Picture perfect communication and collaboration at HOYTS

By Jodi Paton, Director - People, Performance and Culture, HOYTS Group

Jodi Paton, Director - People, Performance and Culture, HOYTS Group

The HOYTS Group comprises HOYTS Exhibition, our 50 cinemas across Australia and New Zealand, as well as Val Morgan Group, our advertising arm offering solutions for both cinema and outdoor screen advertising. We are the second largest cinema group in Australia with about 25 percent market share.

We currently employee just over 3,000 employees, mostly located in geographically dispersed locations in Australia and New Zealand. Our cinema-based employees are largely part-time crew members who work an average of 15 hours per week, and the majority of those fit into the millennial demographic, with 83 percent between the age of 16 and 24. The seasonal nature of our workforce means that over 90 percent of our workforce does not have a work email address and consequently, these employees are without a direct line of communication outside of their own location.

To truly enable engagement, enhance performance, and find the right balance between technology and the human factor, we needed to find an internal communication solution that was already integrated into the way we live. For a team of largely a millennial demographic, communicating via social channels, and specifically, Workplace by Facebook, was the clear answer.

With single sign-on being fundamental to engagement with the platform, we embarked on a partnership with Enablo, a Workplace partner, to provide a claim code via SMS. Direct integration with our payroll system now allows instant activation and deactivation of employees, and provides a single, consistent interface within which to operate.

Our engagement rates are very high, with 91 percent of our employees on the platform, easily the highest engagement activity we ever embarked on across the organization. Not surprisingly, most of the usage is via mobile. We initially had 80 percent as our goal within 6 months, but very pleasingly we achieved that in 2 months, and embarked on achieving our next goal of 90 percent within 6 months. Almost 12 months in and we are maintaining at that level.

Direct integration with our payroll system now allows instant activation and deactivation of employees and provides a single, consistent interface within which to operate

From an HR Perspective, particularly working in an environment with so many teenage employees, I really expected a lot more red flags, but we have been incredibly lucky to have had very few instances of inappropriate content. Our view on this from the very start was quite simple and echoed our core values — if you are the most senior person in any group, you are the moderator of that content, and you are responsible for ensuring it is work-appropriate. Touch wood, no major issues to date!

Team members across all cinemas can now easily access company updates from HQ in company-wide groups or in the News Feed. They can also get in touch instantly via Workplace Chat. The Workplace mobile app makes it easy for frontline employees to stay in the loop by viewing updates and messages on their mobile devices from wherever they are.

Beyond sharing news and updates, Workplace has become a central collaboration hub. Employees share tips, best practices, and fun ideas through team and cinema wide groups. One of the most popular discussions among these groups revolves around promotional ideas for movie launches and merchandising in cinemas – employees who would otherwise never have had the opportunity to raise their ideas in front of a large audience can now put forward suggestions to the wider community as well as get feedback and encouragement from their colleagues. This allows HOYTS to cultivate a culture of innovation, consistency, and superior customer service across cinemas.

More than improving processes at HOYTS, Workplace has quickly become the go-to channel for employees to learn more about each other. This sense of community has boosted team morale and established a stronger, more productive culture within the business.

Our senior leaders, and particularly our CEO, have a direct line to communicate openly with our broader teams both on what we are working on, as well as having visibility at a site level that we haven’t previously had. It gives a level of transparency to our culture that we had always hoped was there, but seeing the validation of the way our teams work together to truly deliver outstanding experiences for our customers is something we are really proud of.

On a more serious note, the recent attacks in Christchurch allowed us to use Workplace to ensure the safety of our team members. All employees based in Christchurch were sent a notification to mark themselves as safe or ask for assistance during this period. Thankfully all employees were safe and those that did reach out for assistance were very quickly contacted and offered support in an appropriate way. This level of centralised transparency has not only had significant safety enhancements but has truly delivered our fundamental values in a very real way to our team.

We’ve made significant progress, but for us Workplace is the launch pad to evolve the way we use the platform to attract talent, enable our teams through technology and enhance growth through exploring innovative new platforms, automation and AI-based tools to complement the core Workplace has created for us.