Fireside Chat: Onboarding & Ongoing Employee Engagement Plan

“If you build it, they will come.”

Despite what Kevin Costner and the makers of Field of Dreams would have you believe, when it comes to getting your employees to adopt a new SaaS platform, “just building it” actually isn’t enough.

Chances are, your team already has more apps on their phone than they can keep up with. So how do you convince them to adopt another one? Fortunately our rockstar Customer Success team here at Beekeeper is here for our customers every step of the way. They work tirelessly to provide customers with insider tips on how to get their employees excited to use their new workplace tool.

That’s why we came up with quarterly fireside chats.

What Are Beekeeper Fireside Chats?

Fireside chats actually have roots in politics, not marketing. The OG of fireside chats was Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) who was known for his series of evening radio addresses. These fireside chats enabled Roosevelt to speak with the American public inside their homes, and develop a familiarity with the people that no other president had been able to achieve until then.

Nowadays, fireside chats are commonly used to reach out and connect on a personal level with customers and prospects.

At Beekeeper, we regularly use fireside chats to share best practices in internal communications — and more importantly — bring our customers together to create a sense of community where they can share success stories and trade tips on how to leverage Beekeeper within their organizations.

Here, we’ll recap our favorite tips, lessons, and internal communication secrets shared in our latest Beekeeper fireside chat.

Employee Onboarding Tips

The first topic we covered in our Onboarding and Ongoing Employee Engagement Strategies fireside chat was how to successfully onboard new employees into the Beekeeper platform, and ensure that they’re getting the most out of their team communication platform from day one.

Here are some key onboarding processes and tips from our Customer Success team.

Small Group Trainings

Conduct small group onboarding training sessions with new hires to show them how to use the Beekeeper platform and review the types of internal communication that your company shares on Beekeeper.

Pro tip: Have new team members create a “newbee” post on their first day so the rest of the company can learn a little about who they are and welcome them to the team. This is actually something that we do here at Beekeeper. In fact, here’s my own newbee post!

Customize Your Quick Start Guide

Beekeeper customers have access to our Quick Start Guide — a resource which can help guide your team members learn the ins and outs of the Beekeeper platform. While the Quick Start Guide is a great resource on its own, we recommend taking it to the next level by customizing your guide with your company’s own branding.

Provide your own messaging to your new team members that explains why Beekeeper is a great communication platform, and how it will help them in their specific role.

Generate Buzz with Branded Visuals

Continue to remind your new (and existing) employees about Beekeeper through reinforcing the benefits of using the platform around the workplace.

This can be done through Digital Signage (a Beekeeper feature) which allows you to display content on a Smart TV via a Chromebit. You can also display your company’s Beekeeper Streams, so everyone can stay up to date on what’s being shared in the app.

You can also always turn to good old fashioned flyers that can be posted in highly visible areas of the workplace reminding employees that Beekeeper is there to help them “bee successful.”

Strategies for Continuous Engagement

Once you have all your employees successfully logged into Beekeeper, how do you keep the momentum going? The next part of our fireside chat focused on ensuring continued success with Beekeeper long after you’ve rolled it out to your team.

Appoint Champions

Lean on managers, department heads, and anyone else who is just really excited about Beekeeper and wants to share their unbridled enthusiasm for their favorite employee app with the rest of the team.

We’ve even seen some of our customers create committees responsible for monitoring employee engagement on Beekeeper. These informal committees also work on coming up with fresh new ideas for content to keep their team members coming back for updates on a regular basis.

Reach Out to Employees Who Have not Logged In to the Platform

Send a list of users who have yet to log in to Beekeeper to managers and department heads so they can personally follow up with these individuals. That way they can make sure they have everything they need to utilize their employee communication platform to the fullest.

On your Beekeeper dashboard, sort users according to who has never logged in to the system. From there, you can export that list to Excel, and then send it out to your managers for follow up.

Keep Fresh Content Flowing in Beekeeper Streams

Give your employees a reason to keep coming back and logging in to Beekeeper by providing them with fresh, new content in their Beekeeper Streams.

Pro tip: We recommend as a best practice that your Beekeeper Streams should have at least one new post per day to keep your team engaged.

Try assigning different teams or departments to “own” Stream content one day per week so the content being shared represents a variety of viewpoints within the company.

Remind those responsible for updating content in your Streams that they can always utilize the “Schedule Post” feature to plan and schedule content ahead of time.

Get Company Leaders Involved

Employees will follow the example set forth by the company’s upper management. If they see their CEO, COO, and other C-level executives are taking time to share their thoughts, feedback, and praise on Beekeeper, they’ll be more likely to log in on a regular basis to see what’s new.

Beekeeper Gamification Ideas

A little friendly competition is a great way to get your team fired up, excited, and motivated. Here are some easy ways you can incorporate gamification into Beekeeper to motivate your employees to use the app.

Managers Competition

Encourage managers to promote Beekeeper within their teams, and turn it into a challenge. Create an internal competition to make it interesting. For example, whoever has the highest activation rate on their team by a certain date wins a prize.

Company Values

Ask employees to share something they’ve done recently that reflects the company’s values. Whoever gets the most “likes” from other employees on their post wins a prize!

Achievement of the Week

Ask employees to publicly recognize other team members in the Beekeeper app for a job well done. Have them label the posts with the official competition name tag, and make sure to use the @ symbol so the person knows they’re being recognized!

Customer Success Story — Flagger Force

Flagger Force, a short-term traffic control company, has been using Beekeeper for a little over a year, and they’ve had some seriously impressive engagement stats. They have about 500 working sites across the Mid-Atlantic with ~1,600 employees who work mostly in the field. Getting up-to-date information in a timely manner is critical — which is why they turned to Beekeeper.

Currently, Flagger Force enjoys a Beekeeper adoption rate of 78% among their employees, with a user stickiness rate at an impressive 90%. Clearly they’re doing something right!

Here’s how Flagger Force has been so successful with the Beekeeper platform.

Careful Content Planning, Campaigns, and Branding

Flagger Force has created a variety of content Streams within their Beekeeper platform that are centered around different topics. They have a Stream for jobs, training, safety and operations, and more. Each Stream has a clear purpose, and content posted by the company is carefully executed to ensure that it’s on-brand, and useful.

Flagger Force frequently leverages Beekeeper’s Campaigns feature. Campaigns are usually created by their Marketing department, or requested by other departments who have something to share with their teams. For the most part, Campaigns are sent out through Flagger Force’s marketing department to make sure the messaging is on-brand, and also to make sure the cadence of their Campaigns is consistent, but not overwhelming.

Here are just a few tactical ways that Flagger Force uses Beekeeper in their internal communications.

Free t-shirts to employees the first time they log in to the Beekeeper app
A carefully curated editorial calendar
Branded content Campaigns
A Water Break Stream where employees can virtually socialize with each other
Field champions who promote the platform to their teams and create their own posts and Campaigns
Prizes tied to Campaigns

In 2018, Flagger Force logged a staggering 33,000 posts by their users! That’s a lot of engagement!

Overall, Flagger Force attributes their success on the Beekeeper platform to three primary initiatives.

Consistent messaging
Strong procedures in place
Regular analytics reporting and monitoring of employee engagement

If you’d like some insight on how to boost your employees’ engagement in the Beekeeper app, ask your Customer Success Manager to save you a spot at our next fireside chat!

Fireside Chat: Onboarding and Ongoing Employee Engagement Strategies

What Are Beekeeper Fireside Chats?