The role of internal communications within Paysafe has always been valued, but this year, like many other in-house teams, we were thrust into the spotlight and relied on as the ‘glue’ that kept things together at an extraordinary time. Overnight, our workload intensified and evolved; we had to rapidly expand the conversation with employees to tackle new concerns over safety, connectivity with colleagues, wellbeing and mental health amongst many other new topics. The significantly adjusted employer voice frankly took us into unchartered territories and we had to deliver at break-neck speed.
Before our move to remote working in March 2020, in person events formed a core part of our employee engagement strategy including leadership conferences, town halls and parties. Paysafe is proud of its people-focused culture which is an important differentiator for us in the fintech world and a selling point when recruiting. How would we keep our company spirit and culture alive in this new world? And even more importantly, how could we support our colleagues through the stresses of living in a pandemic with the challenges of home schooling, looking after elderly parents and much more.
Our response was to launch our Safeguarding Paysafe People employee engagement campaign. Our vision was to maintain a highly engaged and connected global workforce where everyone felt they belonged and had a contribution to make. It was critical that people felt cared for by the company with their wellbeing being treated as a top priority. We also still needed to ensure everyone understood where the company was heading and how it was weathering the storm.
In the early days, the focus of the campaign was around business continuity and the health and safety of our workforce. We established interactive communications channels to share news and to respond to people’s concerns. We introduced a dedicated 24/7 mailbox, a weekly newsletter about life and work during the pandemic and monthly all-employee calls with the CEO and other leaders. Transparency from the top had never been more critical.
As people settled into remote working, we shifted gear to focus on wellbeing, mental health, networking and career development. This involved an ongoing wellbeing survey to identify trends, webinars and podcasts covering topics such as dealing with stress and managing finances, and a charity step challenge to keep people moving. We also enrolled in a company-wide subscription to Headspace, the meditation app, and encouraged people to build this into their daily lives.
The highlight of our wellbeing programme has to be our first virtual ‘Paysafe Day’ event in May when we no meetings were allowed and we took the time to reward and recognise our teams and offered virtual wellbeing activities. And if online yoga or cookery wasn’t your thing, you could simply take the afternoon off. As part of the day, we created an all-employee channel on Microsoft Teams where we posted news and people shared photos of how they were spending their afternoon. There was a palpable buzz on the day - people even likened it to Christmas! It was such a success that we ran a similar event in October, this time with a focus on career development.
As I said earlier on, focussing on this range of topics was new to us and we have depended on close collaboration with our HR team and ongoing insights from regular employee surveys. We use the state-of-the-art Glint platform which deploys AI monitoring which has allowed us to continuously adapt our programme and quickly introduce relevant new initiatives. We’re still learning but it was fantastic to see our global employee engagement score climb three points this year and by 11 points in communications (putting us +18 points ahead of industry benchmarks).
In 2021, I feel sure internal communications will be taken more seriously as a true business enabler. I hope the cynics I’ve sometimes encountered in the past will stop seeing the discipline as a poor relation to external communications. I also firmly believe one of the legacies of the pandemic is that the corporate voice has changed forever and will always be more caring, considered and transparent. I know I speak on behalf of our internal communications team when I say our work has never felt more meaningful than it has this year.