Essilor introduces digital workplace, rallying employees worldwide

For more than 170 years, the Essilor Group has put its expertise at the service of good vision in designing, manufacturing and distributing a wide range of lenses and optical equipment to improve and protect eyesight.

Today Essilor Group is the leader in its field, providing solutions seen by professionals and consumers as the reference in the correction, protection and prevention for visual health. With strong brands such as Varilux®, Crizal®, Eyezen™, Xperio®, Transitions®, Bolon® or Foster Grant®, Essilor Group is active across prescription glasses, sunglasses and reading glasses, and in ophthalmic optics equipment.

Employees:

+ 10 000

Services:

HR, Internal Communications

Industries:

Healthcare, Technology

Essilor’s Digital Growth

Essilor is an international and multi-local company with a strong presence in the heart of the optical market that has significantly scaled operations in the past few decades. With a series of business acquisitions, mergers and new partnerships, Essilor Group accelerated its growth, today serving customers from 32 plants, 14 distribution centres, and 490 prescription laboratories and edging facilities worldwide.

Thanks to the implementation of Google Workspace across the group in 2011, Essilor started building its intranet network using Google sites. However, a few years after its launch, the communications team realized the tool was not responding fully to their need to evolve and revolutionize the internal communications assets of the group. The lack of automation and translation systems appeared as a blocker for optimizing the workload of the communications teams. Employees were able to create Google sites easily, but it quickly led to a chaotic arborescence as governance and editorial rights were difficult to manage.

To cope with the increased need to rally huge numbers of employees around the core principles and values of the company, in 2018 the communications team initiated a project to improve communications and digital employee experience at company-level.

Essilor and LumApps

With people being at the heart of Essilor’s culture and values, the communications team decided to look for a solution capable of providing the needed level of collaboration and the ability to rally employees all around the world. To accomplish this, Essilor decided to build a new communication platform with LumApps.

Main objectives

1. Ensure efficient communication by creating a one-stop-shop for all group’s information

2. Increase productivity and foster effective collaboration between teams

3. Help employees find the right resources and connect to business applications

In June 2019, Essilor introduced “We See” their new digital workplace connecting employees across the group. Being home to all business applications and tools, corporate and local news, We See unites subsidiaries and locations under a single platform.

We See is an innovative platform embodying Essilor’s values and providing a personalized employee experience on both a desktop and mobile, ensuring access from the office but also in the field. With an employee-focused structure and navigation, consisting of hot & cold contents and multiple child sites.

We looked for an easy-to-use and more collaborative solution, with the ability to provide personalized content to users, integrate work tools, create communities and facilitate interactions. LumApps was the right solution for us!

Remy Gueguen

IT Service Manager, Personal and Collaborative Solution SI at Essilor

At Essilor, we have a vision for a global digital workplace that enables communication, collaboration and drives business operations on a daily basis. Working with LumApps to build We See was a strategic decision. It allowed us to have a more targeted and personalized content that is more engaging and ease navigation, reaching an objective to give information, tools and communities access for all employees at Essilor.

Vincent Godot

Project director at Essilor Online division

A Platform that Reflects Corporate Values

We See federates Essilor’s employees under a single platform that allows them not only to stay informed on business information but also to network and exchange with each other no matter where they are. It’s a flexible, personalized and mobile platform that reinvents the way employees work and collaborate at Essilor. Built on the pillars of corporate values, We See promotes culture throughout various groups, sites, initiatives and employee collaboration spaces.

Key Use Cases

Innovation

To ensure future business development and leadership in the industry, We See is also home to a Research and Development hub reuniting knowledge and collaboration on various innovation projects. To support personal growth, the global learning and development teams have set up a knowledge platform, to share training modules and provide direct access to all learning & development tools.

#Research&Development #Learning&Development #KnowledgeSharing

Working Together

With more than 160 collaborative communities, colleagues from different facilities and locations can collaborate effectively, easily share knowledge and discuss best practices. Going beyond professional connections, communities are a place for socialization and mutual support. “We’re in this together” community, created during the COVID-19 outbreak, was a place for mutual assistance and solidarity. Employees that felt lonely or had trouble adapting to the new ways of remote working had a space to exchange positive ideas, have a quick chat with colleagues and support each other.

#ProfessionalCommunities #EmployeeSupport

Diversity

Essilor celebrates diversity and inclusion with a number of communities that are a source of inspiration and motivation within the organization. Whether it is the “Diversity & Inclusion”, “Women at Essilor” or “ Women in leadership” community, they all serve as a common space for sharing diverse ideas, points of view, initiatives and success stories.

#Diversity&Inclusion #SocialCommunities

Entrepreneurial Spirit

We See’s evolution and adoption are in the hands of its people. With an open governance approach, employees can actively participate in the creation and management of sites, content and communities to respond to local needs. A governance committee, composed of representatives from the HR, IT and Communications team facilitates decision making, advises contributors on best approaches and provides support with training materials.

#UserExperience #EaseOfUse #UserFriendly #NativeNavigation

Respect and Trust

We See helps to build trust from the very beginning. A dedicated “People” space welcomes newcomers and provides access to key processes and policies. Trust and respect are also promoted through regular articles giving a voice to employees and bringing forward their expertise and success stories. Spaces like “Talent Management Hub”, “Global Reward Hub” and “Voice your View” are there to help Essilor build loyalty and improve employee satisfaction.

#HRPortal #Onboarding #EmployeeRecognition

Why Our Customers Choose Us

Essilor is an international organization present in more than 80 countries worldwide. That is why it’s crucial for us to have a global platform that centralises all corporate and local communications. 2020 was particularly successful, through We See, we managed to federate more than 20,000 employees across different locations, observing a 51% increase of onboarded users by the end of the year.

Audrey Legrand

Associate Director, Corporate Digital Communications at Essilor

Employee engagement is our priority and the unprecedented sanitary crisis is showing us how important it is. We See is a one stop portal of communication for all of us. The communication from the Corporate team and all local communication displayed around the world give each of us the information needed to stay connected to the Group news. In day to day activity, we also use We See to share with managers and all employees “work from home” tips and advice to manage health and well being during this period (i.e. “Heroes Together, our sport and wellness app”). Last but not least, the communities are a good way to communicate with different groups of people and to stay connected with business topics as well as fun events like the “We are all in this together” song challenge.

Christophe Chebac

VP Culture and Engagement at Essilor

Key Results

25,000

onboarded users

21,910

Active users

165

communities

44

platform sites

1.95

page views per session

366

New content items per month

553

new posts per month

5,477

new reactions per month

Essilor’s Future Vision

Being an international and multi-local company, Essilor has a global vision to onboard all non-connected employees and drive daily usage of We See – their digital workplace portal. After the successful onboarding in 2020 of frontline workers in the United States, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Colombia, the company is highly invested in collecting user feedback and scaling the platform across all other locations and business units in Asia-Pacific, Russia and the Middle East.

To achieve their goal of connecting the entire group, Essilor puts an important focus on its field employees. With the help of the mobile application that allows remote access to communities and personalized news content, Essilor can ensure a better employee experience. Thus boosting the adoption of the platform and onboarding employees no matter the type of their work devices.

It’s not only a question of providing the right tool but creating internal awareness and a sustainable network of collaborators and managers to drive platform evolution and cultural change. Essilor’s team is proud of their choice of solution and are now aiming to turn We See into the reference platform that federates the entirety of their existing and future employees.