Culture and Engagement: Giving Your ESOP Communications a Video Reboot
In their presentation at the NCEO’s annual conference, Jacob Covell, media specialist at employee-owned Carris Reels, and Kyla Alterman, associate consultant at Workplace Development, acknowledged some of the ways in which ESOP communications and engagement might have experienced a bit of a slump since the pandemic.
For some companies, shifting priorities during these times resulted in new challenges related to the way people engage with company communications in the office or from home. The changing landscape of how work was being done and information was being accessed caused a communications slump for many ESOPs that are just now trying to get back on track, but they are doing so with fresh ideas about how to best deliver company messaging, education, and their vision. Companies like Carris Reels decided it was time to start engaging their employee-owners in ways they may now prefer— with videos and training modules that they can access at their leisure.
Communications in Need of a Reboot
Like Carris Reels, nearly half of the companies participating in the NCEO’s Communications Committee Crash Course over the past year expressed a desire to rejuvenate or reboot their culture and communications initiatives. Carris wanted to generate new attention and excitement around the ESOP.
With more than 800 employees in seven different states and three countries,
this was no small task. When Covell joined the company, much of the information about the ESOP, profit sharing, stock allocation, and company governance was given to employees in the form of a booklet. Covell noted that despite receiving information via booklets or similar educational materials, “some employees weren’t motivated enough to dive deep into the benefits the ESOP offers.”
Covell was tasked with producing videos on employee safety training and company production processes, but the Carris team quickly realized that there was not much in the way of video ESOP education for employees. The company has 15 different locations with both English- and Spanish-speaking employee-owners, and while in-person meetings serve as effective and meaningful ways to engage employees, at large companies like Carris, these efforts can be difficult to scale across
the organization.
The company decided to collaborate with Workplace Development to create a series of video modules that would serve multiple purposes and allow them to more effectively grow their communications, education, onboarding, safety protocols, and professional development at all locations. Their team first identified the most important information to communicate in the video series. They initally focused on ESOP-specific topics, but given how important safety protocols are in their line of work, they ultimately decided to create videos on these topics and include them as part of the larger training module.
The brainstorming resulted in 16 video topics, all of which would require their own scripts and storyboards before recording. Video scripts were drafted by the Carris employees or leaders with the most knowledge on each respective topic. Other team members developed storyboards by compiling videos from various locations or images applicable to the subject matter. As a team, they reviewed and edited the drafts of each module until they were in agreement that the messages were being conveyed in a clear and engaging way. The training video content ranged from simple topics such as how to read ESOP account statements to advanced topics such as stock allocation formulas.
These training modules would also be used to onboard future employees across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, so the teams also created versions for Spanish- speaking employee-owners. Given the company’s size and growth over the past several years, ensuring their messaging was consistent across all locations, as well as for both English and Spanish speakers, was a challenge. The investment of time and money necessary to create the videos allowed them to communicate and collaborate with their multiple regions at scale. The team also developed a series of quizzes associated with the videos and training modules in collaboration with Workplace Development and provided incentives to those that watched the videos at their leisure and completed the quizzes to demonstrate mastery of each topic. To those who completed the modules, Carris also awarded company polo shirts emblazoned with their own unique logo developed for their “Certified Employee- Owner” initiative.
Kyla Alterman says that Carris Reels is one of many ESOP organizations choosing to communicate based on the preferences of their employee-owners and the general direction that corporate communications seem to be moving towards. Alterman noted that a lot of mature ESOPs are rethinking how they scale their communications, as so many of them are growing and adding employees at rates their communications strategies cannot always keep up with: “There are just a lot of new people at fast-growing organizations who need to know how the ESOP works and why it’s so important, and given their growing numbers, it can be harder and harder to get in front of them,” Alterman said. “They are not doing away with the manuals and booklets, but they do see audio and video communications as an important addition to their strategy, allowing for a more robust way to connect with employee-owners.”