At Avalere Health, effective communication matters a lot: the company was founded over twenty years ago as a medical communications agency. Since then, it acquired 19 healthcare agencies and consultancies in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. In doing so, Avalere Health evolved into a global commercialization partner, with diverse expertise that spans the entire healthcare ecosystem.
Amid all the changes, the focus on effective communications – including internally – remained constant. But it’s gotten harder: each acquisition brought diverse sets of employees across many different geographies. As the company embarked on a reorganization and rebrand in 2023, VP of Employee Experience Holmes Holmes saw an opportunity to overhaul how they reached employees.
“We have an unusually diverse workforce: strategists, scientists, marketers, analysts, and technologists. And they’re located around the world. We needed to find a way to unite, engage and upskill them - without putting a huge strain on our People and Comms team,” explained Holmes.
Given the global nature of their workforce and the sense of community they hoped to cultivate, Holmes was convinced that video was a format with breakthrough potential for reaching busy employees.
According to Holmes, “We’d recorded video messages before using Teams or Thrive. But it was a struggle. The platforms weren’t user-friendly, and the many retakes turned off ‘camera shy’ employees. On the few occasions we were able to tap the marketing team’s video editors, the process was painfully slow.”
There was another problem, too: “After all that work, the final content wasn’t particularly engaging for the employees.” The result: video was a novelty, used only in one-off situations.
Holmes first saw a preview of Spokn before the tool was even released to the public. “It immediately ‘clicked,’” he recalled. When he and his team tried it out, it was entirely different from the previous experience with video.
The videos they made with Spokn felt different: “they were more engaging and dynamic than the formal, more traditional content that our employees tend to discount as ‘scripted,’” explained Holmes. The more authentic tone of the content was especially important to him, since he’s committed his career to redefining how people think and feel about work. His goal is to make the workplace more enjoyable and the relationships built there more personal.
Crucially, the Avalere team found that with Spokn, “we could make videos fast, without involving the in-house team and turning it into a huge production that would take months to complete,” according to Holmes. And because Spokn simplifies the recording process and ‘holds your hand’ through it all, Holmes found that “even more camera-shy people like me felt comfortable getting involved.”
In the first year of using it, “Spokn has became a core part of our Workplace Experience and Communications strategy. The ease of video creation enables us to use video in ways we’d never even considered before: manager enablement, employer branding, DEI even two office launches and an internal poetry reading.”
The biggest impact came from videos that created community and modernized their learning programs. Here’s how.
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As Avalere consolidated into a single brand, a few challenges arose. The first two: how could the Workplace Experience Team ensure that employees understood the broader vision and strategy of the company, and learn to trust the leaders in charge of it?
Short-form videos on Spokn proved to be an excellent solution. Avalere’s new COO introduced himself and his vision for the company via a Spokn video, the more casual format enabling him to share trust-building personal facts. The company’s CTO announced the company’s GenAI policy on Spokn, the guitar in the background of his frame humanizing an announcement about a technology that some find intimidating. And the CEO of the Medical Division launched a weekly video series, offering division updates and highlighting the achievements of different teams, who could quickly add their content without fanfare.
Holmes and his team were thrilled by the response. Employees loved how personal the videos felt - very different from what they’d seen in the past.
But they weren’t the only ones. “A couple other members of the leadership team had been skeptical at first. But after they recorded for the first time, I heard a lot of positive feedback about how easy it was,” explained Holmes. “I wound up with other members of the ELT coming to me to ask to record intro and announcement videos on Spokn.”They now had a new tool for building trust and connection outside of Town Halls. This was especially important for leaders who didn’t receive a lot of air time during all-company meetings.
“We have an unusually diverse workforce: strategists, scientists, marketers, analysts, and technologists. And they’re located around the world. We needed to find a way to unite, engage and upskill them - without putting a huge strain on our People and Comms team”
The power of the videos went beyond executive communications. In the aftermath of the rebrand, Avalere undertook a large employee engagement survey. Response rates had always been a challenge, and Spokn provided a way for department leaders to serve as “internal influencers”, promoting the survey to their own employees.
According to Holmes, “Tapping these internal influencers made a huge difference. Employees paid attention to the survey communications, and we achieved one of the highest completion rates in our history.”
After the survey was completed, Holmes turned to Spokn to quickly communicate the outcomes and action steps. “Rather than wait for a Town Hall and lose momentum, the ELT and I were able to rapidly respond to what they hear, demonstrating to employees that their opinions are taken seriously,” he explained.
Avalere’s culture is centered around making better health happen, and for Holmes’s team, that includes healthy minds and careers. But as in many fast-moving companies, truly engaging employees in learning and professional development was a challenge.
“We structure learning experiences at Avalere Health in three stages: Excite employees for learning, Immerse them in the learning, and Ignite change in the aftermath. Spokn enabled the team to rapidly and easily create authentic content for each,” explained Holmes.
Given the previously siloed structure at Avalere, awareness of L&D offerings was a big barrier, and it resulted in lower-than-desired utilization of tools like LinkedIn Learning and TEDTalk Training. To increase awareness and excitement among employees, Holmes’s team used Spokn to collect short video clips from the COO and other ‘learning influencers’ within the company, encouraging employees to take advantage of the tool and explaining the benefits offered.
The L&D team also found that, according to Holmes, “Spokn was an excellent way to produce relatable peer-to-peer learning content to be used both during programs and as retention booths to ignite change afterwards. From Interviewing Skills to Leadership Reflections, the peer-to-peer videos stood out because they were relevant and relatable.”
One year into its partnership with Spokn, the Avalere team feels they’ve barely scratched the surface. “It’s not too often that with a single tool, we’re able to advance priorities across so many areas of the People and Communications functions,” says Holmes. Want to hear about their experience directly?
Tune into Holmes’s video below. <<Video testimonial>>
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