Introduction

Company Overview 

Blatchford is a global medical devices company with approximately 900 employees across the UK, EMEA and North America.

With teams spread across multiple regions and roles, Blatchford needed a more effective way to keep employees informed, engaged and connected across the organisation. Existing communication channels often led to information overload, fragmented messaging, or delays in getting updates to employees.

To create a more connected and collaborative workforce, Blatchford introduced Workvivo as its central employee communication and engagement platform. 

Situation Overview 

As a globally distributed organisation, Blatchford faced several common internal communications challenges:

• Ensuring employees across different regions received consistent and timely updates
• Reducing reliance on email-heavy communications that contributed to inbox fatigue
• Improving visibility of business updates and cross-functional activity
• Creating opportunities for employees to engage with content and each other
• Sustaining engagement beyond the initial platform launch

While Workvivo provided the technology foundation, long-term success depended on driving adoption, embedding new communication behaviours, and maintaining engagement over time.

The Challenge

Connecting a global workforce

With employees working across multiple countries and locations, Blatchford needed a central hub that could unite communications, culture and engagement in one accessible platform.

Moving beyond email

Traditional communication channels were making it harder to share frequent updates without overwhelming employees. The business wanted a more engaging and accessible alternative.

Sustaining long-term engagement

Successful adoption is about more than onboarding. Blatchford needed to ensure employees continued returning to the platform and actively participating over time.

The Innovation

Cocentric partnered with Blatchford to launch and optimise Workvivo, helping the organisation establish a strong foundation for long-term success.

Comprehensive onboarding

A structured onboarding programme ensured employees were successfully activated from the outset, resulting in 94% employee onboarding.

This created a critical mass of users from day one and provided the foundation for sustainable engagement.

Consistent content strategy

Cocentric helped shape a communication approach focused on regular, relevant and engaging content. This resulted in an average of 48 posts a week.

The consistent flow of content ensured employees remained connected to business updates, people stories and organisational initiatives.

Driving two-way engagement

Workvivo became more than a broadcasting channel. Employees actively participated through comments, reactions and conversations, creating a more social communication culture.

Engagement levels included:

• 3,261 comments
• 26,972 reactions

Analytics-led optimisation

Ongoing analytics and platform health checks helped Blatchford continually refine its approach by:

• Monitoring engagement trends
• Identifying high-performing content
• Optimising content strategy
• Sustaining adoption and usage levels over time

"Workvivo allows smaller, and more regular updates than our other channels. Our people feel more connected to the business and to each other but without having an overloaded inbox or needing to wait until All Hands meeting for own-department updates. The powerful search function is also pretty fantastic."

Sarah Lambert
Former Internal Communications Manager, Blatchford

The Result

Workvivo has become a highly adopted communication and engagement platform that continues to deliver value well beyond launch.

Key outcomes

• 94% onboarding rate
• 91% monthly active users
• 72% weekly active users
• 48 posts per week on average

Business impact

Blatchford has reduced its reliance on email and traditional top-down communications while creating a more connected and engaged workforce.

Employees now receive more frequent, accessible updates and have greater visibility into what is happening across the organisation. The platform also provides opportunities for recognition, interaction and knowledge sharing that were previously more difficult to achieve.

Peak engagement moments have generated up to 253 reactions and 31 comments on individual posts, demonstrating strong employee participation across the business.

To learn more about how we can help your business achieve similar success, explore our case studies or get in touch for a consultation. 

Platform: Workvivo
Services: Change Management, Needs Assessment, Technical Deployment, Adoption