A Win-Win for All: How Olsson Corporate Communications and HR Teams improve employee engagement using Issuu
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About Olsson 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 employee-centric environment.
“ We work to leave the world better than we found it.
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.”
CHALLENGE:
Reach and Engage Employees with an Enhanced Reading Experience 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.” Alicia Krieger Communications Coordinator
The team outlined the challenges they were hoping to address with a digital publishing solution
• 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 on-the-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.
THE RESULTS:
Better Informed and Engaged Employees With a One Stop Solution For Multimedia Content Distribution 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 wa Being able to add embedded videos within an E-reader people actually click and watch the video is a game-ch for us. It’s really exciting to provide engaging content employees and know that they’re interacting with it.” Alicia Krieger Communications Coordinator
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.
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 autodetected links [are] perfect. Overall, it just seemed to be the best bang for our buck.”
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 The need for an improved The Premium Plan was also a reading experience goes hand pull all that together is good. great value for their small team. in hand with the Olsson team’s It doesn’t look like oh, I just hit PDF on a document... It’s really After exploring a few other focus on enhanced employee options, Lisa selected Issuu, content including photography, upping the game to make it something that is really taking “As far as the [Premium] plan video, testimonials and the user and making it kind selection, we wanted to be able more. Issuu’s strength in of engaging and exciting.” to have [Statistics] to go along elevating content with the with this, to get an idea of multimedia features in a
atch it. r so that hanger to our
“We have an extensive recruiting process to bring new staff on board. Our Human Resources staff frequently ask us for PDF documents of items from our Playbooks to share with engineers and other technical staff who we are trying to recruit. It’s hard to package these files without them seeming like individual documents. It’d be nice to have a system where we can create personalized materials and have them look like a book, rather than a handful of PDFs.” Lisa Sedivy Corporate Communications Area Leader
THE RESULTS:
Publishing Publications Beyond the Company Newsletter
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:
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 “We do have a pretty extensive recruiting company profile and public persona can make process... So we have a lot of requests from our the difference in landing the big project or HR staff: ‘Can you send me the PDF?’ for this hiring the best people. Issuu’s digital publishing high level, mechanical engineer who we are platform allows the Olsson team to create trying to recruit. It would be really nice to have once and share everywhere, publishing sleek, something that we could send on the fly, pull multimedia content to set themselves apart these things together, be able to personalize from other design and engineering firms. them and have it look like a book…[Issuu
The Corporate Communications team at Olsson has been using Issuu for just a few months and are happy to see the transformation Issuu has made to their Employee publications. The Issuu platform transforms the flat PDF they used to send out into the multimedia reading experience that excites the employees and demonstrates that Olsson is invested in their people and the employee’s experience too.
For Olsson, better content that is easily shared equals more engaged and satisfied employees.
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