Oak partnership, a ‘game-changer’ for employees 

We partnered with Halfords back in 2016 and our long-standing partnership has gone from strength-to-strength in transforming their internal comms and supporting their objectives. 

Oak has provided Halfords with a fully branded app, ‘Connect’, which has allowed them to reach and engage with their predominantly frontline workforce. It has allowed employees to access tools and resources quickly and easily, and built a community for employees which has ultimately resulted in more efficient operations and improved customer service.

The challenge

Cutting through the noise

Historically, Halfords’ predominantly deskless workforce operated on a paper-based system and would need to file documents, resulting in boxes of paperwork across every site, making it difficult to locate information. Prior to implementing Oak Engage, employees were also inundated with information that was irrelevant to them and Halfords had no way of cutting through the noise, leaving employees disengaged from company updates.

A combination of these factors meant that a lot of employee’s’ time was taken up by searching for policies, documentation and resources they needed to provide services to customers. 

The solution - driving efficiency

Living the company values

Halfords’ company values are:

• One Halford's family

• Wow our customers every day

• Be better every day

• Have pride in our expertise those 

For the comms team, 'Connect' has to provide tools which enable their colleagues to live and breathe these values every day. In addition to this, they are strict on efficiency in communications.

Better customer service

Through Connect’s branded app which provides mobile accessible document management, all the information their colleagues need is in the palm of their hand. 

Not only do these tools within Oak make life easier for Halfords employees, they have in fact improved customer service through better informed staff and clarity on correct policies and procedures. This is evidence that providing a central information source helps staff to resolve issues quicker, saving time, effort and instilling trust from customers.

Jane added: “Having a central online digital platform has been a game-changer really. It not only helps colleagues find the information, but it helps down the line when they're faced with a customer who might have an issue, and they can access that information quickly. It's been really good, it's really cut out the noise for them which in day to day operations is transformative”

Customised comms for better engagement

Oak Engage’s intranet software has enabled Halfords to deliver content that is personalised and relevant, to grab attention and inspire action. By creating pages and user groups based on specific areas of the business, such as commercial and fleet management, comms are only seen by the desired audiences, which has a huge impact on content engagement. 

Claire adds: “By being able to have specific areas, you’ll see what you need to see. I can reach every colleague from operations to apprentices, targeting comms to their role or where they sit in the business. It’s an absolute game changer.” 

Using the breaking news banner on the Connect newsfeed, updates are elevated depending on importance. Reporting capabilities show content reach and interactions to monitor the effectiveness of their communication. 

Building a community

At Halfords, two-way communication is an essential component of the internal communications strategy. 

Oak allows Halfords to support meaningful two-way conversations and invite feedback. Social and community features within ‘Connect’ have empowered employees to communicate with colleagues in all corners of the business. Encouraging user generated content, where colleagues can share and interact with colleagues’ social updates on the timeline, is a fun way for employees to engage with the app, giving them another reason to log onto the platform. It’s also an opportunity for employees to provide feedback to the business, rather than relying on top-down communication only. 

Another example of how two-way communication with frontline workers has worked is by providing a supplier feedback area for their garages teams within the intranet.

Jane said: “Our garages have suppliers and it's not always plain sailing. There are sometimes issues and we needed a way for our garage services to report if there were any problems with the suppliers or any ways that we can improve the relationships. We needed a way to collate that information and then act on it quickly, so we provided a supplier feedback area which has really been popular, as you can imagine.” 

Encouraging participation

Halfords put their people first and they work hard to include them in every initiative they launch. Through Oak, they have been able to run incentives and competitions - the first of which was naming the intranet! 

Encouraging participation from everyone within the business means that they can all see how their day to day work impacts the bigger picture. Halfords continues to run incentives and competitions on the platform, and they always prove a real success.

By having creative ways to draw people in, once they’re on the site, they are more likely to explore other recent updates, so it’s another opportunity to ensure recent important updates aren’t missed.

Claire commented: “We do a lot of incentives to get employees going and getting those sales, as well as getting people onto the site. Every single user can have that opportunity to take part. We wouldn't be able to do this without Oak as a platform." 

Jane added: “We ran a competition for the employees which was super popular. We had over 200 prizes worth £10,000. We got over 5,000 page hits then 20,000 entries across the group so that was really popular, it was great for us and it was just a really nice thing to do as well, we got so many emails just saying thank you so much.” 

“Another feature that we use from Oak is colleague recognition. It's a really good way for everyone within the company to see recognition for their colleagues as well, so we love that. It's really quick and easy, they just have to pick the employee, select their name and then send them some thanks or praise, it's brilliant!” 

Improved practices and document management

Fleet services is a large division within Halfords and it is paramount that comms are regularly updated and readily available whenever needed. With such a vast amount of information from all of the accounts they work with, their fleet team area needed a refresh to keep it quick and easy to use. Using Oak’s new content applet has been transformative in how information is delivered and navigated in Connect.

Jane said: “It's just transformed the page and the load times. I think anyone who does comms jobs, unless you actually invite feedback, you don't necessarily get it, but I got so much good feedback on this page, the usefulness and how the navigation of it had improved their practices, so that was brilliant.“ 

Keeping documentation up to date is also crucial for colleagues across all divisions of the business, and Oak has provided a simple way to manage this. 

Claire added: “One feature I use regularly is the document review feature. We have documents that we need to look at annually and having that feature is a real peace of mind for us. We can just pop a document on a review to know that it will notify us when it's due for the review, so it really helps us to know that our content is always relevant and up to date.” 

Results

The most tangible result is that 71% of users are paired to the mobile app. This is a tremendous feat and goes to show how much Halfords employees value and rely on the app for quick and easy access to anything they need to get them through a shift.

In the retail industry, average engagement figures are around 50%. To have surpassed this so greatly in an industry with notoriously low engagement rates is such an achievement, especially with a predominantly deskless and frontline workforce. Halfords attributes the branded mobile app to have been instrumental in these results. Each office also has a desktop computer where colleagues can check in for updates if they haven’t got their phone on them. 

Jane said: “For the industry as a whole it's been quite a challenging year but for our garage services have done well and there's probably numerous factors to that, but I don't think that we can deny that getting their operational comms out there to them in the right way and resonating in the right way has helped with that.”

The team at Halfords use Oak’s built-in intranet analytics to measure these results. Prior to Oak, they would have had no way of measuring views and engagement, whereas now they can see first-hand the impact of the work they’re doing. 

Having one place that all employees know is the hub for any information they may need while on shift has enhanced productivity through its simplicity of use for colleagues.

Claire said: “I think Connect has really helped to improve productivity and enhance efficiency and it's definitely reduced a lot of the frustration that our colleagues previously had.  I think with the divisional pages that have been set up,  it's really helped improve collaboration within the teams, our colleagues can now share stories, photos, best practices, top tips and it really does create that one team approach”

Supporting Halfords through the journey

Oak Engage’s simple configuration means Halfords have been able to customise their own intranet and pages to their requirements , reinforcing their brand identity and values.

Whenever they’ve needed support with Connect, their dedicated account manager and technical support team have been on hand to lend advice and walk with them on their journey.

Here at Oak we also enjoy bringing our customers together to meet other internal comms professionals who use Oak, where they can share best practice from their own experiences and gather insights into how to make the most of their Oak platform.