Why Unily is the first choice intranet for Fortune 500 enterprises
Unily has partnered with some of the world’s best-known brands to bring employee experience visions to life. Employees at Shell, McDonald’s, CVS, L’Oreal, Cardinal Health, Estee Lauder, Best Buy, and many more of the dynamic enterprises that make up the Fortune 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 100 index, all use Unily to power their digital experience of work. Throughout these engagements, what have we learned about delivering employee experiences for the Fortune 500? And how are the biggest organizations using enterprise intranet platforms to solve complex challenges and shape the future of work?
Core employee experience challenges for the Fortune 500
Whether you’re a business with 500 employees or a sprawling international operation, there are fundamental components of the employee experience that every enterprise must address to succeed. But, as the scale and complexity of an enterprise increases, so too does the critical importance of getting it right.
Having partnered with clients from every industry and geography to transform employee experience, we’ve come to understand that while every organization is unique, there are some core employee experience challenges common to all. Working with Fortune 500 companies, we see the following needs appear time and again:
- Connecting global workforces requires robust governance, security, and scalability
- Reaching people across the world with engaging communications requires highly granular targeting and personalized experiences in any language
- Complex organizations with various sub-brands need dedicated sites and full control over design, including branding and theming
- Any employee experience platform must integrate seamlessly with existing enterprise technology and drive usage of tools to improve productivity
Throughout our time empowering industry leaders with leading digital employee experiences, we have been able to refine and extend the reach and capabilities of the Unily employee experience platform to better address these challenges. It is thanks to this that we are able to share our success stories with the likes of Shell, Biogen, and many more Fortune 500, S&P 500, and FTSE 100 enterprises.
How do the Fortune 500 use Unily?
The Unily platform is built to unite global enterprises, bringing employees together from disparate locations and empowering them with the right tools to do their best work.
But our work with Fortune 500 enterprises goes beyond just our platform, as consultants and onboarding and customer success teams work closely with clients throughout their digital transformation journey to ensure long-term success.
Thanks to this end-to-end support, Unily is proud to provide the Fortune 500 with the technology to power engagement, productivity, and innovation across the enterprise. Below, we explore some examples of how the world’s largest organizations are using Unily to achieve their enterprise intranet goals.
Royal Dutch Shell partners to power productivity
Shell, one of the largest companies in the world, has served as an oil and gas “supermajor” since its founding in 1907 and has become one of the most recognizable brands on the planet.
Shell partnered with Unily to support their internal communications team in aligning employees against their strategy whilst driving productivity and innovation across an 82k-strong global workforce. Their goals for the project included:
- Move the organization towards a more social, seamless, and digitally-enabled employee experience, with the intranet at the center of the digital workplace, as the window into Shell
- Align over 82k+ employees across 70+ countries against Shell’s digital strategy
- Equip employees with the data, tools, resources, and information they need to do their best work
- Put productivity back into the digital workplace by making things easier to find, more accessible, and more relevant to users
Shell’s Unily platform, “The Hub”, has transformed the employee experience for the energy giant, leading to increased engagement, collaboration, and productivity.
"It was such a contrast between our old platform and the new one. It brought us forward. When we flipped the switch, I felt like, ‘hey, this now is a company that’s here, as opposed to in the past’."
The Hub is used by over 113k unique users every month, with employees logging into the intranet an average of 2.5 times each day. High levels of engagement with the platform draw an average of 140k content views per month, generating 2.3k social comments and 1.4k reactions. By integrating and streamlining access to Shell’s existing systems and tools, Shell saves 3.5 hours of employees’ time every day, driving hard savings of over $41.6m each year in productivity gains.
Biogen puts knowledge at the heart of innovation
With more than 7k employees across 40 countries all working together to research and develop medicines to drive the field of neuroscience forward, collaboration is the beating heart of Biogen’s culture.
Like many Fortune 500 enterprises, Biogen sought to evolve their seldom-used legacy SharePoint intranet into a fully-fledged employee experience platform. Following several years of minimal governance or updates, their SharePoint intranet ended up as a dumping ground for irrelevant and outdated content. With no ability to effectively search their system for useful information and no reliable channels for connecting and networking, the enterprise's ability to effectively share knowledge and collaborate was limited by the technology in place.
Biogen needed a solution that would enable enterprise-wide communication and act as a one-stop-shop for all employees to find everything they need to work. Partnering with Unily, Biogen laid out their goals for a complete digital transformation:
- Replace the pre-existing intranet with more advanced capabilities to improve the employee experience
- Develop modern, engaging internal communications to better connect people to Biogen
- Streamline collaboration and maximizing knowledge sharing with tools designed to connect people
After transitioning from a SharePoint system to their new Unily platform, Biogen has seen their user base grow 70% year on year, with around 30 new sites added to Synapse each year as well. With Unily’s unified search center, Biogen has seen search relevancy rise from 15% to 78%, which in turn has boosted productivity for Biogen’s 15k employees.
"Our employees use Synapse every day to get their work done. It’s a central hub to get to the apps they need, the action items they have, or to the content they require to get their jobs done. They can now focus on value-add activities instead of spending time looking for the content they need."
Estée Lauder Companies brings consumer-grade user experience to the enterprise
The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) is one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of quality skincare, makeup, fragrance, and hair care products. With 60k+ employees working across 120 countries and in diverse roles from manufacturing to retail point-of-sales, the enterprise's legacy SharePoint intranet was not fit to meet the needs of such a dynamic enterprise.
ELC wanted to delight and engage employees in its culture while simplifying user journeys and driving employee productivity. Understanding that employee expectations were being shaped by the technology they were using in their personal lives, ELC sought to bring consumer-grade experiences to the enterprise with a cutting-edge platform that would feel like an external-facing website. The new platform needed to represent the ELC brand through pixel-perfect design and operate seamlessly under the hood.
Key goals for the new platform were:
- Bring together a diverse, global employee base into one system where shared culture can thrive
- Transform internal communications with personalized, equitable access to company news for every employee
- Streamline employee’s overall digital experience and drive productivity by providing a one-stop-shop to all systems, tools and information they needed to succeed
"ELC is a vibrant global company and we have colleagues and business around the globe. We have a corporate, retail and manufacturing employee base, which gives a tremendous opportunity for communications. But we needed a tool that would feel like the other channels they use in their personal lives, especially to bring in the younger generations who are so digitally and socially adept."
Following a rigorous analysis of more than 300 intranet vendors, ELC selected Unily as their chosen partner to bring its employee experience vision to life. Strong content management features, exceptional user experience, and a record of delivering award-winning solutions to large enterprises were noted as key reasons behind the choice. Additionally, ELC wanted to select a partner with a focus on innovation to ensure that their platform would continue to evolve to meet emerging demands.
"It was really important that we had a company that could grow with us. We're ambitious here. We really care about employee engagement and employee efficiency and connecting our employees with a platform where they can be a part of the company culture, especially while we're in a hybrid mode. We needed somebody that was going to have the ambition for that. And Unily's has been that partner."
Less than 12 months post-launch, MyELC was selected by Neilsen Norman Group as one of the 10 best intranets of 2022. In partnership with Unily, ELC were able to launch the world-class intranet they set out to create.
The keys to Fortune 500 digital success
The examples above testify to the fact that every enterprise is unique and requires different things from their employee experience solution. But just like there are certain common enterprise challenges we have observed throughout our partnerships with the Fortune 500, we have also identified seven key features of an enterprise-scale employee experience platform. To find out more about the specifics of what makes an enterprise intranet Fortune 500-ready, check out the blog below.
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