Introduction
The Estée Lauder Companies (ELC) has brands sold in more than 150 countries and 60k employees working across diverse roles from retail to supply chain, in-field, manufacturing and corporate – all from various brands, regions, and functions across the world. ELC needed a state-of-the-art employee experience platform to fuel culture and engagement across the enterprise. The company's previous SharePoint solution was holding back transformation and preventing the communications and digital experience teams from executing their vision.
Not only did ELC want to drive engagement with internal communications, but they also wanted to transform productivity and collaboration with a central platform that could connect and empower every employee with intuitive access to the people, systems and knowledge they need to succeed. In collaboration with Unily they launched MyELC, a digital workplace platform to enhance employee experience across the enterprise. The platform was chosen by the Nielsen Norman Group as the World's Best Intranet of 2022.
The Challenge
- ELC is a complex organization with a matrix of brands, regions and roles that meant the new platform needed to serve a diverse range of use cases
- The company’s legacy SharePoint solution and siloed software couldn’t keep pace with the enterprise’s needs and lacked measurement capabilities
- A new generation of employees with high digital expectations required a platform that could deliver ‘consumer-grade’ experiences akin to those they found in their personal lives
- As a prestige beauty brand, the enterprise needed a platform that would be as beautiful to look at as it is to interact with
- With 1000+ applications used by the workforce, ELC wanted a way to ensure that employees could always easily find the app or tool they require
ELC needed a single platform to connect and engage its large, global employee base that includes corporate, manufacturing, and retail point of sales roles.
ELC was previously relying on a standard SharePoint platform, which proved to be difficult to customize and expand at the level required. Employees found it hard to find the systems and information they needed, content was often out of date, and the user experience was poor. Additionally, the legacy platform had no reliable user metrics to drive improvement, so ELC decided it was time for a full intranet upgrade.
The complexity of ELC’s diverse organization meant that the new platform needed to be capable of fulfilling a range of use cases. In addition, ELC wanted to create a solution that matched up to the digital experiences employees had grown accustomed to in their personal lives. The communications team were held back by their existing legacy system and found it hard to deliver consistent, relevant communications to employees working across brands, locations and roles. They wanted a platform that could deliver a more consumer-grade experience consistent with their prestige external brand image.
The Solution
ELC came to Unily looking for a technology platform, partner, and innovator to collaborate in the creation of a prestige digital workplace solution. The enterprise wanted to delight and engage employees in its culture while simplifying their user journey and driving employee productivity.
The key goals of the new platform were to:
- 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
Vendor selection: why ELC chose Unily
With key goals in mind, ELC set out to identify the best platform to meet their needs. When it came to selecting the right product, the enterprise wanted a platform and partner that was poised to innovate and grow with the business. Acutely aware of the pitfalls of stagnant technology, ELC looked for a solution with an aggressive roadmap that would provide continuous opportunities to evolve to meet new employee and business needs.
Another important factor in the vendor selection process was finding a platform that could meet the high aesthetic and technical standards concurrent with a prestige beauty brand.
Following extensive research, including the commission of a study identifying more than 300 potential vendors, ELC landed on Unily as their chosen platform for building MyELC.
Introducing MyELC
Since its launch, MyELC has evolved to become a ‘one-stop-shop’ hub for all its current highly active 30k+ users to access daily. Through careful design the platform serves to meet the needs of a diverse workforce, elegantly connecting ELC’s global employee base with the tools, information and people they need to succeed. Application of corporate styling across the platform has allowed MyELC to slot seamlessly into the business ecosystem, providing a shared space for employees from myriad brands and roles to come together under a unified identity.
A new lease on life for internal comms
At the heart of MyELC is the Global Newsroom. When the platform first launched in its beta phase, the Newsroom was the first area of the site to be developed. The newsroom has revolutionized the way ELC shares company news, providing employees with a consumer-grade news hub experience wherever they are in the world, on whichever device they prefer.
Today the Global Newsroom provides a single, searchable hub for all ELC company communications. Many regional editors contribute a regular flow of communications, using targeting and personalization capabilities to ensure that employees see what is relevant to their role, location or interests. The Newsroom is the most popular individual page on the site (excluding the homepage) with content contributors around the globe publishing ~300 articles per month.
Reflecting on how MyELC has transformed internal communications for employees, Digant Sheth, Technology Strategy & User Experience Vice President, Human Resources at ELC muses: “We have quite a diverse array of employees or what we would call personas; and each of those personas requires different information, different content and access to that information and content using different channels. The platform allows us to hit all those channels cohesively and most importantly, give our employees a personalized experience which they did not have before. If you go to our brand websites, you see amazing, curated content, it's personalized to you, and it allows you to easily navigate with search. Well, now we're doing that for the enterprise. We're doing that for the employee side of the equation, which is quite a game changer for us."
Enabling two-way conversations with Unily social
Through native social features, ELC employees can now play an active role in shaping company dialogue. Employees can comment, react, share and follow – using familiar interactions to breathe new life into enterprise communications.
For Nicole Monson, Senior Vice President of Equity and Engagement, the introduction of social features across the platform has enabled culture and connectivity to thrive across the organization. Describing the impact of social functionality on employee engagement and knowledge exchange, Monson says: “Social opens up and invites an opportunity for conversation that may not otherwise be there. Somebody in Europe may be commenting on an article and somebody in Latin America may be commenting on an article, and it provides the opportunity for them to talk to each other in a way that we might not otherwise have.
Arming publishers with the features to drive engagement
For ELC's team of content publishers, MyELC has introduced a host of new capabilities to improve efficiency and engagement with company communications. Alongside an easy-to-use CMS, content publishers are embracing new opportunities to innovate content delivery.
The Broadcast Center allows the comms team to push notifications, mobile alerts, and email updates out to employees on their preferred channels. When there is a need for critical comms, the Broadcast Center provides the ability to share important updates at speed and track responses in real-time.
"A key feature for me is the alerts and the notifications. We've been talking about for years about having one place to go for your alerts and notifications, so you don't have to go looking for something buried in an email somewhere, or maybe someone message you separately. To have one communication channel that notifies you or alerts you when there's something relevant for you to look at, that's ground-breaking for us." says Sheth.
Real-time analytics change the game
The ability to easily track and measure engagement with communications has given the communication team access to much-needed metrics that are helping inform strategy improvements and prove success.
"We are a metrics-based company," says Nancy Maloney, Executive Director of Global Communications. "We have a CEO who is highly focused on metrics and engagement, so the metrics have really been a game changer for us. We can now deliver monthly metrics for the entire product, and we're able to highlight how each function in each region is contributing, and that is fostering some nice competition across the teams and really validating the work we're doing, allowing us to test and learn. The robust analytics capabilities really show us what users want and how they are engaging so that we can build on more of that and focus on the areas where we know need next attention."
Rethinking productivity with a single pane of glass experience
In addition to transforming the way ELC delivers corporate communications, another important goal of MyELC was give employees simplified access to the apps, tools and systems they relied on to do their jobs.
ELC sought to embrace a single pane of glass approach that would see MyELC become a launchpad for the thousands of apps and tools employees rely on. The starting point was to create an apps and tools toolbar. The toolbar can be personalized to every employee, allowing users to easily navigate through a matrix of applications to find the ones they need.
Building on the success of the apps and tools toolbar, ELC set about to create a MyStatus page that would leverage deeper integrations to pull and push information in from multiple systems into a single view. The MyStatus page lets employees view and interact with systems like ServiceNow, Taleo and Concur without having to leave the platform. By reducing digital friction in this way, ELC are driving greater productivity and digital satisfaction across the employee population – helping their people to complete simple tasks faster and giving them a single view of items on their to-do list
Alongside the apps and tools toolbar and MyStatus page, the introduction of global search on MyELC means that employees are now able to locate information from myriad repositories in one place. Using a search bar located in the global nav, users can enter keywords to bring up a list of search results helpfully split into key buckets: people, documents, news etc. Refiners and search filters help users to drill down results to find the information they need. The introduction of global search has seen search usefulness improve by 300%.
Overall, as a result of ELC’s integration strategy, time-to-task testing revealed that an average employee saves up to two hours per week through simplified access to systems and information as compared to the legacy intranet.
A home for ELC’s celebrated and inclusive culture
In addition to driving employee productivity, MyELC has provided a home for ELC’s vibrant culture. As ELC moves into new ways of working, embracing more flexible and hybrid models, MyELC has become the vehicle for connecting a dispersed employee base with the events, initiatives and communities abundant across the organization.
The platform houses ‘Communities’, an area for Regions and Functions to socialize and communicate within their own groups. This has also strongly increased engagement by enabling colleagues to share news, interact and comment on content, find resource links, and socialize within groups.
Thinking about how MyELC is supporting organizational culture, Senior Vice President of Equity and Engagement, Nicole Monson comments: "Connecting is critical, I think, to any culture, to any organization. It opens up and invites an opportunity for conversation that may not otherwise be there. People start talking around the world, feel more connected, and feel like they belong more to the organization. It makes our culture stronger.”
MyELC is home to 20+ Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Each group has their own area within the platform where they can house information, events, training and conversations pertaining to the group’s activities.
The Estée Lauder Companies’ collective vision is to be the most inclusive and diverse beauty company in the world, and to be both the employer of choice for diverse talent and the brand of choice for our global consumers. MyELC supports ELC’s commitment to DEI by spotlighting information about initiatives happening around the company and providing information and resources that drive awareness of DEI policies and agendas.
Award-winning accessible design
MyELC was selected by the Nielsen Norman Group as one of the world's best intranets of 2022. Not only does the platform exude prestige through the application of consistent brand styling and carefully constructed information architecture, but the company also took care to apply accessibility principles across all content and pages.
Taking advantage of Unily’s native accessibility features, MyELC supports equitable access through a range of enhancements.
- All images and videos are automatically captioned through AI-assisted captioning
- Text enlargement and high contrast modes are available to assist visually impaired employees
- Screen reader and narrator functionality and keyboard user support are available across desktop and mobile devices
On the mobile side, MyELC offers branded mobile app that works with responsive design to bring high-quality mobile experiences to retail and on-the-go employees. Variations of key pages (e.g., the homepage) have been designed specifically for mobile to provide an optimized experience suited to the device. To support employees with limited internet access, offline reading functionality enables articles to be downloaded and consumed in places where internet connection is intermittent.
The Results
- 30k+ active users
- Employee productivity gains 2+ hours per week
- Search usefulness improve by 300%
- ~300 articles published per month
The response to MyELC from all factions of the business has been overwhelmingly positive. Employees are finally able to get to the information they need to do their job in a click or two, whether working from the office, from home, or on the go with the branded mobile app.
A number of older SharePoint sites were retired, with employee information now completely centralized on MyELC – one of the primary launch goals. At present, the platform is available to all full- and part-time employees and corporate consultants. With the addition of the multi-language capabilities, ELC expects engagement to expand further. The platform continues to evolve at pace with new features being added including an upcoming integration with its learning and development hub.
Self-service HR becomes a reality
Thanks to MyELC, the onboarding experience for new starters is becoming smoother and more streamlined. As the company continues to grow and adopt more flexible working models, the ability to onboard new employees efficiently is of increasing importance and something that the platform will continue to evolve to accommodate.
In terms of HR compliance, MyELC is allowing employees to be more self-sufficient. Mandatory read functionality is helping HR roll-out policy updates more easily and HR efficiency is increasing as employees are now able to find the information they need with ease on the platform.
Comms efficiency skyrockets
For the comms team, MyELC has also transformed efficiency. The platform has provided new opportunities to streamline processes and enhance employee engagement with company comms. What was once a complex ecosystem of channels and functionally deficient legacy solutions is now a single powerful platform for delivering personalized communications.
A bright future ahead
Looking to the future, MyELC is set to embrace new features and expand the list of integrations to continue to build on its success. Plans for digital business cards are on the horizon, and the team is excited about continuing to develop the platform to meet new use-cases as they arise.