Customer story

How Affinity Water delivers award winning employee communications and engagement

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Posted in: Utilities

Overview

Affinity Water is the largest water-only supplier in the UK, delivering more than 940 million liters of safe, high quality drinking water to our 3.6 million customers each and every day.

Headquarters

Hatfield, Hertfordshire

Locations

18

Team size

1330

Turnover

£320m

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Challenge

A key focus area for Affinity Water was to improve the way they communicated with and engaged their frontline teams. With over 950 million liters of water to supply to more than 3.6 million people every day, Affinity had been facing a daily challenge in connecting with their remote teams.

Solution

Having never invested in a communication tool or app before, one of their key strategic aims was to find a way to digitalize their communications so they could easily connect people with the information they needed to perform brilliantly at work. While digital messages play their part, multimedia messages, including video and audio, can provide greater clarity and familiarity. McEvoy and her colleagues utilized this feature of the OurPeople app to build relationships between remote teams and share successes." Affinity Water has launched the OurPeople app companywide with all 1300 colleagues from across the organization using the app. This includes their frontline remote teams and contact center teams, as well as their support functions such as HR, Finance, and IT.

As McEvoy summarizes, “It’s a very simple and effective tool that can make a huge difference to any Internal Communications team. If you’re looking for a platform that will enable you to provide instant, engaging, and tailored communications to colleagues, then this is for you. The metrics offering is fantastic, with real-time data just a click away; and the ability for line managers to get involved and utilize the platform to drive communications within their business areas is a brilliant advantage”.

Results

“The OurPeople app also allowed us to connect with these teams in a more targeted, timely, and relevant way by increasing communication engagement and giving team members an Employee Voice. The app also provided us with detailed metrics and feedback which enables us to continually improve internal communications at every step” explains McEvoy.

McEvoy goes on to add “We were able to connect with our remote colleagues in a way that we hadn’t been able to before. The ability to send engaging content, directly to those typically ‘hard-to-reach’ colleagues was a game changer, and for the first time we were able to create a two-way mechanism through polls, ratings, and quizzes”.

Key stats

80%

app downloads on first push

70%

same day engagement on content

60%

of additional engaged activity

"It really is a one-stop shop for providing engaging, succinct and two-way communications to those hard to reach teams. The desktop version allows great control and measurement for IC teams and managers, while the app is super easy to use and helps users to stay on track and connected to the latest company and team updates."

Kirsty McEvoy

Internal Communications & Engagement Executive