How Sodastream Created Daily Engagement with Over 1,000 Deskless Employees

0
189

Share on LinkedIn

The company

Many companies claim to “revolutionize” or “disrupt” their industry but few actually do. Sodastream is one of those unique companies that actually do as advertised.

Speaking of advertising, here’s their latest Game of Thrones themed video advert:

In the early 1990s, Sodastream was just another small manufacturing company

. They had a very nice, yet niche, operation selling a simple and affordable way to turn tap water into flavored sparkling water.

At the same time, “

sustainability

” and “

ecological footprint

” were becoming global hot topics.

Sodastream quickly realised that they were actually producing a sustainable way of drinking carbonated beverages

.

Not only that, using Sodastream, consumers can control how much sugar they add to their carbonated beverage. So place two giant check marks on on two of the biggest concerns facing consumers today.

check and mate

A rebranding and product redesign was quick to follow and the rest is history.

Sodastream

is now leading the food & beverage industry in the manufacturing of green and sustainable beverages, which saves an average of 550 bottles per user per year.

The challenge

Sodastream has had to rapidly increase its workforce to keep up with growing demand. For most small business owners this is the dream scenario. However, Sodastream were quick to realize that what worked before is not likely to work now.

So how do you create a fast and effectively way to deliver company policies to all your employees? How do you manage daily changes in operational tasks and workflows and communicate those to relevant employees? How do you provide on-the-job training? How do you make sure employees are aware and complying with safety regulations? Mobile-Social-Employee-1132x670

Since Sodastream, naturally, wants to experience continued growth, they decided to dive deeper into their

employee communications strategy

and discover more specific and acute problems:

  1. The Sodastream manufacturing floor staff is diverse and communicates in three different languages: Arabic, Russian, and Hebrew.

  2. Manufacturing floor employees don’t have access to emails.

  3. The way managers communicated with work floor employees is through a plain, old fashioned, bulletin board.

  4. Training new employees is costly because it means employees are off the floor during work hours and it requires extensive maintenance and training budgets.

Sodastream’s employee engagement troubles are not distinct. In fact, 26% of manufacturing workers are not happy at their job, and the manufacturing industry as a whole

ranks last

in employee satisfaction, according to a recent study.

The same study concludes that, not feeling valued by your employer tops the list as the key factor for employee resignation, shortly followed by lack of tools and resources to complete the job, and lack of professional development opportunities.

Da

Employee Engagement

It is at this point that we’ll first introduce the term “

employe engagement

”. Recently, employee engagement has been getting more screen time than Donald Trump, well, maybe not that much, but it’s quickly become the most debated topic in human resources.

Why is employee engagement so important?

Because,

communicating with your employees

, whether they are dispersed, deskless, or other, is increasingly difficult, and a “dis-engaged” employee is an ineffective and costly one.

According to a

recent study

on the manufacturing industry, engaged employees have a productivity rate that is 70 percent higher than those of non-engaged workers.

The solution

If you were too busy to read the above and decided to skim on down, then first of all, Hi. Second, let’s recap the above real quick:

  1. Sodastream has a deskless workforce that works on the manufacturing floor.

  2. In addition, various languages are used to communicate.

  3. And, high employee turnover rates are very common with a workforce that consists of mostly young Millennials.

  4. Present communication and training difficulties.

  5. The result is a disengaged workforce, and you should care because disengaged workers are 44% more profitable.

So how do we engage a workforce that is seemingly dis-engageable (if that’s even a word)? Enter,

employee apps

. Employee apps allow businesses to engage their workforce using the mobile devices they already use and love.

3 screen mockup of connecteam app

Using an employee app, a company can create a

mobile hub of operations

where the workforce can communicate, collaborate, manage tasks, create workflows, and develop training modules for on-the-job training from anywhere – at anytime.

The results

I’ll give you the tl;dr – Sodastream have been very successful at engaging their workforce around their employee app. I guess that part is obvious or we wouldn’t have written

this case study

.

So let’s get down to it

The Goal:

increase employee engagement

How Sodastream used Connecteam’s employee app to increase employee engagement:

  1. Created a company news feed with daily updates including weather updates, daily tips, and more.
  2. Provide updates on the meal of the day at the company cafeteria.
  3. Created “My Department” with modules for:
    1. Safety training

    2. Professional training

    3. Team building exercises

The Result:

Employee engagement has gone through the roof. Almost every employee of the 2,500 Sodastream employees has downloaded and logged into the ir employee app. But it gets better:

93% of employees log into the app at least twice a week and engage with the company news feed or access one of the training modules that they have been assigned by their supervisor.

very-nice-borat-plm

Added Meaning

This is where we can start repeating how studies have shown that engaged employees are more productive and efficient employees that stay with your company longer but that’s not really necessary. Any manager or business owner can make that connection.

What is worth mentioning is that it’s becoming increasingly easy and

cost effective

for

small businesses

to

improve their employee productivity

and retention in the same ways that larger businesses do and have been doing for some time now using affordable tools like

Connecteam

.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here