Randstad Sourceright went global with Happeo and Google Workspace

The presentation – opening

Presented by Perttu Ojansuu, CEO of Happeo

Our jobs are our identity – no longer just a necessary evil. Boundaries that used to define work-life balance are fading. There are more jobs than ever, but people don’t choose to work. They choose a life that fulfills them. They choose what makes them happy.

And organizations are failing them.

• We spend 9.3 hours a week searching for information (McKinsey),
  
  
• We dedicate 20.5 hours a week to check our emails (Washington Post),
  
  
• 14.8 hours are spent in meetings (Forbes).

Why are people forced to waste so much time not doing what makes them happy?

We want to make work a happier place, wherever it is. That can only happen when people can focus on doing what they love. Imagine your company, filled with people doing exactly that. What does that look like to you?

What if your team of remote workers were bound to your company just as much as those who work in HQ? Or if your Sales Director from Singapore could work together with the Business Intelligence team in London? What if everyone, was connected to each other, and they were as productive as they want to be? Isn’t that exactly the place you would want to work?

Typically, organizations have these tools - Email, Chat and Intranet - plus a bunch of others. This is theInternal Communications toolset for most enterprise-level companies. This toolset is functional, but not without its issues. We all love Gmail. Email is super important for external communication, but none of us love getting internal email. It’s too slow to send and read – and doesn’t fit today’s communication standards.

Chat is essential, both internally and externally. We can all agree on that. It’s a great tool for quick one-on-one conversation. But chat has it problems too – it makes a lot of noise. The timespan of a chat message is typically one day or less. Where is the place for long-form information? What happens if you would like to easily search all the company related topics about AI, to name an example? Chat just doesn’t cut it.

Then comes the intranet. The ugly monolith, where you cannot connect with people or find your colleagues. You already know the search doesn’t work and that the information there is outdated. The result? A black hole, where information goes to die. No one goes there – what a lost opportunity to engage the employees.

None of these tools are optimal to reach everyone in the company or find information quickly, yet this is essential to business in the fast-paced world of today. That’s why Happeo exists. Happeo is a Google intranet solution that connects all company software in one place, bringing your company's communication and information into one portal – one that people actually like to use. A place that turns conversations - team and company wide - into collaboration, and collaboration into productivity. It reduces the flood of email and chat, breaks information silos and makes people inside your organization to connect. And everyone finds the company information in one place – faster. This is what the future of work looks like.

Speaking of the future...

It’s my pleasure to introduce Rebecca Henderson, CEO of Randstad Sourceright, who has been newly elected the Executive Board Member of Randstad – a board that’s over 30% female.

Randstad is one of the world’s largest staffing companies in the world employing 40.000 people. Through their staffing services, Randstad has influenced almost 500 million lives globally. Randstad Sourceright - part of Randstad - specializes in Talent & HR solutions.

Randstad Sourceright is a company without borders. Rebecca and their team managed to glue a mobile workforce together. She’s here to tell you how they reached an adoption rate of 80% in their first three months, now topping over 90%. Their people feel more connected to the workplace they love, than ever before. Without further ado, please help me welcome Rebecca.

The presentation – Randstad Sourceright case study

Presented by Rebecca Henderson, CEO of Randstad Sourceright

I am delighted to be here today on behalf of Randstad Sourceright (RSR) to talk to you all about how Happeo and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) has driven our business forward through our version of Happeo - which we have called Sourciety.

So who is Randstad Sourceright? Well, we are a global leader in talent solutions and HR technology, working in partnership with clients across over 70 countries. Our people truly come first at RSR, their opinions are valued; they count and are encouraged to speak up, challenge and introduce new ideas.  In turn, it’s our people that bring the most value to our company and our customers, and we empower them to operate with passion and the agility to meet a demanding pace of work. The essence of our human-forward brand is valuing everyone we work with.

Being a global leader in talent solutions and HR technology, Randstad Sourceright knows that business success today is entirely dependent on talent and to achieve this we needed...

• To connect people across teams, locations and time zones and encourage global collaboration.
  
  
• To build one central platform to drive consistency in communications, messaging and information sharing to provide greater insight and intelligence into employee engagement levels with internal communications.
  
  
• To invest in a Google-based platform and Google intranet solution that enables workplace collaboration, idea sharing and social interaction.
  
  A unique element of our business is that we have a high volume of remote workers based in home offices and teams based onsite with our clients, so our key goal is to engage in company-wide two-way communication that crosses geographical barriers between regions, time zones and countries as well as helping to connect, inform and engage remote teams with each other and with our employer brand.

Previously our business was more siloed by region, but in the last two years we have come together under one global infrastructure. This created even more drive toward finding a way to make our staff feel like they worked for one organisation.

We launched Sourciety – our version of the Happeo system in March 2018, it took only three months to build, implement and launch the system with a background of scoping and content gathering over a couple of months. This system was chosen to underpin our Internal Communications strategy, allowing everyone no matter where they are based to feel more connected with each other, to make the presentation of our brand and operational content more consistent across regions.

Since our launch in March 2018, we continue to see a significant impact on how we are able to come together as one team, brand and business despite multiple geographic borders, cultures, languages and timezones.

If we look at Randstad’s purpose, it’s to connect clients and their jobs with great people, and connect people with great careers. Everyday, we’re actively looking at the best technology to enable the speed of the match and improve the experience of making this connection. As a CEO, I am passionate about ensuring our people have the same level of technology enabling what they do everyday – giving them one place and experience to connect, engage and share information with their colleagues right around the world.

So the first significant impact of launching Sourciety, on the integrated Happeo and Google Workspace platform, is driving consistency of our employee experience across the multitude of locations we work from everyday – this is from onboarding and ongoing communication to career development, learning and employee engagement.

While we used to run our business in regional silos through disconnected HR and Talent Acquisition teams, we are now able to give news hires the same access to our brand and company information from Day One. Even if they are onsite they still get exposure to our business and employer brand commitments. All employees see all news in the same format through a fully branded site.The platform is powered by open two-way communication where everyone has the capability to connect with their colleagues and share information in the same way.

One of the features of Happeo that was the stand-out differentiator for us was the integration with Google Workspace and the ability to work from one central place. Rather than sending our people to multiple platforms to find something, Google Workspace documents all sit in one place alongside communication – either embedded within pages or shared in channels. You can hear the result all the time now: “have you checked on Sourciety”.

As just mentioned, one of our main buying drivers for choosing Happeo - in addition to it’s great features as an integrated work and social platform - was the integration with Google Workspace. Randstad globally is a Google powered company. We have greatly benefited from the increased productivity that Google Workspace brings to our people through collaborating on projects and documentation, sharing information across teams and connecting through Google Meet.

But, due to the nature of the business, we have multiple Google instances, varying the usage of Google Workspace and work conducted across multiple technologies. So with Google alone, this was holding our teams back. This led to disjointed email communication flows and no centralized place to meet together to solve problems or update processes. Now with the integration of Happeo and Google, we are able to set up Project Management Channels incorporating Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, and more. From a single log in, we have everything and everyone in one place, including the team: leading to reducing the flood of emails, more concise communication and ultimately a more productive workforce. In our shared service operations - working across several global centers and supporting multiple client teams - we have virtual huddle boards and team sites and channels that enable LEAN and Agile ways of working.

Going back to our passion, that our people have great technology enabling their connections everyday, we need a social platform that they can naturally interact in – like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. A place they want to go to, not just have to go to! This way, Sourciety combines the perfect features of information sharing of a more standard intranet platform with the social channels that accelerate individual and team interaction and engagement.

So today at Randstad Sourceright, everyone  owns communication. Through open global and regional news and social channels, anyone can post and comment on updates. Teams can set up team channels to enable communication across groups and anyone can set-up a fun channel to get to know people better across the company. One of the favorites is “Pets of the week”. And we have one called #rsrsharedmoments which captures the heart of our employer brand, making work meaningful. And this is what this channel is all about – sharing meaningful moments that bring together our global community of diverse and committed professionals to anticipate the workforce challenges of our clients and create unique and powerful solutions.

So everyday, I am inspired to jump onto Sourciety and see the level of interaction and engagement across our teams, across all business lines, across many geographies and role levels. Before I would have to go to multiple places to connect with our people – now me and every person on my team has one place to bring great minds together, share information and updates, and celebrate success.

And finally for us one of the greatest impacts has been that Sourciety has given us the ability to measure how our people are connecting, engaging with communications, what is driving their interest, how we can capture cross-organizational ideas and how we can continuously improve. We know that what’s important to employee engagement is that strong connection to our strategy and how they individually contribute to this everyday.

We are now in a position to use a measure of “engagement with communications” to improve how we operate and consult with the business strategically, based around how to best engage and communicate with our people. Prior to this we had no centralized system, and limited data available in the regional systems. Pretty much no visibility over our communications performance. Now we have key data at our fingertips, such as the volume of interactivity we’re getting amongst teams and the wider business, what information is most popular, which tools are best to engage with which content and how teams and people are driving self-owned communication. From the launch in March 2018, just over one year ago, we have increased overall global usage of Sourciety from 36% to an amazing 93%.

Since we launched just over a year ago here you can see to volume of activity the site is producing. Most importantly, the impact this interactivity has had on our overall engagement with our business. We measure our people engagement through quarterly surveys and we’ve seen a significant shift in specific scores which are directly linked to the power Sourciety has had.

• Engagement in general has gone from 6.9 up to 7.8.
  
  
• Our Goal Setting score has increased to 8.5. This measures whether our people understand the direction of our business strategy and how they can support the business and contribute to our ultimate goals.
  
  
• Our Strategy score is above benchmark and has increased to 7.8. This measures whether our people feel our stratgy is moving us in the right direction, that they understand it and that they feel they are communicated with about this.
  
  
• And finally, and absolute key metric for me especially in a business that is so spread out is measuring the strength of our relationships internally, the feeling of collaboration and connecting which has vastly improved since the launch of Sourciety has risen from 7 to 8.2.

The presentation – outro

Presented by Perttu Ojansuu, CEO of Happeo

We live in a really exciting time of workplace digitalization. Ask any CEO - efficiency is the goal. We need to integrate our work applications to reach to get there. In the end, all platforms will come together, making work-life easier, giving people a chance to focus on doing what they love. That’s exactly what Happeo does – the Google intranet solution combines a digital workplace and collaboration platform with a social intranet.

Thank you!