Vorwerk Gruppe & Haiilo Social Intranet: The Winning Mix!

Vorwerk’s mission is to make life easier for its customers: whether it’s via healthy meals cooked with the Thermomix, or the helpful Kobold robot vacuum cleaner working its way around the apartment. 

With Haiilo, Vorwerk is making life easier for their employees: creating a secure digital home for employees all over the world. Here is a short summary into how Vorwerk rolled out Haiilo’s social intranet solution and how they use it today in combination with Microsoft 365.

Being agile is a topic that has gained enormous importance at Vorwerk, in recent times. There was a great need for a social intranet with mobile availability, and information that could be accessed at any time, while allowing for an easy and safe exchange between teams internally.

How was Haiilo introduced and rolled out internally as a social intranet?

With the introduction of Haiilo, this gap was closed: information can now be easily and quickly pushed out to all employees, teams and departments so they can all easily connect, and encourage the culture shift to a truly digital workplace.

Managers have also quickly learned the benefits of Haiilo and use it to distribute information to employees quickly and efficiently. The implementation of a feedback channel has been very well received by the workforce so far. Haiilo has become the main internal communication tool for Vorwerk.

The Big Bang!

1/20/2020 – The day of the launch of Haiilo. Extensive internal marketing was done in advance to inform everyone of the new digital home experience: 

• Advance announcements were shared on the old, static intranet that a new digital home was coming.
• Information around the launch of Haiilo was included in the Vorwerk employee magazine.
• Development of a Haiilo information booklet that was sent to 6,000 employees worldwide.
• A training tour: The project team gave Haiilo presentations at various work sites.
• Designated intranet managers: A team of Haiilo specialists who were trained on the platform inside and out, serve as Haiilo contacts for employees on site.
• Anyone who starts working at Vorwerk today, starts with Haiilo. The HR department has set up a dedicated page for virtual onboarding at Vorwerk within their social intranet. This way, new employees get to know the company directly via Haiilo.

How Vorwerk benefits from M365 integration in the social intranet?

One year earlier, Microsoft 365 was rolled out across Vorwerk. With the large number of subsidiaries, production sites and country-specific processes, this was a comprehensive project. In Germany, Microsoft 365 was also introduced in parallel with Haiilo. Both platforms have a common goal: To promote a digital workplace.

Was this an additional challenge for the launch? Not at Vorwerk! The two project teams have been working closely together, and to this day have created clear rules about what kind of communication belongs in which tool. Even though both tools – Haiilo and M365 – have some overlap in use cases, it is always the task of internal communicators to set up clear rules for this and to inform employees about what happens where, and how in which tool. 

Vorwerk’s requirements for Haiilo:

Inform larger groups (or all Vorwerk colleagues) across all departments about a specific topic or ensure clear exchange of information.

• Find colleagues with a specific expertise or from a specific project – with the help of a search function if required.
• Collect information that helps in daily work – the Haiilo features of “Pages” and “Communities” are highly suitable for this. With the option to follow colleagues, every employee can curate their own individual newsfeed on the timeline.