Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
The APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) are hosting an interesting webinar in a couple of week’s time, looking at how to manage a successful ESN…
As promised, Facebook announced their business solution yesterday as ‘Workplace by Facebook’
It’s always good to read a successful customer reference story, particularly when the organisation’s culture and productivity has truly been revolutionised by deploying a new internal community.
This is definitely the case with this new case study, featuring UNIQA Insurance Group. Based in Vienna, UNIQA have grown incredibly quickly over the past decade, particularly via a push into Central and Eastern Europe. This has left them with a number of substantial challenges in terms of communications and alignment across these varied markets and native languages:
Jive Software, Inc. today announced that UNIQA Insurance Group AG (UNIQA Group), a leading European insurance group, launched a new Jive-powered Interactive Intranet to strengthen strategic alignment and employee engagement across its global workforce. With this modern corporate communications solution, the rapidly growing company is cultivating a more transparent, unified culture, while gaining a better understanding of the reach and impact of its internal messages.
UNIQA Insurance Group AG (UNIQA Group), a leading European insurance group, launched a new Jive-powered Interactive Intranet to strengthen strategic alignment and employee engagement across its global workforceOver the past fifteen years, UNIQA Group acquired several insurance companies during its push into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The business is now one of the leading insurance groups in its core markets of Austria and CEE, serving more than 10 million customers in 19 countries. UNIQA’s 100 percent subsidiary, UNIQA International, manages 15 markets in the CEE growth region-most of which operate with different languages, cultures and other regional distinctions. The company’s international communications team struggled to efficiently deliver announcements and messages to various countries via email, multiple disconnected static intranets and expensive in-person meetings.
“As we expand, we’re striving to be a different kind of insurer. The cornerstone of our operations is companywide personal contact and direct collaboration amongst all employees throughout our countries and local branches,” said Gabriela Rusu, head of group communication at UNIQA. “Jive will bring us a big step forward in this journey by connecting those offices, and facilitating employee engagement and change management. We made the switch to Jive’s Interactive Intranet because we need a secure, cloud-based solution-with both powerful communications and collaboration functionality that save the organization significant time and money.”
The interactive intranet-dubbed “UNIQAspace”-launched this summer to facilitate captivating communications that reach thousands of employees across all of the company’s markets. Underpinned by Jive, the solution makes it easy for executives to interact with employees through blogs and videos. People can ask questions, comment, share and discuss-opening up transparent dialogue between executives and country teams that fosters alignment around the company’s vision. UNIQAspace also provides consumer-style mobile apps with easy ways for employees to get company news, stay connected and participate wherever they go.
I had the pleasure of working with UNIQA on the early stages of this project, and it’s been hugely rewarding to hear how well UNIQAspace has been received by their employees, and to see the transformational shift that is taking place in their international communications, knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
UNIQA are a good example of an organisation that has grown quickly, primarily by acquisition then followed by organic growth, where the existing centrally-published intranet and communications methodology simply hadn’t kept up with the demands of a relatively young, multi-national and multi-lingual workforce. Shifting to a open, transparent and collaborative work style via a cloud-based community has empowered employees, created opportunities for cross-team engagement, and ensured that all countries are representated, heard and understood.
