As a company that struggled with conveying key business messages to its employees, Buckinghamshire New University (BNU) needed an intuitive platform to help improve business communication and maximise employee engagement. Keep on reading to discover how Oak Engage helped transform their communication process.
Industry: Education | No. of users: 1,200 | Area: England
Oak needed to help BNU create a go-to space that all employees, regardless of their job role, can go whenever they need to stay up to date with information and engage with company activity.
Having initially relied on distributing internal communication through email, the communications team at BNU found this method incredibly time-consuming and difficult to target certain audiences within the company. Additionally, they would receive complaints from employees that messages were not read or lost in inboxes. `
They needed a platform to streamline communication and convey key business messages in one secure place to give them the confidence that their employees were being kept up-to-date.
Oak and BNU worked together to create BEN aka BNU Employee Network - a branded, intuitive intranet which acts as the go-to place for all things company related.
Employees simply visit BEN to access company news, explore and engage with information and events and connect with anyone they need across campus with ease. How exactly did we do this?
Communication functionalities such as Breaking News and Push-E Notifications has meant that BEN behaves like a news website, communicating the latest and greatest information in an instant. Employees can now keep up to date with critical business news and information in a matter of minutes with minimal to no effort on their part.
BNU utilises Pulse Surveys to monitor performance and measure employee satisfaction. Since distributing these surveys on the intranet the HR department has seen an engagement increase of 29%.
Thanks to Oak Engage, BNU has been able to keep its strong company culture alive while working from home; from hosting quizzes, meetups and online events all through its intranet to ensure hybrid and remote stay connected. BNU has also hosted live Q&A sessions via BEN to give employees the opportunity to ask questions directly to their leadership team, encouraging open communication across the business.
How do you implement an intranet when employees are resistant to change? This is another challenge and the team knew they had a task on their hands when it came to launching their new intranet, BEN (BNU Employee Network).
To create fun and anticipation around the intranet, they created a ‘Where’s BEN?’ competition in which employees had to log in to the intranet to search for clues to find the university’s mascot, BEN the robot.
BNU has also made its intranet a key part of its employee onboarding process as it’s included in every induction and is referred to as the ‘single source of truth’ for everything new employees need to know.
“The user experience of Oak gave us everything we needed – attractive and easy to use for all staff no matter their technical capabilities.”
Leading UK homebuilder Miller Homes was keen to find a platform that would help improve business communication, easily upload company news and showcase its new housing developments.
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