M-Culinary‘s Business Systems Manager – Alexis Strizich shares her thoughts on how an employee communications platform has helped to maintain a connection with all her employees and engage them. Alexis also talks about her experience working with HubEngage. Get firsthand insight into how the platform was used to employee communication for the food service industry boost employee engagement and enhance communication and collaboration. This is a great case study on how to improve employee communication for the food service industry!
Q1. Tell us a bit about M-Culinary Concepts and your role over there.
My name is Alexis Strizich and I work for M-Culinary Concepts, I’m their Business Systems Project Manager. Our company is a little over 20 years old and we are the largest catering company in the south-west.
Q2. What specific need were you trying to address?
Our need was a little bit twofold. One was for our HR department to move away from the typical website of information and do something a little more interactive. A good majority of employees, some being full-time and some being temporary events staff – they never come to our main buildings so they’re a little bit off on their own or on their own island so we really wanted to try and connect all the locations and really give everybody kind of a full view of the company and to feel like they were part of the company even though they weren’t going to that location.
Q3. Why did you decide to work with HubEngage?
The first thing was that it was the most customizable and we could make it look like our own app. It wasn’t of a cookie-cutter type thing. We could really put in our logo, we could design all of the menu icons at the top of the screen you know do all of the coloring and all of that so I think that was one way of making it really be us. We wanted the fun out of it and those competition pieces and employee recognition pieces, we also want the flow of it to be very organized and make sense.
Q4. What is the Rebel Challenge?
Our marketing team came up with this idea of the Rebel Challenge actually it was “We Are Rebels” and it was a five-week challenge that we did so every once a week we came out with five different questions basically or challenges if you will and they were all visual so you had to do what we would say like “maker some art”, “show us virtual happy hour”. It was all virtual, pictures or videos depending on which one we did. “What are you bingeing on Netflix”, people just show their TV or they could show a screenshot from IMDb or whatever it might be. So we left it a little bit up to interpretation – “to be rebels” and really it was fun to just look through everyone’s pictures and what they were doing because we hadn’t seen anybody lately you know it’s a good way to see people in their home and see what they were doing because we weren’t really getting to visit with in person so it was good. And it did really increase engagement and we all got T-shirts!
Q5. How has your experience been working with HubEngage so far?
You are always looking for the cutting edge difference of things to do and so I think that’s important and are very open to those ideas and usually half of the time it’s already on the docket to implemented in the next couple of weeks or months so that’s always nice to have. That close kind of customization even for us even though it feels like it may just be us, I know that it’s a company thing but it is very personal relationship I get a very quick response whenever I have any issue or questions on things that come up so great responsiveness too which is not always the case in many software companies.
