Empowerment and education through peer-to-peer internal communications

In the absence of a universally accessible platform, we harnessed the power of people to spread core messages, resulting in a more engaged workforce.

Challenge

Sodexo is one of the world’s largest employers, with over 420,000 people working in 80 countries. The onsite teams provide facilities management services to businesses, hospitals, schools, universities, prisons, the armed forces, oil rigs and at event sites.

Since 1966, Sodexo has shared the ‘Quality of Life’ message to its stakeholders but due to the company dynamics and unique structure, the message struggled to make it to frontline employees.

Our challenge was to engage every employee with the brand, vision and company goal, and to enable employees to be more motivated and connected to Sodexo.

Sodexo has a unique structure of two distinct audiences – managers and frontline employees. With four out of five of the employees unable to access a work email or intranet and a huge reliance on their managers, we quickly decided that a face-to-face approach was the only way to make an impact, utilising the power of Sodexo’s people.

We started the first campaign in the UK – empowering 2,900 managers to become Sodexo ambassadors, responsible for reaching over 31,000 employees. We discovered ‘Quality of Life’ is a concept that is intangible to frontline employees but by using real people we were able to go a step further and discuss real situations, talking about what employees do and how they help their customers improve their lives.

We filmed and interviewed ambassadors talking about how Sodexo improves lives and helps employees achieve their goals. With the gathered material we created employee booklets, prompt cards, quizzes, a creative ‘high five’ exercise, films of customer and client discussions.

The process of empowering and enabling managers to communicate effectively with their teams is now successfully implemented across Sodexo’s global structure of over 420,000 employees.
Sodexo employee campaign

Impact

Delivering the Difference has been rolled out to 95% of Sodexo’s workforce globally, with their vision statement having a 5% increase in positive reception for UK-based employees.

The programme opens employees' eyes to what Sodexo is. Many front-line employees are unaware of the scale of the business and it can really alert people to the opportunities available to them. Sodexo employee