How Legoland Parks & Resorts built an employee app for real-time comms
With building at its core, it should come as no surprise that Legoland Parks & Resorts created a technology framework to keep employees up to date. It earned a Grand Prize for Best Use of Technology in Ragan’s Employee Communications + Top Places to Work Awards.
“If you build it, they will come,” or so Legoland Parks & Resorts believed, much like the movie “Field of Dreams.” In the middle of the pandemic, Legoland Parks & Resorts sought the help of Speakap to implement an employee app for its entire workforce, including over 5,000 frontline workers without a company email address, desktop or phone.
The internal communications platform’s goals included: streamline real-time communications between office and frontline workers through mobile and web; ensure that on-the-go staff had easy access to events, documents, videos and images; facilitate the sharing of appropriate information and questions between teams, locations and tiers of the organization; and alert employees of breaking company news through timely push notifications with read acknowledgements.
Speakap worked alongside the Legoland project team to create materials for employee introduction to the app and associated training activities. It was a quick, four-week turnaround for the launch so the teams needed to create stages for the project to ready for launch. Those included:
Set Up: Brickbuzz (the name chosen by employees for the app) was released as a native app for iOS and Android, available for tablets and desktop devices. The app is 100% white labeled and makes no reference to Speakap.
Through an HR sync, which Speakap created with Ceridian, an API connection automatically assigned employees to their respective location, department and job role within the app, connecting team members to the right colleagues as determined by the organization’s structure, without manual setup by app administrators.
Twelve 30-minute training sessions were held via Zoom for Florida, New York and California to engage managers, specifically those who work on the frontlines. Managers were critical in helping onboard extended team members use of Brickbuzz.
Infographics and launch videos helped get employees excited about the launch.
Launch: On Sept. 15, all 5,000 Legoland employees were invited to join Brickbuzz. Head office employees received the invitation through their corporate email address. The frontline associates received it through their private email addresses or via text message. Some even received a printed invite with a QR code. Almost 80% of employees were activated within the 4-week timeframe, and 87.1% have activated to date.
Additionally, before the launch, the company enabled a rewards and recognition integration with Kazoo HR, making their content and features easily accessible for Legoland employees through the Brickbuzz app.
Learn & Improve: In the first month, weekly project management calls between stakeholders continued. Then, in the months to follow, Legoland deployed employee surveys to get feedback, discussed the analytics, held quarterly business reviews and rolled out new app features such as language translation.
The Employee Communications Awards 2022 are now accepting entries – submit your entries before Aug. 19!
