Do Employee Stories Matter to Reputation?
By: Lisa Noury, Director, Corporate Internal Communications, Bayer U.S.
When you do research, you find out interesting things. But when you discover a truly valuable insight, you realize the money you spent was worth it.
Back in 2019, we did research on our Bayer Scapes blogs—a weekly blog series to amplify the voices of our employees to help boost our reputation both internally and externally. We started these weekly blogs back in 2017 but we didn’t have a way to measure the impact on reputation externally. Sure, we were doing the typical metrics with counting things. But we wanted to answer a deeper question: Do these employee stories matter to our reputation?
In the research project, we tested four blogs with 2,200 adults to determine reader/viewer preferences—frequency of sharing, channel use and preference, topics/content and impressions of Bayer. The finding that truly blew us away was Net Favorability of Bayer. Perception of Bayer included things like caring about our employees, being a great place to work, doing meaningful work and having a positive impact on communities. All content that was tested increased from 15 to 48 percentage points from pre-to post-exposure! So, we finally had our answer: Employee stories DO matter to our reputation externally—and in a big way.
Internally, each Bayer Scapes blogger is put into the spotlight. We featured our bloggers on our company-wide intranet, BayerNet, and our Yammer ShoutOut channel. Employees are encouraged to “like and share” the blogs using our BayerNet employee app. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, we also featured employees on digital signage. We’ll get back to that in the future when more employees are back at our sites.
When the COVID-19 pandemic started earlier this year, we put our Bayer Scapes blogs on hold. It was a hard but essential decision. Mainly we needed the resources of our team for crisis work. However, as weeks turned into months, we finally hit a point where we could shift resources back to this flagship blog project.
In August, we restarted Bayer Scapes with a terrific story about Joan Purk, Technology Agreement Manager in our Crop Science division. In her spare time, Joan volunteers to transport dogs to areas where there’s room or foster families. The people behind our brand never cease to amaze me. In a word, they are impressive—and their stories continue make a huge impact on Bayer’s reputation.
About Bayer
Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. Its products and services are designed to benefit people by supporting efforts to overcome the major challenges presented by a growing and aging global population. At the same time, the Group aims to increase its earning power and create value through innovation and growth. Bayer is committed to the principles of sustainable development, and the Bayer brand stands for trust, reliability and quality throughout the world. In fiscal 2019, the Group employed around 104,000 people and had sales of 43.5 billion euros. Capital expenditures amounted to 2.9 billion euros, R&D expenses to 5.3 billion euros. For more information, go to bayer.us.
Bayer® and the Bayer Cross® are registered trademarks of Bayer.
Lisa Noury, Director of Corporate Internal Communications for Bayer U.S.
In her role, Lisa leads internal communications (IC) measurement for the U.S. including establishing Bayer’s first IC dashboard to revolutionize the use of metrics in strategic conversations and planning across the country. She leads country-wide research projects and co-creates IC strategy for Bayer’s country organization. Lisa leads country-wide communications programs including efforts to externalize employee stories. Additionally, she is the strategic business partner to the Chief Financial Officer Organization and Law, Patents and Compliance department, collaborating with senior leaders and their teams on strategic IC to achieve business results.
Previously, Lisa held various leadership roles of increasing responsibility at Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey. During her tenure there, Lisa was the head of Audiovisual Services, Multimedia Communications, Employee Communications, and finally she was the enterprise communications business partner for leaders in Finance and Human Resources, providing counsel to senior executives on communications strategies to support business goals and to align with enterprise direction. Lisa began her career in cable television with leadership roles as program director, producer/director and operations manager of community, news and sports programming.
With more than 20 years in corporate communications, Lisa has been recognized with numerous top honors including IABC’s Silver Quill awards, MarCom Gold awards, and international, national and regional video awards.
Lisa holds a master’s degree in Executive Strategic Communications from Columbia University, a BA in Communications and various leadership certifications. She is a member of Ragan Communication’s Communicators Roundtable and has presented at IABC’s World Conference on communications measurement.
