IT services company uses employee engagement platform to offer employees unique benefits set and actively engage 90% of a hard-to-reach workforce

Atos provide information technology services throughout the U.K. & Ireland with 9,300 employees working across many different geographical locations. The company has recently grown through mergers and acquisitions resulting in a diverse employee base.

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90%

employees actively using platform in first 12 months

£243k

saved by employees through discounts platform

£3.1m

had been spent through the platform

What they needed

Back in 2013, Atos undertook a Great Places to Work survey which revealed 65% of their employees were looking for their company to provide a unique set of benefits relevant to them and their individual lifestyles. Atos already had an offering in place, iChoose, which wasn’t getting the levels of engagement they had hoped, and so opted to partner with Reward Gateway to launch “Prosper” – their new employee engagement platform. The team deliberately chose Prosper as the name as it signalled the end of the defunct iChoose offering and created a new brand identity of success and fortune.

Further feedback from the survey showed that employees also had a lack of understanding towards their benefits and total reward package. Atos’ HR team decided to use Prosper as an holistic one-stop-shop platform to bring all of these aspects together. They knew for this to be a success they needed to get across the message that the new benefits are far better than the previous and ensure their people would want to use them.

To do this, the team put together a pre- and post-launch communication strategy with the key objective to drive employee engagement and promote their new set of benefits as being usable by everyone. Critical decisions would also need to be made around the diversity of their workforce, with 40% being site- or home-based, 10% being offline, 400 based overseas, and 211 operating locations to consider.

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Industry:

IT services

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Number of employees:

9,300

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Number of locations:

211

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Platform features:

Employee Discounts, Employee Recognition

How we helped

Atos’ team invited a group of diverse employees to be their Prosper Champions who got early access to the engagement hub and were a sounding board for communication challenges. The team saw this as an important step in forming their strategy as well as giving them another channel during launch which would maximise engagement through word of mouth.

With the important feedback gathered from their Prosper Champions, the team had now identified no less than 12 communication channels. Highlights of which include:

  • Scheduled eCards – for joiners, birthdays, and service anniversaries.
  • Branded merchandise & roadshows – Prosper goodies given out at launch.
  • Manager packs – for managers to educate offline employees about benefits.
  • All-employee calls – used to promote Prosper initiatives, hosted by SVP of HR.

Atos-HUB-optimized-1To refine their focus, the team categorised their offering into three pillars – MyHealth, MyWealth, and MySelf – and established a plan which takes into account key holidays and internal initiatives. This includes the Wellbeing@Work week where the team used Prosper to promote the Reward Gateway-provided benefits such as Cycle to Work, employee wellness and an array of healthy lifestyle discounts. Atos also tied the promotion of recognition into their Prosper hub, utilising it to promote weekly themes alongside engaging content which is appropriate for all employees.

Through evolving the hub, the team were able to include peer-to-peer eCards, manager-led InstantAwards™, the Atos Star Awards, a Hall of Fame, and the ability to send a colleague flowers in special circumstances. They also turned their focus to financial wellbeing with Barclays Workplace piloted at their three largest sites. And in line with their evolution, Atos’ team launched a digital banking solution where employees can book phone or video conference appointments to discuss their financial needs.

 

The results

During the implementation of their Prosper hub, the Atos team had set a benchmark figure of 60% engagement within the first 12 months. They far exceeded this, seeing 90% of employees actively using the hub in the first year – with 40% of these registering in the first two weeks! The team have also seen spend rise month on month over and by Prosper’s third year, £3.1 million had been spent through the platform with employees saving £243,000.

Direct feedback from employees has also shown Atos that their communications are reaching those at home and offsite locations:

“Working on the NS&I account [offsite] can mean I don’t have ready access to an Atos laptop, but since joining I have learnt about Prosper and how easy it is to access from home. My wife is obsessed!”