The result

More engaged and connected staff and a more inclusive communications culture. Hundreds of workers are now using Reach daily from wherever they are based, connecting, posting, and engaging via mobile or desktop.

Yorkshire Tea – a tradition of valuing people evolves into the digital age Is there anything better than settling down with a comforting cup of tea?

In the business world, excellent staff engagement and internal communication comes close...especially for tea merchants who embraced employee communications app ‘LiveTiles Reach.’

Yorkshire Tea are one of the biggest tea manufacturers in Europe with a reputation for creating a truly excellent product with a focus on craft, quality and valuing their people. The company has a network of production plants in both the UK and India and their tea’s reputation is among the best in the world. Yorkshire Tea also have spin-off businesses in the retail market, including bakehouses and coffee shops.

The client’s primary means of communicating with their staff was via email and a couple of employee newsletters. One of their key pain points was the wasting of people’s time and resources, not knowing if these outdated forms of communication were getting through to the diverse groups of employees and the feeling that important cohorts of colleagues were not being reached or included in the workplace comms and culture.

How to improve food and beverage employee engagement while retaining the brand

While elegant Yorkshire Tea shops and quality products remind us of the simple pleasures in life, they needed to be able to communicate effectively with all employees, whether at headquarters, on a factory floor in India or a retail outlet in Leeds. Added to the challenge was the fact that many of the frontline employees had no digital identity within the Yorkshire Tea corporate ecosystem.

With so many different touch points to consider, Yorkshire Tea needed a solution to easily communicate with their staff, no matter their role, location or device. To achieve this, they set out to embrace innovative and easy-to-use internal communications technology.

Yorkshire Tea also recognized that spending so much time in email systems meant their communications were very one-way. They were very keen to move onto a much more advanced solution, something that was mobile-first, so they could move away from their dependence on email and create a two-way dialogue with their staff.

Finding the perfect solution with LiveTiles Reach

It was clear that Yorkshire Tea needed a simple, portable means of reaching staff. The LiveTiles employee communications solution ‘Reach’ was the perfect match. ‘Reach’ is a mobile-first internal comms solution delivering targeted content through dedicated channels, and multilingual capability.

What’s more, ‘Reach’ seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Teams and Office 365 or it can also be standalone. This is ideal for including all the frontline colleagues who may not have M365 licences assigned to them. Reach’s simplicity and ability to unite the workforce is its unique selling point.

The Result: Engaged, connected staff with LiveTiles Reach

More engaged and connected staff and a more inclusive communications culture. Hundreds of workers are now using Reach daily from wherever they are based, connecting, posting, and engaging via mobile or desktop.

Staff are innovating, creating events, participating in polls, an employee of the week page, and their own buy and sell. They also have their own ideas for innovative additions to Reach. The employee voice at Yorkshire Tea has never been more included or amplified. This massive increase in digital workplace participation has also positively impacted the evolution of company culture as Yorkshire Tea continue to accelerate their digital transformation journey.

After six months of using Reach the Yorkshire Tea comms team is hugely satisfied with the solution and how it’s benefiting the business. An off-shoot of the project was a digital paper being published monthly for and by employees, driving more effective corporate and bottom-up content and conversations. A survey was carried out with staff and leadership teams, asking for their thoughts on how the new Reach solution was benefiting the organization. Unanimously, the responses were incredibly positive.

Their "Employee of the Week" page, and a buy and sell trading page have become extremely popular. Polls and events have also really taken off and brought greater connectivity to the company culture and corporate communications.

Yorkshire Tea goal was to get around 1500 staff actively using Reach daily. Currently, around 900 staff are using Reach, and user numbers are rising steadily every day.

The Comms team at Yorkshire Tea has gathered plenty of ideas for new additions to ‘Reach’ that could be implemented going forward, such as a livestream function, a live Q and A function, and the ability to attach photos to news posts.