As HR professionals and leaders, if we want to start taking a more strategic approach that will elevate the business impact HR has, we need to evolve from being process-focused to becoming strategic partners. This means taking ownership of people data and insights, and using them to drive decisions that have a real impact on the business.

Take for instance, employee experience. How can we make this more strategic? What can we learn from marketing and the strategies that they use to enhance the customer experience?

To delve deeper into this topic, on the this episode of Digital HR Leaders podcast, host David Green sits down with Kaz Hassan, Employee Experience Industry Lead at Unily, and Luke Farrugia, VP of Marketing at ScreenCloud.

Both guests bring unique insights and expertise on the topics of employee experience, internal communication, and digital transformation, having both dedicated their careers to helping businesses improve their employee and customer experiences alike.

In this episode, listeners can expect to learn:

• Lessons from marketing on their data-driven journey and how HR can apply these strategies;

• Innovative strategies for effective employee listening and engagement;

• Insights into why retention is still a major issue and the importance of focusing on employee engagement and a high-quality experience;

• Strategies for enhancing digital experience, including the effective use of digital signage and internal communication tools;

• Areas where HR professionals can upskill themselves to effectively manage the transition towards a more digital experience-driven workplace.

This episode for every HR professional responsible for improving the employee experience and driving digital transformation in their organisation.

Support from this podcast comes from ScreenCloud–the digital signage platform that helps HR around the globe elevate their digital employee experience, with 'screens that communicate'.

To learn how ScreenCloud can enable your organisation to increase employee engagement, drive productivity, and improve compliance, visit screencloud.com

Links to research articles referenced in the conversation:

Have employee experience leaders given up on retention?

[0:00:00] David Green: As HR professionals and leaders, we're always exploring ways we can add greater value and enhance our organisational impact.  In order to do this, we must transition from being process-focused to becoming strategic partners.  Recognising the importance of embracing data and insights ownership, we acknowledge there's room for improvement by learning from other business areas, such as marketing's successful data-driven journey.  What can we learn from marketing's journey; and how can we leverage those insights to boost our employee experience initiatives? 

To discuss this topic, I'm delighted to be joined by Kaz Hassan, Employee Experience Industry Leader at Unily, and Luke Farrugia, VP of Marketing at ScreenCloud.  I'm particularly excited to have Kaz and Luke on the show, as together they bring a wealth of experience and knowledge in both the HR and marketing space.  We will be discussing the importance of employee listening, innovative employee experience strategies from the marketing playbook, and the role of technology in enhancing employee engagement and communication.  So, if you're looking for ways to take your employee experience to the next level and drive real business impact, then this episode is for you.  With that, let's dive into our conversation with Kaz Hassan and Luke Farrugia.

Kaz, Luke, welcome to the show.  I'm really excited to get into this conversation on the importance of digital experiences in improving employee engagement and retention.  But before we dive in, could you both share a little bit about your professional background, your current role, and maybe for a bit of a unique twist to start, your favourite thing about working in the field of HR?  So, Kaz, I'll come to you first.

[0:02:01] Kaz Hassan: Yeah, so hi everyone, my name is Kaz, and I've pretty much worked in the employee experience, employee engagement tech space my whole career, which is hopefully cooler than it sounds!  But I work for a company called Unily and we are an employee experience platform.  I guess in traditional speak, people think of it as an intranet and then some, I guess.  So, we work with enterprises, the likes of CVS Health, Shell, and Wipro, EY, these sorts of companies, to engage, inspire their employees through communications as well as many other capabilities.  My role specifically is actually to lead our community and industry insights.  I guess I sometimes explain that as thought leadership.  So, I work on what is our position on things; how do we drive the product forward through thought leadership; and can we work with influencers in the space, like yourself as well, to further what we do as a company.

[0:02:58] David Green: Great, thanks Kaz.  And your favourite thing about working in the field of HR? 

[0:03:01] Kaz Hassan: My favourite thing about working in the field of HR is probably, I'm in the community area, and so it's probably around looking at what's happening in external society trends around people, looking at what's happening and what's gathering momentum on big social media apps and in society and trying to understand what that might mean for people leaders.  There's trends on workplace headlines that are hitting front-page news every day and it never used to be like that, and I quite like looking underneath those trends to understand, "Okay, is this going to change what that means for the workplace and the people leaders as well?"

[0:03:38] David Green: Yeah, very good.  Welcome to the show, Kaz.  And Luke, welcome to the show as well.  Can you share a little bit about yourself, your background, and your favourite thing about working in HR and employee experience?

[0:03:48] Luke Farrugia: Yeah, sure, absolutely.  Thanks for the intro, David.  So, I've been in marketing now for around 14 years.  Moved into the tech industry around seven or so years ago, having started off my career in B2C.  And if we fast forward to today, I've been leading the marketing function at ScreenCloud for about, yeah, coming up two years.  We're a digital science platform.  We've got over 10,000 customers that we help to essentially get the right information to the right people at the right time, using the screens on workplace walls.  We're especially focused on what we call the digitally detached, probably more commonly known as frontline and deskless workers.  These are the types of people that just don't have access to the same comms channels and information sources as desk-based workers like ourselves.  But I'm sure we'll touch on that in a bit more detail later on in the conversation. 

Before joining ScreenCloud, I was leading the marketing team at TrueQ, which at the time was part of the same portfolio as Orgvue, who I know you're familiar with.  And there, we built a people analytics solution, which was powered by our HR data warehouse platform, doing some really cool stuff with people analytics teams at the likes of BAT, Microsoft, and essentially helping HR leaders to solve some of their biggest problems using data, which I guess leads me on nicely to why I enjoy working within the field of HR now, besides being a people person, so innately invested in anything that seeks to improve people's wellbeing and experiences, both in and outside of the work environment.

Obviously, HR is all about creating those optimal employee experiences, but the pandemic was a real eye-opener for me, in terms of my understanding of and my appreciation for how crucial HR really is and the people function are for shaping the future of work.  And as Kaz said, it's just a super-exciting time to be involved as a vendor, as I have been for the last five years, and providing a solution which enables people leaders to create that value for the business.

[0:05:54] David Green: Luke, given your background in marketing and given that marketing's already been on this data-driven journey, what lessons do you think that HR can take from marketing in its use of data and analytics?

[0:06:07] Luke Farrugia: Well, yeah, I think everyone's aware that marketing's undergone a quite drastic transformation probably over the last decade in particular, and especially over the last few years.  We really had to pivot when the pandemic hit, and data was really the lifeblood of keeping us afloat.  But I'll just give a couple of examples, because I think there's a lot that we learned, but I think these two examples would be most valuable from an HR standpoint.

So, my first would be around A/B testing and experimentation.  As I mentioned, since the pandemic, we really had to up our game, especially in terms of our agility, being able to test and react faster to buyer behaviours in order to optimise our programmes and campaigns, and ultimately deliver and prove ROI to the business.  And in fact, any marketing team who isn't really adopting this culture of experimentation is likely to already be behind their competition.  I think the same will increasingly go for HR too.  So, let me explain that a little bit further in the context of HR.  We know there's a lot of challenges in terms of employee retention, engagement.  So, it's really crucial that we're not waiting until it's too late to change the course of action; and with an experimental approach, you'll be able to monitor leading indicators and course-correct before it's too late.  And obviously by too late, I mean employees becoming disengaged, employees becoming a flight risk and leaving the business, and obviously all of the losses that come with low productivity and people being off well, and mental health issues being a byproduct of that.  So, experiment with different recruitment strategies, training programmes, employee engagement initiatives, and then using that data to understand how they perform to then inform how to iterate and optimise your strategy, programmes, initiatives in relation to whatever the key objectives are. 

Then, I think the next one, the next tip, which is very much linked to the first, is all about measuring ROI, right?  So, I think being able to understand what the impact is across a whole range of leading indicators is super-important.  And initially, at the moment from a marketing perspective, we're very focused on engagement.  We know that, yes, maybe the end goal is that we want our customer to buy or upsell, but ultimately, way before that happens, it's all about engagement.  Make sure that you're very focused on a set of leading indicators that allow you to track and measure at the right time.  So, here we're talking stuff around productivity, employee satisfaction, and ultimately an impact on revenue to the business, if we are thinking about the role that people have in supporting those revenue-generating activities.

[0:09:08] David Green: So, in terms of harnessing employee listening to understand your employee personas and preferred communication channels, what are some of the innovative strategies that you found in your research at Unily on the effective, and maybe even non-traditional employee-listening strategies that HR can employ to listen to and engage with employees more effectively?

[0:09:29] Kaz Hassan: Yeah, so when it comes to employee listening I hopped on the trend of looking at the ins and outs for 2024.  And one of the things I put on my out list was the once-a-year employee engagement survey.  And thinking about that marketing mindset again, if you think about what are the companies that are having the biggest impact on customers and delighting them, they're the companies like Apple and Amazon, and they don't send you a once-a-year survey to ask you how they're doing.  They map out the customer journey and they understand all these different touch points, how did we do here; what was the packaging like; did we make you happy; was the product what you expected?  But there are synergies there that people need to understand, which is understand specifically what's working, what's not working.  And yes, the once-a-year survey is helpful to help you benchmark, are we going in the right direction year on year? 

But if you're thinking of the average employee and what's going to help them stay in the role, they are typically the little things that they want to see change quickly and implement it.  And I think there's a pretty good example that I talk a lot about with my team, which is I got a bit obsessed with the Apple TV series, Ted Lasso.  And they basically bring this American coach to coach a football team, or soccer team, and he has no experience of football at all.  But what he does do is he builds the team up from little suggestions, anonymous tips, things like fixing the shower, which aren't massive strategic changes, but they are the little listing activities that you listen to what the team want, what the people want, and you implement them and you show that you've done that.  That's on my in list, to kind of contrast that, is more dynamic and varied types of listening.  And yes, that's tick-box suggestions and little ways to improve pulse surveys, things like that.  But also, looking at more like non-traditional types. 

We've got some customers that have worked out that when they've got a younger-generation workforce coming in, that they are quite opinionated and they don't want to sit at a desk and work on an Excel spreadsheet; they see an inefficient process, they want to speak and act on it very quickly.  And so they've kind of built this whole, using the Unily platform, an ideation platform where any employee across the business can pick a business goal and say, "Hey, I've got this idea to help us meet this goal".  And the executives can then look through all of those ideas to understand what's popular, what's not popular, what are the most popular ideas.  People have conversations around them to then say, "Hey, actually, our staff really know how to help us meet our goals", and that's where the cool listening is happening.

[0:12:07] David Green: Yeah, understanding the moments that matter, I guess, Luke.

[0:12:11] Luke Farrugia: Yeah, and you're only really able to achieve that if you've got the right structure and framework and technologies to allow you to ultimately collect that data and use that data to inform how and where things are working and they're not.  So, yeah, really exciting time, but also it isn't something that you can just achieve overnight, right?  It is more of a marathon, not a sprint.

[0:12:38] David Green: To stay with you, Kaz, your research again at Unily shows that despite retention being a worldwide issue, and we hear a lot about great resignations and the return on a great resignation, and all these other almost marketing-type slogans, if you ask me, but many HR professionals, they've put on the brakes on employer retention.  Why do you think this is?

[0:13:56] Kaz Hassan: So, this was a really interesting bit of data that we found.  So, last year, if you look at all the trends' data, a lot of people said, "This is the year of retention over recruitment.  We understand times are tough, we need to work on keeping our workforce".  And so every year, we do a bit of research, and we do that research across employee experience leaders.  So, these are HR, internal comms and digital workplace leaders.  So, there are some other types of stakeholders in there.  And we ask them to basically rank their list of priorities for the year.  We almost didn't ask the question because we kind of thought we knew what would come out, but we did in the end.  And what was so interesting about that result is what came up second from top was recruitment.  So, recruitment's still ranking really highly.

But what was most surprising, what came up dead last, so seventh on the priority list, was retention, and this just didn't make any sense to me.  So, I then spent some time to work out from the data, why would this be the case?  And my analysis of that, my hypothesis is that we have a tried and tested employee recruitment blueprint; we do not have a retention blueprint that we know works.  And so, it's kind of sad because it shows that we're adopting an out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new approach to the workforce, which aside from going against everything we know drives high-performing teams, also just seems super-illogical.  Like, we want to spend the time and money to get these people in, but then not to keep them.  And so, what I take from that is we need to invest in understanding, how do we keep people in the business; how do we retain them?  It's more nuanced of course than recruitment because we've had that model for a while, we know how to do it well.  So, it might be harder, but we need to work at it.

[0:15:57] David Green: Yeah, and actually that quite surprises me as well.  It's almost counterintuitive really when we think about how hard it is to find and attract and recruit the right people into the organisation, and spend quite a lot of money on-boarding people and getting them to be productive.  And if we think that, particularly if we look in countries like the UK, the supply of talent is shrinking because of demographics around things like age and everything else.  So, you would think, and certainly again anecdotally, some of the companies we talk to, retention is very high on the agenda.  And we think about things like internal mobility, we think about more listening to engage and make sure that we're engaging people in the right way, understanding the moments that matter, looking at personas, as you said, just as we do with customer engagement as well. 

So, why do you think that came in that survey; you've obviously had some hypotheses?  And then, maybe broadening that a little bit, Kaz, and thinking about your experience in the EX space and the research you've been doing obviously on a regular basis, what would you say HR need to focus on to enhance employee engagement and improve retention? 

[0:17:14] Kaz Hassan: Yeah, so I said just then, I think, it's about trying to understand the retention blueprint.  I think one of the things that we need to be aware of there is that recruitment kind of sits in a mature domain and clearly with people.  Retention is much more nuanced and there are people that we have to bring together around certain journeys, from different parts of the organisation, like internal communications, for example, a classic stakeholder that needs to be brought into the loop on building out that blueprint.  But then after I got that result, I then started looking at other bits of research and also looking at the customer retention blueprint, looking at how people are retaining customers, how they're delivering best-in-class customer experience, and then trying to kind of map that along to employee experience.

The first big thing that came up was listening-led, and I know we've touched on that a little bit.  But it was just around exactly what we discussed, more dynamic and varied types of listening.  The next thing that came out was, I guess I would call it, and it links to that whole persona conversation is, okay, you've got those personas, what do you now do with them?  Well, you have to make sure that you target effectively and you allow, and this is interesting, when you allow employees to take control of their experience a little bit.  So the targeting is, stop using the everyone audience for your comms and your activities and engagements.  There's a lot of noise in the workplace.  It's about mapping out all those target audiences, ensuring that all the content, communications, engagement efforts that you have are targeted and relevant to the right people at the right time.  So, that's a big part of it. 

The personalisation part is really interesting, because what we see is that kind of Netflix-type experience, like every person that logs into Netflix sees something different because it knows who they are, where they are, you see your top 10 in your area, you know what genres they like and so you've kind of got this fingerprint of an experience that is built to engage me as an individual.  And then those employees are using Netflix and they come into the workplace and you get these kind of one-to-many experiences.  And so, it's bringing these two things together, pointing the right comms, right engagement efforts at the right people, but also let people control what content they're interested in, what notifications they want, through what channels as well, like when do they turn them off; are they a mobile user; do they want to get more through their mobile; do they like things in their email?  I certainly don't, but some people are really still wedded to email, so let people control their experience a little bit. 

There is one more thing as well that I wanted to bring up.  So, there's the listening-led part of the customer experience that does really well, the kind of targeting and personalisation element of it.  But the third one is very digital, and this for me is probably the one that got me most excited, which is if you look at the last year, last two years, what are the directions that the big tech companies are going in with consumers?  And they're going in what I would call a super-app direction; meaning, over a period of time, we've added so many different applications on our phone.  Meta has Instagram, all these different things.  Uber, for example, started off as a taxi app, but now you can get your train, your plane, your food on it.  It's about trying to, yes, we may have 100 different apps going on in the background doing really complex, powerful things, but the user, the employee, needs to have one simple user experience that pulls all of those apps together in one app.  So, those are the three things I think that can be added to the blueprint, the retention blueprint, that I think will help.

[0:21:14] David Green: That's really interesting.  I love the way, again, you bring in some of those lessons that we can learn from what's happening on the customer experience side, and particularly on the use of technology.  And Luke, that seems like a good point to turn to you, actually.  Obviously, coming to you as the digital experience expert here, it'd be good to hear your thoughts on how HR and employee experience leaders can enhance the digital experience a little bit, expanding on what Kaz has just said there.  What strategies can HR employ to supercharge their digital EX initiatives?

[0:21:49] Luke Farrugia: Yeah, sure.  I mean, Kaz has touched a little bit on what I was going to start off with in terms of basically the marketing 101 lesson.  Before you start throwing any type of resource and investment at new technologies, you really have to understand your audience, what your employees require, what they desire, in order for them to be engaged and productive and as compliant as possible in the workplace.  So, I can't emphasise enough how important it is to be segmenting your workforce into cohorts.  And then obviously, you're going to have personas within that, which you can't be as granular as maybe we are in marketing, but you definitely can still look at them as cohorts and then varying personas within that. 

I think this is especially crucial when you're talking about frontline as well, because I think historically what's happened is that there's been a lot of just imposing the same approach to frontline workers and as I mentioned earlier, what we class as digitally-detached workers, as information workers, who are two completely different groups in terms of obviously the workplace environment, and the nature of the work, and the way that they can actually access and use information and what information they actually need to be more engaged and to be more productive.  So, that really is super-important.  And if we are thinking more about frontline as an example here, we know that there's that shift in the workforce from older generations now to millennials, and in particular Gen Z, who are expecting a digital-first experience.  And yet we see, even in some of our customers when you go to these huge warehouses and factories, they're still using notice boards to communicate vital information, to share information about new job opportunities, learning and development paths.  And really, there's been this approach to using unconventional communication channels to create an experience, which isn't optimal for an audience that actually can't access those types of technologies and channels during their day-to-day work. 

So, I think, yeah, as I said, I can't emphasise enough how important it is by starting with what is having the employee right at the centre of your strategy and of your multi-channel experience plan, and then building out from there. 

[0:24:24] David Green: So, Luke, maybe explain a little bit about what you're doing at ScreenCloud, I think, because I think it would be helpful for listeners; but framing that in the sort of sense of, how can organisations effectively use a tool like ScreenCloud digital signage to improve employee engagement and communication flow?

[0:24:44] Luke Farrugia: I think really, it starts with the science, right?  So first of all, we have to understand what is it that engages employees.  It's driven by two innate human needs really, and desires.  First of all, it's the connection to purpose, and then it's the connection to each other.  I think it was a 2021 McKinsey article that I read recently on how to help new employees find purpose, or watch them leave, so pretty up front about it.  And it was all about defining their individual sense of purpose by their work.  So, in order to regain the trust and engagement, it's so crucial for organisations to help employees understand why their work matters, not only to the company, but to the world.  And this is only going to increase in importance as Gen Z enter the workplace.  And then there's a connection to each other.  So again, referencing a recent report, this one was by HubSpot, and I think it's the Hybrid Work Report.  And it found that most workers actually value good relationships with their colleagues more than a 10% pay rise, which I was pleasantly surprised about. 

So, we know that hybrid and remote work makes real connection challenging, and we also know that frontline workers feel extremely disconnected from their information work counterparts.  The frontline connection gap, it really is a thing.  So, where does that leave us?  Communication is more important than ever, and obviously it's got to be effective communication.  So, to do that, you have to again understand the neuroscience first, so what type of medium is going to be optimal for the type of information and the audience that I'm sharing it with?  So, from a digital science perspective, large screens, the screens on our walls, big billboards in Times Square, these mediums have a much higher recall rate than say your phone, an app on your phone, or even the screen, the laptop screen that I'm looking at now.  So, if there is a type of information that you need someone to be able to subliminally consume and recall, then digital signage is much more of an optimal medium than say an app or a laptop.  So first of all, it's understanding the neuroscience behind those different communication mediums to then inform your channel mix around, okay, well how am I going to take an omnichannel approach to my common strategy where I'm using the optimal channel for the audience that I'm looking to target with the information that they need and they want? 

Then it's looking at the behavioural science.  So, you cannot just put a screen up on the wall and start fire-hosing information through it and expect that you're going to have the desired impact that we know screens can have.  You really have to understand the behavioural science.  We actually did some research with the Behavioural Science Unit at the University of Durham beginning of last year, where we explored the understanding of behavioural science insights to inform messaging through screens.  And, example might be the nudge theory, where you're using more emotive relationships to nudge behaviours with people in a way that is not intrusive or imposing, but it happens over a more prolonged period of time.  And obviously, screens are great for that,  In contrast to say sending an email with a large document on, or even just hammering push notifications via an app.  And where it works best is where you have an integrated solution.  So, we've got an integration with Unily, which we're very excited about building out; we've got integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack. 

So, it's really about an ecosystem of communication apps and being able to surface the information via a screen in the right environment at the right time that digital signage lends itself to, in particular in the context of a frontline worker environment, that we're really seeing take a lead in those deskless workplace environments.

[0:29:00] David Green: Where do you feel HR professionals need to upskill themselves to manage this transition effectively; and, Kaz, I'll come to you first and then, Luke, you can chip in as well? 

[0:30:01] Kaz Hassan: Yeah, so what I would say is the data, I'll probably be a little bit controversial on this, the data is really important, but it's like how are we translating that information, that data that we have into understanding our employees?  And I know we've touched on the journeys, the personas, but where I've seen some people create personas and I've then looked back at them, they look like they've been ChatGPT-generated.  Their ideas of employees that yes, okay, they start at this time and finish at that time, but does it really represent who that employee is?  Like the marketing personas, they understand what gets someone out of bed in the morning, when they get out of bed, what time they go to bed, what goes on around the interactions that they have in the day, what their personality types are, what's the lens that they see the world through, what's their perspective.  And so, the skill I would say is work out how that data maps onto understanding your employees, so it's not just about creating these 2D ChatGPT-generated employees, like we've got personas.  It's, does this actually represent a modern employee, understand their priorities, their personality type, that sort of thing, so that we know how to engage them.  Because again, the value of those personas is understanding what makes them tick.  And if you've got a journey for your persona, it starts at 9.00am and it finishes at 5.00pm, that's not representative of that person.

[0:31:35] David Green: So basically, take time to understand the different personas, maybe test a little bit.

[0:31:42] Kaz Hassan: Yeah, I would say maybe when it comes also, I guess the next step of that is once you've built out those personas, is to then look at customer journey mapping and try and take from that customer journey mapping, what's the kind of employee journey mapping, work out the friction points and where you can implement technology or where you can implement communications or where you can have manual interventions to help that journey drive the action that you want.  But yeah, it's not just about, "Persona done; tick.  Yes, we've created an average day in the life; tick"; it's, this represents the type of employees that we have, these are the journeys that they're going on, these are the pain points, the points of digital friction, or whatever it may be that we can then intervene in to then help the experience and help the employee do what they need to do and do their job. 

[0:32:37] David Green: Really good.  And, Luke, would you add anything to that? 

[0:32:40] Luke Farrugia: Yeah, I think it's really important to not get too fixated on the technology.  I think HR has gone through arguably one of the quickest transformations that we've seen.  Obviously, since the onset of the pandemic, that really accelerated things.  And I think there's been a lot of technology that's been thrown at, well, a lot more towards information workers, but we know we're seeing issues around digital friction and reciprocity debt when it comes to the overwhelming amount of technology that we have at our fingertips now.  I think on average, information workers have six workplace communications apps that we're having to balance at the same time. 

So, I think taking a step back and as Kaz said, yeah, understanding your audience and then obviously understanding what is the objective of this communication that I'm looking to push to this audience.  And if it's not actually something that's going to be valuable and beneficial to them, then just don't do it.  So, have those conversations and learn from your peers in a way that will hopefully give you some more ideas how you can maybe apply some of that learning in the context of your role with owning your employee audience. 

[0:33:58] David Green: What are the key takeaways you'd like for our listeners to take home from our discussion today? 

[0:34:04] Kaz Hassan: Yeah, I'd say for me, it is to understand the things that are engaging, activating employees are ultimately the things that are engaging and igniting them in their personal lives; and understand that you are also as an employee, you're a person, maybe look at what is igniting you, what are you engaging with, and work out that there isn't this magical divide that when someone comes into the workplace, that everything changes, whether that's the tech, whether that's the content and comms, whether that's the processes and things like that.  It's not a clear line.  So, I would say, I hope that they've taken away that there are some really cool, exciting concepts that come from marketing, that come from consumer experience, that sort of thing, that can be applied to your roles in HR too. 

[0:34:57] David Green: Yeah, very good.  And, Luke, what would be the key takeaways that you'd like the listeners to take away with them?

[0:35:05] Luke Farrugia: Sure, so I think the first one would be, you've got to be focused on an omnichannel, not a multichannel digital experience, right?  So, create that omnichannel experience for your workforce.  By doing so, you'll allow your employees to have their preferred place to consume and engage with the information they want and need.  And we know that in turn, this will help reduce digital friction, reciprocity debt for your information workers, but also help close that frontline gap, which is a real issue and challenge at the moment; giving more optimal channels for that crucial subset of the workforce to access the information they're currently unable to access. 

The second takeaway, which is going to be a bit of a promo for ScreenCloud, actually something I wish I'd mentioned earlier, I meant to mention earlier, we're just about to publish a really interesting piece of research that we commissioned with Google ChromeOS, who we're a partner with, where we researched 2,400 respondents, 1,200 decision makers, 1,200 frontline employees across manufacturing, logistics, supply chain and construction in the US and UK territories.  And this research found that three in five frontline workers believe that the information that is shared on their workplace screens helps them to become more engaged with the wider business, so that was 61%; 59% think that they've become more productive; and 62% say they've become more data literate.  And so, that research really signifies the immense impact that access to information has on workplace engagement and productivity. 

So, get a better understanding, as I say, of the neuroscience and behavioural science that underpins the communication mediums and channels that you're using.

[0:36:50] David Green: Great.  Well, thanks for sharing that research, Luke.  We can certainly put the link to that in the show notes for listeners who want to dig in a little bit further.  So now, finally, to the question of the series.  So, this is one that we're asking everyone in this series, which ScreenCloud are kindly sponsoring.  So, Kaz, starting with you, how will AI transform the role of HR? 

[0:37:13] Kaz Hassan: What I'd say, looking at it from the HR lens is, it's not just AI for the sake of AI.  Have a look at what are the genuine gaps that we have, and how can it help us?  So for me, I would say look at how it can help us create content if there's a bit of a content deficit; how can it help us target that stuff?  We've created those cool personas, can it help us personalise that and make it more relevant to people?  That's what I would say.  I'd say also, generally speaking, when you've created that content, you made it more relevant, can it help with things like accessibility as well?  Looking at all the things like have we been transcribing our videos so that people can follow them, or podcasts or things like that, whatever it may be?  So, for me, it would be look at where there are gaps and can we use AI to create more, better, relevant content that's more accessible to people across the organisation, so that we get to do the more people side of the function.

[0:38:14] David Green: Very good.  And Luke, same question, how will AI transform the role of HR?

[0:38:21] Luke Farrugia: Cool, so yeah, I think I'll stay on the same theme of improving that employee experience for this question.  And I think AI is going to be instrumental in helping to personalise the digital employee experience and ultimately drive that engagement.  I think a real use case is using AI to analyse the data, employee behaviour data, employee sentiment and feedback, and then identify those patterns that will be leading indicators of engagement levels, etc.  And then, use those insights to proactively address any issues and to tailor your strategies to individual needs to ultimately prevent disengagement and employee turnover.

[0:39:08] David Green: Some great thoughts from both of you there.  So, last thing for me to say is thank you, Luke, thank you, Kaz, for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast.  So, Luke, maybe starting with you this time, can you let listeners know how they can get in touch with you on social media, find out more about ScreenCloud? 

[0:39:25] Luke Farrugia: Yeah, absolutely.  So obviously, search my name and you'll find me on LinkedIn; screencloud.com to learn more about how digital science can help you create a more engaged, productive and compliant workforce.  And as you said, David, I'll kindly share that research that we're publishing the week after next with you so that your listeners can also get their hands on that as well.

[0:39:48] David Green: Great.  And, Kaz, thank you very much as well.  How can listeners stay in touch with you, maybe find out more about the research that you're doing and also find out about Unily as well?

[0:39:59] Kaz Hassan: Of course, yeah, and thanks for having me, David.  So, I'm quite prolific on LinkedIn, I post a lot, I do a lot of trends and predictions, and I also post the odd controversial opinions, so if that's your thing, @kazhassan.  I also have a YouTube channel, I'm a very video-medium person, so if anyone's interested in seeing explainers of our Employee Retention Report, for example, I do my kind of three takeaways from that.  And yeah, on unily.com, we've got that full Employer Retention Report with all the data, what employee experience leaders are prioritising, looking deeper at the digital super apps concept as well.  So, on unily.com, as well as @kazhassan on the main socials. 

[0:40:41] David Green: That's great.  And we'll put links to your social profiles in the show notes as well.  So, Kaz, Luke, thank you very much for being guests on the Digital HR Leaders podcast today.  Enjoy the rest of your days and we'll speak soon.

[0:40:53] Luke Farrugia: Brilliant.  Thanks, David.

[0:40:54] Kaz Hassan: Thanks