How to Turn Internal Stories into Employee Advocacy with Matt See

Matt See (00:00)
It was the noise? So much noise, competing messages. There's no clear thread. They're like, wow, we've got this one big shiny lever and it's all company email and I'm just going to yank this lever all day long until this baby breaks. I always wanted an all company email to feel like it came from your bank or it came from your mom. That needs to be the big red button that you slam when you really need to get a message out.

Rhona Pierce (00:06)
How do we choose?

How do you build that culture of where people are so interested that they actually go seek it out?

Matt See (00:35)
We know half the people are not looking at this, not if you want authenticity. So if you're building a culture that is based on core values that include fun and working together and things like that, all the ones that I know we've all seen, then you also need to live those as well.

Rhona Pierce (00:54)
Most employees have no idea what's really happening inside their own companies. And that's why so many advocacy programs fall flat. Matt C has spent his career transforming internal comms at massive organizations, and he's discovered something most leaders miss. Employee advocacy isn't about social media training or content calendars. It's about telling stories inside the company that are so compelling, so human, so real, that employees can't help but share them.

Today, we're diving into how internal storytelling turns employees into authentic advocates and why the stories you tell inside matter more than any campaign you launch outside. Matt, welcome to Workfluencer.

Matt See (01:38)
Thanks

so much for having me. It's great to be here.

Rhona Pierce (01:41)
So for listeners who haven't met you yet, can you tell us who you are and what you do best?

Matt See (01:47)
I am a communicator and a dot connector, 100%. I've been working in marketing communications in multiple different industries for the last 20 years. And what it really comes down to is telling compelling stories. ⁓ I love working with people to tell a story that sticks and also something that really helps get the message out that the person is trying to deliver that message really wants to get out.

I find that in communications, a lot of times we ⁓ oftentimes try to write the most, ⁓ the story that has the most buzzwords in it, the story that has everything that we think needed to be ticked off, instead of really looking at what does the person I'm delivering this message to really want to read, what's going to resonate with them. And that's what I specialize in. It's what I've done in everything from online education to hospitality, retail to home shopping network, and recently in last 10 years doing it.

across multiple healthcare organizations.

Rhona Pierce (02:50)
Amazing. So your approach to internal comms, it's really different than most of the people that I've worked with, at least. ⁓ So everyone is, like you said, focused on the prettier newsletters, the better memos. You really have discovered that most companies get this backwards, right? Like, how did you figure that out? Like, when did you come to this realization that storytelling is really where it's at?

Matt See (03:16)
It's probably when I first started working with some of the larger organizations in my career, you know, I started out with much smaller organizations, state-based nonprofits, and then went on and worked in the hospitality industry for a small ski resort that was outside of Washington, DC. And these were organizations that might employ a couple hundred people. Employee communications is still extremely important at that level. But, you know, when I really started to notice, when I started to jump up to organizations that were kind of more that

mid-size, so 1,500, 2,000, 5,000 employees. And then I just noticed the noise that was happening. I wasn't working in internal communications at the time. I was working in marketing and doing regular external communications. And where internal really impacted me is the way the company was delivering a message about how we're doing as a business or something that was extremely important. And I watched people that I had been managing and growing

for a number of years become really shaky and be like, ⁓ don't know if we're doing well as an organization. I'm going to bounce. I'm going to leave. And I'm like, no, no, we're fine. I've seen the financials. We're okay. But because of how that message was delivered, I've seen that really allow me to not only create some shaky leaves throughout our company and the companies that I've worked with, but really seen some amazing people leave.

happens ultimately is the business is impacted, right? So when the opportunity came to run internal communications at Centene, I was like, let's go. Like 70,000 employees, like I can make a huge impact. And that's why even my wife was like, why are you going to just strictly internal communications? was like, because I feel like it needs to be fixed. There's an issue here. And I feel like everything I've done in marketing for the last 19, 20 years, I can take all of that and use it.

on internal communications and to actually help propel organizations.

Rhona Pierce (05:21)
I love that. Hey, have you subscribed? Let's fix that. It's the easiest way to support this show. What is that storytelling like going back to your example of people thinking that that the company was not doing well and starting to look outside? Like how does it look when you're actually doing the storytelling and conveying this information correctly?

Matt See (05:44)
Yeah, so the biggest, the way I can tell you that is the way I've noticed it being wrong, right? So when I joined Centene, an organization with 70,000 employees, first thing I noticed wasn't the complexity of an organization of that size. know, something like a large health insurance payer, that is a very complex thing to understand. So I was like, oh man, I'm gonna go into this and it's gonna take me up this huge learning curve here. But it wasn't that, it was the noise.

So much noise. like ⁓ the Grinch, right? When he's tired of hearing the hoos down in the middle saying, he's like, the noise, noise, noise. And I think of that when I read that book to my daughter around the holidays. And that's what it was. It's hundreds of emails, hundreds of emails that were coming out that's filling your inbox, right? That might be coming from an HR lead, from an IT person, just that are going out to these mass groups of people, right?

competing messages, there's no clear thread. And to look at that and say, good Lord, like we have got to, nobody's paying attention to this. It's, if you're like a fish and you're swimming in ocean and the water is all these messages from an internal perspective and you're like, good gosh, I'm a fish and I'm drowning in this, right? So what I looked at was what are the four things that we're really trying to do? We're trying to, and when you break internal communications down and it was

We're trying to inform, right? There are messages that maybe aren't as exciting from an internal perspective, which are those information pieces like, hey, your benefits, things like that, that are extremely important, but we need to get out. So we need to inform the population. We need to educate them, right? Our business changes. It changes on a daily basis. No matter if you're in, you're working in ⁓ tech or if you're working in healthcare or wherever it is.

Businesses are changing every single day, right? So if you're not educating your employee base on how your market is changing, how you guys are dealing with those changes, where you see things going in the future and actually teaching them about what you're doing, then you have your number one advocates there that are willing to maybe run through a wall for you, but they don't really know what they're gonna say when they have that Kool-Aid moment and bump through the wall. They should be like...

Yeah, but they don't really know how to say it because they haven't formally been educated around it and then inspiring right so You know health care is really good at inspiring But the people that are really doing the work can do the inspiring as well What I've learned in a lot of organizations is when messages come out They only work from the top and a lot of times they're speaking with language from the top as well

When you have an employee base, even if it's 1500 or 2000 people, you've got everything from C level executives to mid level managers and frontline employees, right? Well, being classically trained in journalism, I know that, you know, that standard kind of reading level is eighth grade. Well, if you're writing in an executive stance every single time, you're missing at least a quarter or third of your audience because

They don't understand the jargon that you're spewing out, right? So when you're inspiring, you're making sure that you're actually using people, not just highlighting executives all the time, but highlighting people that are actually doing the work, right? And then, it might, again, it might want just to step back there. The inspiration doesn't have to come with the work that they're doing. These are people, right? That are out in the world.

that are still representing you as a brand and as an organization, they're representing you outside of there, but you're doing amazing things, right? They might be volunteering, they might be doing, you know, teaching at a local university or whatever. So bringing those messages in. And then the last piece of that is celebrating, right? So celebrating the work that's being done, celebrating the differences and what those people are bringing together. So we kind of pared it down into those four buckets to make sure

that we have different information that's going out on a regular basis.

Rhona Pierce (10:01)
So inform, educate, inspire, and celebrate. Yes. But if we've worked in organizations, we know that everyone thinks their message needs to be shared with everyone. Everyone thinks their message is the most important. And everyone wants to inform everyone of everything. How do we choose?

what messages are shared? Because like you said, and I've experienced it, there's a ton of noise and it gets to a point where you see an email from internal comms and it's just like, ignore. Like even if you read it, your brain is still ignoring it. Cause it's email number 10,000, right? So how do you choose what messages or what stories or what you're actually sharing with employees?

Matt See (10:51)
Yeah, so it's funny because I used to joke and say that even the really smart ones like the IT folks probably have the filters set up to where it just automatically filters the messages that are coming from internal calls. No, but there's a couple of things you can do, right? In marketing, what we like to do a lot of times is we say, let's take a shotgun approach and just see, let's just get all this message out and we're going to blast it out to everybody, right? So we're going to put it on a billboard and hope that anybody that

cares about it's gonna see it. And I think that's what internal comms still falls on a lot of times. They're like, wow, we've got this one big shiny lever and it's all company email and I'm just gonna yank this lever all day long until this baby breaks. And that's what has happened to a lot of organizations up in that. And they don't look at building segmentation strategies like we do in marketing, right? When you're marketing a product and saying, all right, who's my audience that is...

more likely to read an email. What might be a frontline employee, right, that only gets certain times to check their email, or maybe you work in an organization that frontline employees don't have emails. And the only way you can get in touch with them is by creating some type of material that sits on a board in a break room, right? So what you need to do is look at, you need to build as many levers as you can. And that's really what I looked at was, you know, when I was like, all right, how many levers can we build?

to say, all right, this is a message that needs to go to these people, these people, and these people, right? And we pull on them as we need. And it might be everything as big as an all company town hall, or something than all company email, or it might be something as small as a Slack or Teams message to a smaller group of folks, or like I said, putting a ⁓ poster up in a break room. And once you realize,

who those audiences are that you're talking to by pulling each one of those levers. You can then say when somebody comes to you, track the data like we would track and stuff and you could say, hey, I've got a message that I to get out to these people because they need to do X, Y, You can say, based upon our segmentation strategy, based upon the numbers, we get the highest amount of engagement when we do it this way. And once you do that, you'll learn that they care about the message.

but they respect you and how to deliver it and get it to the right audience. Then they stop asking, when people come to us, they stop asking, hey, can I get a spot in town hall and can you give me two posts on the intranet and an all company email? They start saying, hey, here's what I need to do. I need people to do this. They need to do their self-evaluations by XYZ, and then we can help them better because now we know

right levers to pull. I always wanted an all-company email to feel like it came from your bank or it came from your mom. And you're like, Holy crap, somebody hacked into my bank account. I need to look at this all-company email. And that's really what we went to. And I really charge other people to do that too. And you can still gain that back if you find other levers. You can still gain that respect back of the all-company email.

if you limit it to only certain times when you're sending that message. That needs to be the big red button that you slam when you really need to get a message out.

Rhona Pierce (14:22)
So you would say that the company email is more of like the to inform that bucket, right? ⁓ So I wanna talk about the other areas because I really loved your approach of like, I call it the backwards ⁓ or like, maybe not backwards isn't the word, but like opposite way of activating your. ⁓

advocates, right, your employee advocates, it's by telling them a story so compelling that they want to share it. So most companies really, they try to control the narrative by giving employees scripts or social media templates or things to share. Does that really work?

Matt See (15:07)
Not if you want authenticity, right? And you have to, and a lot of this goes back to the culture that you're building within your organization and all of that as well, right? So if you're building a culture that is based on core values that include fun and working together and things like that, all the ones that I know we've all seen time and time again, then you also need to live those as well and be okay to let people showcase that. You know, if you're in talent attraction,

There is nothing better in talent attraction than it's almost like getting a review on a product or a podcast or whatever or video, right? If you got somebody in talent attraction and I'm hiring for a role and I get somebody that's within our company that's sharing how much they love working there and then they're sharing this role, like that is massive for somebody in talent attraction because when that lead comes in, I'm not having to say, here's why you should work here. They know, right? Because...

These employee stories, these employees sharing their experience drives them in and they already really want to work there. ⁓ And sometimes, you know, I've found that some of that is when it's controlled, you're only getting the message that ⁓ the company wants you to tell. So there's been people that I've followed and even worked with previously. They'll share about their organization online a good bit. And I'll say, ⁓ there's a role there. I would love to...

to come join your organization and they'd be like, it's not really like that. And I'm like, well, what? What do you mean? And they haven't been sharing information outside of it, right? It's just the stuff that you're seeing about that organization that maybe their pages are putting out, right? ⁓ So what you want is that authenticity and that organic nature. That's what we all feed off of. That's why when Amazon launched and they had reviews,

We all followed the reviews. We're like, man, this thing's got five stars, 3,000 reviews. This must be the best product ever. Now we're like, know that there's some gaming to that, right? So I think you're toeing that line to trying to be back at that time to where you want your employees out there talking about their experience, sharing stories about the amazing people that they work with, right? And sharing the story of what the organization is doing.

with their mission and all of that and not be tied to making sure that you use the branded coffee, that you use this and that you use that, right? Because, hey, they're out there every day talking about your organization, whether it's with family, whether it's, you know, they get a target and somebody sees their shirt they're wearing and they say, hey, tell me about that. They're talking about your brand. Why not make them educated about it? Why not make them inspired by it?

So when they're talking about it, they're talking about you in a more organic light than them trying to remember, ⁓ man, they told us that this is what we're supposed to say, or I'm only allowed to say this.

Rhona Pierce (18:13)
How do you find those stories? Because yes, we understand it's a lot more authentic when it's like you're living things and you don't get those people whispering like, no, no, no, no, no, it's not that. How do you find the stories that you then present to your employees?

Matt See (18:33)
Yeah, I old school, old school. Again, like I said, I'm classically trained, J school trained. So what happened to my team? Hey, guess what? You're getting a beat. Like I'm signing you up. You're getting a beat. Just like, you know, if you're working for a newspaper and I say, all right, you get downtown, right? So downtown might be I.T. And I want the good, the bad and the ugly, right? A new store open, the football team won or somebody's car got broken into. Right. So you're assigned to that beat.

and it's really about getting to know the people that are there, following them on LinkedIn even, because I find that a lot of employees, like I found an employee once that helped put together one of the ⁓ floats for the Rose Parade, right? And I was like, that's so freaking cool. I wouldn't have known that if I wasn't following him on LinkedIn. He didn't tell me. I didn't know that, right? So I try to connect with a lot of people on LinkedIn. And when I see that, I immediately said, hey,

We want to do a story about that and put it on on the intranet. And he's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, that's really cool. Not many people get to do that. The Rose putting together a and walking in the Rose parade and watching them put together those amazing floats is like crazy. Tell me about it. We want to interview you. Tell me all about it. Why? Because that's an employee that works here. But now you're showcasing something they're doing outside. It allows people to talk to them when you go see them at ⁓

you know, in a town hall or something, you'd like, hey, I saw the float you did, things like that. So we really try to make ⁓ our teams be more like reporters and covering their beats. And even with executives, you know, I try really hard to get them to get to know the executives. does this executive really love basketball? Hey, March Madness is coming up. Let's get them to do something around that. Why? Because any employee, no matter if your organization's 30 people or 70,000.

You get nervous when you get around the C-suite executive, you don't know what to talk to them about, right? But if you know that they like basketball, then it's easy for any employee to walk up and say, hey, excited about March Madness or hey, excited basketball season's coming up. It creates connection points that even when we're remote now, and I know people are going back to the office and all that, but you have those connections and those water cooler connections that maybe we don't have as much now as we used to have.

So that reporter piece, I have employees coming back all the time that are like, oh my gosh, did you know so and so is an opera singer, which was like one of the employees that we had? I'm like, no, they're like, she sings like twice a week at the St. Louis Opera. I'm like, what? Like that is really cool, right? So it is, it's like running a newspaper internally and it's covering all those four key areas.

Rhona Pierce (21:27)
I absolutely love that approach. What about for companies? ⁓ I'm a startup gal myself. So I've worked at smaller companies and I know a lot of our listeners are at smaller companies or they're a team of one, employer branding, TA, HR, internal comms, it's all them. How do you activate the, like how do you get those other reporters on the ground for you when they're not directly on your team?

Matt See (21:57)
I used to do this all the time on social media, right? So I might be a person of one running a social media team back a long time ago. doing this at the university. They had about 160,000 students, but it was just me running the social media team. And what I did then was really worked hard to find other people in other departments that are interested in social media or interested in telling stories, right? So I did.

really a road show. That's more of an official term, right? But more of just built relationships within other departments, right? And then started to tell them what type of stories we were looking to share and saying, you know, a lot of times that was, you know, on LinkedIn for employer branding or talent acquisition support, things like that, talking about our culture. So it was a lot of, hey, what are your people doing? What's somebody, what's somebody on your team doing that's really, really exciting?

that you've heard about recently, whether it's a project internally or externally. So I find building that network really makes it nice because I always tell people, I'm like, send me every freaking story idea you have. Like, do not turn off the tap. Right. Send every single one them to me. I can't get enough ideas because if you limit people, you don't know what you're going to get. Right. So I built this net, this web network and say,

send me everything you think sounds cool and we'll weed through it. And we might not get to it right away. We might get to it later. We might not ever get to it, right? But the more and more that we have, the more of a dynamic story we can tell. And I think it's really important, you know, if you are a body of one is to really look at ⁓ how I can empower some of these other leaders to bring more information to me. Right. So it's

You might find out about a project that IT is working on that might be an amazing project that might have legs externally that you didn't even know about it because you built that relationship with the IT team and they're bringing to you now. So you're learning more by kind of creating that communication.

Rhona Pierce (24:11)
So picture this, we're at a company, we have everything limited where we're not bombarding everyone with 20 messages. So they actually see our stuff. But the reality is most people don't ever go to the intranet, right? How do you build that culture of where people are so interested that they actually go seek it out? Because intranet is something that

you would have to like purposefully want to go see, right?

Matt See (24:44)
Yeah, so again, I look at a couple of different things. Some of that is trends and how people engage. ⁓ Some of it is through conversation with those contacts that I've built to say, how do you find your people like getting their information? Do they like getting it in team meetings? Do they like getting it through, you might have IT or creatives that only like using Slack and things like that. So trying to find those ways. I've never been one.

that sees a campaign as successful if it reaches 80 or 90 percent. Like, yeah, that'd be great, right? That'd be awesome. We would all love for that. One of the things that they hung their hat on at one of the organizations I worked on was like, we have a 92 percent open rate on all of our internal messages. I'm like, OK, congratulations. What does that even mean? Like, we know half the people are not looking at this. You ask them a question about something that was in the newsletter and they look at you like you've got, you know,

Mud on your face or whatever. So, you know what I look at is hey and that's what I'm about multiple levers is if I'm engaging people and it's engaging people in 17 different places and then that doesn't sound efficient but if I'm engaging people in multiple different places Then I'm okay with that because I'm engaging them where they want to be and want to be engaged So I always look at adding other levers or channels and things like that

to say, well, if I'm engaging the IT team by using Slack, then I'm going to push that out to them. And then if it's going to engage these people by doing bullet board messages, I'm going to do that. So, you know, I think it's really about looking at where things are. And then it's about creating buzz too, right? Just like anything else that you're doing. When I was in social, we used to do something called story mapping, which would be you'd look at a story, right? And

This is probably really easy for people to understand now. It wasn't as much back then, but this is a good way to think about it from an internal comms perspective, right? The story comes in, somebody wants to get a message across. You're not going to put that same message on Facebook and the same message on TikTok and the same message on Instagram the same way, right? They're completely different audiences and people are not like, I get a CEO letter on TikTok, you're going to be like, what the heck is this? Right?

But if I see something like that on LinkedIn, I'm going to understand why it's there. So you have to think of your messages the same way to say, all right, what's the right message for this channel? The message can be the same. It's just how am I delivering it? Like maybe your CEO is going to TikTok dance, right? I don't know. We don't know the message is, right? But you're looking at how am I going to map this story across every single channel and still get the point across?

And some of it's work, but to be honest, if you want your employee base to all be on the same page, then you really need to look at where's the right balance.

Rhona Pierce (27:49)
Why do you think that we know this and practice this externally, but not internally?

Matt See (27:57)
don't know, why do we get up in the morning sometimes and not like make our bed, right? Or why some mornings like we wake up and we make breakfast and we leave and leave all the stuff on the counter and then we get all in like, man, why am I cleaning this stuff up? It's because it's right there in front of you, right? It seems like, all right, none of this stuff's gonna spoil if I leave it on the counter, right? It's just a cereal box and whatever. So if I just leave it there, it'll be okay. And I think a lot of times we think if we just...

Like if we don't talk to our employees or we just send this message out, I know it's boring to get an email, then like they're still going to read it if it's important or we'll cover it somewhere else or you know, it just doesn't seem like the thing that's going to really set the organization apart. And I'm telling you that it will, right? Why not test messaging? I teach a course at West Virginia University. And one of my favorite things to do is talk to the students that are there.

and learn how it's about advertising. It's about advertising and its impacts on society. And one of my favorite things to do is learn about how they really translate advertising now in 2025. I mean, I know how I do, but to sit there and have a group of, you know, 119 to 23 year olds, you learn so much from that. So how do we do that to learn a lot from our organization? And then

share that information out so they fully are bought in, whether that's bought in on the culture, bought into where we're going as an organization, bought into team building with the inspiring and celebrating others, ⁓ or test out your messages, just like I'm testing out with my students on how they might respond in advertisement. Test out your messages. Get a couple of, like everybody spends all this money on focus groups. Hell, bring your team together. know, bring a couple of people from a couple of different departments.

I've done that a lot of times with internal messaging and say, Hey, we're going to launch this campaign. Do you think it'll go well? And I've had people go, actually we're getting ready to go through like a transition and we're going to have to unfortunately let some people go. And I don't think it's the right time to do this fun summer go on vacation campaign. And it's like, ⁓ thank you. Cause you don't want to, you know, you don't want to interrupt anything like that. Or you get other messaging that lets you see something that's bigger that you can step into.

So I think, you know, being able to use those people to not only test your external messaging, but also bolster what you're doing. These are your advocates. The more and more you can get them excited and test things. going to tell you better than a focus group will on if they think it fits the brand or not.

Rhona Pierce (30:46)
I love that ⁓ because we all know that the brand and the company culture is really how your employees perceive it and understand it and not what you're telling them because and we've all worked at places where what they're saying is different from what they're doing and that's where the disconnect is. I know people listening are like, yeah, yeah, I'm sold. This is great. This works externally. It should work internally. But we work in

places where people want us to show them numbers. Is there any way to measure the success of your internal storytelling and how it activated advocates?

Matt See (31:29)
Yeah, so this is what I'll tell you that I've shared this recently on a couple other events and things is that stop trying to pound communication metrics into everybody's head. Stop walking around as a communicator and talking about open rates and talking about how many people, how many views the press release got or how many views this got or that got. Like stop trying to get your executives and others across the line on these metrics.

At the end of the day, they care about very different things. So what I've done is, if you're doing internal messaging, is working with the chief people officer, working with the talent traction folks and learning what they care about. What are they? What do they care about? Right. Is it, hey, we've got to hire a hundred crucial roles. ⁓ You know, OK, great. How can we help you? Right. How can we help you do that? Because what's going to make you look better? It's not taking a metric that

Maybe the C-suite understands and they probably don't and say, look, we increased this metric by 20%. And they're going to go, oh, OK, that's nice, but we're still down as an organization 10%. But if you're going and you're saying, hey, we partnered with TA to bring in 100 new employees. And oh, by the way, we've also had 20 less openings this year than last year that you could point back to and start to build those narratives and build those relationships.

so they can help you. That's what C-suite's gonna care about. When I've been a team of one, I've gone to sales teams and said, hey, can I see all of your RFP messaging? They're like, what do you want that for? It's pages and pages of stuff. And I'm like, I wanna see it. I'd love to see it. Because they're pitching for business for your organization. It's important. So I take a look at it and I dive through it. It's pages and pages and pages. And as you're looking at it, you're seeing they've got brand messaging from five years ago.

brand messaging that we just updated, maybe something in there that we don't do anymore. So spending time going through that stuff that maybe nobody's ever looked at and helping them get it all together. Then when the president of the company says, well, communications, what have you done for me lately? You say, actually we just rewrote all of the RFP messaging. And by the way, we now have five finalist presentations coming up in the next two weeks. So that's what I look at is,

The organizations cares about communications, but if you tie it back into other departments and what they're trying to achieve, it makes the work that you're doing shine much brighter. And yeah, you can still keep those metrics for you. So you get excited and track those things that you need to, to ensure that your messages are being delivered the right way. But I really assign them that way. And you'll learn to even work with executives.

You know, asking them what they care about. had one once that I thought wanted to be an influencer on LinkedIn and all of this. And he wanted us to maybe speak at a couple of conferences and all that. And I figured out that he had childhood diabetes and he wanted to be in on the childhood diabetes board. And I'm like, we can do this. Like we'll start writing content towards that. We'll start angling everything through that. If I just went at it as a just a regular communicator and said, well, we're in healthcare and I need to write stuff about

where healthcare is going with AI and all this other kind of stuff. He's going to look at it go, okay, yeah, that's good, but it's not really doing anything for me. Having those conversations with people or communicators is highly, highly important.

Rhona Pierce (35:06)
I've loved that every answer ties back to talk to people, understand what they want, message it, like share it back to other people who are likely going to care about the same thing. And that's how you get these stories and the natural thing.

Like when you hear it that way, it's like, yeah, of course, duh, I should have thought about that. But do you actually ever think about that? Not necessarily. So I really love how you've positioned it. So hopefully listeners are having the same experience that I'm having. So if someone listening today wants to start telling better stories internally, like where should they start? What's the one thing that they can do today?

Matt See (35:50)
I would look at who do you have a good relationship with across the organization? And I think it's imperative to say, I've got a buddy that I've been working with in TA or somebody that I've been working with in IT or sales or whatever it is and say, I really enjoy working with that person or I've had conversations with them and they seem like they'd be fun to work with and reach out to them and tell them what you're trying to do and see if they can help flip some ideas towards you.

A lot of times they're probably a good leader. ⁓ you're attracted to them and you're a good leader, like minds attract each other, right? So I think what they're gonna do is you're telling them what they're gonna do. They're gonna be excited. They're gonna be like, we've never done this before. This is really great. I've got people that do amazing things all the time. I'd love to showcase them. ⁓ So figuring out ways like that, ⁓ that's the easiest way to start it, is just communicating and having a conversation and getting people excited about stuff.

If you get people excited, then that you'll find that a lot of the excitement and a lot of the interesting things that I've seen happen and I've organizations through mergers and acquisitions and rebrands and all of this is if you get people excited, they're willing to go through some of that shakiness with you as an organization, right? And trust you and all of that. So, you know, I think that's a lot of what this is about is how do we get

And you've talked about culture. It is work. Yes, we do work and it is something that we're trying to do to help an organization. But how do you get people excited about where they're at, what they're doing and who they're doing it for to ensure that no matter what happens, there's always shakiness in organizations that they can easily kind of ride that through because they've got that trust in you because of what you've done for them and they're excited to continue. So I think that's what I've always tried to do is approach it

with having a conversation, getting someone excited about it, and then you'll find the stories just really come to you. And if they start getting slow and you're like, there's not much coming from there, then go to your next person and then go to your next. I wouldn't start with six or eight. I would start with one or two. And then as those start to slow, grow. And you'll find that as people start reading those stories, that you'll get a lot in your inbox. We used to get a lot of interesting ones in our inbox because

People are seeing them on the intranet. They're seeing them in other ways and saying, my gosh, I just met this person. They did this. You should reach out to them. And then the last thing I want to mention, just from an engagement standpoint that I forgot earlier, we were talking about ⁓ getting people not go to the intranet. And we're talking about external social media as well as I created ⁓ at the last place that was we created an actual place for employees to shout out other employees.

So we created an actual ⁓ section on our intranet that's right there on the homepage that was just for shout outs. And they were able to go in and I could shout out Ronna for the awesome job that she did or wish her a happy birthday or whatever it is with some emojis and post it. And it would then show up in a feed. And when you would log on, you would see those messages. It didn't take long to develop. I worked very closely with IT to do it.

I know there's brands out there that do things like that, but we would see every day thousands and thousands of messages of people sending stuff saying, congratulations. you just killed it with this. Whoa, way to go. And that message would not only go to that person, but it would also go to their managers. Their manager would see they're being shout out. So, you know, I tell people, try things, right? If it doesn't work, that's fine. Move on. But if you try something like that, you might catch lightning in a bottle.

and see employees supporting other employees in such a public manner, you know, in front of other employees, which is extremely important. And it might surprise you.

Rhona Pierce (39:50)
And you just drove them to the intranet because if they're there doing this thing that they naturally want to do, that's so brilliant. And I'm thinking of all the places where I've worked at where we've done the shout outs thing, but it's usually in Slack. It's like, why did we not just put it somewhere like the intranet where we all where we want them to go and then, OK, they go, they do their shout out. And then, by the way, here's this thing that's on the home page that that's so brilliant. I love that.

So if you've watched the show, you know there's always a segment at the end. And I'm excited because this is a new segment and I'm calling it trigger warning. So I'm going to read you a few sentences that instantly set off comms professionals everywhere. What you're going to do is say out loud what you really want to reply when you hear them. No filter, just the truth. Are you ready?

Matt See (40:47)
I'm ready.

Rhona Pierce (40:48)
All right, here's the deck. Can you make it pop?

Matt See (40:54)
What does pop mean? That's what I want to say. What do you mean by pop? ⁓ yes. Yes. What does pop mean?

Rhona Pierce (41:06)
All right, next one. I had Chad GPT generate this press release. Can you just get it out?

Matt See (41:11)
You

These hurt my soul, Ronna. ⁓ Sure, sure. The sarcasm come through. Sure, why not? Whatever you want. You gonna pay for it?

Rhona Pierce (41:30)
All right, we don't need a comms plan. Just whip up a few poster ideas.

Matt See (41:37)
Cool. So you don't want anybody to read it. You don't want it to go anywhere.

Rhona Pierce (41:42)
love that one. All right. The audience is everyone.

Matt See (41:52)
So no one's gonna be looking at it.

Rhona Pierce (41:54)
I love it. I love it. I love that I made you laugh with all of these because I'm sure you've heard them before at some point throughout your career. ⁓ Yeah.

Matt See (42:05)
just try not to like come back with another question of like, so what do really want, which is how I typically am, which is, and I think that's the point of all of this, right, is we're gonna, nothing's gonna stop these questions, Rana. They're gonna continue to happen. What's extremely important is one, you don't take it personally, because I watch that happen a lot, right? People take that immediately personally. yeah, you think you've got Facebook at home, you could do Facebook here or.

You can whip something up in chat GPT and I can send it out for you. But why are you, what are you doing? What are you trying to achieve? And I think don't get upset that they've done that. Think of it as you as a toddler that's trying to do something on their own and they've never, don't fully understand it, right? Or if I was going in the IT world and I was trying to do something to theirs and I'm like, look, I just coded this and they're like, yeah, you did a terrible job, right? So don't get upset about it. Don't take it personally. It's not personal.

Use that as a moment to pivot and ask them because typically what they faced, right? If you want to make friends quick, ⁓ don't don't like push back. But in that moment, just say, OK, yeah, that's something we could do. But let's talk about the piece. Like, what do you who you say the audience is everyone? What are you trying to achieve? What do you want them to walk away with? Like, start having some of those conversations because.

They might be too busy. might not be thinking about it. Like none of it is malicious. Always assume that positive intent. But if you ask those questions, you can really get to the bottom of it and you'll find that you could teach them to when they come back the next time, they're not going to order it up the same way. get really frustrated when comes people are like, we're just order takers. And I'm like, not really. Like not unless you, you gotta have that conversation with people and teach them how to fish. So they come back to you. And you know, that's why.

I would say the response to a lot of those, is just, yeah, they're frustrating and they're hilarious. And sometimes you do want to pull your hair out or say something really snarky back. But if you just ask a couple of curious questions, a lot of times you can break half that stuff down and get in much better place for everybody.

Rhona Pierce (44:13)
Amazing. Well, I've really enjoyed this conversation. How can listeners connect with you?

Matt See (44:20)
Yeah, just find me on LinkedIn. So just look me up, Matt C. S-E-E. It's as easy as it sounds, seven whole letters. You can find me there. Feel free to connect with me, reach out. I love meeting new people and chatting. And if there's anything I can do to help, drop me a note. I'd love to help you.

Rhona Pierce (44:38)
Thank you so much for being on the show.

Matt See (44:41)
Thank you, it's been an absolute pleasure.

Rhona Pierce (44:43)
Thanks so much for listening. If you're enjoying the Workfluencer pod, share it with someone who's changing how we talk about work or who should be. And hey, if this episode gave you ideas or inspiration, leave us a five-star review. Reviews help other listeners find us. And honestly, it makes my day. Workfluencer is produced by Perceptible Studios. Learn more about how we can help you use video to attract, engage, and retain qualified talent at perceptiblestudios.com. Thanks for listening.

and I'll chat with you next week.