Creating a Cohesive Employee Experience in Times of Change
Change management is always a challenge. But stack up a global pandemic, multiple platform migrations, timezone and language barriers, and a corporate merger - the challenge is anything but simple.
How do you merge brands, technologies, culture, people and processes into one cohesive corporate vision?
The team at Stellantis (Beth Ann Bayus, Sarah Beal, Jennifer Kolf and Staci Oseid) accomplished this, and joined a recent Ragan webinar to discuss how.
Creating “The “Hub” to Improve Employee Experience
In 2021, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) and Peugeot merged to create Stellantis. During the immediate aftermath, each entity had their own different site or portal; information was disconnected. Important content and crucial information was in different places and collaboration among employees was difficult.
The team is now developing one site and a fully connected experience called “The Hub” for all global employees.
The process started with a large global workshop (~47 people) to discuss design, user experience, and policy. From that workshop, they created working groups and a corresponding structure to execute the decisions made in the workshop, complete with regular meetings and realignments.
Their conclusions, which became their road map for the development, rollout, and maintenance of The Hub, reflected both industry best practices and the particular culture changes and needs of their company.
Key Decisions and Popular Features
A few examples of key decisions the Stellantis communications and IT teams made regarding The Hub included decentralized content creation, emphasizing engagement and peer-to-peer interaction, local and regional content displays, language choices, and adjustable notifications for users.
“We also, in the past with LumApps, we're able to do interactive communities,” Beal says. “So people can ask questions that way if they don’t have time to join an actual [event].”
Another popular feature was the “people finder” which allowed employees to search for people within the global organization by name, email, org, region, etc. This brand-new feature was introduced through The Hub.
The launch was not without its challenges. Employees faced login issues as new credentials were required. Safety precautions prevented in-person meetings and collaboration. The team used other tools such as short videos and how-to documents to fill in the knowledge gaps with employees. Another need was to work closely with HR to consolidate employee data into a single directory.
The unique timing of The Hub rollout fostered connection and engagement during pandemic isolation within the employee community. They hosted lunch-and-learns and implemented a post-launch survey to keep tabs on how employees were finding the new experience. They believe the decentralization of the content creation made for a much more engaging and dynamic experience for all users.
Best Practices and Tips
Nuances persist with such a large global workforce. Languages and translations, and writing styles continue to be different across regions and countries, and the team keeps an eye on consistency while still allowing employees to create content in their own style. They report that, despite the very “open” content creation, they have had to edit or remove very few pieces of content posted by employees.
After this 2-year period of planning, development, and continued change, the Stellantis team has plenty of best practices and tips to share for anyone seeking to make similar changes. Chief among these is to use the immense amount of analytics data to keep tabs on The Hub and change things for the better, rather than just looking at the data for its own sake. For example, pause or end ongoing content series if it isn't getting a lot of traction, and focus on something more engaging.
There is much more valuable insight from the Stellantis team, as well as nearly 20 minutes of Q&A to expand on their insights.
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