What was Byron's challenge?
Since its launch in 2007, Byron has been at the forefront of Britain's premium burger revolution. The restaurant chain grew to encompass 21 locations, employing nearly 700 front-line restaurant staff alongside its corporate team members.
The team looked for a better way of communicating with each other, and a single space from where their dynamic company culture could be celebrated. As things were, 99% of their frontline staff were email less, and comms took place primarily on WhatsApp.
The team at Byron were aware that the most essential strategy for success in the wake of 2020 was building an even stronger culture and ensuring that every single person felt valued, engaged and focused. Whilst there was a strong sense of connection to the brand, the lack of a single communications platform meant that several versions of the Byron culture had developed over the years. They chose Workplace from Meta as the platform to unite their teams, celebrate success and drive change through the business.
It was also vital for the team to integrate their HR system information into Workplace by Meta and enable staff to claim their accounts intuitively. To achieve this, they collaborated with our digital consultants, aiming to launch Workplace to their Byron team by November 2020.
Innovation
Working with Cocentric, Byron embarked on a project which sought to:
- Make day-to-day work easier for their growing team
- Solve communications across the organisation
- Bring their company culture together
- Provide better onboarding and offboarding
- Ensure their majority frontline workforce could self-serve.
This would be the biggest change for communication at Byron in their history, and there was a real sense of anticipation amongst the team.
The strategy involved three areas:
- Workplace from Meta to provide a step-change in communications
- Connect by Cocentric to seamlessly integrate between Workplace and Fourth (Their HR System)
- Seamless account activation and self-serve for their frontline workforce with the Activation Portal.
Once the vision had been set, a solid communications plan was developed for both pre-launch and launch day itself.
Additionally, a team of Workplace Champions was formed to embed the launch of workplace across the team. The Champions were trained on Workplace, and the benefits it would bring Byron. They were also armed with a selection of powerful assets on making the most of Workplace, Workplace Do’s and Don’ts and video content which they could share too.
Engagement is better than ever – already we can see numbers going up in active posts and comments, or liking. Everyone is posting, our CEO, directors, GMs, waiters, chefs. Absolutely everyone is getting involved!
Ellie Wardlaw
People Co-ordinator, Byron
Results
Byron had greatly anticipated their Workplace launch, along with Connect by Cocentric, the Activation Portal and the benefits it would bring to their team, particularly against the challenging backdrop of the UK lockdown and hospitality closures.
The team at Byron had a laser focus on account claim at launch, and the result of this was an incredible 70% account claim in the first day. This statistic was celebrated across social media and the team was praised for a supreme effort in driving account claim in the first 24 hours.
In the first week, six of their sites had achieved 100% account claim – a remarkable feat given that the business shut midweek due to a second period of UK furlough.
Plans for the future are exciting, with Workplace expanding to include a variety of different groups for the teams to become involved with. There are all-company groups that cover a wide range of topics – from Byron news, Workplace tips and tricks to Customer Success Stories and Byron Careers – a place for internal job postings.
Fundamental for the team is making Workplace the hub for ideas and thoughts from anyone, regardless of what they do at Byron. In this way, Workplace will become essential as the business begins 2021 and beyond, cultivating business ideas from within the platform.
