Comms In A Nutshell is your go to place to listen to discussions with industry experts, global brands and our hosts Vic McEwan & Scott Ritchie about the most pressing topics surrounding the world of work and internal communications.
It’s safe to say boohoo are making the most out of their intranet. They’re using their intranet ‘boohooforyou’ to host their internal company podcast, have used the in-built feedback tools to engage with their workforce about their celebrity designed collection with Megan Fox and use their intranet as an onboarding tool to welcome new starters and instantly become part of the boohoo family. With over 350k content views on their homepage, it’s safe to say they’ve got their internal communications strategy down and their content has got their employees engaged.
In this latest challenges by industry episode Vic & Scott chat to boohoo’s Internal communications manager, Madison Birtwistle about:
- Maddie’s Role as an IC professional and what internal communications looks like at boohoo group - boohoo group is made up of 13 major brands from Karen Millen, Pretty Little Thing, Debenhams, Nastygall and boohoo itself!
- How boohoo are driving employee engagement for their office based, remote and frontline workers through their intranet and their relatable content
- Their favourite features of Oak and how to make the most out of your intranet
- The challenges boohoo have faced with internal communications and how the pandemic affected their internal communications strategy
Listen to the interview below, and be sure to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast player for all the latest episodes and discussions.
Key Quotes
Employee Engagement
Every time that we do a campaign launch, say if we've done a launch with Megan Fox, for instance we'll use the homepage and use polls and say what do you think of the collection? Any feedback? Or we leave a feedback form for people to give their suggestions and ideas on what we could do better. We've used the feedback form as well as polls, I wanna say on probably about 70% of the pages, and the engagement on these pages are really high and people are engaging with that content and leaving feedback and responding to polls. And I think that's a really important and a key way to get employees to interact. I guess it's all around that two way conversation. It's not just tell, tell, tell it's like we wanna hear from you, you tell us what you think and we absolutely embed that. And we enforce that people do come forward and let us know how they feel or what they think of a certain project, or I think that's really important, not necessarily within internal communications, but within the business in general.
Creating a great company culture
The main aim for me when working in internal communications is to engage, inspire and inform. I think employee engagement is really important in the business. I think if you were to ask anyone they'd agree in saying it's pretty critical to a company's success. Engaged, enthusiastic and happy colleagues definitely equals a thriving business and for Boohoo it's always been at the forefront. We absolutely have a work hard, play hard ethos as cliche as it sounds, but it's so important that colleagues connect to the business values and the positive culture is key. And whether that's us talking about diversity and inclusion or health and wellbeing we absolutely promote and engage with our colleagues as much as possible and a great way for us to do that is to use Boohoo for you.
Creating engaging intranet content
So since January, 2022, we've had over 350K page views across the site and that's just on the home page itself. So it's not including the different pages that go around the site, which to my point of view, I think that's great. In terms of keeping engagement high, we're really disciplined in that we use boohooforyou for as the first method of communication. So no matter what the comms are to the business, as the first point of call, we will absolutely write a news article on boohooforyou. And then we send the email, it's just getting colleagues into that mind frame that like, this is where I need go for information. And I mentioned earlier, I think it's really important for Boohoo with it being such a visual creative business that we use imagery and videos to keep employees connected to the brand.
Our Challenges By Industry Series
Oak’s challenges by industry is a mini-series exploring the different challenges that those working in Internal Communications are facing in a variety of different industries. Vic & Scott have previously spoken to Tarmac, EKFB and Vistry Group about how they’re tackling the challenges in the construction industry and how they’re operating in this new normal.
What about our other episodes?
In case you missed episode 7, hosts Vic & Scott spoke to Aoife O’ Brien about mental health in the workplace. Our guest Aoife left the corporate world to set up her own business Happier at Work which helps businesses create a happier working environment and become more people focused through real data driven decisions. She helps leaders and managers facilitate creating positive work environments so we can all enjoy work that little bit more. Want to listen to the episode? Catch up right here.
Download Episode Transcript
