Here at Glint, we are proud to partner with best in class companies from around the world! When these organizations receive accolades for the impact they are having on their industry, clients, and employees, it makes us even more excited to represent them.

With that said (drumroll please!), we wanted to celebrate our client, Ketchum, a world-renowned marketing communications agency, who recently ranked among the Top 5 Best PR Agencies to Work For in North America.

It’s no surprise Ketchum made the list! Having worked with them on their employee engagement strategy, we saw first-hand how even their company-wide Glint pulse debut made a splash in our books as one of the most innovative internal communications we’ve seen. 

Here’s why:

Rob Flaherty, CEO of Ketchum, announced the launch of the firm’s first Glint pulse on Workplace Live—that’s right, live on streaming, social technology! Some quick stats on the reach of this approach: over 200 individuals tuned into the live broadcast, and the video surpassed 600 views post-broadcast. This is double the amount of views than any other video posted on their internal site. Rob’s message through Workplace Live demonstrated the high value the company places on employee voice and fueled record participation rates in the pulse.

So, we took the opportunity to chat with Melissa Barry, Senior Consultant of Strategy and Organizational Effectiveness, who leads the Glint survey initiative to enhance work life at Ketchum. We wanted to learn more about their people-centric approach to business success, after reading her blog post about the whole shebang!

Check out our Q&A session with her below:

Sneh, Glint: Why did Ketchum’s CEO decide to announce the launch of the Glint pulse through Workplace Live?

Melissa, Ketchum: It was natural for us to think about the Glint pulse launch from a PR lens because we’re a PR and marketing firm! This was the first big announcement that Rob did on Workplace Live. 

After his broadcast, the messages, likes and comments came pouring in.

Launching Glint felt like a fresh, new thing for our agency, and we didn’t want to just send out a formal memo. For an innovative tool, we wanted to use our innovative Workplace platform—the stars aligned for this!

Further, we continued to leverage influencers within the company to gain further traction about the pulse launch through emails and Workplace groups.

Sneh, Glint: Are there any unique or creative ways you plan to share the results of the Glint pulse with your employees?

Melissa, Ketchum: We’re still finalizing our company-wide approach to sharing the results of the Glint pulse back to our employees. With that said, we want to use this time as a moment of recognition for all employees and the great work they’ve done. Most importantly, we want to visibly link our strategy and goals to the pulse results—to connect what we’re doing as an organization to what we’re doing well and what we need to do better.

Sneh, Glint: How would you define People Success at Ketchum?

Melissa, Ketchum: Here at Ketchum, we’re an ideas place. So, at the end of the day, it’s really just all about our people—people are our main asset—so we’re super focused on our employees. It’s the reason talent chooses to come work with us. 

We invest more in learning and development than most companies in our industry. It’s because our goal is to make sure people are not only the best in their area of expertise, but the best in leadership and client service capabilities, as well.

Thus, People Success so resonates with what we do here. We have macro ideas about what we can do to improve our employee experience, but Glint’s platform and insights help us focus on where we should spend real time and effort. We already knew about many of the areas that surfaced, but Glint helped us uncover additional areas that matter to our talent. Now we can allocate our time on the actions that will give us the most ROI and make the most impact on our employees.

Sneh, Glint: What are some best practices or advice you have for other companies out there that are trying to make employee feedback a business priority?

Melissa, Ketchum: In our industry, things are changing so fast—our actual service offering is changing so fast! And as important it is that Ketchum keeps up with trends in our industry, we also need to keep up with how our employees are feeling. Our response time with clients is amazing, and we should be just as swift in our response time to our own people. It’s vital that we move at the same rate internally.

After our old survey closed, we always felt like we were looking backwards with a “you said this a while ago”. Now that we’ve shifted to Glint pulses, the reporting reflects “you are saying this currently,” and that’s a big difference in how we’re thinking about our people data. It’s happening now, today! This isn’t old information.

Overall, focusing on our talent helps us be more agile. And we needed something like Glint to get us there. Compared to annual surveys, it is much more feasible to take action with more frequent pulses. I’m glad we’ve adopted this way of engaging with our people—it’s the key to our vitality.

“We are in a client service industry and a critical part of delivering exceptional service is constant open feedback. We want to not only hear from our clients, but from our employees too, which is why we have partnered with Glint. Glint’s innovative and fresh technology combines sleek, easy-to-complete pulse surveys with advanced analytics and artificial intelligence.”

— Melissa Barry, Ketchum Blog: Breaking Through for Our Employees