Employee Engagement Rates At Woodie’s Jumped By 54% with Workvivo

Woodie’s and Workvivo

What did internal comms at Woodie’s look like before Workvivo?

In 2014, Woodie’s completed its first annual employee engagement survey with Great Places to Work. The responses showed that only 57% of colleagues felt that they were kept up to date with company changes, and only 25% believed they had the opportunity to receive special recognition.

The audit revealed a number of challenging areas. Since 70% of colleagues were frontline with no access to a computer, they also had no access to company communications. A lack of structure meant that key messages were diluted and teams were overloaded with information.

With a newly hired internal communications manager at its helm, a five-year plan was devised on the back of a comms audit.

No central line of communication led to each store receiving updates differently, and people couldn’t connect over achievements and more personal moments like birthdays.

There was not a high level of trust in the organization,” Declan said. “There was no culture of recognition. There was no telling anybody anything. Messages that would cascade through the organization got as far as the store manager, never went any further. The business didn’t have any sort of mission, purpose, and values.

In response, leadership made sure that their new internal comms strategy prioritized some key traits:

• Accessibility through the adoption of a mobile-first communications platform.
• More transparent and open comms with democratized information.
• Simple communications guidelines that streamlined messaging and updates.
• To make all of this a reality, Woodie’s needed a solid technology partner that would allow it to communicate with staff in a user-friendly and familiar way.
• It also needed to merge its old intranet and previous employee engagement app Kudos into a single platform.

It chose Workvivo. Within a single month, over 95% of its colleagues had registered on the platform. Today, that figure has grown to 100%.

Communicating in a time of crisis

As well as employee engagement campaigns like Pride Month and the Woscars, Workvivo has also been invaluable for crisis communications at Woodie’s – something the company came to rely on during the pandemic.

Declan said that on the night that COVID lockdowns in Ireland came into effect, Workvivo “really came into its own”.

“There was a very confusing situation around DIY retail,” he said. “The Government made the announcement at nine o’clock at night, so at five past nine, I had a message on Workvivo to 1,400 people in our organization saying, ‘You know what? We don’t know what’s going on, we’re going into a meeting and we’re going to update you as to exactly whether you’re going to come to work tomorrow morning, or whether you’re not going to come to work, because it’s quite a confusing situation. And at midnight with almost all of Woodie’s looking, I could say, ‘Guys, do not come to work tomorrow morning.”

Having a central and accessible internal comms platform has made all the difference, Declan said. In other retail companies using traditional top-down communications like email, people without access to a work email or computer are left out.

Workvivo’s push notification feature and analytics and insights dashboard meant that the Woodie’s leadership team could rest assured that their messages had reached and been read by every colleague within minutes.

“We have a fantastic tool that allows people to get instantaneous communication, that allows us to trade information onto a communications portal,” he said. “Every procedure that we have reaches every colleague and is read within minutes. You don’t need to go running to your manager to do it.

“So, we put a lot of work into communication, a lot of work into recognition, which is what Workvivo does as well.”

Open communications that goes both ways

Having that direct line to every colleague across Woodie’s has helped bridge the gap between leadership and more junior workers.

Declan views Workvivo as a “complete communications portal”. So, in addition to the internal campaigns the platform makes possible and the crisis communications it facilitates, it was also a place where he could publish a weekly CEO blog containing leadership updates during his time leading the company.

“I’ve been writing blogs every Thursday for 15 years, and it’s amazing, you don’t run out of stuff to say,” he said. “And because of Workvivo, 98% of our colleagues have the Workvivo app on their phone. And I’ve asked myself, ‘I write this blog, does anyone actually read it?’. And actually, everybody does because we can measure that on Workvivo. And also some people read it twice!

“And so, I know I have a direct line of communication to 1,400 people, and I can use that to steer certain directions that I want to steer within the organization.” Declan’s blog is posted to Workvivo every Thursday at 3pm, and this has become the busiest time on the platform each week with more than 1,000 colleagues logging in.

That direct line of communication works both ways – a crucial step for any organization embracing open communications. Now, feedback and new ideas from frontline colleagues can reach HR easily and efficiently.

When one worker suggested a Back to School savings scheme for colleagues, for example, the company’s HR team agreed to the request within 25 minutes.