How Haiilo is helping Elekta reinvent and increase workforce engagement

Elekta elevating its employee advocacy strategy with the help of Haiilo

As a global leader in the development and production of precision radiation therapy, Elekta is committed to ensuring everyone is offered access to the best cancer care possible and in effect, improving lives while bringing hope to patients and families dealing with cancer. 

At a time when Elekta was readying the renewal of its brand in 2021 and 2022, Haiilo was seen as a great opportunity to support those efforts while introducing the platform to employees — the same employees who would be helping to elevate the Elekta brand by becoming ambassadors. 

“We were considering options to help raise our brand reach and employee advocacy initiatives, including a Haiilo competitor at the time,” says Kathy Pajari, Communications Manager at Elekta. “We chose Haiilo because in addition to offering Elekta everything we were looking for in an employee advocacy platform, our decision was also based on our open discussions and the developing relationships with Haiilo’s people and some of the other tangibles that we required.”

One of those requirements was ensuring Elekta had the tools and abilities to comply with regulations. As a life science and medical technology leader, regulatory compliance is crucial for Elekta.

“Compliance is essential in our industry, with careful consideration required of any content we promote and how we share it,” says Karin Vyöni, Global Director of Employee Communications at Elekta. “Our people are enthusiastic and eager to share industry-related news, but with compliancy comes hesitation. Haiilo’s people and advocacy platform have helped to alleviate that hesitation for Elekta’s advocates by fully preparing us with tips and information, ensuring our people can safely share content.”

Broadening new content opportunities

With Elekta made up of various business units involving internal content creators within each of those businesses, it’s unrealistic for all the unique content to be shared on the company’s official social media channels. 

That’s because Elekta’s content includes everything from industry-related articles and product news updates to product benefit videos and job recruitment postings. Sharing all the material to the company’s official social media channels would overwhelm those channels and drown out other necessary corporate initiatives. 

Enter Haiilo, where launching campaigns and advocating for the Elekta brand couldn’t be easier.

“We’re now experiencing how easy it is for our teams to create campaigns directly within Haiilo, where all of their videos and content can be added,” says Kathy. “And we can see that other employees are easily and quickly sharing that content to their own networks. This has allowed us to see the true value of Haiilo because all our functions and businesses now have a platform for their voices to be heard.”

From Haiilo pilot to launch in a matter of weeks

As with any new solution for an established company and its employees, in turning to Haiilo, there was some apprehension early on. To overcome any uncertainty and working closely with Haiilo’s customer success experts, Elekta created a two-phase approach beginning with a smaller pilot group where 400 employees were chosen to be the brand’s first influencers and advocates on the platform. 

Trainings and face-to-face meetings were then organized with the pilot group throughout, allowing for feedback to be collected on how their experiences were going.

“Following our initial learnings and in consulting with Haiilo’s customer success team, after just a couple of weeks, we felt we were already comfortable to open up and grant access to other colleagues,” says Kathy. “With the bigger launch in November 2021, face-to-face trainings, Q&A sessions and reference materials for both our global and local employees played a key role in educating Elekta and our employee advocates.”

Just over a year later, today, Haiilo seats are available for up to 3,000 employees to share content to their social and professional networks easily, helping to advocate for the Elekta brand. With a workforce of 4,700 globally, about 60% of the company today can use Haiilo in sharing Elekta content and be true brand advocates. 

“We weren’t naïve to think that some persuasion and convincing to different teams and colleagues wouldn’t be a part of our Haiilo journey early on,” says Karin. “But through Haiilo’s intuitive and easy-to-understand dashboard and insights reporting, we can vividly see the results of our actions. It’s been clear within just the first year that Haiilo is offering us tremendous value, with our marketing and talent acquisition teams especially embracing the new possibilities.”

Looking ahead to more brand-building opportunities

Now well into their second year since bringing on Haiilo as they were renewing their brand, looking ahead, the Elekta team anticipates even more opportunities for its workforce to grow its brand ambassador program with the help of Haiilo. 

“In the future, we’re planning to develop even more brand-building ambitions and more employer branding-related content aligned with our corporate brand strategy,” says Kathy. “We’re still on a growing journey regarding our brand, and Haiilo plays a key part. Our contacts at Haiilo have been great for us, too, which makes it easy and fun to continue developing, collaborating and looking ahead.”

With a global presence across 120 countries, one place Elekta sees and plans for more opportunity is around more content more closely targeted to local markets.

“Something we’d like to focus on soon is for our regional employees to be able to create content in their local languages, with Haiilo helping them to leverage that content and increase the reach,” adds Kathy. 

Employee advocacy a reflection of improved employee engagement

As an employee communication platform, employee engagement and communication are two of the most influential benefits of Haiilo, both usually resulting in improved collaboration.

“Haiilo has increased the collaboration across many different Elekta teams and functions,” says Karin. “I’m especially impressed and would highlight the improved collaboration with our human resources colleagues when considering the talent acquisition aspect and employer branding. They’ve been fully on board, and we see the results thanks to Haiilo.”

With its easy-to-use and intuitive interface, Haiilo’s solution even provides new opportunities for Karin, Kathy and their colleagues to share Elekta’s employee engagement results with their leaders and Board of Directors and Executive Management in easy-to-understand ways.

“In revealing the results of the Elekta 50 campaign, our top management has been more than impressed as they can clearly see how proud employees are with how much content they’re promoting and sharing as each is helping shape the Elekta brand,” says Kathy. “It says a lot about how engaged our employees are and what Elekta stands for.”