Organization overview
Love's Travel Stops & Country Stores is the USA's leading travel stop network, providing professional truck drivers and motorists with 24-hour access to clean and safe places to purchase gasoline, diesel fuel, fresh coffee, restaurant offerings, and more.
Project Overview
Mission:
Launch a cloud-based, mobile-optimized intranet platform that enhances engagement through personalized experiences and cultural initiatives everyone can participate in.
Key goals:
- Introduce a targeted experience for employees, based on their role and location.
- Increase business acumen among team members to help them understand how every individual’s work contributes to Love’s overall performance.
- Serve as the digital home for Love’s tight-knit, inclusive culture.
- Create a single source of truth that is easily accessible for all, including deskless employees.
The Challenge
Turning to digital technology to enhance connectivity
From their first filling station in Watonga, Oklahoma, the Love’s commitment has remained the same: “Clean Places, Friendly Faces.” As an enterprise that has been family-owned and operated since its establishment in 1964, this sense of camaraderie extends not only to Love’s customers, but also to their employees.
With more than 560 locations in 41 states and a growth rate of approximately 40 stores per year, technology is crucial for maintaining the close-knit culture that has set The Love’s Family of Companies apart from the very beginning. Since more than 75 percent of the company’s workforce is deskless and frontline, any digital platform must be mobile accessible to engage team members who are driving Gemini trucks, managing hotels and restaurants, and ringing up orders on the shop floor.
Given the wide range of employees’ roles and responsibilities, Love’s could not take a one-size-fits-all approach to digitalization. Instead, leaders sought to introduce a cloud-based, mobile-optimized platform that would enhance engagement through personalized experiences and cultural initiatives everyone could participate in.
The Solution
Letting user research lead the way
While Love’s already had an intranet in place called theWave, the existing platform left much to be desired. Poor search functionality and a lack of two-way communications channels topped the list of pain points associated with the company’s current solution.
With their sights set on a cloud-based platform, Love’s prioritized user research to ensure its forthcoming intranet would prove relevant and useful for all. The enterprise’s Internal Communications and IT teams divided the workforce into six unique sub-audiences and conducted employee interviews with each group. Following these conversations, the project team created robust profiles for every persona, outlining what users in each group were looking for, the most pressing challenges they face, and the matching O365 services they would need to leverage.
Once Love’s had developed an in-depth picture of the needs and preferences for each of its sub-audiences, they reviewed different potential providers to partner with for their relaunch. After weighing several vendors, they selected Unily due to its extensibility and well-honed track record with enterprise clients.
Giving employees what they’re looking for with Love’s personas
Following their vendor selection, the project team and Unily worked closely to unveil a new iteration of theWave that would serve each of the personas the company had identified. Key priorities for each group included:
Cashiers and hourly store employees
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Easier ways to get to the systems they use
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More direct communications from Love’s leadership and corporate office
On-the-road truck drivers
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Ability to connect to the intranet via a portable tablet or mobile device
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A place to share information with other drivers
Multi-tasking store managers
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Ability to work from anywhere
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Single sign-on for all applications used regularly
Road warrior
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Ability to find resources via theWave
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More streamlined communications and a reduction in email traffic
The knowledge worker
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More personalized content on theWave
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Ability to collaborate with teammates from anywhere
The content distributor
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Better tools for reaching all employees
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Ability to target content to specific audiences
Introducing theWave: a behind-the-scenes look at Love’s new intranet
With a personalized approach and user preferences as their North Star, theWave has become an employee favorite across the organization since its relaunch, thanks to the following features:
Personalized answers on-demand
When Love’s conducted employee interviews, improved access to relevant resources was a request that was echoed by several different personas. It was also a challenge that was on their leadership team’s radar, as the director of human resources voiced concerns about their legacy intranet’s search functionality.
To give employees the best possible answers to their questions, theWave now includes a cognitive search bot called “Ask Love’s.” When a user types a question into the bot, the answers are tailored based on their role and designation within the company. Employees can also evaluate how helpful the information they receive is via a thumbs up or down icon, creating a feedback loop Love’s IT team reviews on a weekly basis to ensure nothing is missing from their knowledge base.
Prior to the debut of Ask Love’s, the Internal Communications team launched a robust hype campaign to help everyone take full advantage of the new bot. Employees received explainer content to learn how to leverage Ask Love’s and to help users understand how it differs from global search.
Inspiring everyone to achieve their fullest potential
Love’s culture encourages everyone to be a leader, regardless of their position. To celebrate those who are taking charge and leading the way for their peers, theWave includes Love’s Ladder stories, a series of articles spotlighting employees who have grown their careers at Love’s.
Recent profiles include an employee who began working part-time at a travel stop and now serves as the location’s general manager, and a hotel manager whose career started at the travel stop next door. New stories are added monthly, with all content archived so employees can look back and gain inspiration from their colleagues’ success.
Love’s Ladder stories are consistently some of the top-performing content published on theWave. The page demonstrates the vast potential within every Love’s employee and encourages colleagues to celebrate their peers and even learn from their best practices.
Gaining employee feedback
While Love’s legacy intranet lacked opportunities for two-way communications, theWave now provides several channels to encourage everyone to raise their voice. When theWave launched, Love’s created a feedback form that was placed in a prominent location on the homepage, so that users could share their thoughts and offer suggestions for improvements they would like to see on the site. These requests were quickly put into action, leading to the creation of several department pages and the addition of new terminology for the Ask Love’s bot.
TheWave’s social networking functionality provides another opportunity for employees to share their insights. In addition to liking, loving and commenting on content, users can choose colleagues to follow to ensure they stay updated on what their peers are doing.
Driving lasting change
TheWave has also served as the virtual home for Love’s diversity and inclusion initiatives and corporate giving mission. Over the past two years, Love’s has increasingly focused on diversity and inclusion through a variety of culture observance days, including an event hosted by the Oklahoma City Urban League for Black History Month.
Since Love’s employees operate during three different daily shifts, it would be nearly impossible to find an event time that would work for every team member. By publishing recordings of live events on theWave, all employees can participate and engage with Love’s cultural initiatives on their own time, in turn strengthening the sense of connection that spans the entire enterprise.
The results: creating a culture that brings out everyone’s best
In a year since launch, theWave has achieved:
Love’s user-centric approach and ongoing emphasis on employee research have clearly paid off, as both impressive analytics and glowing employee testimonials illustrate.
When it comes to targeted answers and finding key information quickly, Ask Love’s has been a crucial component of the intranet’s success. The bot has recorded a success rate above 90% every month since launch, indicating that the vast majority of users feel confident they have the best answers at their fingertips.
TheWave has also played a vital role in maintaining Love’s close-knit culture, even in the midst of a global pandemic. By leveraging their newly launched intranet, Love’s was able to cultivate a sense of connectivity that touches every employee, whether they are working from their home office or serving customers on the shop floor.
"Our goal has always been to utilize technology that inspires and empowers our employees. One key example of this is the modernization of theWave, which fosters Love’s collaborative and inclusive culture. During this unprecedented pandemic, theWave has been instrumental in keeping employees informed about changes, resources and more, while also still providing quick access to the apps and tools they use every day."