Kaufman & Broad: celebrating individual and collective successes with LumApps

After a global reflection in 2021, Kaufman & Broad wanted to focus on internal communication and, above all, employee engagement, by offering them an enriched experience on a personalized platform. By choosing LumApps, the group was able to increase exchanges, enable employees to work together despite the distance, and highlight individual and collective successes on a daily basis.

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Kaufman & Broad, a leading real estate developer based in France, has been present throughout the country for over 50 years. Kaufman & Broad offers a unique experience in neighborhoods, residential, retail outlets, and office buildings built all across France by combining innovation and the sustainable development of towns and housing.
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The group's activities are based on meaningful principles. Kaufman & Broad is a responsible actor towards cities and residents, that remains agile to evolve in ever-changing markets while maintaining a long-term vision. Their vocation is to contribute to building a healthier, more resilient and inclusive city, because "Building is acting: for Cities, for People, for the Planet".

Employees:

800

Services:

Internal Communications

Industries:

Real Estate

Locations :

22 agencies in France (HQ in Courbevoie, Paris)

The challenge

At the end of 2021, a transformation project was launched at Kaufman & Broad following a company-wide reflection process. On the one hand, internal communication was mainly top-down, limited to simple news items. On the other hand, the old tool was technically outdated and limited in its functionalities, notably in terms of layout, ergonomics and intuitiveness. The need to set up a Digital Workplace within the group was then identified, for several key reasons:

connect employees nationwide, as soon as they arrive,
enrich human relations and facilitate exchanges,
collaborate despite distance,
share information from different teams in a modern, less formal way, share highlights and collective successes,
save time at every level.

Beyond these objectives, a challenge for the group also arose in terms of employee adoption and engagement: successfully getting all sites and professions on board with a new tool common to all.

Our challenge was to offer a practical, enjoyable, high-performance tool, but also to be able to connect our employees and bring them together in communities. For us, this is the real strength of LumApps.

Fabrice Gitton

Internal Communications and Employer Brand Manager, Kaufman & Broad

Why LumApps and Wedocom?

Kaufman & Broad wanted a quick and easy solution. LumApps appeared to be the right solution to link the two.

Connect

Their platform, Kolibri, easily connects the group's 800 employees, making collaboration possible in spite of distance, and creating richer human relations by giving them a digital space to connect and access information - goals that were previously unattainable.

Celebrate

Thanks to LumApps, the group has been able to offer its employees a "company storefront" tool, a unique place where everyone, on a daily basis, can find all the information useful to their activity in a more dynamic way, and where key moments are celebrated instantly with all employees.

Engage

The ability to create communities to foster engagement was also one of the key points in the choice of the solution. The group wanted to enable its employees to join geographical communities by branch, subsidiary or region, business communities by expertise and speciality, or social communities for trainees or assistants.

Centralize

With LumApps, the group was able to connect their new intranet to their existing Sharepoint install, where all documents are stored. This integration helped streamline their workflow for greater accessibility and to make the new platform the one and only point of entry. What's more, Kolibri is the place where employees can access the fifty or so business tools they need on a daily basis.

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Since transitioning to the Google suite and implementing LumApps, the collaboration environment offered by IDKIDS has become much more appealing. Easy communication, resource availability, and open exchanges in a centralized space have allowed the group to achieve a successful transformation of the working environment. Group news articles are now visible and distributed to a larger number of employees. The Internal Communication team is able to reach over 6,000 employees throughout France and worldwide, instead of the 600 most connected employees in the company they could reach before. By reaching this wider audience and using their IDKIDS Forum to do so, the group has seen a constant increase in interactions between employees.

The Internal Communication team has also transformed the formerly formal weekly communications sent separately to stores and central services into shared communication with richer and improved visual content. Furthermore, consolidating the group's resources and information in one accessible place for all has allowed teams to streamline their workload. Content can be created on a single platform and published in one place. Additionally, publication rights can easily be extended to a larger number of contributors. The group's knowledge base is also more intuitive and relevant, providing a positive impact for users who can quickly and easily access available documents.

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The real plus is to embark a network of contributors-ambassadors of the solution who will be able to be actors of internal communication. This is the richness of the solution! From now on, everything does not rest solely on the internal communication department, instead we can support contributors to be autonomous on the tool.

Fabrice Gitton

Internal Communications and Employer Brand Manager, Kaufman & Broad

The Results

When Kolibri was launched in June 2022, the team created an internal communication plan specific to the launch – teasing video, tutorials to facilitate the handling of the tool, event broadcasted “LIVE” with speeches from management members to present the tool and its features, internal poster campaign, etc.

In return, employee engagement on the platform has undoubtedly improved, evidenced by an increase in the number of registrations for the relayed sports events, and on the interest shown in matters such as Corporate Social Responsibility or Innovation. This increase is clearly reflected in the number of employees active on the platform: more than 90% of whom come back to Kolibri at least once a week.

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Thanks to their LumApps platform, Kaufman & Broad was able to rethink its communication strategy: all employees are actors in corporate communication, since they can publish content autonomously. Everyone can share their activity at the business or geographical level in a simplified way. A governance of the platform, made up of a hundred trained contributors, remains of course present to support and provide its expertise, in order to ensure the proper use of the tool over time.

LumApps also provides seamless access to information, thanks to dedicated pages that allow users to have simplified access to information they did not have before, and in a more digestible way: company news, agencies with detailed files, company services, etc. The ability to target communications, based on the employee's region, brings another degree of personalization so employees receive the most relevant content.

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A year after the launch of Kolibri, the platform now hosts 24 active communities that have become real places of expression for employees to share collective and individual successes, creating a certain richness on the platform.

Another strength of Kolibri is its document database, which is surfaced thanks to the Sharepoint integration. It gathers all company documents and processes known as "SymphoniK", from real estate operations to land development and after-sales service; everything is centralized on the platform. When a file is updated, all the links pointing to it on the various pages will redirect to the updated version. It was crucial for the teams to have the guarantee at all times that the documents were available in their most up-to-date version. Kaufman & Broad's teams can now work seamlessly with a common database accessible to all employees in real time.

In short, at Kaufman & Broad, LumApps is prized for its user-friendliness, the ease of access to useful company information and content, the possibility of sharing one's own business or local news, and above all the opportunity to exchange between colleagues. The tool really makes it possible to value and recognize all employees.

Key use cases

Communities help create project synergy

At Kaufman & Broad, it sometimes takes several years to finalize a real estate project. The group created community spaces to organize and connect employees around the real estate projects they are working on. Throughout the project, team members can use the communities to communicate on multiple aspects, making both successes and difficulties visible and facilitating exchanges between employees. This is how an employee based in Strasbourg was able to share a post to ask for help on a project from her business community, and that an employee based near Paris was able to bring her the key element that unlocked the situation. Even though they work in different countries, they were able to easily interact and provide valuable assistance, thanks to the LumApps community spaces feature. Kolibri can truly be the starting point for beautiful stories.

Personalized onboarding

Everything has been set up to facilitate and improve the integration of new employees thanks to LumApps Journeys. Personalized onboarding courses will very soon be implemented to support and integrate them as well as possible, depending on their position: head office course, manager course, etc. The objective is to engage new recruits and create a uniform onboarding process, despite the distance. Plus, this feature allows HR teams to save time spent onboarding individual employees, while also ensuring a consistent onboarding experience for all newcomers. For several months now, new employees have also been promoted on the platform by publishing an introductory article as soon as they arrive.

Facilitation of HR processes

Kolibri is essential for the HR team as well since they have been able to take advantage of the tool to create targeted, timely campaigns, such as during annual interviews or professional elections. LumApps now plays a central role in HR processes, since a large number of documents are available directly on the platform.

Centralization of access

Kolibri plays a central role in facilitating the daily life of all employees: the various business tools can be accessed in a few clicks, a library of company documents classified by theme centralizes resources, and a directory which includes an interactive organizational chart allows everyone to easily find information about all Kaufman & Broad employees (branch, contact details, reporting line, department and management, etc.). An essential appreciated by all!

The future of Kolibri

Kaufman & Broad is now focusing on improvements that can be made to Kolibri to provide their employees with the best possible experience. Emphasis is placed on strengthening the feeling of belonging to the company and increasing interactions, and the group will soon launch Journeys, the new LumApps solution which allows you to create personalized onboarding journeys.

What's more, the future for Kolibri lies in two areas around Artificial Intelligence: search and content generation. Firstly, employees' daily lives will be made easier, as they will no longer need to search the database themselves to find information. Thanks to AI, when the employee does a search, the system will be able to read the answer from the available resources, extract the information sought, and above all share it with the employee in natural language. At the same time, they will benefit from a better grasp of processes, both for those who have just arrived and are not yet familiar with them, and for those who have been with the company for 10 years and need an update on processes that may have evolved. Secondly, employees will be able to use content generation to boost their inspiration, enrich the content they produce and save time during these stages.