How Olsson Corporate Communications & HR Teams Improve Employee Engagement Using Issuu

The accomplished engineering and design firm Olsson, uses Issuu to improve Corporate and Employee communications such as Newsletters and Company announcements with seamless digital publishing resulting in over a 30% increase in employee engagement.

As a nationally recognized engineering firm, Olsson focuses on fostering a corporate culture to celebrate their people. They know that by creating an environment in which employees can learn, thrive and grow, the result will be: “Inspired people. Amazing designs. And projects with purpose. A win-win for all.” Issuu digital publishing is an important tool for them to support this employeecentric environment.

We are Olsson, a nationally recognized, employee-owned engineering and design firm with a rich history of success. Founded in 1956 on the very mindset that drives us today, we’re here to improve communities by making them more sustainable, better connected, and more efficient. Simply put, we work to leave the world better than we found it. Our most important asset is our people, and we are dedicated to an environment where we continue to learn, grow, and thrive. This entrepreneurial spirit has made us successful and will keep us successful. The result? Inspired people. Amazing designs. And projects with purpose. A win-win for all.”

The Olsson Corporate Communications team is in charge of creating employee communications and Company public brand and profile content. The team is led by Lisa Sedivy, Corporate Communications Area Leader with support from Alicia Krieger, Communications Coordinator.

“A [company-wide] pain point was that employees just didn’t want to link back to the intranet. They wanted to look at it [Employee Newsletter] in the PDF form or just look at it right there in the email and move on.”

• Publish a professional employee newsletter with a more engaging reading experience and improve upon the flat PDF currently being created.

• Deliver employee newsletter to teams both at the Headquarters and in remote satellite offices that maximizes reading enjoyment.

• Ensure newsletters are mobile-optimized for onthe-go reading.

• Increase employee readership.

• Avoid linking employees to Company Intranet or requiring VPN to read the newsletter, but still deliver in a private manner.

• No easy way to track reads, time spent reading or what content performed best.

Before publishing on Issuu, it wasn’t uncommon for less than half of the company, with over 1,000 employees, to read the monthly Employee newsletter. After publishing on Issuu, the Employee newsletter saw a 30 percent increase in employees reading it in addition to more time spent reading and a higher engagement of employees outside of the Headquarters. Employees were spending at least 3 minutes reading the Newsletter and even more on an important Company Announcement. Being able to track the readers on mobile vs. desktop was a big improvement too for their engagement goals. Finally, using the Issuu “Unlisted Publications” feature ensured the Olsson company publications remained private.

“We are using a lot more video throughout our communications, but video is only helpful if people watch it. Being able to add embedded videos within an E-reader so that people actually click and watch the video is a game-changer for us. It’s really exciting to provide engaging content to our employees and know that they’re interacting with it.”

The Olsson team was impressed by the comprehensive analytics and suite of publishing features that the Issuu Premium Plan offered. Many of the features fit their immediate needs, and quite a few of the multimedia features were going to be new publishing capabilities that the team is excited to try. The Premium Plan was also a great value for their small team. After exploring a few other options, Lisa selected Issuu, “As far as the [Premium] plan selection, we wanted to be able to have [Statistics] to go along with this, to get an idea of how much time people spent reading, how many people actually visit the publication, etc. We also wanted to be able to have links that would be able to take people back to our intranet, so the auto- detected links [are] perfect. Overall, it just seemed to be the best bang for our buck.” The need for an improved reading experience goes hand in hand with the Olsson team’s focus on enhanced employee content including photography, video, testimonials and more. Issuu’s strength in elevating content with the multimedia features in a seamless way was the perfect compliment to Olsson team goals for improving Corporate Communications content. Lisa shares her excitement about the multimedia features, “We are playing around a lot more with video...and just being able to put those embedded videos within an E-reader so that you can have an experience and pull all that together is good. It doesn’t look like oh, I just hit PDF on a document... It’s really upping the game to make it something that is really taking the user and making it kind of engaging and exciting.”

The Olsson Corporate Communications team is already looking ahead to how they will use Issuu beyond the newsletters and Company announcements they first sought out the tool for. From critical Company Standards & Process documents called “Playbooks” to key recruitment documents in the highly competitive Engineering field, Issuu will take these document types to the next level and help Olsson stand out and bring in the best talent. Lisa highlighted the opportunity here: “We do have a pretty extensive recruiting process... So we have a lot of requests from our HR staff: ‘Can you send me the PDF?’ for this high level, mechanical engineer who we are trying to recruit. It would be really nice to have something that we could send on the fly, pull these things together, be able to personalize them and have it look like a book...[Issuu enables] documents to be all tied together, so they’re really easy and professional looking, but we’re not re-inventing the wheel every time because we have it already created.” Issuu can also support external Corporate Communication, company profile building and content marketing goals including publishing Company Articles, Stories and publications for easy social sharing on social media platforms such as LinkedIn. In the highly competitive recruitment and project landscape, Olsson’s company profile and public persona can make the difference in landing the big project or hiring the best people. Issuu’s digital publishing platform allows the Olsson team to create once and share everywhere, publishing sleek, multimedia content to set themselves apart from other design and engineering firms.