Zoom on Zoom: How we connect and celebrate our shared purpose with Workvivo

Most of us want our work to be meaningful. We want to connect with the people we work with, to feel like what we’re doing matters, and to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

Good things happen when people are engaged — both for individuals and for organizations. When comparing employee engagement levels, Gallup found that the best-engaged workforces had 81% lower levels of absenteeism, 43% lower levels of turnover, and 23% higher levels of profitability over the lowest-engaged workforces. This research also suggests that engaged workforces have higher earnings per share and recovered faster from the 2008 recession.

At Zoom, we believe work can be enjoyable, and that people can have strong connections and feel a sense of purpose in what they do. That’s why we use Workvivo. And with Workvivo customers now able to access their employee engagement tools within the Zoom platform, it’s easier than ever for everyone to stay connected with their teammates.

We talk a lot about collaboration at Zoom – how do we get work done together? So much has been developed to allow us to connect and collaborate seamlessly. But one of the biggest missing pieces is this perennial challenge of culture and connectivity. This challenge is top of mind for leaders today. In a study by Gartner, CEOs rated culture as their biggest concern as they go hybrid. The same study found that 40% of HR leaders increased their culture budget since the start of the pandemic.

In April, we welcomed Workvivo — the employee experience platform that helps simplify internal communication, build community, and drive engagement for hybrid and remote employees — to the Zoom family. Built for the digital workplace, the platform helps people engage and connect in a familiar way. 

Whether you’re accessing Workvivo in your web browser, on your mobile app, or directly in the Zoom client, it’s easy to interact with your colleagues and get the information you need, no training needed.

Workvivo helps organizations bring their culture to life digitally — no matter whether their workforce is in the office, the factory floor, a hospital ward, or at home. It’s a natural extension of the Zoom platform, allowing us to bring a full employee experience solution to Zoom and Workvivo customers. Here’s how Workvivo helps employees.

Familiar user-friendly experience 

Often, people’s first reaction to Workvivo is how familiar and social it feels. Whether you access it directly on the Workvivo app or within the Zoom client, all you have to do is click on the Workvivo icon to scroll through your activity feed with the latest news, posts, and shout-outs. 

This new addition to the Zoom platform is designed to give employees an easy way to connect with each other more meaningfully each day. For instance, you can jump off a project wrap-up meeting with a colleague and straight into the Workvivo tab to congratulate them on a job well done for the entire team to see.

Like many of the Zoom products we all know and love, Workvivo was designed to be simple to use and reflect the experiences so many of us have when reading the news or connecting with friends. This means less strain on IT and quicker time to value.

Communicate more effectively

Employees want to be informed about what’s going on in their organization. They want to hear from their peers and from their leadership, learn from each other, and celebrate their wins together. Increasingly, internal communications teams are also embracing new rich media to get messages across using live video streams, podcasts, digital signage, and videos. Central to the platform is the activity feed which is personalized to each individual and allows employees to stay up to date with the latest news and activities.

Alignment to broader missions, goals, and strategies

Employees crave a connection to the purpose and direction of the organization. Workvivo brings this purpose and direction to life and helps employees feel part of the bigger picture by allowing users to tag any piece of content to a company value. This results in daily posts from all corners of the organization with examples of how employees put their company values in action.

Find the information they need, fast

Employees can find critical information in Workvivo when they need it — it’s designed for self-service. Instead of jumping between tools and apps, they can quickly access what’s most important and then get back to work.

Engage on all levels

With Workvivo you can stay engaged by recognizing colleagues, marking important moments like onboarding, running awards, facilitating community spaces, and giving feedback via surveys. Everyone on the Workvivo platform should have a voice and feel free to be themselves by sharing their work, their goals, and their interests. This open communication approach drives adoption and keeps employees coming back to the platform.

Streamline your digital workplace 

Replace your clunky legacy platforms with an easy-to-use experience — whether you access it within Zoom or directly on the Workvivo app — and you’ll have a hub of resources, pages, and integrations all in one place. Many Workvivo customers retire their legacy systems and migrate everything to the Workvivo platform to create one central hub where their employees can access everything they need.

Strong mobile experience

Just like the Zoom platform, Workvivo lets employees easily switch between devices. That especially impacts groups like frontline workers, like nurses in the ER, construction workers, miners, factory workers, and flight attendants. Some 70% of the U.S. workforce works in frontline jobs, yet this section of the workforce is often neglected and excluded from company culture. Workvivo can help organizations keep employees informed and engaged, even if they don’t have company emails.

With its strong consumer-grade UI and mobile-first approach, Workvivo sees high levels of adoption. In contrast to traditional tools, Workvivo has become the “digital heart” of the organization – a term coined by a customer.

The challenge of engaging employees impacts every industry and Workvivo is helping organizations globally to keep staff informed, engaged, and connected. Ryanair CEO Eddie Wilson called it “the fulcrum of all communications within Ryanair.”

Other customers have seen a huge impact of Workvivo on their engagement, communication, and people strategies – TELUS International saw 90% activation rates while CluneTech saw employee referral rates jump 336% and a 30% increase in employee retention. Dollar General, America’s General Store, is currently rolling out Workvivo to its 190,000 employees across its stores and offices. 

Zoomies were also keen to experience the Workvivo platform for themselves, and a project team quickly came together to roll it out across the company.

Just weeks after launching internally, Zoomies are enjoying recognizing colleagues, marking milestone moments, and sharing their interests on Workvivo. The team is already seeing the impact with hundreds of posts and shout-outs across the platform, as well as thousands of comments and likes in the first month.

Zoom leadership also celebrated the launch, leading by example with video messages to encourage Zoomies to embrace Workvivo.

Recognizing each other

Out of all the Workvivo features, Zoomies were most excited to have a place to recognize all the efforts of their colleagues. In the Zoomie Recognition Space, colleagues can give shout-outs to their peers on a job well done and tag the shout-out with one of our company values. 

Marking important moments with a rich multimedia experience

Workvivo helps everyone feel included and informed — whether they’re fully remote or hybrid — about events happening around the organization through all types of media, from live streams and podcasts to TV and photo galleries. And it’s easy for everyone to create this type of content.

“Not only does Workvivo connect us to what’s familiar in a modern and fresh way, it makes it easy for teams like ours to be creative in the way we connect employees to our mission, vision, and purpose,” said Taylor White, internal communications specialist at Zoom. “The options for types of content are endless.”

During Zoom’s Perspectives event earlier this year in Palo Alto, Zoomies were able to get a feel for the event through videos and posts from attendees. 

Celebrating our values

Oftentimes a company’s goals and values are relegated to a wall in the HQ or a slide in an onboarding deck — it can be difficult to bring those values to life in a meaningful way. On Workvivo, employees can tag any piece of content to a company value. This creates curated feeds of content, so people can see how their colleagues are representing each value in real life.

“It’s been great to see these values come to life on Workvivo with posts from all corners of the world and the business. Zoomies aren’t just telling us how they care for their teammates or customers, but showing us, with photos and videos,” said Matthew Saxon, chief people officer at Zoom. “Now that Workvivo is deeply integrated into the Zoom experience, it’s even easier to see Zoomies’ updates on how they’re living our values of care.”

Until recently, Zoomies were using Zoom Team Chat channels heavily to talk about everything from dad jokes to global travel. The move to Workvivo provided an opportunity for these communities to live more permanently and operate asynchronously. Zoom Team Chat became the place to drive immediate connection and collaboration through chats, meetings, and whiteboards. Workvivo became the place to foster engagement and community between teams and colleagues across Zoom.

“We often get questions about whether Workvivo competes with chat applications like Slack, Zoom Team Chat, or Microsoft Teams,” said John Goulding, Workvivo’s founder. “Workvivo integrates with and complements these tools, which are really important for day-to-day communication and getting work done, but which can at times be noisy.”

Some open Team Chat channels moved to Workvivo, including “Dog Lovers,” “Zoom Soccer Talk,” and employee resource groups, communities that encourage diversity and inclusivity of different cultures, backgrounds, and abilities.

“If you need to ask where to join a meeting or how to share a doc, you can send a message on Team Chat but if you’ve won a deal or completed a project and want to celebrate that, you go to Workvivo,” John said.

So often, it takes time for employees to fully adopt and understand a new tool or platform. But Zoomies loved Workvivo immediately.

“The fact that we saw so many Zoomies jump in and start sharing stories and celebrating each other is a real testament not only to what Workvivo can do but how easy it is to use,” said Leo Boulton, head of competitive market strategy at Zoom. “It’s easy to go to the Workvivo platform inside the Zoom client throughout the day to search for content, post updates, and see so much positivity in posts from colleagues. Now that Zoom and Workvivo have been brought together, I’m looking forward to seeing how the experience continues to evolve over time — we’re just getting started.”

Visit the Workvivo blog to learn more about this powerful employee engagement platform on Zoom.

Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in August 2023 and updated in November 2023 to include the latest Workvivo updates on the Zoom platform.