Prominent Leader in the Automotive Industry
Optimizing Employee Communication and Collaboration to Support a New Way of Working
What if...we could improve the employee experience and foster a sense of belonging in a new hybrid work model?
Our client is a prominent leader in the automotive industry with a rich history of groundbreaking achievements and pushing the boundaries of automotive innovation.
Tackling Unprecedented Communication and Cultural Challenges
The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented changes to the automotive industry, causing disruptions in the global supply chain, production processes, customer interactions, and the employee experience.
Our client faced significant challenges in communicating effectively with its employees when the pandemic forced work-from-home or hybrid work models. The company needed a cutting-edge, multichannel internal portal to better communicate and engage with employees and foster a stronger sense of culture and belonging during a time of relative isolation.
Providing a Smoother Ride in the Post-Pandemic Employee Experience
Our client needed a way to electrify the employee experience following the pandemic. Employees felt disconnected, and the client needed to bring the community spirit back to the forefront.
We shared an experience visualization with our client that demonstrated how we could create a world-class employee portal. We explained how the portal would foster interactions that inspire employees to pursue their dreams and encourage their teams to reach their fullest potential.
Based on this vision, the client asked us to help create the digital employee experience portal to streamline and optimize the employee experience online.
Listening to the Voice of Employees
We began by using our Envision Framework to conduct voice-of-employee surveys and card-sorting exercises to solicit employee feedback on the features they would like to see in the new portal.
We balanced employee, business, and technology needs against those visions to develop a solution architecture, implementation roadmap, and an objectives and key results framework to track progress on the development of, and employee engagement with, the new portal.
Next, our digital experience experts got to work using the Viafoura engagement and personalization platform to design the new employee portal.
Fostering a Personalized, Yet Collaborative Experience
It was important to our client that the new portal include personalization components that allow each user to tailor their homepage to their unique experience and interests, including bookmarking relevant content to create a frictionless end-to-end experience.
Among its collaborative features, the new portal allows employees to connect with one another in chat forums. After bookmarking the key topics and subjects they want to follow on their homepage, users can follow specific threads, "like" different posts, and have conversations through threaded commenting. This drives multichannel communication and networking that lets employees feel connected to each other. They can also ask work-related questions, even if they are working in a hybrid or remote format. This feature was curated to reach the goal of fostering a family, community-driven experience.
Including the Extended Family
Being a member of the organization's family doesn't end when an employee retires, and the client wanted to ensure that the new site was inclusive of both current employees and alumni.
The new employee portal allows alumni to access and curate a homepage to receive company news and information about their healthcare benefits. With the online portal, alumni can interact with employees to comment on events, as well as offer advice.
Our long history of partnership with the client, combined with our enterprise thinking, experience in user research and deep experience in application modernization, made us the ideal partner to help the company create a more engaged employee experience.
Results
The New Multichannel Portal Drives Employee Engagement
Since its launch, the employee portal has driven high levels of engagement among employees and retirees, improved employee satisfaction and retention, and increased company advocacy.
Employees can quickly and easily access content, while the threaded-commenting feature enables them to easily communicate with each other and maintain community no matter where they are.
Our long history of partnership with the client, combined with our enterprise thinking, experience in user research and deep experience in application modernization, made us the ideal partner to help the company create a more engaged employee experience.
