#PRAwards 2021 highlight: Indosat Ooredoo puts twist to internal comms to keep staff engaged

Indosat Ooredoo's employees were forced to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. This raised the need for a central communication tool to bring employees together. This led Indosat Ooredoo to implement an official and secure communication channel, open to all employees. With this channel effective communication, engagement and innovation amongst employees would be enabled. Find out how Indosat Ooredoo won the silver trophy at MARKETING-INTERACTIVE's recent PR Awards 2021 with the strategies it implemented. 

Challenge 

Indosat Ooredoo’s vision is to be Indonesia’s leading digital telco and it has embarked on a digital transformation journey in recent years to help reach this goal. One aspect of this journey was to deploy an official digital communication channel for the company’s more than 2,250 employees to facilitate organisation-wide collaboration all in one place.

With the target audience being Indosat Ooredoo employees, the goals of the project were to transform and integrate Indosat Ooredoo’s existing internal communications channels into a holistic digital community, which would encourage and allow employees to stay connected, engaged, and feel an integral part of the Indosat Ooredoo family. This, in turn, would also lead to a collaborative digital working environment that breaks down the hierarchical structure and encourages sharing of ideas and information in a way that would support innovation and communication between individuals and teams, as compared to working in silos.

In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Indosat Ooredoo’s employees to work from home, and this further accelerated and deepened the need for a central communication tool to bring employees together, raise morale and foster greater collaboration in socially distanced times. The solution would need to be, an official and secure communication channel, widely open to all employees for them to contribute as needed, tools that allow for organisation-wide collaboration and that enable effective communication, engagement and innovation amongst employees. It would also need to be able to contribute to an agile organisation with sustainable business impact and higher employer branding rating

Strategy

To meet its objectives, Indosat Ooredoo chose to implement the Workplace tool by Facebook thanks to its ability to boost engagement amongst employees, give everybody a voice, and streamline internal communications. In addition, Workplace helps to connect the deskless workforce while amplifying company culture and making leaders more visible.

Workplace would allow it to execute its strategy, which was based around three key pillars, each with their own aims, as outlined below:

The first pillar would be communication, to foster better collaboration between teams enabling innovation and efficiency. Its aim would be to move communication channel from email to Workplace, host more virtual events in Workplace to drive employee engagement and satisfaction, increased accessibility due to mobile-friendly tools.

The second pillar would be people, meaning increased engagement and employee satisfaction, breaking down hierarchy. Its aim would be to increase involvement of C-level executives to flatten hierarchical structure, position a group of employees as Workplace Champions; "Growth Partners" to play a crucial role in the successful deployment of the tool, encouraging engagement amongst colleagues, monthly challenges and rewards for employees to rewards their hard work, raise morale and keep people engaged, and finally, create a digital community where employees can earn rewards and recognition, and take charge of their learning and career development.

The third pillar is systems, creating a secure and official communication channel, improving internal processes and turning Indosat into a digital community. Its aim would be to facilitate a smoother and more integrated online employee onboarding process, getting new starters up to speed in record time with simple ways to find information, ask questions and work together

Execution 

In order to implement its three strategic pillars, Indosat created three distinct channels within the Workplace tool, each with a different communication purpose. These were then activated through interactive posts and various activities.

Each channel has its own purpose and activities. For the Indosat Ooredoo Buzz workplace channel, its purpose was corporate information and events and the activities were: hosting regular virtual events according to content and even calendars, moving official company-employee communication to workplace, and new employee onboarding communication and channel through Workplace and Workchat.

For the Sahabat Indosat Ooredoo work channel, its purpose would be individual and community engagement. The activities for this workplace channel would be employee challenges posts, community and functional groups, C-level/people leader updates and endorsement within group, position growth partners as workplace champions, integrating collaboration tools, workplace monthly & identifying annual most valuable players.

For the Everyone @ Ooredoo work channel, its purpose would be for corporate updates which would include activities such as communicate corporate activities and achievement information through C-level executives’ accounts, communicate corporate updates through "Ooredoo News", create interest/career-based group across operating companies for knowledge sharing.

The interactive workplace posts that activated the workplace channels are as follows:

Here is an example of its learning and development activation, which involves admin-driven posts, such as courses and webinar recommendations.

Meanwhile, this is an example of its corporate events activation, which involves updates on internal employee events, both regular and seasonal. These include an up close and personal Q&A with a C-level executive, a virtual celebration for Indosat’s 53rd anniversary with the president director and Monday Funday.

Results

In a challenging year for employee engagement and satisfaction, Indosat succeeded in making Workplace the single communication channel for its employees – recording another major step in its digital transformation journey. This has allowed the company to seamlessly organise a series of engaging events, such as trivia quizzes, video challenges and virtual runs, bringing employees together despite physical separation and raising morale. In addition to bringing a sense of community, introducing the Workplace platform allows for a quick and easy way for Indosat to share corporate news and updates, and implement smooth and efficient internal processes, such as the digital onboarding of employees. It also provides greater engagement between C-level executives and other employees, creating a flatter, less-hierarchical structure.

Its key achievements are as follows: 

- More than 70% of Indosat’s employees post in Workplace per month

- Indosat’s engagement is 3x the current Workplace benchmark

- At least 30% of Indosat’s onboarding and orientation programs take place on Workplace

- Activated learning and development programme exclusively through Workplace

- Activated rewards and recognition programme exclusively on Workplace

- More than 83% of Indosat’s employees gave Workplace an overall high rating (seven to 10 or 10). Through creating compelling content and events, Indosat ranked highest in terms of Workplace activation across Ooredoo’s 10 operating companies, demonstrating high levels of engagement amongst Indosat employees and enjoyment of using the tool.

Through creating compelling content and events, Indosat ranked highest in terms of Workplace activation across Ooredoo’s ten operating companies, demonstrating high levels of engagement amongst its employees and enjoyment of using the tool.