Update and Iterate: How Refreshing Our Digital Workplace Reinvigorated Our Company Culture

by Rachel Foster, Corporate Communications Analyst at Paycor

When your company is experiencing rapid growth, there is a mindset to do more, and to do it fast. And often, when you move fast and things break, the instinct is to scrap what’s broken in favor of installing something new and more robust in its place. Or, to continue to build on existing infrastructure, ignoring the problems or trying to fix them with new, unnecessary features.

We do things differently at Paycor.

We’re never satisfied with “good enough,” which is why we’re one of the top payroll and HR SaaS companies, serving medium- to small-sized organizations. We have 1,600 employees countrywide with about 900 located in two office buildings in Cincinnati — one of which is our headquarters. The rest of our team is remote or in satellite offices around the US. We recently outgrew our first building and are still experiencing rapid growth.

To support this rapid growth, we implemented a digital workplace with Igloo in 2012. We wanted to create a central destination where everyone could communicate and interact with one another, see each other’s photos, and feel like all employees are part of the same family. This hub was intended to build a cohesive sense of community as more Paycor offices popped up around the country.

Give your employees their own online space. They’ll naturally reinforce company and team culture.

Yet, something as vital as a digital workplace can easily get set on a backburner when the company is focused on growing and building out its own products and services. But we realized a platform like Igloo could support our company’s growth, help create a robust company culture, reinforce our branding, and share and organize company documentation. While we were hitting the mark on some of our goals, engagement wasn’t where we wanted it to be.

Leveraging Our Frustration as a Catalyst for Change

I started at Paycor in a different department, and it was frustrating to use our workspace within that role. I couldn’t find the documents or tools I needed to get my job done. But when I stepped into my current role, I knew I could finally do something about it.

I realized our digital workplace needed to become more of an employee experience platform; a central destination that would connect a variety of applications and enable employees to interact with their colleagues, share updates, and avoid blasting emails. It would be a place you can post that celebratory retirement photo of your colleague, or advertise and recruit volunteers for community events. It would also be a place where you can recognize your colleagues and get informed about upcoming product updates. With those goals in mind, we decided to take action.

We started with a full company survey, where we asked for people’s feedback on the workspace. More than half of the company responded, which proved to us that people used the site and saw the potential in our workspace and cared about improving it. We heard complaints, so our goal was to find the root of the problem. We wanted to know whether it was the search functionality, the appearance, the site structure, or even a mixture of these issues.

We then explored the key, repetitive messages even further in focus groups, asking whether this was indeed the best platform for us. We heard it looked somewhat “clunky” and didn’t match the clean, modern look we had built in our headquarters.

We learned if we altered the layout, enhanced some of the search functionality by properly tagging files as well as cleaning up outdated files, it could feel like a new site. So, the design and the search functionality became our two main objectives.

With our goals in hand, we needed to decide if we would refresh our existing workspace or start from scratch with a different technology and vendor. But as we looked around at the other options in the market, switching to another vendor just didn’t make sense. Our issues were not with the platform, but how we were using it. Igloo’s capabilities were strong, and we’d built an incredible partnership with the company over the years.

We took the feedback and decided to refresh our Igloo digital workplace. From there, we kicked off a refresh project with Igloo in July 2017. We met with Igloo to do a walk-through of the Community Workbook, where they asked about the feedback we gathered, our key objectives, and our brand assets and guidelines to define the look and feel. Then, we got to work and put it all together.

Modern and Functional: The Finished Product

In January 2018, we launched, and our refreshed workspace has never looked more exciting. The finished product matches our headquarters, with the same colors and modernized appearance. It mirrors our brand and connects with new developments we’ve done. We’re working to keep that consistent as we move forward. The company’s language has also changed slightly, so we also addressed that in the refresh. For example, we used to simply call our departments “departments” and now we call them “business units.”

Organization-wise, the employee resource group pages were inconsistent and disorganized. Now, they’re properly labelled in what we call “the social zone,” which is much more accessible. It’s also easy to add new pages to this area of the portal, which will ensure we stay organized…

Read the full story here.