Engaging and enabling thousands of ‘unconnected’ colleagues as part of a people-centric digital transformation strategy
With over 300 outlets in over a dozen countries, welcoming 100 million guests each year, our client knows that their vision of giving every guest an inspiring entertainment experience is entirely dependent on its people. As they embarked on a major digital transformation journey, it was critical to find a way to engage all 12,000 colleagues – the vast majority of which had no access to corporate emails nor applications.
Having grown by acquisition, the group had multiple disparate HR systems and employee directories across Europe – with no single authoritative version for all employees, contractors and temporary workers. Over three-quarters of the 12,000 colleagues were ‘unconnected’ with no corporate email address – and previously the only way Internal Communications team could share information with these colleagues was via newsletters and posters. There was no approved, secure way to engage the entire company in real-time two-way dialogue – and as a result many colleagues were resorting to consumer tools such as WhatsApp and Facebook groups to communicate and collaborate.
EveryCloud worked with the technology and communications teams to explore how the Workplace from Facebook communication platform could help them achieve their ‘Big Plan’ to deliver awe-inspiring systems to create a great place to work for their people. The first step was for EveryCloud to lead the client through a Value Assessment workshop, where the following key business drivers were identified:
- Increase collaboration across regions, teams and functions by promoting new connections and improved communication
- Improve executive transparency and communication
- Live the company values and bring them to life, in particular providing space to have fun and share passion for their work
- Decrease shadow IT (e.g. WhatsApp and Facebook) and provide an approved, secure space for teams to communicate and share
- Improve business performance by promoting innovation, best practice and knowledge sharing
- Innovate and increase effectiveness in Internal Communications Practice
Against each of the above, a clear set of activities and success measures was put in place and agreed with the executive leadership team – thus providing a blueprint for success for the project, for launch and post-launch. In preparation for launch, EveryCloud guided the project team through key steps of readiness – including executive leadership engagement, technical alignment, champions training, Workplace groups set-up and launch communications planning.
Needing to enable its entire workforce to simply and securely access Workplace and future cloud applications – but with the vast majority of colleagues having no corporate email access, the client then entrusted EveryCloud to help them understand the identity and access management options available to them. Having assessed their global infrastructure and identity requirements around colleague experience, security and ease of administration – EveryCloud recommended the Okta Identity Cloud solution, thus enabling them to realise the benefits of a single identity platform for all employees.
With an urgent focus on rolling out Workplace as their first ‘all colleagues’ cloud application, they called on EveryCloud’s cloud architect team to help deploy the Okta solution and achieve the following deliverables:
- A single Directory, providing one place to manage all email users, by integrating Okta with multiple active directory domains across 13 countries.
- Single sign on capability for employees to seamlessly and securely access multiple applications including Office 365 and Workplace by Facebook
- Identity management of all email-less colleagues, using Okta’s HR as master capability to pull in data from a variety of 3rd party systems.
- A web-based user provisioning application to enable email-less colleagues to claim accounts and register for corporate applications.
- Full lifecycle management to manage the Joiner, Mover and Leaver (JML) process and cater for seasonal staff.
This has enabled our client to securely and seamlessly create and manage users, helping IT gain speed and efficiency – and accelerating end-user adoption of important cloud applications, starting with Workplace. Most importantly, it ensures they can keep every one of their 12,000 colleagues – regardless of role or location – at the heart of their strategy. After all, it’s those people that will deliver on the group’s vision of giving every guest an inspiring entertainment experience.
