How Certification Europe enhances communications with teams across Ireland, UK, Italy and Japan
Certification Europe shares how their “CE Connect” employee app by Thrive reaches and engages with every team member, integrating employees from the organisation’s separate divisions, and multiple locations.
Certification Europe Ltd., founded in 1999, is an Irish- based, internationally-focused, Accredited Certification Body. Headquartered in Dublin, with offices around the world, providing auditing, training, inspection and independent assessment services through a professional, client-focused and dynamic approach to the auditing process of client operations. Certification Europe is part of the Amtivo Group and offers Certification, Training, Environmental & Inspectorate (E&I) and Technical Services to organisations in both the private and public sectors.
The Challenge - Reaching a Remote, Dispersed Workforce
With dispersed teams, across different locations as well as multiple business units (Certification Services, Environmental & Inspectorate Division and Technical Services), Certification Europe needed a ‘central hub’ for sharing their latest updates, organising internal events, posting urgent announcements, in particular regard to Covid-19 news, and also for making sure they continued to motivate employees and lift spirits with competitions, fundraisers, games and celebrating their birthdays.
The outbreak of Covid-19 made remote working necessary for every employee across the company. Improving employee engagement and communications was even more necessary and the organisation needed to ensure their teams got to know each other personally, built strong relationships with each other and were engaged in the organisational culture, despite being dispersed and not working (physically) together on a daily basis.
As well as remote working becoming the norm, Certification Europe was growing and with a number of vacancies available the organisation knew they needed to have a platform where new hires would be able to access all of the information they needed about what was happening across the company, and also experience the essence of the company’s culture and be able to interact socially (from a distance) with their new peers.
Finding the Best Solution
The company researched the market to find an employee engagement partner who would support them to create the best application to suit their needs. Certification Europe wanted to work with a company which had been well established and tried and tested by multiple clients.
As the COVID-19 pandemic had just begun, it was important that the deployment and onboarding process was supportive, with a quick and efficient turnaround time.
They needed a partner who provided clear communication from the beginning, worked with them to provide best practices and advice on content, took client suggestions on board and provided new release updates and functionality to their services over time.
A Perfect Fit...
"Thrive is a perfect fit for our needs. It was quick to implement, it was scalable, and most importantly it did not need specific technical expertise to set it up nor run it. We made a decision to implement the app and very quickly we were able to develop a large amount of content, test it and go -live all within 6 weeks, and we have not looked back since. Over the last 6 months of having CE Connect up and running, Certification Europe has definitely seen an increase in employee engagement. Through having a place to upload weekly update videos, run competitions, let users upload pictures, share comments and like different events, it has been excellent to have through the Covid-19 pandemic. Our Assessment Team have noticed a big change in employee engagement since the introduction of CE Connect. Having always worked remotely or on client sites, they feel there is more interaction between the teams now than ever before. Overall, we have had a great experience working with Thrive and creating this app for our organisation and look forward to seeing how it grows over time."
"From the initial on-boarding to the training and design, the team at Thrive were so accommodating with a quick deployment time, setting the app up promptly. Certification Europe’s internal ‘Great Place To Work’ Team worked closely with Thrive to receive training in the management system to create content. Thrive also offers bespoke promotional material and all the guidance launch the app with success and get all employees logged into the app smoothly. Working from home can be isolating, and the app has helped everyone stay in the loop with what’s going on across all areas of the organisation. The company’s ‘Great Place to Work’ Team have been running competitions and fundraisers and the app has made it much easier to reach everyone in the organisation with the notification options and the wide range of content options we can include on posts."
A Happy, Informed and Connected Workforce
The deployment of the app enables all staff to receive weekly newsletters, policies, procedures, job vacancies, well-being information, video updates, Health and Safety information, Covid-19 updates and more, at the same time, in real time.
Feedback from Employees
"After the launch of the app, our teams were delighted. The feedback from each team has been really positive and they appreciated having one platform that held all of the useful information, company announcements, updates and also the fun stuff in. With a competition to send in a “Working-from-home Selfie”, engagement was up from the beginning and it was great that our staff could all interact and comment on each other’s posts. This interaction element got great feedback from all team members."
"All of our success factors were met and exceeded by Thrive and they ticked all of the boxes we were looking for. As soon as we approached Thrive for information on their platform, we felt that they would be a great partner for us in developing our application. Each person we spoke to was so helpful, enthusiastic about what we wanted to do and worked promptly to get the ball rolling for our app. One of the most appealing aspects of Thrive.App was the straightforward “back-end” management system, and the upload of information and creation of content is so easy to do. In addition to this, the suggestions from the Thrive team of what we could include on the app showed us that they had covered everything that we wanted the app to do."