Why you should take a deep breath, relax, and let AI speak for your brand on explainer videos fro...

Welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is a podcast to help anyone with something to say to get noticed. I focus on the intersection of communications, technology, and business. I believe that PR encompasses internal teams, partners, and customers. So today we are going to learn about 12 employee engagement statistics you need to know in 2020. from the organization People Managing People. These are the views of the author Ben Aston. Let's dive in. The fact that 2020 has been a challenging year for many workers worldwide because of COVID-19 is well recognized. For instance, Tamarind Nelson, a researcher at Amnesty International, produced an article that uses the words nightmares, exhaustion, and burnout when describing the pandemic's emotional toll. But what does this mean for employee engagement? To answer the questions, this article looks at employee engagement statistics that people managing people need to know in 2020. We believe that numbers don't lie. From the statistics, managers can find ways of reacting to issues related to employee engagement. Before we look at the 12 employee engagement statistics we have gathered for this article, we will define employee engagement, provide some reasons why employee engagement matters, and then briefly look at some factors impacting employee engagement. What is employee engagement? For both the organization and the employees to meet their respective goals, there has to be a relationship. This relationship can be described and understood through a concept called employee engagement. The goal is to answer a fundamental question: What is an engaged employee? A comprehensive definition of employee engagement is provided by EngageForSuccess.com, a voluntary movement that promotes employee engagement. It describes employee engagement as: a workplace approach resulting in the right conditions for all members of an organization to give of their best each day, committed to their organization's goals and values, motivated to contribute to organizational success, with an enhanced sense of their own well-being. Writing for Forbes.com, Kevin Cruz, the author of the book Great Leaders Have No Rules, advises that employee engagement is not the same as employee happiness. Cruz argues that an employee can be happy and still not be productive. He also says that employee engagement is not the same as employee satisfaction because an employee can be satisfied and still fail to go the extra mile. From the insights above, employee engagement can be defined as a situation where an employee is emotionally invested in their company. This means that the employee cares whether the company succeeds, will defend it when it is criticized, and approaches their work with enthusiasm. This implies the commitment your people have to the organization and its goals. How do you identify engagement in employees? Such an employee will perform beyond expectations. They exhibit high energy, work hard to maintain positive relationships with colleagues, and are happy to assist new employees in finding their feet. Engaged employees are willing to accept change and offer solutions to challenges. They become the people that your company relies on.

Why employee engagement matters. Employee engagement results in employees who are more committed to their jobs, will do their best even when the manager is not watching, and are willing to go the extra mile. This is why Cruz proposes that engaged employees lead to better business outcomes. The positive results of high employee engagement are supported by results from several other studies and surveys done by reputable organisations, such as the Harvard Business Review and the American analytics and advisory company Gallup. The Harvard Business Review Analytics Services surveyed more than 500 business executives, and 71% of the respondents ranked employee engagement as very important to achieving overall business success. This implies that businesses that have engaged employees are likely to have a competitive advantage. They are also more profitable. Gallup's study concluded that the behaviours of highly engaged business units result in 21% greater profitability. The same study says that when employees are engaged, they are less likely to leave. It says that highly engaged business units achieve 59% less turnover in high-turnover organisations and 24% less turnover in low-turnover organisations. Bamboo.com, the provider of HR software for small and medium businesses, supports the view that engaged employees are more likely to stay in companies for longer and contribute to business success. It notes, employees who feel engaged are proven to not only be more productive and content in their job role, but they are also more loyal to the company and more driven to contribute to overall business success. It is also more likely that when employees are emotionally invested in a company's success, they will provide the best service to the customer, have improved morale, and take less days off from work. This results in better sales, higher profit, and happier shareholders.

So what factors impact employee engagement?

Well, let me just answer that. That was pretty wild. That was text taken from an article online she shared with me by the People Managing People team. And I then entered that content, 1,000 characters in this particular case, into a platform called talkia.com. And Talkia is one of a number of platforms now that we can use to take our text and convert it into any number of voices. For a remarkably low price. So let's just look, shall we, at 2 services that you can use. I've currently got the Talkia service because Talkia came with a bundled price along with the platform called Doodly and Toonly, which are 2 other animation explainer video platforms. So when I bought it, I was able to buy a lifetime license for just under $100. But if you want to buy a more full-time license, then at the moment you can pay just $20 a month for that, or about $34 if you pay monthly. Another one is called Speechelo. So I thought I would just go through a couple of the sort of ideas and features that you might want to look at. So Talkia and Speechelo are 2 platforms for video content creators, but also could be a podcast creator like me, or someone's creating explainer videos where they don't want to hire a voiceover talent, where maybe there are lots of short segments, for example, or where the budget just doesn't run to having voiceovers. You can then use these platforms. I use Tokia and You put the text into a dialog box and you can choose from a number of different characters. Now if we look at Speechelo first, it's the one that I don't use, but there's a very handy review on Video Tool Review, and the standard Speechelo has some 23 languages and really supporting every accent that you could possibly need and has some 30 voices. So you can have male, female, you can have young, old, you can have Russian, Ukrainian, Indian, and so on. And Speechelo is $47 as a one-time payment, and also you can upgrade to a Pro version for $47 every 3 months. So Speechelo's pricing model is very affordable. It also then allows you to download the audio file as an MP3, just as I've done in fact with the audio that you've heard already that I made on the Talkier using my MacBook Pro sitting in the car waiting for my daughter to finish her dance class. Now here you've got background music as well that you can add But in Speechelo, that is an option only if you get the Pro version. There's also a limit with Speechelo of 700 words or 5,000 characters at a time, but in the Pro version you can have unlimited characters. So that can be the limitation. So when I was creating this article in Turkey, once I reached 1,000 characters, which is about 4 paragraphs, and you heard there about 4 minutes of reading, then I was kind of out of runway, so I would need to upgrade for that. But with Talkia, the standard version has 6 languages, which frankly I felt is enough, but they also have different accents, so you have different sort of dialogue different dialects within the language. The danger with some of those, like you heard the Russian, becomes quite thick and becomes almost unintelligible. But if you are playing something for different audience groups around the world, but all speaking English, you could have though a different character speaking for local context, which is very powerful, of course. So for the standard version, Talkier is on the website $39 a month and $69 a month if you want to buy the Enterprise. What I did find though was that they do bundles, so I bought the Toonly and then was offered afterwards the Talkier, which was great, and then I've also got the Doodly. So they're all from the same company. So again, with the download you can export the content into MP3, which is very powerful. And with the Toolkit, you get 30 background music options, which, you know, frankly is enough. What I'm doing is I'm doing it in, uh, my, um, normal, just clean vanilla, then I'm downloading and adding my own backing track using my Hindenburg. So the, the 2 platforms make it very easy And I have to say that the software on the Talkia is very easy to use, not particularly good for editing, and you do the audio transcript and it drops it into the track below, and then you can preview that and listen to it, which is perfectly functional, not necessarily great for editing, but if you want to caption, say, a 3-minute explainer video, for example, you can do that and then export that as I've done and make it into a very passable file. So there we are. We have Speechelo and Talkia, both of which enable you to take text and make it into audio, multiple different accents, 2 genders of course, and with a voiceover, with a backing track for music, and all that for a monthly cost much less than the cost of even just one voiceover. Very flexible, very quick, so really good fun to play with. So with that, thanks for listening to this episode of Speak PR along with my talkier voiceover talent. I hope that you've enjoyed this. My name is Jim James. If you would like to subscribe, please do. If you're interested in getting our weekly newsletter, come to eastwestpr.com. And if you're interested in a mastermind, then do please come to speakpr.co where we have the sign-up for the 5-stage Speak PR methodology where we teach how to build your own public relations program without the need for an agency and using technology-assisted Thank you once again, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating and quite possibly just letting an AI character generator speak for you.