Honest Burgers – Connect by Cocentric and Workplace from Meta

When Cocentric launched Workplace from Meta at Honest Burgers, they had 100% account activation in just over a week. Since then, Workplace has become embedded into day-to-day work life. At restaurant level, it is the go-to place for all important information, whilst at a leadership level it has given Honest founders Tom Barton and Phil Eeles a platform to speak direct to their teams on live video.

So what happens when business as usual comes to a halt in a nationwide lockdown?

We recently spoke with Daniel Davis, Engagement and Communication Manager at Honest Burgers,
to talk about Workplace, Honest culture and the changing face of communication during furlough.

Making The Change To Working From Home

At Honest Burgers, we’ve always been big advocates of Workplace from Meta

Daniel – Honest Burgers

Right from the start, Workplace has been central to our ‘Stay Connected’ strategy.

On the day we announced our restaurants would close, our founders Tom and Phil were on live video through Workplace to everyone in Honest, telling them exactly what was going on, exactly why it was happening. Three quarters of our team were watching live, reacting and commenting in real time in a completely open dialogue with our leadership.

We’re very familiar with using Workplace video for keeping our people up to date, it’s something that everyone in our Exec Team has used to communicate with the team. Being on furlough, we’re now using video on a daily basis for live updates on an ever-changing situation.

With all the live content we’ve been doing we’ve seen that sometimes you don’t need to have a long thought-out comms plan, with Workplace you just get on live video and you reach people in real time.

A lot of the feedback we’ve been getting has demonstrated a real humility and humanity to doing this. It’s allowed our leaders to be sitting in their homes, and communicating to the entire organisation, removing any hierarchy.

A Real Sense Of Community

One of the most amazing things about the furlough is that all our staff engagement has grown organically so much further than anyone anticipated.

We were in the process of launching a new social initiative for our team – Honest Community. With furlough, what could have taken a year to land has taken a month. What that means in practical terms is people are creating new groups, sharing content all the time.

I think the period of furlough has definitely allowed the entire business to look at what is important to us, what matters. The main thing that has come out of this period for us is that community is really important to people. Connection and being together even when we are separated is so valuable.

We’ve got a gamers group, we’ve got a beauty salon, we’ve got the Honest Pub where we host pub quizzes, there’s guitar lessons, a bingo night. We’ve got the Honest family cookbook, where people have been sharing recipes and photos of all the things they’ve been cooking; and Tom our founder has been running twice-weekly HIIT classes – it’s incredible.

Connecting Our People To One Another

Workplace has allowed us to have visibility on every single thing that has happened, in real time.

When we launched, it was about ensuring that all the cross functional working groups were set up, making sure restaurant groups were set up automatically and making sure all the administration around those groups was done automatically.

New starters, and leavers are added to these Workplace groups through Connect by Cocentric, which is integrated with our HR platform, Fourth.

To already have something that is so effective in our business to allow us to look after our community and also keep people engaged, informed and to allow them to continue to be connected to one another, it’s been absolutely vital.