About Hays Travel

Hays Travel has been an Oak customer for many years, so for most people “it felt like it had always been there”. Their workforce of 4,800 is spread across retail branches, home working, call centres, Independence Group and Head Office. 

With a history dating back over 15 years, Oak was originally brought in as a central communications platform for Hays Travel, an alternative to all-staff emails. It was time for a complete revamp, to realign the workforce in advance of peak trading months and to ensure that colleagues were getting the best out of their employee intranet. A key result is a faster, more intuitive way to find information - giving branch staff 10% of their working time back each month through streamlined content delivery. 

 “If we look at the Hub now versus what it was, it is absolutely night and day. It is nothing short of revolutionary for the business. Being able to cut through the noise for our retail branch teams has transformed their morning routines, making them better informed and more productive.”  

‍Michael Smiles, Technology Change Manager at Hays Travel

The challenge

Hays Travel’s intranet, ‘the Hub’, had grown organically without a central owner. This meant that new starters struggled to find information, while long-serving staff had developed workarounds for the clunky experience. 

Each business unit needed to see different content, but in reality, all divisions were overloaded with information they didn’t need, which made it “a jungle to navigate.” Entire departments had permission to post anywhere, causing clutter and duplication. Links upon links made information search unnecessarily long, while unclear navigation meant that finding the right version of anything was time-consuming and frustrating. 

Michael added: “Over time, the platform had grown arms and legs and had no central owner. We had the site set-up and infrastructure, but we didn't have a dedicated person to manage it. Over time, there were folders within folders, documents here, there and everywhere and the search function wasn't great because we had so many documents with similar names.” 

New starters quickly felt lost. This hindered access to important updates and policies, which could impact service delivery and affect their sense of connectivity to the organisation. 

Why change was needed

Employees across each business division needed clarity on trusted sources of information that were quick and easy to access. Site admins needed to ensure that each person only saw information relevant to their role without feeling overwhelmed. 

Hays Travel has  over 700 suppliers, each of them regularly sharing new offers with T&Cs. These, on top of regular internal updates for HQ, retail branches, independent travel consultants and franchisees, make it easy to see how things became difficult to manage.

“We needed a refresh because the Hub had grown as the business had grown and it had become a bit unwieldy. Each department had to click within another page to find other links. The very straightforward and simple objective we set ourselves was to reconfigure the layout so that everyone could get where they needed to be in three clicks - and I’m pleased to say we've achieved that.”

‍Jane Peverley, Head of Communications at Hays Travel

How Hays Travel reimagined their Oak intranet

This project required cross-team collaboration from IT, Projects and Communications to ensure that all requirements were met to create something truly valuable, intuitive and modern for their workforce. They collaborated on best-practice layouts, new governance rules and improved content policies to instil confidence in the new and improved platform for the future.

A full site remap meant that every page, folder and document on the site was audited before streamlining duplicated content, overhauling the navigation and updating admin access for 60+ content owners. 

Untangling years of legacy structure, broken links and duplicated documents was a team effort with a tight deadline before peak trading season approached. 

Jane added: “Big change is always going to ruffle some feathers but we had to bite the bullet and go for it. We did get a bit of pushback at the start, as expected, but we implemented a really strong feedback system where we collected both positive and constructive feedback which helped us to adapt in those first few weeks from launch.” 

To make the launch process run as smoothly as possible, digital tours of the site were set up for users and feedback loops were embedded into the Hub to gauge employee sentiment throughout the first few weeks of re-launch.

Michelle Trotter, Senior IT Administrator, explains: “People instinctively don’t like change, so as soon as you change something, they can become defensive, but once they get used to it and familiarised with the benefits it brings, they really do appreciate it more and this was proven in the positive feedback we received.”

The business impact

Streamlined communication with branch staff

Senior leadership takes part in ‘back to the floor’ days to understand how things are working day-to-day across different areas of the business. This identified that branch staff were receiving up to six notifications an hour, many of which were not business-critical. 

With so much information feeding through from suppliers in multiple intranet posts and several Teams chats involving different departments such as marketing, social, destination specialists and more, this ongoing distraction generated unnecessary noise throughout the working day. 

Losing focus meant losing time and money, so branch staff needed a more streamlined way of receiving need-to-know updates while filtering out the nice-to-know to explore in their downtime.

This led to the launch of ‘News at 9’, a daily briefing which lands at 9am in a bespoke area with only the most relevant news for the day ahead, such as which holidays are working well, travel alerts and time-sensitive information. ‘News at 9’ has a dedicated content manager who approves or rejects update requests each day to ensure that only the most relevant news makes it into the following morning’s daily briefing. 

Michael commented: “All channels of communication are filtered into an easy-to-read morning update. When they log in, today’s update is at the top of an accordion with snippets of key news including the last 7 days at a glance. Branch staff then have the flexibility throughout the week to explore the Hub for ‘nice to know information’ at their own discretion. If anything happens throughout the day which may impact them, we can use push-notifications or configure a notice to deliver this to them.”

Since implementing this initiative, branch staff have regained 10% of their time back each month that can be better spent servicing customers and completing other duties more efficiently. Branch support teams have even seen a complete reduction in requests for where to find information because everything is right there, at a glance.

Retail branch staff now also know to expect a Monday morning ‘weekly briefing’ and a weekend update from the Head of Retail which sees exceptional engagement every time. This proves that by having that dedicated space with regularly timed, succinct updates, branch staff know that they are fully informed and supported to serve customers every day - maintaining a 4.9/5 rating on Trustpilot. 

Quick and easy three-click navigation 

User journey mapping identified that it took an average of 8 clicks to find the right information. This finding is what triggered the objective of enabling access to anything within just 3 clicks.

Inefficiencies which had built up over time were identified and able to be rectified, such as having multiple versions of buttons to the same pages all over the site. Reposting the same things over the years so that ‘you couldn’t miss it’, actually had an adverse effect. Mapping out the new navigation meant that a foolproof menu function would be easy for all users across the business to understand.

Michelle explains how re-engaging with Head Office departments was a key task in this project: “Everyone was too busy doing their own thing, posting things and forgetting about them, whereas now, it’s clear that they stop and ask themselves when they’re uploading things: Is this relevant? Is there another version to update and is it in the right place?”

Transforming information discovery with three-click navigation has made the search process 2.6x faster while reducing user clicks by 62.5%. These incremental savings multiple times a day, a week, a month, all add up to a significant amount of reclaimed time to get on with what really matters.

Jane added: “The navigation is so much better now. The whole thing just makes sense. I would like to think that as a new starter on day one, you feel you can step right in and you know your way around. I think what's important is that since the relaunch, everyone understands that we keep on top of this, it has to be continuously looked at and developed, we can’t just put it in a box and say that’s job done.”

Reducing content overload with streamlined admin and internal audience segmentation

Grouping internal audiences has been pivotal to avoid content overload. Certain groups have been assigned different levels of ownership across their department areas, so they’re  either a reviewer, contributor or viewer. This establishes clear content authors to provide some level of control and to reduce the noise.

Michael continues: “We used to reposition the same communication several times - one for retail, one for Independence Group and any other relevant business area, which bogs down the news feed very quickly. Now, we can do one communication with a ‘click here’ for any assets or documents, linking to a folder with permissions-based control so that each user only sees the resources that are relevant to them. It’s cleaned everything up significantly and allows us to communicate so much more effectively.”

Head Office can now communicate directly to specific groups within the organisation through permissions-based targeting rather than posting multiple versions of the same message in different areas for different teams.

Michael added: “We can now communicate once and efficiently, plus, permissions are controlled so the relevant people see what is appropriate to them. Using the group function to set up audiences has been key for us. We can set an audience up to match who needs to see what, rather than unravel our web. For example, we create a group labelled ‘retail,’ then we can add in our retail estate and other interested users. Going forward for document or communication control, we can apply security at that level.”

‍Over 75% of users spend more than 5 minutes on the Hub per session. This demonstrates a strong signal of genuine daily reliance and deep platform engagement, particularly when what each colleague sees on the Hub is relevant to them and their role.

Housekeeping to prepare for effective use of AI

An employee survey identified that 60% of users lacked full confidence in the Hub’s content freshness, which is attributed to the sheer amount of information that is shared to the Hub from various suppliers and departments every week.

This insight called for individuals to update or remove outdated resources and for a content review process to be put into action. Now, all content has automatically set review and expiry dates so that they are regularly checked to ensure that each item is still relevant, up-to-date and the most recent version. 

Michael explains: “We had to strike the balance between housekeeping and being a nuisance. We know that everyone is busy but it was a priority - we targeted key people with the most outdated content assigned to them and asked them to review or delete to ensure that information search is as easy as possible for everyone. While there are still thousands of pieces of content and an ever-growing media library, we’re on the right track to maintaining strong housekeeping around content freshness which will pave the way for successfully implementing Oak’s AI tools within the platform in the future.”