Challenge
As Australia’s largest equipment hire company, Coates Hire needed a solution to support its 2,000+ employees across 180 branches in Australia, including branches based in remote areas. Coates Hire had email as its predominant channel of communication, and intranet that was used mainly for daily applications by branch staff and to support corporate staff. Employees did not have a voice in this top-down communication structure.
“When I started three years ago, we had a hard copy publication that came out 4 times per year,” says Hugh Scott, Communications Manager at Coates Hire.
With organizational roles ranging from branch manager, sales coordinator, fitter mechanics, yard persons, drivers, qualified engineers, sales managers, and corporate support roles, Coates Hire needed a communication solution that could support and be used by all their team members.
Although internal communication was a core priority, Coates Hire wanted to further promote its health & safety initiative ‘The Big 5’; a program that keeps employees aware of the top five safety checks to be mindful of that will get them home safely each and every day.
99% of Coates Hire employees had access to a smartphone device and it was important that the communication solution of choice would be accessible on mobile and desktop.
Solution
Coates Hire had the aspiration of building a long-term employee value proposition that focused on employee engagement. They chose Workplace by Facebook as their collaboration tool and selected Enablo as their partner to implement the platform.
Coates Hire started implementation in April 2018 through conducting an Enablo Blueprint Sprint; the Enablo program that assists organizations plan, workshop, implement and adopt Workplace. Coates Hire wanted to ensure that by implementing Workplace by Facebook, it would further enable them to:
Make faster and better decisions
Reach the entire organization via mobile
Be expressive and engage with the crowd (employees)
Integrate with other platforms effortlessly
Coates Hire wanted greater business agility in response to shifting market demands, customer and workforce needs, and knew Workplace by Facebook could provide support toward these.
It took one month for Coates Hire to implement the platform.
“What I love about Workplace is the instantaneous ability to communicate with people. Workplace makes everyone in the organization a storyteller,” says Hugh.
“The Enablo team worked with us as a trusted partner. They were part of our communications team and I was able to rest easy at night as all the detailed planning had been done. It was a great success!”
Hugh Scott
Communications Manager at Coates Hire
Results
“What Workplace has enabled us to do is for those people in branches to tell us what they think about the organization, our initiatives, and streamlining ways to do things,” Hugh explains.
With Workplace by Facebook, Coates Hire now has: