment, regardless of what platform they were using to talk about our Xfinity 10G network.
So it was more of a relationship with Viva and not the sole tactic. That's amazing. And I think we'll finish it off with this final question that Rachel's asked.
We're hoping to launch Viva Engage next year. What's your biggest piece of advice for their comms strategy? The biggest piece of advice would say, give it time. I think what I see with Viva Engage is that it truly lives in the spirit of longevity.
Even from a post, you can post something on a Monday and see so much engagement throughout that week or even the following week. And the story, what I told us from year one to year two, it takes time. It takes adoption for people to get used to it.
It takes time for people to understand Viva. But with that time, you will see the results that you're looking for. So I would say day one, don't hope for 70 million views on something.
Meet the speakers:
Darnell McAlpin
Senior Manager, Employee Communications
Comcast
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