3 ways Charles Taylor accelerated employee engagement with an intranet

How to launch impactful company-wide initiatives

Internal communicators are always on the lookout for new strategies and projects that can take the employee experience to the next level. Driving employee engagement and boosting morale sometimes requires a fresh take, so turning to your intranet to support new initiatives can provide a new approach to engaging your audience.

Whether it’s office away days, bike-to-work schemes, or social groups, a well-executed employee initiative can fuel a sense of community among colleagues like nothing else, offering an effective way to revitalize faltering corporate cultures.

But, when it comes to launching a brand-new scheme, the devil is in the details. You can work tirelessly planning out every aspect of a new project, but if you can’t attract enough interest it will all go to waste.

With the backing of a powerful communications platform, you have every opportunity to increase the visibility of new projects. Initiatives that enjoy widespread reach and engagement have the most cultural impact, so using every tool at your disposal to advertise them is crucial.

For an example of how effective an internal communications initiative supported by the Unily platform can be, look no further than what Charles Taylor has accomplished.

Turning to Unily to reinvigorate internal communications

Charles Taylor is a leading provider of professional services to clients in the global insurance market. Headquartered in London with over 3k staff across 30 countries, a third of their entire workforce work remotely, traveling frequently and relying on mobile devices.

Charles Taylor were frustrated with their legacy SharePoint intranet. Their internal communications team, relying on email as their primary communications channel, craved more opportunities to reach and engage people.

They partnered with Unily to reimagine the ways they connected with their fragmented workforce, providing new channels for communication and collaboration to engage desk-based and remote workers alike.

A platform to launch engaging initiatives

Utilizing Unily’s multi-channel communications platform and Broadcast Center to connect and engage people, Charles Taylor saw Compass as an opportunity for the social side of their culture to flourish by building connections between different parts of their enterprise.

They set out to achieve this by leveraging Compass to launch three key internal communications initiatives, bringing people from different sides of the business together to build a supportive, positive culture.

#1. Coffee Connections

Coffee Connections aims to connect people from across Charles Taylor that would otherwise never work together. Users sign up to the program from an article promoted on Compass and are grouped with colleagues from different locations and business units. These groups of 3-5 spend up to an hour together and share insight into their roles, using an integration with Microsoft Teams to provide global connection opportunities.

With Coffee Connections, employees get the chance to learn more about their colleagues, their responsibilities, and the inner workings of Charles Taylor. The group has leveraged Compass to build a stronger sense of community among staff and inform people of the various processes other business units undertake.

These connections boost morale in the short-term and pay dividends in the long-term, as employees that understand more about the wider business know exactly who to turn to should they need help with a project, facilitating communication and collaboration across the business.

#2. Digital Ninjas

The Digital Ninja Academy is a project that asked Charles Taylor employees to form a support network of technology ambassadors. Using a link on Compass’ homepage for employees to sign up to be a ‘Ninja’, the group asks participants to act as a go-to expert for their colleagues, regardless of their own IT expertise.

The group uses a channel on Microsoft Teams, accessible from an integration on Compass, to feedback the issues with technology other employees experience. The Ninjas then use the channel to troubleshoot as a team, meaning each member is supported by the entire team of Digital Ninjas’ collective knowledge.

As well as helping employees with issues with technology, the group also encourages colleagues to use them as a sounding board for new ideas and feedback for Compass.

The Digital Ninjas provide a kind of self-service IT support network for Charles Taylor employees to rely on. The group not only boosts productivity by efficiently finding answers to users’ problems but also relieves the load placed on the IT department and gradually upskills its members by learning from each other.

#3. Champion Program

The Champion Program aims to make Compass as inclusive and useful to employees as possible, ensuring that each corner of the business can find value and engage with what the platform has to offer.

Feedback gathered from employee surveys showed a slight London-centric bias in content, so the internal communications team looked for ways to tell stories from the wider Charles Taylor group.

In response, the champion program was formed to make sure that everyone helped shape the shape and direction of the intranet, asking individuals from various teams, departments, and locations to step-up as champions. These volunteers would act as ambassadors for their specific demographic, passing feedback, stories, and information back to content writers, who can then ensure that the content published on Compass helps to meet the needs of everyone within the business. Champions are also invited to create content themselves to promote a diverse range of voices heard on the intranet.

Producing dramatic results

Compass has not only provided the perfect platform to launch these initiatives, it has also enabled the enterprise to track and analyze the impact they have had on employee engagement and adoption of digital tools.

Despite coming in at half the cost as their SharePoint site, Compass has revolutionized Charles Taylor’s employee experience strategy. Adoption continues to trend upwards, as since May 2019, use of tools and apps such as the Microsoft 365 suite has spiked 113% from around 800 entrances per month to over 1.7k a month.

To this day, Compass has amassed over 340k total views and almost 200k total sessions from just 1.7k users, demonstrating extremely high engagement across Charles Taylor’s workforce. Of the users that access the Compass homepage each month, around 40% engage with content. With Unily analytics, these statistics can then be split into separate departments and locations. This allows Charles Taylor to see where Compass is used most, and where further targeting is required.

Give your initiatives the platform they need to succeed

Speak to an expert today to find out how Unily’s employee experience platform helps transform employee engagement and culture with internal communications.