Employee Engagement: Using Technology Solutions

Louise Furness, Group HR Director, Marshalls

As an experienced senior leader, I’ve worked across a number of sectors, moving to the Manufacturing sector as HR Executive Director for Marshalls plc in 2018. Throughout my career, I have seen technology grow to be a significant enabler in enhancing and uplifting the connection and engagement of colleagues.

At Marshalls, our130-year heritage gives us significant strength. It also presents us with challenges – one of which is continuous evolution and transformation to keep up with a changing world, driven by advancing technology. We have a number of different sites and acquisition businesses, which also makes it more difficult to ensure all of our teams understand business priorities and their role in achieving success and winning together.

We recognise that changing technology means our people have new and different wants and needs when it comes to employee communications. Previously, our communications relied on a digital-only cascade approach. This isn’t the most effective solution when you consider that around half of our employee base is not connected to a computer to do their day-to-day jobs. They weren’ thearing about what was happening in the business, and couldn’t see how their day job connected to the bigger picture.

While broadcast one-way communications had been the method of keeping employees informed previously, our research and experiences told us that this was no longer the most effective way to drive engagement. Employees want to know and feel excited about what is happening in their organisations, and they want to be involved.

These different factors meant we had to think differently. We knew we needed to encourage our ‘unconnected’ workers to engage voluntarily with alternative communications channels, such as social media.

We set out to make change.

Our starting point was to build out a communications strategy that was fit for the future. We actively sought feedback and opinions from a broad range of stakeholders so we could understand what really mattered to our people. We put the focus on extending our communications reach to all corners of the organisation through reviewing our messaging channels. Our goal was to meet our people where they are.

“We recognise that changing technology means our people have new and different wants and needs when it comes to employee communications”

During our review of communications channels, it became clear that we needed a way to enable all colleagues to hear and engage with business messages through an improved intranet. The solution we turned to,after a careful review of the market, was Reward Gateway, which is an employee experience platform. With Reward Gateway’s support, we developed the platform to become ‘Marshalls NOW’, which was the start of us creating a one-stop shop for all things News, Offers and Wellbeing at Marshalls. This technology has helped us to enhance our connection to employees while also delivering a well-being, benefits and total reward offering. A win-win for our people strategy!

Another channel that we utilised to improve engagement and connect our people came about when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. During this time, we also had to communicate quickly and clearly with everyone. Our think differently approach saw us create a closed social media group where employees could get the latest messages in the quickest way,and share their thoughts and feedback too – creating two-way dialogue was another element of our communications strategy.

Developing new opportunities for our employees to engage with the business is a time and resource commitment, and like any financial commitment, we want to understand how that return on investment measures up. So, we also introduced an engagement measurement platform from Workday Peakon Employee Voice. We launched our regular ‘Your Voice’ surveys at the start of the pandemic and we’ve worked hard since then to grow response rates from 22% to 67% and climbing.This platform has quickly become a valuable and recognised way for us to collate feedback, which we then use to drive meaningful changes. Our future goal is to introduce more regular opportunities for colleagues to input and give feedback.

We’re seeing excellent results from these new technology-based platforms. We’ve had over 33,000 comments shared with us in the Workday Peakon Employee Voicechannel; we have a combined post reach of 143,000 on our social media channel; our CEO video messages that are shared through Marshalls NOW have been watched over 10,000 times; and we have over 76%of our people actively using Marshalls NOW. These statistics are just some of our measurements that tell us we’re hitting the mark for our people so far.

The technology solutions that we’ve put in place are helping us to enhance the employee experience at Marshalls. We will keep reviewing our employee technology to ensure we continue to build an engaging, valuable and modern offering.

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