Social housing organisation uses employee engagement platform to improve customer satisfaction and employee communications

2018_EnEx Assets-most-strategic-comms-tower-hamlets

30%

of workforce registered in first 12 days of launch

Increase

in awareness of benefits offering through communications

What they needed:

As a result of the company being created through a staff transfer from the local council, Tower Hamlets Homes (THH) lacked a distinctive company identity and hadn’t changed its benefits offering in 10 years. After conducting a staff opinion “pulse” survey in February 2018, the team discovered only 57% of staff were proud to work for THH. This fueled the need for a revamp of THH’s current benefit offerings, for stronger employee communications and an overall need to improve employee engagement.

Offering staff reasonable pay increases is a challenge in the public sector, but there were other ways to increase engagement. THH staff mentioned “reward and recognition” as an area the company could improve on in an October 2017 staff workshop. On top of that, THH needed to support its highly dispersed workforce. While 47% of employees didn’t have access to an office or a computer, the other 53% were spread across four offices. This meant communication needed to be thoughtful, strategic and reach all employees with the same message in different formats.

Lastly, THH wanted to encourage its staff to take greater personal ownership of the customer experience. Feedback from customers showed that 20% of leaseholder complaints received in 2017 related to the quality of THH’s communication and customer-handling experience. By giving staff greater ownership over the employee experience in terms of pay, benefits and wellbeing, would encourage the corresponding behaviour when it came to customers.

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Industry:

Social housing

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Number of employees:

480

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Number of locations:

200

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Platform features:

Employee Benefits, Employee Wellbeing, Childcare Vouchers

How we helped:

In order to streamline employee communications, benefits and wellbeing, THH was looking for an online platform where employees could easily access both pre-existing and new benefits. After choosing Reward Gateway as its partner, THH needed to generate some buzz about the launch of the new programme.

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The organisation brought its new brand to life by mixing together its corporate “THH” with “buzz” to create a new brand name for the employee engagement platform, called “THHbuzz.” This new site would engage employees with a blend of photography of its homes and cartoon imagery.

Before the launch of the new employee engagement platform, the THH team created a teaser campaign with branded emails and posters to all staff to enhance communication of the new offering. Then, “staff champions” were identified and were granted pre-access to the site to help colleagues post-launch.

To deliver the message in-person about THHbuzz, the team launched wellbeing and benefits in phase one, and recognition in phase two, helping tailor the right message at the right time. On the day of the launch, senior managers attended seminars which were led by “team THHbuzz” experts. Branded merchandise reflected the “honey” theme and were useful for both offline and online demographics. The team further boosted awareness by sending postcards home to all staff, which helped reach those not based in offices.

 

What they achieved:

Due to the success of the launch campaign and a mix of targeted employee communications, the platform had a successful launch. By using the analytics tool through the THHbuzz platform, the team discovered that 30% of the workforce registered on the employee engagement platform within the first 12 days of the initial launch.

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Although THH is in an early stage of implementation, the company is anticipating seeing a positive impact on the proportion of staff who say they’re proud to work for THH. Higher employee engagement will lead to higher customer satisfaction and fewer customer complaints as a result of effective employee communications and a streamlined platform to house THH’s new offerings.