Symington’s, the food manufacturer behind household brands including Chicken Tonight, Mugshot and Naked, has selected Engage Solutions Group (ESG) to help drive its three-year people transformation strategy.
ESG will roll out its Engage colleague app to a 700-strong workforce spread across four locations. Two thirds of users are non-desked without a corporate email address and Engage’s strong social media-style communications tools are seen as pivotal to effective change, as people director Lisa Rowlinson-Brown explains:
“Internal comms has been a priority for us in recent years but the necessarily paper-based publication of newsletters, bulletins and posters for that universal reach has been resource-intensive. Even before Covid we wanted to be more agile, more responsive, more real-time in terms of the centre connecting with everyone in the business; and we were also keen to encourage more horizontal comms across locations, with teams and individuals able to converse and collaborate more easily.
“The Engage app gives us a great opportunity to digitally enable our business, and to build a company community that embraces everyone, regardless of role or location. A personalised feed for every employee, push notifications, WhatsApp-esque messaging, special interest groups, these are all things that are familiar from our consumer lives and they’re all there at the touch of a button. They work across generations and will give us so much scope in terms of content and frequency to take things to a whole new level.”
Engage is set to integrate with Symington’s existing HR and LMS platforms, and digitise the current reward and recognition and survey processes; the mobile intranet capability will also allow Symington’s to migrate off their current static platform in time.
Concludes Lisa: “We want this to be the essential workplace app. It’s about giving colleagues a really slick ‘go-to’ place for all the news, resources, rewards and support that they need day-to-day, and in return the company getting a more engaged, happier and productive workforce.”
