Introduction
The Adecco Group in France is the country's #1 Human Resources provider, placing an average of 120,000 interim staff in temporary jobs every week.
As part of a wider vision for digital transformation, leading recruitment brand The Adecco Group in France embarked on a mission to transform the working habits of its 9,000-strong workforce with a digital workplace that could reinvent communication, collaboration and productivity in the workplace.
The new Employee Experience platform, ADICT, supports employees situated in 1,000 offices in placing an average of 120,000 interim staff in temporary jobs every week. Part of the largest HR solution firm in the world and the #1 human resources provider in France, The Adecco Group sought a suitably feature-rich digital workplace solution that could assist their continued domination of the industry. Unily stepped in with the answer.
The Challenge
Having already trialed and rejected digital workplace products from other providers, The Adecco Group in France had a clear idea of what its new intranet platform needed to deliver.
With a legacy intranet that was limited to displaying basic news and insights, The Adecco Group in France recognized the need to modernize its approach to the digital workplace with a forward-thinking platform that could deliver more than one-way internal communications. Promoting collaboration was a priority for ADICT – an acronym for Adecco Intranet Collaborative Tool – and the endorsement of enterprise social networking played a significant role in the overall strategy.
Business silos were having a negative impact on the productivity of the business, preventing the transfer of knowledge and hampering progress and innovation. The Group’s Business Units function in isolation of each other, operating under different brand names and catering to different industries. However, many of the processes the BU’s undertake are identical, meaning there was a justified interest in facilitating the flow of knowledge from one to another.
Building on the theme of using ADICT’s advanced functionality to fuel change in working habits, The Adecco Group also sought to utilize their digital workplace to drive engagement with Office 365 tools. Having engaged with a Microsoft Change Management plan, the company required a platform that could support this aim by acting as a gateway to Office 365. “We are beginners,” explains Mikael. “For us, this is the first step to engage all employees on Office 365 and we needed a solution that could support the transition.”
Following a comprehensive review process, four primary goals were established that became the defining pillars of the new platform:
- Inform
- Collaborate
- Break Silos
- Improve Search
The Solution
Collaboration and productivity were identified as overarching objectives that the Unily platform could accommodate in droves. The new intranet was named ADICT as a nod towards its predestined centrality to the business. It was designed to become a tool that the employees would rely on to complete their daily work and achieve their potential.
Leveraging Office 365
Unily delivered on the requirement to leverage the digital workplace to drive engagement with Office 365 tools. With seamless Office integration that made it simple and intuitive for employees to access the full suite of Microsoft tools. An expandable Apps and Tools menu means the all Office programs are a single click away from any page on the intranet. Meanwhile, an integrated document center allows employees to collaborate on files in real-time without having to leave the platform. As a result, ADICT has accelerated Office 365 adoption, allowing The Adecco Group to derive maximum benefit from their licenses.
Seeing the benefits of what was possible Out-Of-The-Box, The Adecco Group wished to take their Microsoft integration further with a custom Microsoft Teams or ‘Équipes’ widget. To promote the use of Teams as a means of enhancing collaboration and productivity (reducing reliance on email) an access point to the widget was placed in the global navigation so that users could access their personal Teams view in a single click without leaving the intranet. An Outlook widget was also developed to surface emails and calendar information on ADICT, further preventing users from switching between systems.
Accelerating productivity
While supporting enhanced collaboration was an important goal for the new intranet, the most critical role it needed to perform was to improve the working lives of its 9,000 users by making it easier for them to find the tools and resources they needed to perform the most basic functions of their jobs. Uniting apps and tools on a centralized hub was just one part of this process but the fundamental driver of productivity was Unily’s intelligent search, which transforms the ease with which employees can find and gain access to resources.
With advanced search, employees can search for documents and content by typing key words into the global search navigation. “As a business, this was one of our major pain points, that users of our legacy system could not find the information they needed quickly and easily,” says Mikael. With ADICT, users can scan vast depositories in seconds to find not only the specific documents they need, but additional supporting information that they may not have realized existed in the previous siloed system.
In conjunction with this, Workspaces have been leveraged to organize resources into intuitive categories, based upon user needs. Accessible from the global navigation, users can easily find the resources and information they need by selecting from function-based menus that organize sites and pages by Client, Candidate, HR, Practical Information and Group.
The Results
In the first four months:
- 6,164 social posts
- 16,479 social reactions
- 70 social channels
With such superior functionality and a design that addressed unique challenges faced by The Adecco Group’s employees, the new platform was unlikely to come up against resistance. In fact, there was great anticipation from employees who craved a more intuitive system.
Thus, for The Adecco Group in France, the primary obstacle to the success of the platform was training needs: “Employees had only ever had access to an old-school internet used to display information, so this was a big transition,” explains Mikael.
To confront the issue head-on, the Group’s Internal Communications team developed a clever and comprehensive training strategy, that emphasized and incentivized self-teaching that was designed to make training intuitive and painless. On the day of the launch, employees were invited to take a part in a ‘treasure hunt’ that guided them through the intranet and its functionalities, allowing them to learn by doing rather than by seeing.
Cleverly, the treasure hunt concept meant that users were able to familiarize themselves with areas of the site they may otherwise have never visited. It exposed them to new tools likely to increase their efficiency, compelling them to explore new ways a digital workplace could be incorporated into their working day. It was an extremely effective practical training approach that was supported by more traditional methods in the days and months following the launch.
Maintaining momentum
To maintain the momentum and keep engagement levels high, a continued support strategy was implemented to build on the successes of the launch. Ambassadors were selected from various departments to act as go-to people for employees to seek advice from and to demonstrate examples of best practice. Ambassadors received extensive training prior to the launch and were on hand to support users throughout the transition. Managers also received similar training to facilitate a top-down approach to adoption that would support the integration of ADICT into the processes of different departments.
Gamification was utilized in the form of badges to reinforce exemplary use of the intranet and incentivize training. Users were rewarded for completing challenges like posting on social, contributing insights, completing training tasks and engaging with webinars. “We were conscious that launching ADICT and doing nothing else would not work for us. It’s a question of remaining in close proximity to staff and continuing to identify areas for improvement or further training,” says Raphaèle.