Bus Éireann’s Employee Engagement Levels Grew By 55% with Workvivo
Driving Bus Éireann’s dispersed internal comms strategy to new places
55%
Increase in employee engagement with Workvivo
89%
Adoption of Workvivo among employees
83%
Percentage of employees that access Workvivo each week
State-owned bus and coach operator providing services throughout Ireland
Workers in the field – or in Bus Éireann’s case, on the road – are much harder to reach with traditional communications. Things get trickier when you need to communicate the same messaging to frontline and in-office employees at the same time. Add in a global health crisis that forces a significant number of your staff to work remotely and you’re facing challenges you likely never expected. When we think about employee experience and corporate communications, what usually springs to mind are company newsletters, email campaigns, and virtual noticeboards. But there’s a large cohort of workers across the world – almost two billion – that carry out their roles on the front line.
According to Microsoft, 88% of organizations employ people in frontline roles. They’re on the ground instead of behind a desk. Newsletters popping up in the inboxes of your in-office employees might be a great way of disseminating information, but excluding people doesn’t bode well for company culture and worker satisfaction.
At Bus Éireann, a state-owned bus service operating across the Republic of Ireland, over 71% of employees have no company phone number, company email address or company computer. Out of 2,700 employees, 1,700 are drivers and 300 are garage-based.
Before partnering with Workvivo, the company had no way to engage or directly communicate with three-quarters of its workforce. Changing that would require a unique, cost-effective solution that catered to Bus Éireann’s specific needs.
Enter Workvivo.
People
2,800
Industry
Public Transportation
Location
Ireland
Category
Mid-Market
Employee engagement grew by 55%
Fast forward two years and a whopping 89% of Bus Éireann employees have registered on the Workvivo employee app, with 1,500 people (60%) logging on each day.
Since embarking on its Workvivo journey, Bus Éireann has experienced major improvements right across the business. In just two years, their overall employee engagement score grew from 51% to 79%, an increase of 55%.
They also saw a 114% increase in confidence in leaders and strategy and a 67% increase in understanding of strategic priorities and goals.
“The biggest achievement is the fact that we can communicate directly, immediately,” Bus Éireann’s Head of Internal Communications, Tanya Waldron, says. “There’s mission-critical information that happens all the time, particularly during COVID, where we would find out what changes there were to capacity and social distancing at the same time as everybody else in Ireland, but we had to enact it overnight.
So to be able to get out to our drivers, out to garage employees, literally within as quick as I could write it – that was mission critical.
Bus Éireann was also keen to find a solution that was easy to use with minimum training required for staff, and they found that in Workvivo’s familiar interface and user experience. Presenting the Workvivo platform with Bus Éireann branding helped employees feel right at home with company logos, colors and imagery throughout.
The biggest achievement is the fact that we can communicate directly, immediately
Tanya Waldron
Head of Internal Communications – Bus Éireann
Impacting the bottom line
The impact goes beyond engagement and creating a more inclusive and dynamic culture – it can really benefit your bottom line too. Bus Éireann is able to communicate with every employee on Workvivo, whether they have an Office 365 license or company email address or not, as the Workvivo system supports colleagues without a work email address. An Office 365 license could cost a 1,000-person organization over €45,000 per annum.
Another powerful feature of Workvivo is that is supports automatic user provisioning from Microsoft AzureAD via SCIM, an industry standard protocol. This integration saves teams time by automating the addition of new users and the removal of deactivated users, as well as updating staff details.
Single Sign On (SSO) can also be enabled to ensure secure authentication of users to the Workvivo platform on any device, anywhere, at any time. This means Workvivo can inherit any Multi-factor Authentication enabled on Bus Éireann SSO.
Of the company’s 2,700 employees, just 350 still complete employee engagement surveys on paper. The rest send their responses through Workvivo, where they can also nominate and vote for each other in Bus Éireann’s internal employee awards.
This means two things – less cost and less hassle. Tanya and her team no longer need to worry about printing and posting physical notices that people don’t engage with.
Elevating customer satisfaction
Bus Éireann’s customers have reaped the benefits too. Since rolling out Workvivo, its customer satisfaction score has increased, jumping from 84% in 2019 to 91% in Q2 of 2022.
Workvivo has helped the company keep its values around customer satisfaction “front of mind”, Tanya says. “Unless you’re continuously reminded about these things, they don’t happen.
We have a frequent update on what the customer satisfaction score results are. We call out where employees of particular areas have over-indexed and we celebrate that.
Easy access to third-party apps
Bus Éireann wanted rosters and payslips to be easily accessible for everyone, not just those with a company computer. They needed a solution with the ability to launch third-party apps, meaning that once a user was logged in, they could navigate to those external apps from one central hub.
Not only did implementing Workvivo make rosters and payslips more accessible for all Bus Éireann employees, paving the way for a more inclusive workplace, but it also helped the company cut down on printing and postage costs.
More efficient internal communications
Bus Éireann prides itself on open, honest, and transparent communication, and it wanted Workvivo to help keep that alive. Tanya says that two-way engagement is encouraged at the company and that every employee has the opportunity to post on the platform.
Speaking to the Irish Examiner in early 2021, Bus Éireann CEO, Stephen Kent, said that his team was sending and receiving important messages every single day through Workvivo. Implementing the Workvivo platform has paved the way for two-way communication at Bus Éireann, leading to “better information rather than less information”.
The transport company’s CEO said that in the wake of the “enormous challenge” posed by the shift to remote working, Workvivo was “transformative”. He said:
They developed an internal communications platform for us, so it meant we could get our communications and updates to staff all downloaded on phones. We have about 2,700 people in here, with around 2,300 of them with the app on their phones, and we have messages going out every day
Bus Éireann drivers can now tell the necessary people in the organization where there were incidents, and the appropriate team can respond with information on where services are going to take place.
It has actually led to better information rather than less information, so we are able to get into dialogue; drivers were able to tell us where they had incidents; we could tell them where services were going to happen; we could put videos out.
It was fantastic when we were so dispersed. That actually created a huge connection for everybody and a great sense of teamwork. It has been transformative for us.
Tanya notes the benefit of being able to communicate “everything from company news, new job postings, urgent and critical information, to more social posts”.
The Workvivo features Bus Éireann employees love
Workvivo helped Bus Éireann elevate one of its existing programs: its annual GEM Employee Awards. The Awards capability on the platform, which helps to bring organizational values to life, meant that colleagues could easily submit their nominations.
In its first year of using Workvivo, Bus Éireann received 456 nominations from staff for the Hero of the Year award alone.
The Workvivo features Bus Éireann employees love
Workvivo helped Bus Éireann elevate one of its existing programs: its annual GEM Employee Awards. The Awards capability on the platform, which helps to bring organizational values to life, meant that colleagues could easily submit their nominations.
In its first year of using Workvivo, Bus Éireann received 456 nominations from staff for the Hero of the Year award alone.
Workvivo: Supporting Bus Éireann’s internal comms team to champion their goals
In a global work trend that goes far beyond Bus Éireann, HR staff and people leaders are experiencing the highest levels of burnout ever. Giving your internal comms team the tools to realize their vision and enjoy their work has resounding benefits that percolate the entire company.
“You put something up on Workvivo and you can update it literally within seconds,” Tanya says. “So for me, as a comms manager, it is a fit-for-purpose business tool that gets our message straight into the hands of our employees immediately. No fuss.”
At Bus Éireann, the award-winning internal communications team of Tanya Waldron and Claire Doolan continues to reach new heights with the help of the platform.
Check out the Bus Éireann website here.
