Benefits Communication: Building an Internal Brand That Grabs Attention

Transcript:

Jeremy Eskenazi: Hello everybody and welcome to The Conference Board. Today we’re going to have a special webcast on benefit communications and employee engagement, how to build an internal brand that grabs attention today. Just an FYI, if you need to earn credit attendance certificates for any of your continuing education credits, please let us know. You’re see the icon at the bottom to download your certificate at the end of the webcast, and you can use that to claim continuing education credits.

So again, hello everybody and welcome to today’s webcast on benefit communications and employee engagement building, an internal brand that grabs attention sponsored by Segal Benz. I’m Jeremy Eskenazi, and I’m the program director of The Conference Board’s Talent Acquisition Councils and a senior fellow in the human capital center of The Conference Board. I’ll be your moderator today, and I’m joined today by Bridget O’Meara, Vice President and Senior Consultant of Segal Benz, and Dana Shay, Global Benefits Director at AMD.

Before we move on, I’d like to introduce our speakers specifically. Welcome Dana Shay, Director of Global Benefits at Advanced Micro Devices, otherwise known as AMD. She has almost 25 years of experience leading global benefits and well-being initiatives across numerous industries. And in her role at AMD, she helps to create an environment where top talent can do their best work by driving strategic planning and design for benefit programs globally. In addition, she oversees all domestic and global vendors, ensures programs are current with regard to trends and practices and manages program cost and vendor support. Now, prior to joining AMD, Dana held leadership positions at WTW, Panasonic Avionics and Qualcomm.

In addition, we have Bridget O’Meara who has 30 years of experience in strategic employee communications. As an award-winning communicator, she’s passionate about providing employees and their families with simplified, easily digestible benefits information, that helps them improve their physical, emotional and financial health. At Segal Benz, she currently works with Sandia National Laboratories, the University of Idaho, AMD, and several multi-employer clients. Between stints at Segal Benz, Bridget worked with The Boeing Company for more than 12 years, communicating the company’s employee benefits with an emphasis on well-being communications. Bridget also founded and oversees all of MarCom work for the Mend-A-Heart Foundation, a nonprofit supporting children born with congenital heart defects. Help me to welcome both Dana and Bridget. And now Bridget, feel free to take it away.

Bridget O’Meara: Thanks, Jeremy. Good afternoon, everyone. Dana and I are super excited to be here today to share with you the work that we did with AMD, helping them to develop and roll out a global brand. What we’d like to do is just give you a little bit of information about our organizations and then we’ll talk a bit about brand, and we’ll walk through a six-step process that we went through with AMD to build their internal brand. We’ll let you look under the hood and see the process that we went through in doing that. We’ll also share with you what the brand looked like once it was implemented and we’ll allow time for questions and answers. So just know that throughout this session today, if you have any questions, drop them in the chat and we’ll get to those at the end of the presentation.

As Jeremy mentioned, I work with Segal Benz and we are the communications arm of Segal, which is a private benefits and HR consulting firm. We have employees located across the country. There are 1,100 employees working at Segal, and we’ve been helping organizations for more than 80 years. And really what we’re dedicated to doing is helping great organizations inspire their people to improve their health, their finances and their futures. And the way that we do that in the communications practice is really taking the benefit experience and trying to make it a positive consumer experience. And I think we all know that benefits can get confusing and complicated, and we really focus on trying to break that confusion down and make things easy to understand. And today we’re going to talk about how having a strong internal brand can really help you do that. Dana, I’m going to let you introduce yourself a little bit more and AMD

Dana Shay: Yeah, hopefully everyone has heard of AMD. We’ve been at the forefront of a lot of advancements recently, but you may not know all of what AMD is. So AMD was founded back in 1969, like any good tech company as a Silicon Valley startup with just a group of employees focused on building leading edge semiconductors. And since then AMD has grown into a global company setting the standard for modern computing and a lot of major technological advancements and industry firsts along the way. We currently have about 28,000 employees globally. We put a high level of value on innovation, execution, excellence, and collaboration. That’s a key part of our culture. Our vision and mission are really the north stars that we look to when we think about AMD culture and what gives purpose and meaning to our work. So our vision is to transform lives through high performance computing, high performance, and adaptive computing.

And our mission is to build great products that will accelerate the next generation computing experiences specific to AMD’s Total Rewards, which is really what we’re going to focus on in the discussion today. We also look to our north star or our vision when we make decisions about our programs, and that vision is to advance the goals of the company by attracting, retaining, and motivating the best innovators in the world and enabling an environment where we can all do our best work. There is purpose and strategy behind each of our compensation and benefit programs. And so this vision is very specific to Total Rewards but connected to AMD’s broader vision formed a big part of the work that we’re going to talk about today.

So what you will hopefully start to see on the screen is a snapshot of the final rebranded deliverables that were the outcome of this one-year internal branding project that we rolled out globally. The materials were all a meaningful part of the work that my team and I did to increase employee satisfaction and appreciation of benefits. At the start of this project, my goal was to improve employee satisfaction and appreciation of benefits by one percentage point. We measure that every year through an annual all employee survey. The year after we implemented our new brand satisfaction and appreciation rates increased by 11 points. I can’t give full credit to the communication change, but I really do believe that it played a key part in what drove that significant increase in employee satisfaction globally. And so during the meeting today, we’ll walk you through how we achieved that, Bridget.

Bridget: So we’d like to kick things off by talking about brand and reviewing what we can learn from consumer marketers. Some consumer marketers have been effectively marketing their products and services for decades or even longer than that. And so when you think about iconic brands and what they have in common, there’s really four characteristics that we want to highlight. They all have a strong identifiable logo. They have memorable, often catchy taglines, and then they use those logos and taglines to develop impactful marketing and advertising materials. And when they’re really good at what they do, they create an emotional pull with their consumers.

So we ask, "Well, why does it matter?" And it’s not rocket science why consumer marketers invest so much in their brands. They’re trying to engage with consumers, drive sales of their products or services. It’s good for their bottom line. And so as HR professionals when we’re communicating internally, I think that there’s a lot that we can learn and mimic from these consumer marketers who’ve mastered how to connect with their consumers. So I’m going to ask Dana, if you could share your thoughts on why you think it’s important to also establish a strong internal brand.

Dana: We feel that it’s really important at AMD to have impactful employee communications. We want them to stand out to get the attention of our employees and to engage them. We think that a strong internal brand helps increase awareness and appreciation of our programs, and ultimately that leads to better engagement and ROI in those programs. The strong communication internal brand helps us to attract and retain talent. It really is about promoting meaningful resources that allow employees to bring their whole selves to AMD and do their best work back to our vision. It’s about bringing the right resources to employees at the right moment. And when we deliver impactful employee communications, we increase desired behaviors such as all of those that you see on the screen there.

Bridget: And Dana, before we delve into the work that we did for AMD, can you kind of set the stage for why you reached out to Segal Benz for support?

Dana: Yeah, and I’ll do that on this next slide. So at AMD, our focus is on delivering market-aligned programs, incorporating employee feedback into everything that we do, delivering benefits that are consistent with AMD’s culture and values, and ensuring that we’re managing program costs and value for AMD and for our employees. When I joined AMD a few years ago, despite offering a highly competitive set of benefits that took employee feedback into account and we felt aligned with AMD’s culture and values, overall satisfaction and benefits were decreasing year over year. Again, this is something we measure through our annual all-employee survey, and there’s always room for improvement in program design, but I really believed the greatest impact to satisfaction could be felt through improving our benefits, communication, and education. At the time, our look and feel of messaging for benefits and Total Rewards was really outdated. It was text-heavy, it was plan-centric rather than employee-centric, and it was difficult to find information that you needed. And so I really felt strongly that if we wanted to drive stronger employee engagement in benefits and build better awareness of our programs, it wasn’t going to come through program design changes. It was going to come through communication changes and really felt like that would ultimately drive better satisfaction in our programs.

Bridget: Thanks for that background, Dana. What we’d like to do next is talk about how we took the principles of consumer marketing, and we employed them when building and managing brands internally. So we’re going to walk you through the process that we went through with AMD, and we broke the process down into six steps. This first step is to really understand your audience. So when we first started working with Dana and her team, we provided them with lots of different questions and requests for information. We asked for detailed information about their demographics. We wanted to understand what AMDers were like, what’s their gender makeup, what’s their ages, what types of benefit programs are they enrolled in, where are they located? And as Dana mentioned, AMD has employees all across the globe. So we really wanted to understand where there were high concentrations of employees, and we also wanted to understand what their concerns are.

And as Dana mentioned, AMD conducts an annual survey. So all those results, the survey results were shared with us so we understood what their benefits are and areas where they might have feedback. We also work closely with Dana and her team to really understand what were the goals that they were trying to achieve. And another opportunity where we had to really gain insight about AMD and their current situation was conducting the Segal Benz 10 Keys assessment. It’s a proprietary assessment that was developed to measure 10 different areas that we’ve identified as best practice areas for communications. So within each of those 10 areas, we have a multitude of questions that we ask, and each question scored and weighted, and at the end of the assessment, it gives us a good idea about what an organization is doing well and opportunities for improvement. So with AMD, we had the opportunity to do this in-depth assessment with Dana, as well as some of her counterparts in different parts of the country, and that really just gave us a good sense of what was working and areas for improvement within AMD. And I want to remind people if you have any questions as we’re going through the presentation, just drop them into the chat for us.

Dana: So the next step in the process was leveraging our external brand. It was really important to us that our Total Rewards brand felt like an extension of the AMD brand and didn’t feel disconnected from it. So before I even launched the project, I was very transparent with our internal brand team about this project and our goals, and it was an important step to build their trust and early buy-in to the work. At the same time, I had to help them recognize that our audiences were very different. What they want to present externally to customers is different from what we might want to present internally to our employees, but still by gaining their buy-in early on in the project, involving them, asking for their feedback, allowed us for greater flexibility as we got deeper into the work. And it was really critical that we listened to their feedback that they provided, especially on early mock-ups by incorporating their feedback. This ultimately led to a better end result that everyone was comfortable with.

And so this brings us to AMD’s external brand, which is very important, and it defines who we are, what we do, why we do it, and what we aspire to be. We’ve been very intentional in identifying the right behaviors that link to our mission, vision and strategy that we discussed before. As we developed our internal brand, we anchored everything that we did to this external brand. And so you’ll see some of the words that are important to our external brand show up later on when we look at our internal brand personality, and those are innovation, excellence, direct, humble, collaborative, inclusive, these are all really core values to AMD and their core values when we started to develop our Total Rewards brand.

Bridget: And then the next step in the process is to work with AMD to define their brand personality. So I really think this is a fun part in the process, and what we asked AMD to do was to think about what they want to stand for and what they want their employees to think when they think about AMD? Again, we had a series of questions that we asked AMD to consider as a team. So we asked them things like, if AMD were a car, what type of car would it be and why? We asked AMD to come up with a list of adjectives, how they describe themselves. And so the overarching goal of this whole exercise is really to understand what’s the essence of AMD and how do they want to resonate with their employees? And we wanted to create a brand for them that was going to connect with their employees. One that their employees were going to engage with and really resonate for them. So what we have next or a list of the adjectives that the AMD team came up with. I’m going to let Dana walk through these adjectives.

Dana: So these were the adjectives that our global Total Rewards team settled on to describe AMD and what we stand for. And as I said before, you’ll see a lot of overlap between these words and the words on AMD’s external brand and, not surprising, because they all form part of the guiding principles of what it means to be AMD. But the words that we particularly leaned in on as we considered how we’d want to guide our internal brand were: support, innovative, inclusive, and collaborative. We felt that those words best described the feelings that we wanted employees to have when they think about our Total Rewards programs.

Bridget: To recap, at this point in time, we understand who our audience is. We’ve thought about AMD’s internal brand and how it connects with their external brand, and we’ve worked with Dana and her team to understand what they want their brand to stand for. So the next step in the process is brainstorming. And at Segal Benz, the way that we structure our communications team is that we have a consultant like me who serves as the main contact with the client, but then we have a project manager who handles scheduling, organizes the team. We have a group of editorial folks, writers, copy editors. We also have graphic design, graphic designers who specialize and have been helping organizations for many years strictly communicate their benefits. So they’re extremely talented and good at what they do. And then we also have tech consultants who also are part of the client teams.

So what we did in AMD’s case is we gathered both our core AMD client team, as well as other individuals from within the Segal Benz team just to bring in more creativity and fresh ideas. And we shared all the information that we’ve gathered in steps one, two, and three with the team and just asked everyone to throw out their ideas about some ideas for directions that we can go with the branding. Our goal was to go back to AMD with two really strong brand directions that we could present for input from them. So once we went through this brainstorming exercise, and we went back and forth many times, but we landed on two different directions that we wanted to present. The first one was, "Together We Advance You." And the second was, “We Got You”. So both of these directions were really meant to put the AMD employee at the focus of both of these directions.

We wanted them both to have a feeling of collaboration, of the employee feeling that they were important to AMD. So once we identified these two directions, what we did next was brought in our creative folks and we wanted them to bring these two directions to life through visuals, looking at photography and colors, and also refining the messaging that we were using on these two directions. And so I think it’s if you’re working on doing this internally, if you can allow as much time as possible, and I know that we’re all busy and we have timeline demands, but if your schedule allows, I think it’s really important not to rush this step and to give your creative team as much time as possible to come up with their ideas and get their creative juices flowing.

So what I’m going to show you next are the two directions, the visual directions, that we came up with for both directions. The first one is what we called “you matter”. And this direction tied very closely to the external brand that Dana had showed you earlier. We actually were piggybacking off of AMD, the tagline that they use on external communications that says, “Together We Advance”, and in this case, we just simply added “You”, for you, the employee. So we thought it was very simple, but a powerful way to tie in with the external brand and we thought it was just really powerful.

What I’m going to show you next is how the brand, what it sounds like, and I’m just going to simply read to you what’s here on-screen. "Your AMD benefits help you to live your best life. Your benefits support the things that matter most to you. Your benefits provide the resources you need to build physical, emotional, and financial health. With them, you can achieve your wildest dreams." So that gives you a sense of what the messaging would sound like and materials that would be produced for this direction. Then the other thing that we did was show the team, if you went with this direction, what would it look like when you apply it to your communications deliverables. So here on screen you can see on the left-hand side what it would look like on a benefits guide. And then on the right-hand side, it’s a postcard.

So again, you can see those, the imagery of this is stock imagery, but it’s meant to show AMD and the things that are important to them, the things, the people that matter to them. So that was direction one, and then our next direction was the “We Got You”. So as you can see, again, this direction is really meant to show how AMD supports employees and puts them, makes them, the focal center point of their benefit programs, but it has a slightly different feel and look, it’s a little bit more, you can see there’s more white space, it’s a little bit more airy and fresh, but yet it’s still very warm. And as you can see, we’ve taken the AMD part of their logo and used that to frame the pictures, photography that represents employees, and the people that are important to them.

Then in terms of what this direction would sound like, it’s somewhat similar to what you heard before but tweaked a bit, and I’m just going to again read what’s here on-screen. "At AMD, our people are at the heart of everything we do. They drive our success. We believe it’s important to take care of our own. That’s why we provide benefits to help support your physical health, emotional well-being, and financial stability, everything you need to thrive at every stage of your life." And then again, we showed how this direction could be applied to materials, a benefits guide on the left and a postcard on the right.

The other thing that I just wanted to mention is that what we did for AMD as part of this process was what originally Dana came to us and asked us to create: a brand for AMD’s benefits. And as the team dug into this work, we really felt that it would be most beneficial for AMD to rebrand all of their Total Rewards programs. So we also presented the idea that they go forward with doing that, and we provided some recommendations of how they could bucket their different benefit programs, total compensation programs. So here on screen, you can see we’ve divided them up into my health and well-being, my money, my life and work. And ultimately the team asked us to go forward with rebranding all of the Total Rewards. And so as we’ve developed materials like benefits guides, we’ve used this structure to help organize and present information. It’s also a structure that’s been applied on their internal SharePoint site that they use to communicate benefit information with employees. Dana, I think it makes the most sense for you to share the process that you went through internally to gain consensus on the brand, and you can share the direction that you chose.

Dana: Yeah, and no surprise because you saw the answer at the start of the presentation, but we selected option one. We selected that because it felt more like AMD, it felt like an extension of who we are as a company, but with a more compassionate, lighter tone that is appropriate for our Total Rewards programs. I’ve already mentioned the collaborative process that we took in embarking on this work, but I just really want to underscore that again here. Every step of the way, from building the initial business case to changing this from a benefits only to a Total Rewards initiative, to ultimately deciding which creative direction we would take, I got input and feedback from our teams. And so once it came time to implement this new brand, everybody was already engaged and excited.

And so now was really when the fun began. This was the time to implement this new brand. So we’d done all of the work to get alignment, and we’ve done so, so much work to get to this point, and now we have to launch it across all of our materials. So starting just to help ease the rollout of the new brand and make it as easy as possible for our team members around the world, we developed a set of templates for a number of digital assets that our teams could use. So here you see we’ve got a PowerPoint template, an email banner that allowed for customization by country, and then here is a screenshot on the right of our benefits guide. This is sort of version one, showing how we applied the look and feel to an existing piece of communication. Just providing easy access to these templates was a really important way for us to maintain brand consistency. Our teams were thrilled. They were absolutely thrilled to have these templates and now to be able to send out and create new materials with a consistent look and feel, that felt modern, and then it also just created a great starting point for anything new that they wanted to prepare.

Another really important step in the branding update was to apply it to our intranet site that serves as the central hub where employees go to for information about all of their Total Rewards programs, and it’s consistently rated as the number one place that they like to go to get information. And so Segal Benz helped us with some mockups of select pages and they provided guidance about everything from font size, spacing, headlines, use of color, even an inventory of pictures that we could use to populate the pages. We started first by updating all of the US pages, and then after we completed that, we assigned an internal project manager who trained all of our in-country staff around the world to be able to update their own pages and follow not just the consistent look but consistent style of messaging. We knew this was going to be a huge effort.

We are in over 30 countries, and you can imagine that for every country there’s at least five to 10 if not more depending on the country intranet pages with information on Total Rewards programs. And so we really understood that this was a great deal of effort that was going to be required to get to an updated state. And so we built out a project plan with the goal of completing all of this work over the course of a year. We focused first on larger headcount countries or countries where an open enrollment season was coming soon earlier in the year so that we could really get to the greatest number of employees as quickly as possible with these updates.

And so just a few more examples, this is now, this was kind of a year later how our open enrollment materials for last year looked. So we continued to refine our benefits guide and the postcard here to leverage the updated brand. We’ve also used it to launch global campaigns. This was a Global Time Off campaign reflecting the new brand. We solicited photos and quotes from actual AMDers that we incorporated into these materials. We wanted to highlight the importance of time off benefits and the role they play in the lives of our employees and encourage them to really use their time off and use that as a chance to unplug and recharge. And we’ve continued building off of this campaign that we ran last year again this year, partnering with our internal communications team to continue to emphasize how important it is for our employees to recharge on that same theme. We also ran a global campaign last year encouraging self-care and making time for yourself that reflected the new brand. And as of the start of this year, we introduced a new EAP partner and created a campaign to promote that new vendor. One thing that we did with that campaign that worked really well was we customized the photography on these digital displays for different regions, so that way the images that displayed in offices around the world really resonated with the AMDers in each of those locations.

And so to kind of wrap up some of the key takeaways, this project came about because despite offering what we felt was a really competitive set of benefits, overall satisfaction was decreasing year over year. And as I mentioned before, following this initial rollout of our new brand and communication materials, we saw an incredible 11% increase in total reward satisfaction year over year from our AMDer survey. The business case that I built up front to compel our leaders to invest in this work didn’t even anticipate such a significant increase in satisfaction, and I was really proud of the results of that. Another important learning throughout this project was just seeing the bigger picture at every step of the way. That includes starting from let’s just make this a benefits brand to realizing that Total Rewards is really what we need to focus on and not something as narrow as benefits.

Looking back, it also begged the question of whether we should have made this a broader HR initiative. It would’ve been great from overall employee experience, consistency in materials, messaging, internet pages, all of that, but it ultimately would’ve slowed the work down and made it more difficult to move forward. So we’re happy that we did accomplish this for Total Rewards. I’ve also said several times, alignment and collaboration with other stakeholders was key to this work. While taking the time to pause and get feedback at time can feel like it slows the process down, it ultimately led to a really great product that was ready to run once we launched it. And so overall, I’m just really proud of the work that we’ve put together here and the way that we’ve been able to improve the experience for AMDers and give them really relevant access to information and resources on their Total Rewards programs. So I think we can pause now for questions.

Jeremy: Great. Thank you so much ladies. And by the way, congratulations. Setting a goal of 1% improvement and getting 11% is quite an amazing accomplishment, so congratulations on that. We have a few questions, and the first one is actually just a comment that somebody made, which is what exactly is a Recharge Day?

Dana: Recharge Days were something that we introduced during the pandemic at the time, as I’m sure when people weren’t taking vacation days. They are global company shutdown days, so no meetings encouraged, no work. We started with three and a couple of years ago we added a fourth. They are the most highly valued benefit that we provide to our employees globally, and they are great because everyone around the world does not work on those four days, and you really do get to recharge.

Jeremy: That’s fantastic. Thank you. We have a couple of questions here, and what I thought I would do is just kind of go through them and then either one of you can answer. The first question is, how did you align your communications strategy with the broader employee value proposition?

Dana: Yeah, so AMD looks at employee value proposition a little bit different from other companies. So whereas many companies will define what the value proposition is of working at that company, AMD believes that each individual employee defines their own value proposition, and a key part of the manager-employee relationship is ensuring that the manager understands that. That’s why we ask for very regular employee feedback to ensure that we know what their value proposition is. And so what’s kind of key to that from a Total Rewards perspective is that our programs are inclusive and flexible and meet the needs of employees across different life events and life stages. And so how that showed up here in the communications is all of this is meant to, as I said earlier, get the right resources to employees at the right time. The way that our communications were structured before where it was hard to find, it wasn’t written from the employee’s perspective, it wasn’t engaging meant that people weren’t either utilizing or even aware of programs that would be helpful to them. And so this really enabled us to bring greater value to employees by giving them access to the information that they needed.

Jeremy: That’s great, thank you. Another question we got was did you get input and feedback from employees after the launch? If so, did you alter the materials accordingly based on the feedback that you received?

Dana: We always get feedback from employees at AMD, so we do run an annual all-employee survey that is an opportunity for employees to provide formal, regular feedback every three years. We also run a Total Rewards specific survey so that we will be doing at some point in the first half of next year, it’s coming up to three years since the last one, so this will play a big role in that. And then of course we receive feedback ad hoc all the time. Overall though, as it relates specifically to the communications materials, it’s been all positive feedback. We’ve gotten so much good word from employees about how much easier the intranet sites are to navigate, how they’re able to find answers to their questions. We’ve even seen a decrease in the volume of ticketing that comes through with questions, and we think this plays a key role in that.

Bridget: I was just going to mention, Dana, I think upfront too, correct me if I’m wrong, but you informally got feedback from teammates and people outside your team about which direction they preferred. So I think that also contributed to the decision on which direction we went with the brand.

Dana: Yes.

Jeremy: Thanks. Another question is did you extend the new brand to other Total Rewards elements such as compensation and retirement?

Dana: Everything. So we rebuilt all of our Total Rewards communications, as we were mentioning before our intranet site. What we ended up building was a Total Rewards landing page, which included those three categories that Bridget showed earlier, health, money and rewards, work and life. And so all of our Total Rewards programs fit within one of those three categories, and from there is where you can access information specific to the programs within that. So yes, it includes everything within the Total Rewards space.

Jeremy: Great. Another question is, did you have to do a lot of work? And you kind of already talked a little bit about this at the beginning, but you did have to get a lot of work done to get leadership on board with these changes.

Dana: Are you sure there’s no questions for Bridget in there, or you want me to keep talking? I’m just kidding.

Jeremy: Either one of you.

Dana: No, I’m kidding. I did. I actually spent a lot of time building out a business case, which I did in partnership with Segal Benz, who kindly entrusted me with their time to help me build that out because there was an initial investment that was needed, but more so it was about having that long-term vision of what this could mean. And so some of that business case was survey data that showed the direct impact that impactful communications have on employee engagement. It was screenshotting some of our competitors web pages and kind of giving them a model for what it looks like at other companies. And it was also really digging into the fact that our benefit program satisfaction was decreasing, but the state of those programs, it just didn’t make sense. And so yes, I did build out a thorough business case, which I took to leadership to get approval to move this forward.

Jeremy: Super. And a follow-up question that we have here is how did you handle the talking point regarding the investment the company is making and any cost savings realized from revamping or choosing new vendors for your benefit program?

Dana: Yeah, as a starting point, what I was asking for as an investment was less than 0.01% of our annual benefit spend. So that was my first step, just putting it in the context of we spend a tremendous amount as a company annually to provide these wonderful programs to our employees, and if they’re not appreciating them or using them as they should or we hope they should, then it seems like a very simple solution to invest almost a drop in the bucket compared to that budget to make the communications better. And with budgets, there’s always a little bit of finagling around prioritizing something to deprioritize another, but that was sort of one of the more compelling arguments, is just how small this investment was compared to what we spend overall.

Jeremy: Sure. Thanks. I’ll ask this question of Bridget, but Dana, feel free to jump in as necessary. The question is, how involved was your work with the internal AMD brand team?

Bridget: Dana had to kind of service as the buffer between us or she chose to take that role on, but we always do when we’re working with clients, we encourage them to work closely with their internal brand teams and engage them throughout the process. I’ve worked with organizations over the years who’ve failed to do that, and then sometimes you go off and you do a bunch of work and then your internal brand team’s like, "No, you can’t do that. You got to rework it." So we really always emphasize importance of engaging them from the get-go. And Dana, I’ll let you elaborate on how you did that.

Dana: Yeah, and I think just to say AMD’s culture, as you saw in our values, we are a very collaborative culture, and so it was important for me to ensure that I had the buy-in of the brand team as we embarked on this work because like I said before, we wanted this to feel like an extension of that brand. I think there was a lot of initial support, but then where it became sticky was that discussion of kind of a push towards sticking very conservatively to the external brand. Their desire for us to do that versus our desire to create something with a softer tone that was designed with a different end goal in mind really. And so just ensuring that we were aligned with what their goals are with the external brand and what our goals are with an internal brand. That was probably the stickiest part of the discussion, but it’s a continued partnership we have, even since this made additional updates to our external brand and have since started to incorporate some of those updates into these materials and just having that open door style with them has allowed us to continue to refine these materials in a way that works.

Jeremy: Great. Thank you. It looks like we have time for just about one or two more questions, and I’ll go ahead and ask this of both of you actually, or probably for Dana. The question is, where does learning and development sit within your organization? Is it part of Total Rewards? Reskilling and upskilling are top of mind for many employees?

Dana: Yeah. Learning and development sit within our HR function, not within Total Rewards at AMD, so it wasn’t part of this rebranding process, but there are certain things that we do partner very closely with them on. An example is the launch of our new emotional health partner. What we’ve been focused on this year and into next is building out manager enablement training and materials, and so we’re partnering with them very closely just on that as a specific example of how we take what we do here, and we partner with other teams to ensure that we’ve got a combined focus.

Jeremy: Super. Great. I have one more last question for you, and that is how did you measure employee engagement overall?

Dana: Well, our primary measure is through our annual AMDer survey, so we do have a number of questions in there which measure employee satisfaction and engagement with our Total Rewards programs. But in addition to that, we look at program utilization. We really have seen an increase in utilization, sometimes in cases where I wish they didn’t use it so much because it’s driven up some costs, but where we’ve really leaned in on communicating, we have seen some great results in the utilization of programs. We’re also still early, but we do feel already we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback about this focus on emotional health and taking time for yourself. So we’ve already started to receive some great feedback from managers and employees about the impact that that has had on them, and I think just bringing these materials front and center, having those digital displays with a QR Code show up when folks are waiting for the elevator, it makes it so easy to access information about our programs, and so that’s been another way that we’ve been tracking it.

Jeremy: Excellent. Thank you for sharing the answers to those questions. We’re going to go ahead and wrap up right now, but what I’d like to do is just share with you if you would like to connect directly with Dana or with Bridget, you can connect with them using their LinkedIn links that you see on the screen here. They’re both more than happy to answer your questions following this conversation and connect with you. Thank you to both of you, again, Dana and Bridget, for a really great story here. As a talent acquisition person, I can tell you that I wish that talent acquisition teams had the kind of support that you had and the benefits’ communication side. Obviously, you could use much of this in the employer value proposition for many other parts of the human element in company. So great job again to both of you and thank you again to Bridget and Segal Benz for sponsoring today’s session.

What I’d like to do right now is just remind everybody as we wrap up, we do have more upcoming webcasts, so stay ahead with our latest lineup. We have one on healthcare costs coming up in October. On October 28th. We have another one on awareness to action driving engagement in mental health benefits, and then we have another one on navigating the evolving workforce, how Disney intentionally designed a culture of engagement on October 30th. You can see the full list of webcasts by just using that QR code and secure your spot the same way you did today’s session.

There’s a couple more events that The Conference Board is hosting, including our in-person people first reimagining talent and rewards October 16th through 17th in Brooklyn. We have the AI Leadership Summit in Brooklyn in November and the Employee Wellbeing Summit in December in Brooklyn. Again, feel free to just simply scan the QR code to access information. Other than that, thank you all for joining us today. The Conference Board is very, very glad that we had you all here. Our agenda is simply to help leaders navigate the biggest issues facing business and to better serve society. Thank you again for joining us, and thank you again to Segal Benz and our guests, Dana and Bridget, for today’s session. Take care, everybody.