Jive Intranet Drives Employee Engagement & Alignment in Retail

How a Jive Interactive Intranet is helping an international retail federation foster team spirit, engagement and alignment among tens of thousands of employees.

Adeo is a federation of 30 retail companies in 13 countries specializing in DIY home improvement. Employees are spread across hundreds of store and office locations in Europe, Latin America and Asia, and many of them don’t even have a corporate email address.

For a lot of companies, that kind of dispersion leads to organizational fragmentation and employee disengagement, but not at Adeo. The company’s Jive Interactive Intranet – called “Younity” – is a hub for connection, communication and community for tens of thousands of workers. It’s the place where people come together to learn, share collective knowledge and function as one team. It’s where the company keeps employees – even those without a desk or email address – informed and aligned, where executives collaborate, and where stores communicate with headquarters (and vice versa).

Younity has lived up to its name, helping Adeo build a common culture and highly engaged workforce that’s delivering better service to customers.

Transcript

Unifying the Organization

ADEO is a federation of 30 companies across 13 countries. We had many different intranets in all our companies, and we didn’t really have one single place where all the employees could connect together, find colleagues, and work with each other. So that’s what we made with Jive.

Our platform is called Younity. It’s a name we are proud of. It says a lot about us. It’s the place where we make our employees practice the “we,” the “us,” and not the “myself.” It’s very important. It’s the place where we foster collective intelligence, where we can really make sure that when people have something to say, something to give, they can do it. I am a human resources person now, and I would say that the biggest impact for us from Jive is that now, everybody in the company has a voice, a digital voice.

That was not the case before. Before Jive, we had 30,000 employees that didn’t have an email, so they didn’t have a digital voice. And now with Jive, everybody can speak, can talk, can connect, and that’s a great thing for us.

A Communication and Collaboration Hub

We use Jive in many different ways. One of the ways we use it is that we create communities of learning. For example, we have one community that is called Optimadeo, which is a community made for our executives in order to learn, share some information and interesting topics. Another way we use Jive is that we create communities for our departments – for example, for kitchen or for gardens, and we bring together people – for example, our sales persons or our product managers – and they go together into these communities in order to exchange information and knowledge.

We have some examples of the way Jive (which we call “Younity”) helped us improve work and efficiency. For example, we have a store, Leroy Merlin, in France. The team that is in charge of customer care created a community for the team and they decided to use this community to improve their practices. And thanks to this, they gained 93 places in our “Top Accueil,” which is our way of comparing the customer client services of all the stores. It’s a really great story for us.

And another one would be, for example, in Aki, Spain, which is another company, they created a community which is called “Jardin” (Garden), for Aki, Spain and they use this community to implement new products and improve the way they work. They use this every day. It’s the main way to communicate and collaborate between stores and the headquarters, for example.

We have a company in Brazil, Leroy Merlin, that used to be a little less connected to the other companies because they’re far away, and I think that with the use of Younity (Jive), they feel more connected to the rest of the company. We see them talking about issues, giving comments in our corporate communities and for us it’s great and for them it’s a way to belong to the company. Jive is the platform where, in our company, people can feel we are “us,” and not only “myself.”