DPD Ireland Transforms Their Employee Experience with Thrive.App
Here’s how leading delivery company, DPD Ireland, used a Thrive employee app to break down their internal communication barriers, create an inclusive work environment and improve employee engagement for over 650 dispersed employees.
DPD Ireland is one of the leading and largest parcel delivery companies in Ireland with over 35 years’ expertise. Spread across 35 depots throughout the country and handling more than 20million parcels each year, DPD Ireland is constantly focused on meeting the evolving needs of the customer and consumer to deliver the best possible service.
DPD Ireland has over 550 employees working on site in their Head Office and Central Sortation Hub in Athlone in Ireland, spread across different departments and shifts, including drivers regularly on the road delivering parcels. A further 100 employees work from home. Managing such a large and scattered workforce meant communicating and connecting with everyone was a challenge, and DPD Ireland recognised that if they wanted to improve their customer experience, they first needed to improve their employee experience.
Check out our video to see how DPD Ireland achieved employee engagement success with their Thrive employee app or read the full story below.
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Download PDFThe Challenge – Outdated & Disjointed Communications with a Dispersed Workforce
As a 24/7 operation working over six days a week across different shifts, departments, and locations, DPD Ireland found it challenging to communicate with everyone simultaneously. Messages were often being missed between day and night shifts. Additionally, many employees were regularly without readily available access to a computer, such as the drivers and those working in the hub.
Wanting to create an inclusive work environment and break down communication barriers, DPD Ireland sought a solution that would give their employees equal access to communications, updates and opportunities at any time, no matter where they were. The ideal solution would enable them to replace their outdated Intranet with a new digital platform that would also help them to share relevant, clear, and concise communications – something they felt their current content lacked.
The Solution – A Cost-Effective Mobile App with an Intuitive User Experience
DPD Ireland found the perfect partner with the Thrive employee app – a low-cost, easy-to-use mobile app that would replace their old platform with a quicker, more streamlined digital platform. The new platform would improve their employee experience and transform how they communicated with their dispersed workforce.
The Thrive app would enable the company to keep employees both informed and connected through their mobiles anytime, anywhere, with important corporate information and other company updates. The app would also provide them with the inclusivity they wanted as employees wouldn’t need to have an email address or even a computer to be able to access the platform, making it accessible to everyone.
The process of setting up and implementing the Thrive app was smooth and straightforward with the support of Thrive’s Client Success team. Once set up, DPD Ireland found the app to be a very familiar and intuitive user experience that employees could adapt to naturally.
“We wanted to make sure that what we were communicating was relevant and worth sharing. Everyone has a mobile phone, with access to it at the touch of a button. The Thrive app was ideal as it gave us the opportunity to use the platform on peoples’ phones. It was intuitive, real-time, and cost-effective - all fantastic benefits when you're talking about communicating to your employees, and that's the reason we chose it.”
The Outcome – Transforming Company Communications & Employee Engagement
The deployment of DPD Ireland’s customised app, ‘Out of the Box’, has had a huge impact on the employee experience - connecting everyone together, keeping everyone informed in real time and building a positive company culture.
Improving employee engagement
DPD Ireland launched their ‘Out of the Box’ app with a fun pizza box challenge to kickstart employee engagement on the app. The challenge involved pizza boxes being delivered to employees’ homes and encouraged everyone to post their own user-generated content on the app. By simply sharing photos of the pizzas they made with their families, employees were instantly in with a chance of winning a prize for the best DPD pizza!
The company has found that user-generated content is the most popular feature, helping to keep employees engaged, with posts reaching up to 11,000 likes! The sharing of real content that’s relevant and relatable has created a strong sense of involvement and community amongst employees. This has included even those employees not currently working, such as those on holiday, off sick, or on maternity and paternity leave – helping everyone to stay connected and up to date.
Communicating with everyone, everywhere, at the same time
The use of push notifications has enabled the company to inform employees of new content and updates in real time; however, employees are still able to access information whenever and wherever they need to.
Each department has also nominated Communication Champions who share department-specific information with their teams as well as the good news stories. The use of the app to share both business and personal updates has made it the one-stop shop for communication throughout the whole company.
“The app allows us to deliver important business communications, but also good news stories, those moments that matter to employees, such as the baby news and the wedding news. It also boosts employee engagement, morale, and keeps everyone connected. Employees can access information at a place and time that suits them. With push notifications, we’re able to inform employees of new content in real time.”
Building a positive, inclusive & more connected company culture
The user-generated content and social features have been a huge success on the app, with employees regularly liking and commenting on posts – just like on social media! Allowing employees to post directly into the app has given everyone a voice and a sense of belonging.
This in turn has had a huge impact on helping to build a positive working relationship between the senior and leadership teams and the employees working in the hub, the office or on the road. By giving employees a platform where they are encouraged to share content, ask questions, and leave feedback, it has effectively removed the feeling of ‘top-down communications’ and helped to build a culture of unity, inclusion, and trust.
Bringing everyone together on one app
The app has enabled the company to reach everyone and connect them all together in one place, including those working from home, on site and on the road. For the drivers in particular, the app has helped them to feel less on their own and instead more involved with the company and more like part of the team.
It has also been beneficial in reducing the amount of time they previously needed to spend in the office simply to catch up on the updates or communications they had missed while driving. The drivers are now more comfortable being out on the road for longer periods of time, knowing they still have access to their communications through the app with instant updates and push notifications.
Segmenting content for more targeted & relevant updates
With different teams requiring different updates, DPD Ireland have been able to use the app to categorise content specifically by department and topic. Using customisable icons has helped employees distinguish which department content has been shared from or the topic it’s in relation to.
By creating these different user groups, employees are better able to easily search for content that’s relevant to what they need to find, providing them with a more streamlined app experience.
Transforming the onboarding experience for new starts
DPD Ireland have further enhanced their employee experience by giving their new starters access to the app before they start their new roles. This has not only enabled the company to improve their onboarding process: it also gives new staff a great opportunity to learn about DPD Ireland’s vision, culture, core values and their own colleagues. This helps them to feel more connected to the company before they even arrive on site on day one!
Providing an intuitive, user-friendly experience
Thanks to the app’s intuitive and user-friendly design, ‘Out of the Box’ was embraced quickly and naturally by employees. It was a user experience they were already very familiar with, having used similar features on social media and other communication apps. Even employees who viewed themselves as ‘non-technical’ have found it easy to create and publish a variety of media types when sharing a post – everything from text, images, and videos, to polls, downloads, and links!
The ease in which the app could be set up, rolled out and engaged with has meant DPD Ireland have been able to maintain and manage the app without getting any other IT resource involved. This has been a huge benefit that has saved them from wasting valuable time and labour!
“The positive impact of the app implementation has been staff engagement. It’s been getting people talking on their breaks about what's happening within the company and what's happening within people's lives. It's brought us all closer together.”
The Future
DPD Ireland’s ‘Out of the Box’ Thrive app has been in operation for over a year and has been widely embraced by all employees, with many using the app on a regular basis since its launch. Having seen the huge impact the app has had on transforming communications in their Head Office, the company plans to develop the app further in the year ahead. Their next goal is to roll it out to their full Depot network, to continue transforming communications, engagement, and the overall employee experience for all 35 depots across the whole of Ireland.
Want to Learn More?
If your organisation is similar to DPD Ireland and you want to improve your internal communications, talk with a member of our team today to learn more about the Thrive employee app. We're working with many organisations across the UK, Ireland and beyond, to improve both daily operations and communications, as well as employee retention. Book a discovery call today.