Blog Customer Spotlight: Severfield Last updated: May 25, 2021 Calculating… For this month’s Customer Spotlight, we caught up with Severfield to discover how they’re keeping their employees engaged on their site whilst working from home. They also gave us an insight into what intranet features have been the most popular among their workforce. When did your Oak journey begin? We were first introduced to Oak in late 2019 after numerous failed attempts in finding an intranet platform that was suitable. After our two-day training course, we felt more confident that Oak was the best provider and most importantly, it was going to deliver. We named our site Connect as we felt like this was most suitable in what we as a company were trying to achieve – to connect people! When did you launch Connect? Our original plan was to launch in May 2020 however when the pandemic hit in March we had to act fast and bring forward the launch date to communicate effectively with our employees. This led to us having to fast track a lot of things but it was a brilliant way of us getting stuck in there and building Connect. How have you used Connect to keep employees engaged while working from home? Since our launch we have loved having the ability to push our engagement ideas even further. Earlier this year we launched our ‘Rate My Plate’ campaign, an internal competition that allows employees to upload their food to a tailor made page within Connect. To generate interest in the campaign, employees also have the chance to win a month-long subscription to Hello Fresh. The Timeline feature lets people easily upload, like and comment on each other’s post and the employee with the most likes wins the prize. The engagement on this campaign has been amazing and even led to us extending the competition for another month. How have you used Connect to keep employees informed while working from home? Other departments are now wanting a piece of the Oak pie after seeing how engaging and how informative it can be. Our HR Department used Connect to launch their new payslip programme, My View. This was massively beneficial to us from a comms perspective as every employee who wanted to see their payslip had to do it through Connect. This led to our engagement figures increasing dramatically. What features of Oak have been popular with your employees? The feature that stands out is Hubs. It lets our employees communicate with each other and introduces people to other staff members that they normally wouldn’t come across in a normal everyday working environment. We have an Entertainment Hub, Fantasy Football Hub and most importantly a Pets of Severfield Hub. We also recently did a homepage take over for Mental Health Awareness Week. Throughout the week we posted multiple news articles, videos and guides all in aid of Mental Health. What advice would you give to an organisation starting out on their Oak journey? Trust the process – Our site is still evolving everyday. Start small – Once we had one homepage live with key articles and important information on, this enabled us to take our time in building other pages around it. If you’re interested in sharing the success of your site and would like to feature in our next Customer Spotlight please email marketing@oak.com
For this month’s Customer Spotlight, we caught up with Severfield to discover how they’re keeping their employees engaged on their site whilst working from home. They also gave us an insight into what intranet features have been the most popular among their workforce. When did your Oak journey begin? We were first introduced to Oak in late 2019 after numerous failed attempts in finding an intranet platform that was suitable. After our two-day training course, we felt more confident that Oak was the best provider and most importantly, it was going to deliver. We named our site Connect as we felt like this was most suitable in what we as a company were trying to achieve – to connect people! When did you launch Connect? Our original plan was to launch in May 2020 however when the pandemic hit in March we had to act fast and bring forward the launch date to communicate effectively with our employees. This led to us having to fast track a lot of things but it was a brilliant way of us getting stuck in there and building Connect. How have you used Connect to keep employees engaged while working from home? Since our launch we have loved having the ability to push our engagement ideas even further. Earlier this year we launched our ‘Rate My Plate’ campaign, an internal competition that allows employees to upload their food to a tailor made page within Connect. To generate interest in the campaign, employees also have the chance to win a month-long subscription to Hello Fresh. The Timeline feature lets people easily upload, like and comment on each other’s post and the employee with the most likes wins the prize. The engagement on this campaign has been amazing and even led to us extending the competition for another month. How have you used Connect to keep employees informed while working from home? Other departments are now wanting a piece of the Oak pie after seeing how engaging and how informative it can be. Our HR Department used Connect to launch their new payslip programme, My View. This was massively beneficial to us from a comms perspective as every employee who wanted to see their payslip had to do it through Connect. This led to our engagement figures increasing dramatically. What features of Oak have been popular with your employees? The feature that stands out is Hubs. It lets our employees communicate with each other and introduces people to other staff members that they normally wouldn’t come across in a normal everyday working environment. We have an Entertainment Hub, Fantasy Football Hub and most importantly a Pets of Severfield Hub. We also recently did a homepage take over for Mental Health Awareness Week. Throughout the week we posted multiple news articles, videos and guides all in aid of Mental Health. What advice would you give to an organisation starting out on their Oak journey? Trust the process – Our site is still evolving everyday. Start small – Once we had one homepage live with key articles and important information on, this enabled us to take our time in building other pages around it. If you’re interested in sharing the success of your site and would like to feature in our next Customer Spotlight please email marketing@oak.com
