INTRANET TOUR | Enhancing the Employee Experience @ Mead & Hunt

All right, let's go. My name is Susan Strom. I'm the Chief Client Officer here at Knowledge Architecture. And with me today are a couple dear friends, Jennifer Fulmer and Kathy Schumann. Kathy is the employee Experience and Communications Director at meadahunt. And Jennifer is a knowledge manager. And you are in an intranet tour, which is a place where we share stories of how our clients are using synthesis to help evolve and grow their AC firms through knowledge management. Today we're spotlighting Mead and Hunt's Internet, the station. The station is a hub for firm news and important announcements, information about who works at Mead Hunt and what they do, and lots of knowledge about the unique culture and practice at Mead Hunt. It's one of the first places employees experience Meadhunt when they join the firm. And it's something that most employees are experiencing every single day. So when Meena Hunt did an employee survey recently, it is not super surprising that employees had feedback and ideas about how they could make the station even more useful for them. I think what's really unique and cool is that that feedback came to the station team in a manner that was very thoughtful, that was very organized and was super actionable. So Jennifer and Kathy are going to do a couple things today. They're going to take us behind the scenes of that employee survey process. How they went from general employee survey findings to these very actionable insights Mean. And Hunt is bigger than a lot of the gay community firms out there. But I think that you're going to find that this process can scale down as well as up, and I hope you find it inspiring. The other thing they're going to do is actually show us what they did on the station based on that employee feedback. So, without further ado, I'd like to hand it over to Kathy and Jennifer to take us into your world.

Thank you. Susan, wonderful introduction as always. I'm going to share my screen, make sure that's all working before I continue.

Yeah.

Okay, perfect. Well, it's great to see everybody. We're really excited to be on this call today, especially as two people who have received a huge benefit from this community over the years. I'm really grateful for what KA has put together. And hello to all our other friends out there who we haven't seen in a while and we're looking forward to hopefully seeing soon. So a little bit about our company, Mead and Hunt is getting ready to celebrate our 125th anniversary next year. So this is our founder, Daniel Mead, who's pretty nationally recognized for his contributions to engineering Ethics, as well as being a brilliant engineer and doing the right thing by people and for the benefit of people. So these are the ideals that really helped craft our current purpose statement, which is we shape the future by putting people first. So this is who we are today. We're a multidiscipline firm. As you can see, we're pretty spread out around the country, about 55 plus offices. Most of them have somewhere between 25 to 75 people in them. We have some with just a few people, and then we have a few much larger offices. In addition, we have about 200 plus fully remote employees, meaning that they are nowhere near an office. And we've grown pretty rapidly. So we're about a little over 1400. When I joined 25 years ago, we were, I think somewhere around 140. But our growth has been mostly through mergers and acquisitions. Our last two occurred in the last two years. That brought on about 170 kind of off the bat. And then every year we're onboarding somewhere between 240 people. So really we heavily rely on our Internet to keep us connected. So I know everyone enjoys seeing Internet tours. We're going to spend a little time bouncing back and forth today between the presentation and the tour. But I'm going to give you a real quick overview of it right now. So let's see if we can get over here. Okay. So you should be seeing the home screen of the station. We've actually been working with KA for about 11 years, I think. We did the Synthesis 6 upgrade last summer. And we're still kind of adjusting and in a process of continuous improvement, which we actually really love. These are our primary communities up here at the top. So this probably looks pretty familiar to anyone else who's using synthesis 6. A lot of these, the terminology we adapted into the same. So corporate Hub is really kind of human resources, finance. Most of our corporate practices, all of our technical areas, marketing and bd and then technology is it. But a lot of our software and our programming kind of around that. And then we've got a learning community out here. So homepage of the station, we have a hot right now section we use quite a bit, I would say. I updated about once a week kind of with whatever we're addressing, timeliness of whatever we're addressing, deadlines, things like that that we're trying to campaign with. So that's a little bit about how that works. What I love about talking about the station is that I love telling employees that everything is available from the homepage. So this probably sounds familiar to any of you on the Internet, but a lot of people want a homepage designation. And this hover navigation system, this little menu really allows us to explain and share with people. It's like, well, absolutely. You can get anything you need from the homepage. And so that's kind of how we talk about it all the time. This is our primary corporate sense, corporate communication. So it comes out here first, before anywhere else. An example of how I support that. So my role is in communications and I do a monthly bulletin. This is about all I do with email these days. But you can see this is all information that was previously announced on the station. And here are all the links to all the posts. So this is kind of, like I said, a support to that. Everything comes out here first. We get the most engagement over here in the break room. I don't know because it's the name, the break room. Everyone likes to post over there. It's really supposed to be for fun and entertainment purposes and, and kind of connecting as people. Right. But we, we get a lot of things over here, which is great. This is where we get people comfortable with posting. Let me see here. We've got really great engagement. We're very lucky to have engagement from our CEO, COO Chro and a few other leaders. If you would ask me a year or two ago, I probably wouldn't have said that. So we've been really lucky to have that. But my strategy is it just takes time. Again, we're using that as our single source and we've had some people who've really adopted it because we are so spread out that we use some fun posts, I guess, to connect and engage. And I feel like our engagement is really strong. I would say generally at any time that I've been looking at our analytics, we've got about 80% of employees who are seeing the posts and about 50% of them who are opening them on a sort of steady basis. Susan could tell me if it's better than that, but some examples of some stuff we do here to increase that engagement. So random acts of kindness, that's what REOK stands for, was part of our We Care week. And that is a big. This was the first time we ever did it, but kind of a big giving back week. And this was one way we were trying to connect all of our employees across the country. We haven't done anything like that in a really long time. We ended up having two or three hundred people participate in this week, which is huge. So essentially office, our teams we think we could have up to 30 teams, got $100 and they could band together and just do something lovely in their community. Didn't need to be charitable. It could have just been a nice gesture. So you can see kind of all of the engagement we had throughout. So that's one way we've connected the cool part of that story. This group right here is our, one of our newest acquisitions. They actually this is post from May 23rd. They joined May 1st. The event ran May 13th through 17th and they just jumped right on board with it. So I wouldn't say every group has, has done as well, but this was awesome. We were really excited. They. They got their hundred dollars. They, they engaged. They figured out how to use the station with no training. So that was really cool. Okay, well, we are here to talk mostly about the engagement survey. So I'm going to jump back into that and get one more thing up here to get my notes. Okay. So the engagement survey is a huge deal for us only because we, we have a lot of type of measurements that we do. We're trying to reach as many team members as possible. We seek feedback regularly, but every once in a while we will do a bigger effort. So in 2023, last summer we did this and we rolled out finally implant engagement survey. It had been more than five years. A little embarrassing to say that now because I know a lot of firms like to do them every year or two. I'm not sure how that took so long, but it was, it's, it was great to do it. But really this kind of allowed us to live out our purpose and values. If we operate under this idea of continuous improvement, it's typically because we're also, we're looking to identify any pain points employees have or any way we can celebrate our employees. So what are we doing? Well, what can be improved upon? And we're really trying to create a constant feedback loop. So we were using some smaller mechanisms to do that in the past five years. This was a much bigger effort. So the why or the how we customized an employee survey template. So I went ahead one there. We customized an employee survey template just a little bit, not a lot because by not customizing at a time, we were able to benchmark our results against other user results. I'll show you that in a little bit. And then we ended up sharing the results to the company and then developed those results into action with those employee focus groups. We took it kind of a step further. I'll show you the timeline on that next. We did work with McLean. It's an HR consulting firm that we do quite a bit with. This was our first actually big effort with them. The Mead and Hunt HR team was involved and then our C suite for our leadership team helped us craft where this was going. So in terms of rollout, here's how everything went. May, In June of 2023, there was a survey is coming, sort of multiple promotions with that, including sharing out at meetings, communication through email, even just really stressing the importance. By July of 2023, we launched the survey. And then by September 2023 we had those survey results report live. So kind of what happened in the. In July, you know, it's summer. We were a little nervous about putting it out at that time, just with vacations and travel and everything. But we ended up getting like a 71% response rate, which we think was really great. Between July and September, we got the results back from McLean pretty quickly and went through those as nature and the leadership team. And then this September is when those survey results were reported out to the whole company. About two weeks later, we conducted focus group sessions. So it was a rapid gathering of participants to take part in that. So I'll share about that in a minute. In October of 2023, just a few weeks later, we had our focus group results back from McLean and that we were able to share those next steps with employees. So this has been the fun part. So from the end of fall, November 2023 to literally just this past week, we have been spending time tying all those survey results to actions. So kind of during this time, that whole stretch of time, we've been, you know, sharing some information. In company meetings, our group leaders received group reports. Our HR business partners work tightly with managers. They could receive individual results if they chose. There was kind of a constant hum in the background. But anytime we shared anything externally, internally to the larger group of the company, we were a lot more involved with tying this piece together, drawing that thread all the way through. And now we have really incredible engagement from leadership and a new team at the company called the Operational Excellence Team. And they are kind of taking the ball and rolling with it toward the next survey. So I want to share a little bit about how we did this on the station because we spent a lot of time doing that again, pulling the thread through the experience. Our employee opinion survey is coming. So this was actually right after our June all company meeting. We did announce it. Then we followed it up with some more details. We answered some questions we couldn't get to in the meeting. So that was sort of the stretch there. McLean came in and gave the presentation. So this is a September all company meeting that I had mentioned. This is part of their presentation. We house all of those recordings on the station so we have really easy access there. Employee engagement survey. What's next? This is some methods that I would, I would do to. Again, remember I said we had a lot of rapid hiring and there's been a lot of new people kind of during that stretch who didn't experience the survey. So this was us bringing it back up and refreshing it a little bit because we were still focused on those focus group results. And so this is how we tied it all back in for folks who were new, gave a little thanks and kudos, that sort of thing. These survey results, recognition. So this was fun. We were able to celebrate managers who had really great individual results. So we just kind of found a metric we felt comfortable with. Only so many people scored at that metric, so that was pretty easy. And we just did a little kudos and recognition for them. And this was our post just last week or this week. I can't even, I don't even remember. This was kind of our final wrap up of the focus group. So this is where we introduced it. We took this and gave it to Leadership Team and Operational Excellence Team to take the final pieces that HR didn't feel like they were in charge of. So that was really kind of that sort of final step. We actually reiterated that at our all company meeting yesterday. So that was really great. And then this one is just really fun. We had a Middleton office project showcase basically first time we ever did it. We had staffers who never really get a chance to talk, come up and present about what the Middleton teams are working on, both around the country and in the area. And this was a really popular event. But I started this event by saying, you remember you guys with the focus group results on department collaboration. This is. You wanted to know more about the projects we're working on. So this is how we're pulling that thread through a little bit about our results. This is our. The metrics that we studied and how well you can see that. But then we landed in, in the green high performing area a decent amount which was really exciting. We benchmarked, we did pretty well in the benchmarking. Now that was not against our own results because this was the first time we used this and it wasn't against other AE firms. It was a broader industry. But I think they were all similarly sized is the criteria when we do this. Survey again next year we'll be benchmarking against our own results as well. And then what we did is look at the last two metrics, so work life balance and department collaboration. And we chose a little bit to focus a little bit more deep on those. So the structure of the focus groups, these again were facilitated by McLean Having that third party facilitation was just fantastic. We had more than 100 employees participate. I think we had, I forget how many groups but like six to eight people in each group. So there was enough opportunity for people to weigh in without feeling, feeling like an overwhelming group. No one from HR or leadership were on those groups. And then McLean was taking notes. They asked everybody the same types of questions, kind of dug through the results. And then the manager and employee groups were separated so employees might feel less comfortable speaking if their manager was present in their group. So we separated those our results. So the recommendations shared by McLean to the HR team were kind of shared in this sort of format you're seeing here. These are their words. And keep in mind that they had never seen our intranet. They had never. Haven't heard any of the pain points that maybe we had even had. They were just parroting kind of what they heard through these events. And this was our number one department collaboration. Vote Getter, Leverage the station. And I'm a resource for. I think every. There's some very specific information needs to be added to the station. So actually they, they even share that. It was really surprising how consistent people were. And then they gave us this whole list of items that they, that they had suggested based on employee feedback. So that was huge. So from that we determined three key opportunities we had to make station improvements and have an impact on users based on focus group and survey feedback. The first was increasing awareness of our capabilities in the market we serve. That probably showed up three or four times in that block I showed you increase awareness of who has what expertise and is a key contact and then how to search for that information. Probably one you all recognize if you use any intranets at all, that that is definitely one that's pretty popular. And then the final was improved standardization. So I'm going to focus quickly, I'm going to jump back into the station and kind of show you one thing that we did, one example of kind of how we handled this opportunity. We are doing a few other things. This one just happens to be a little bit more complete at this point. But this is about our capabilities in the markets we serve. So give me a sec here. Okay, so back on the homepage. I'm going to head to our practice communities. So these are all of our groups. We are, this is basically how we are structured. It's actually not entirely accurate. We're in the process of updating this. But most of these groups with the Synthesis 6 upgrade last year, we kind of brought everything over sort of as it was before. And one of our groups here in particular was pretty robust. So they've done a few more things since we brought it over and gotten a little bit active. But this is what I would say was a traditional group community for us. How it was built is for the members of the architecture and building engineering group. So it's, it's built for them to kind of connect with each other. The big thing here is the toolboxes and training. There's a lot of information in here, again very specific to those folks who are in A, B and E. So here's an example of a, of a pretty solid toolbox, a lot of templates, how to's. They have some sort of consistency among all of those toolbox. But again it's really directed toward the group Meet the Team. Another example literally includes Everybody who's in 340 people or some crazy number of people who are in the Meet the team. So again, really robust, sort of split up in the way that that group understands it. But what's missing here for a lot of employees is it doesn't tell us everything that this group does or how they might work with other groups. And they do quite a bit because they've got some specialty services in here on this community. I don't know who they market to or who is responsible for that effort necessarily or other kind of helpful collaborative cross selling info. So as part of this outcome of the survey results, we tried to go with a different model. So this is our newest model. So EPC stands for Engineering, Procurement, Construction. It is our newest service line, I guess. Well, from our company, this is from an acquisition two years ago. They are kind of a unique group for us. So of course they were open, wide open to some changes here. And they do a lot of cross selling because they can work within a huge number of segments. And it was just trying to get people to understand who they were. So one example of something we created is an overview page and we're actually going to roll these out in the next couple of weeks for every single one of those groups. This is just a very simple here's who we are, here's what we do and here's how we're organized again, the company being so large and people coming in all the time, this is going to give sort of a smaller glimpse but a little solid understanding of what that group does. Project examples of this literally these links over here come from our our company website. Knowing that a lot of employees don't go out to that externally there's great resources out there. We just link them in so that we weren't duplicating a lot of effort. They love kind of having an at a glimpse sort of button system. I know I've watched a few other companies share these in their intranet tours too. But I love what they chose to highlight. So their meet the team is not a full everybody in epc. It's really kind of who does what and who to reach out to for what phone numbers and all. We just want to make sure that we're getting the right people engaged. They added a process flow and it has names attached to it that kind of just shares how you can work with them and what that looks like and who's. Who's sort of the responsible parties for that and then our project locations and type. There's a lot about EPC nobody at our company knew about. So this really is what makes a good EPC project. How does that look? Could my client benefit from that? So again to support the cross selling role we did a features feature projects list just to get some really quick data out to folks. So this is a bit more built out including whether or not this was a project award winner who might be involved. A lot of the standard items that we would typically include. We're just making sure that their feature projects are a bit more polished so that people have easy access to that information and then again where they're working and then I finally, I kind of like where they're going with this marketing materials. We're still, we're still developing this a little bit but we're really focusing on the cross selling piece. We will get to memberships in a little bit here but upcoming events is where they are kind of sharing where they're going to be. So this whole section here is really again helping other people understand what the group does and how they can partner on cross selling efforts. So that was sort of one example of the changes we made there. So I am going to stop sharing and hand it over to Jennifer who is going to take it from here.

Thank you Kathy. So let me go ahead, I'm going to jump in. So I'm going to continue on and talk a little bit more about some of the campaigns that we had created to help support the employee Engagement Survey that we had done. And so one thing that Kathy had mentioned, and I'll just reiterate that Employee Engagement Survey, the focus groups that were created, they shared that one of the number one suggestions for improving department collaboration efforts was to leverage the profiles on the station. So who does what, who has expertise in what areas and making it easily accessible for employees to get to that information. And this presented a great opportunity to launch several campaigns to gather this information from employees, which would address the second opportunities statement here that you're seeing. So we already had an employee profile set up and we also already had a process in place where employees are responsible for updating their information in their employee record in Deltec Vision, which that information comes into the station. And so what we did was build upon this. We identified a few key pieces of information that were missing. We set up some fields in Vision to collect this information. And we launched a couple campaigns over the last like seven to eight months to engage employees in helping to beef up our data. Basically we were then able to make some changes to the employee profile page in the station and enhance our directories. So to start with, I'm going to first share an overview of these campaigns with you and then we'll dive into the station again to look at how we utilize the station to support our campaigns and further engage our employees and show you the outcomes of these campaigns. So let's talk about our campaigns first. One item that we identified was missing was like who has experience in what software? So what's their software proficiency? And we didn't have a field currently, so that was a new piece of information that we wanted to collect from employees. This campaign itself lasted for about 10 weeks total. We started it, we launched it in November and ended it the end of January. We utilize multiple sources to promote this campaign because we want to try to engage as many employees as we can. So we kind of go at it from different angles. We had a couple emails, a couple posts, and we utilize the hot right now corner that Kathy had mentioned earlier. So here you can see is the initial email that had gone out. And just to point out a couple of pieces that we included, we had a data collection form for this campaign. So there's a link in there to a short form with some questions. We also had an incentive, so I mentioned employees are responsible for populating their own information into Deltec Vision and we were giving them like a one time bonus. Fill out the form, we'll take that information and populate it into vision for you. And then since a lot of this wraps around the employee survey that we had done, we wanted to make sure there was that employee survey connection. And so we made sure to include a little blurb about like what this was accomplishing and how it tied back to the survey. The form we had them fill out had five questions we asked about their software expertise. But, you know, you're reaching out to employees. We're like, I think there's a few more pieces of information we might as well grab since we're throwing it in front of them. So we asked for what languages they have experience in days in the office, primary office, and then we had to throw just to kind of keep things light and fun. Our fifth question that we threw in was DC or Marvel. I just want to bring your attention to the green component. We found it interesting that that was that we had 114 people answer I don't understand the question. Which just kind of made us chuckle throughout the whole thing. Overall, we had 542 responses. When all was said and done, which we were thrilled about that we got that many of our employees engaged in this particular campaign. We considered this an assisted campaign versus a teaching campaign because we were getting information from them, but we were doing the legwork to get it to where it needed to be. We kind of do a combination of these different types of campaigns. Next campaign I want to talk about is the membership campaign. And so we've had a lot of requests to know who has, who has memberships with different organizations that might be able to answer questions about subscriptions through those organizations or conferences through them. And we have this field already in vision, but we wanted. Which was coming into the station, but we wanted to collect and just update this information. So we decided to create a campaign around this. This particular campaign just kicked off a few weeks ago. We promoted it via email. Here's an email that kind of. We made sure it was kept graphic, very short and succinct and gave direction as to what they needed to do. We also promoted this campaign via the station in the Hot right now corner we had. And as of this morning, we've had 53 employees add new memberships to their employee profile in Deltec Vision. Now we don't have stats here on who edited or removed memberships that were no longer active, but to get 53 new ones. We're pretty ecstatic about that. And like I said, our campaign is still in progress. This is a teaching campaign because we weren't going to do the work for them, we're prompting them, we're pushing them or requesting it, but we are asking them to go directly into their Deltec Vision record and populate that information where it should be populated. So to further support these efforts, we throughout this we were sprinkling in station directory trainings. So for instance, last fall we did a couple of hangouts which are 30 minute training sessions on how to use station directories. We had a post in November that talked, that had a little video for tips and tricks for using directories. And then just last week we launched our, our third campaign that I'm going to talk about called the Summer of Search. This began just last week. We had our first one. We included some fun branding. Just it's summertime. We want people to smile when they see information about this campaign. We're focusing on Station 101 sessions and so really getting people, you know, to come in and learn from the basics to more advanced. We're doing one per month and they're 15 minute sessions. And just to talk about how this 15 minutes came about a little bit, it was really inspired by a company event that we had happen a little over a month ago where it was our aviation regroup, where we brought everyone from our aviation group into a location to do team building, sharing and learning. And one of those learning portions was a lightning talk where we had six different topics. One of them being was how to do searches, how to utilize the directories in the station. And we were limited to 15 minutes and it really focused to really zone in on what information do you want to share. And as the attendees for that event, they picked what session they wanted to go to. 15 minutes, a bell would ring, they'd switch. So we repeated that 15 minute session multiple times during those lightning talks. And so we use that as inspiration for setting up the Summers of search because the 15 minutes we received a lot of great comments from people. It wasn't information overload. People said that they learned new things, they were able to retain what they were learning. And some of the things that we showed the people, some of the comments were we didn't even know it could do that, which we love to hear. And it just kind of helped to reinforce the that we need to continue doing like continue training through all of this. With our Summer of Search, each session is going to build upon the last. They're not going to all be the same and we're using questions and comments that we received from the first session to inform the next sessions. I am going to jump over into the station now just to kind of share how we've used the station to support these campaigns. So first of all, I talked about our, the Software Proficiency campaign. We launched that in November, which is right around the holidays. Which can be good or bad during the holidays. I think we ended up with a couple like 230 responses or so. And we decided we wanted more than that and so we did another push. And you really leaned on the station for those pushes. So you can see here after the holidays, you know, second week of January, we did another post that was a short video, two minutes saying, hey, turning this into a. Yeah, go ahead.

We're seeing PowerPoint still. Did you want us to be seeing the station?

Yes, I thought that was the case. So let me. Are you seeing the station now? No, I'm going to stop sharing and reshare.

Okay, that sounds great. Oh, we're seeing it now.

Perfect. Thank you, Susan. Okay, so this is the post that we made that was a mini video and we turned the whole campaign into a contest because everyone loves the competition. We offered some gift cards just to kind of prompt people to get going. Next post was about a week later just to say, still going, let's go get in there, fill out the form. Here's a little video that showed why the information they were providing us is valuable, showing where that information is going to show up on the profiles and in directories. Then the last post to kind of wrap it up was we announced the winner. We basically the winner was based on the percentage of employees from each group. Whichever group or department had the highest percentage of employees participate. We gave away randomly three $100 gift cards to individuals within that group. So when all was said and done, we went from that 230 mark up to that 540 plus mark for respondents. So we kind of doubled the participation just by doing another push and turning it into a competition and utilizing the station. You can see here everyone loves an attention grabbing photo. But I mentioned we had done a post to kind of sprinkle in trainings and this was a post that was just a little video on tips and tricks. But the photo drew people in. We had a lot of comments on that and, and then to kind of talk about how we did those trainings in the summer of like searching when you're in the station. One of the things that we're utilizing is that hot right now and this is kind of focusing on the membership one that we are is currently in progress, but we utilize this hot right now corner a lot just to bring out important things that are happening from day to day, week to week. Like Kathy mentioned, when we go into our directories, how these campaigns affected our directories. I'm going to go into the mega menus here and you can see that we have a number of directories that are set up and you can tell the first five are focused on employees and they're vetted for different focus areas. I'm going to jump into our primary employee directory. One thing we're doing to make it easy for employees is we have created under the Global Global Views for Directories Support the Software Proficiency campaign. We went ahead and set up a directory specifically focused on software proficiency so that employees can very easily come in here and source this information now. So for instance, when we come in here, they can go ahead and utilize the filter to look for specific programs. So let's say that someone's looking for program called Highway Capacity Software and they can easily go in here and find the 11 people throughout the system that have indicated that, you know, that program. And it just offers a really great resource to connect people. You know, when you have over 1400 people, it's hard to find those experts. And this is a really great way to do that and make it very easy and quick for the employees. So that's an example of how the campaign influenced our directories. When I go into our employee profile, I had mentioned we already had a profile set up. We went in here and kind of modified our and enhanced our employee profiles to include some of those fields of additional information that we were collecting. So you can see here we have days in the office. We're showing languages that employees know. We also have the software proficiencies listed along with a slew of other types of information that is beneficial for employees to grab. So skills licenses, education, standard stuff I think that many of us are showing in our profiles to throw up. One other profile like another piece of information is if employees are receiving individual awards, like a 40 under 40 award. Our awards section is also showing on our employee profile. So that is really focused on the employees employee data. Another kind of way that we went about this data that we focused on has to do with some of our project data. And data is just a big deal at our company. And part of our strategic plan talks about data and the importance of having one source of truth. As our company continues to grow and to support that, another campaign or initiative that we launched this summer has been bringing four marketing data interns in to help collect that data and put it where it needs to be, which is Deltec Vision. And so we've been working with our marketing managers to identify their top 200 projects where they would like to have key data available in Deltec Vision, which then flows directly into the station. Our interns have been sourcing multiple different sources to collect that data. Some of it is in Vision already, some is in InDesign documents or standalone Word or Excel files. So they're collecting all of that and working directly with our PMs to confirm that the data is good or fill in any missing pieces. And it's been just, it's been a great process so far to help promote this whole initiative. For the summer. We've been leaning on the station and we have a couple of posts here that we've done. You know, initially when the intern started, we talked about our one source of truth, our commitment to knowledge management and having this data accessible. That was a post on the station. In addition to having talking to different leadership groups and joining different meetings and sharing this message, we also, when we're ready to start sending emails out, we sent another, we did another post to say, heads up, project managers, you've been hearing about this. Now it's happening and it's been really beneficial to be pulling this information together. So that's how we've utilized the station to support it. And then if we go and look at the directories, again, ways that we've utilized the directories to kind of show everyone like why this is beneficial. If we go into the project directory, this isn't quite set up yet for everyone globally, but you can see here we have an award winning project. So one of the pieces of data we're collecting are all of our awards. Do we have them where they need to be? Now users can come in here and just go right to this and pull up all of our award winning projects, they can use the filters to filter it by group if there's a specific group of projects they're looking for. And it's been super beneficial. We also took that information and carried it through to the project profiles as well. And so when we go into a project profile now you can see here that there's core project information, it has images coming from Open Asset, we have some basic info, any awards the project has won, the project descriptions, partners, it's just a whole slew of information that we're pulling together in the project profiles so that again, all this information is very quickly and easily available at the fingertips of our users. So with that, I think that that's what I wanted to share with how this station is supporting our different initiatives which kind of circle back to our employee survey. So with that Kathy, I'm going to turn it to you all.

Great, thanks. I'll just close this out really quickly with that last topic. And that was improved standardization, which actually, which Jennifer shared is a great example of one way, one way that we are doing that. The issue of standardization goes way, way, way beyond reaches well past the station. We are actually in a process right now where we're studying for a new ERP system. So we're kind of early stages of that, but a couple, we've added a couple resources in the meantime with the idea that we're trying to teach process. So if we can teach process through the station, then that's kind of a win for us. So one of those, Jennifer, if you want to click on that request, Project Hub. So these are some just overall project resources we have at the company. But we like if you're kind of involved in getting an early start in setting up a project. But we have some groups that don't have particular engineering disciplines within their groups. And so we've created sort of a formal, more formal way to reach out to those and get the help that you need. That's kind of been, it was really well received by those who do put project teams together. Again trying to avoid subbing out work that we could do internally. I know our new ERP system at some point may, may assist with that, but this is some of the standards we're sort of putting in place now. The next one is that communications and document storage. So really we mapped out the process here for how to communicate here at the company and we've shown those types of opportunities in addition to where you should store your information. So we've created sort of a, a loose but sort of informal, I guess process of best practices on this. You guys probably all have very similar things at your company with, with so many different places to put this information. But network drives, the station and teams we've identified kind of what should go where and really we use the station as an example of sort of that 30,000 foot view of where to, of kind of what you might need. And then it will direct you to kind of the deeper views which might exist on the network drives and your smaller teens group that you might just be having more one on one conversations with. So that's kind of the process and the last one is just more fun. So we actually have a very strong onboarding process with an orientation day and we fly everybody into Middleton, Wisconsin to go through an orientation process. And typically there have been a lot of emails and a lot of information that went out regarding what that is, some misinformation, some confusion. So we really wanted to model what a good process is. We're telling them why they're there, what to expect, schedules and attendance, travel and expenses, kind of all of those things. So our next step is really to put together an editing team for the station that will take this to the next level and do more of these types of processes. So it's a lot more transparent to employees what to expect. And that's one way we're working on standardization. And I think that takes us at time.

Yeah, that was great. Thank you both so much. We have some questions that have come in and I'm just going to jump to them and I invite anyone who's with us. If you'd like to ask a question yourself or upload a question, just go to the Q and A panel and let us know what's on your mind. So the very first question was actually asked like pretty early. It was about acquisitions. So Audrey asks, curious how adoption of your intranet has been for companies you acquire. How do you integrate and train them on it?

Great question. A little hit and miss depending on the size of the groups that we bring in. I think the last. So this last one, for example, it was a smaller acquisition, about 30 people, and they were pretty in tune during their orientation process, their introduction to us. We have a whole team that goes down and kind of handles that piece. And so that was an early, that was an early effort. They got maybe a six to eight minute overview of the station. And then about two months after they onboarded, we did, I did a deeper dive, like a 30 minute overview and kind of a how to use, ask me questions, that sort of thing. That was an easier group for the, for the 110 employee group, the bigger one. I went down to their office and did multiple sessions live. And that was kind of the best way to get people to ask questions. Kind of as they come up, they could sit there and I always tell people, you can interrupt me, stop if you have a question about something you're seeing or how we do this process. So that was really kind of perfect. I prefer that better. I feel like they, I love a good Q and A session, but I, I angle it toward kind of what the group seems like they're, you know, would appreciate.

Nice. Thanks, Kathy.

All right.

There was a question that came through when you were talking about the employee survey process from Kayla. Are you using a specific platform for hosting the surveys and analysis or doing it yourself? Wondering as our HR team rolled out something called Culture Amp or Studio. And I think she's referring specifically to the employee survey process analysis.

Yeah, yeah. Most of that was led and directed by McLean, who are our partners. And I see someone's here today, which is great. But it really was directed and led by them. I think that that's the key part of the process for us. You know, working with an organization that has a lot of experience in it and they kind of led us through and then we were able to do customization as needed. But they have a wonderful dashboard process that you're being able to see your data in that way. So that's kind of the method that we use. So that was McLean's sort of system that helped us out a lot. And we'll actually be using them for interviews and 3 month check ins as well. We're starting that soon.

Yeah, thanks. And Danica from McLean is in the chat if anyone has questions for her. Question from Bill also about the survey and analysis. He asked how did you organize, facilitate and prioritize the information collected? For example, we use two by two with complexity value. Placing things on that matrix. Did you have anything, any kind of insights or easy to share?

We used the best practices that McLean had. Again, it'd been five years since we did a survey. It felt a little bit like we were starting from scratch. We had used other surveys systems before. That is, it's certainly not a strong suit area for me. So it was really lovely to have kind of a process sort of already in place and you know, they, they shared, you know, here's what we think are best practices. How do you want to modify and what, what kind of information do you want to see? And I think ultimately what they created and you know, Danica, probably give a much better overview of the technical terms. But what they created was able to get us the data in the way we needed to get it. I know we used Net promoter scores for some parts of that. We had those metrics. We decided which ones we wanted. I think we did most of the ones they did, maybe added one more. So it was just an interesting process that we just kind of walked through with someone who has analyzed data daily that was really helpful. We just don't do that as much internally here.

Thank you.

All right, I'm going to close with a question that's coming through in the chat about your T shirts. Tell us the story.

Oh, man. Jennifer, how did we do this? So I think we were talking about promoting kind of how we were going to go through this process for those data management interns because notoriously, getting information out of however, 200 some project managers, we knew that wasn't going to be simple. So we, I think T shirts came up. We came up with the idea of T shirts just so that you're like, well, once they introduce themselves and actually there's a post going out on the station soon with a kind of a T shirt video for them, but once they introduce themselves then they potentially could wear the shirts and, and I've worn them around the office. She's worn it around the office again. We're just trying to get a little bit more engagement and recognition of the effort we're undertaking. So. And then AI helped us come up with the slogan, but think it's pretty slick. So we've been enjoying, we've been enjoying this and I think we'll, we'll probably wear them more. Susan, I don't think we can hear you here.

Thank you. I just want to say thank you, Kathy and Jennifer so much for taking us behind the scenes on the whole process. I felt like we got a deep dive as well as the, the overall, like, how does this all work? It's one thing to have great data on your Internet, but it's nothing to understand. Like what goes into collecting it and tying it back to the employee survey is just so genius. I also wanted to share with folks that we have more events coming up online and also in person. We have a Internet launch story with LS3P on January 11th. We have plant roundtables coming up the following week in July. And then we have an Internet towards Tower Kingster in August. And then finally K Connect is coming up on August 13th. Chris will drop a link to our upcoming event stuff in the chat. If anyone, if you don't, if you haven't looked at that stuff already.

I.

Am so looking forward to seeing you all at those events in between on calls. Thank you for joining us and helping us all be better together. See you later.

Thank you.

Thank you.