Leightons Opticians is a family-run business, and one of the UK’s most trusted optical and hearing care providers. They have a network of 35 Opticians and hearing care providers across the south of England. Together with their sister company, The Hearing Care Partnership, which specializes in hearing care, they have around 200 practices UK-wide.
Matt Toffrey is a Project Manager extraordinaire, and has been at Leightons for the past 5 years. He started as an area manager looking after several branches and is now in charge of all major projects. He kindly took the time to talk to us and tell us how Leightons uses Happeo.
“Before Happeo, we had an on-premise intranet. We hosted it on our servers internally which caused a lot of problems during the rapid changes brought on by the pandemic, such as working from home. Additionally, our business model changed a lot recently. Five years ago we were an optical business with about 35 branches, and our hearing care partnership was in its infancy. We now have over 200 partners and more of our team is mobile based. They're out on the road and working from remote locations. Because the intranet that we had was on-premise and behind our network and our firewall, you had to be on-premise to be able to access it. As our workforce changed and became more hybrid, they weren't able to access the information. We knew we needed a new system so we set out to find a product that would give us the ability to grow and expand.”
- Matt Toffrey, Project Manager
Leightons set out the following requirements to find their social intranet:
“Every week we have ‘5-bullet-Friday’, where someone from our leadership team, be it the CEO, our Managing Director or some of our managers, share 5 important successes or updates for the week. Alongside that we’ve also created Channels to specifically share and celebrate the company’s achievements. And our staff absolutely love this. Anyone can go there and give a shoutout to colleagues, and it’s a really nice way to show appreciation and see what the other teams have been up to.”
“When people log in to their computers in the morning and open their web browsers, the first thing they see is Happeo. We’ve also turned on email notifications for the especially important announcements so no one misses a beat. Before we needed to send an email for everything individually. Now we have everything in Happeo, and users can receive emails containing concise information with all the updates. Happeo has become our digital HQ, for all our employees to connect and get their news.”
“Happeo is our one single source of truth. When we're launching a project, whether it be a new product, a new process or a new system, which we've done an awful lot of this year, we always share it on Happeo. Before we struggled with filtering that information out to the masses. The ability to post something to one channel and it be the single version of the truth, and having everybody get that same message regardless of which department they work in has been hugely advantageous. And this means less asking and more finding. It use to be that you’d have to go from person to person until you found what you were looking for. Now we simply direct people to Happeo and thanks to Happeo’s search function they can find all the answers to their questions.”
“What we especially love are the Channels. Tis two-way flow of information, where we can post and where people can then comment or ask questions or create posts themselves is something we've never previously had and is a game-changer. Channels have really given a voice to all our employees and has been essential for bottom-up communications.”
“I can see that the future with us and Happeo is going to be a long and fruitful one. We’ve already doubled the number of Pages we had since launching Happeo, we’re truly building an internal knowledge base and as Leightons continuously grows we’ll be able to use Happeo to accommodate for that growth.”
Watch a demo video