How Pizza Hut embraced social collaboration using Yammer

Office 365 takes a starring role in restaurant redevelopment project

Pizza Hut has managed to persuade 3,000 of its 8,000 UK employees to begin using enterprise social collaboration platform Yammer as a serious business tool.

That's a standout achievement for the firm, as most of its workforce are digital natives, all too wise to badly executed attempts at engagement.

At the same time, introducing a robust collaboration platform is essential for a company in which the majority of staff work in scattered restaurants rather than head office.

Pizza Hut's restaurant business was acquired from its previous owner YUM! Brands by specialist restructuring investor, private equity firm Rutland Partners, back in 2012. The promise then was to turn around a struggling business - the ongoing project now is to revamp the 280 restaurants.

Gareth Hopley, head of communication at Pizza Hut, believes social collaboration may be one of the key factors in moving forward.

"We'd tried to [set up social collaboration] ourselves with our own internal bespoke social media platform called HutSpace," Hopley tells Computing.

"It worked really well and opened up the world of social comms to the brand really nicely. We built it up effectively, but didn't make it as slick as it should have been, and with a workforce of mostly 18-25 year olds, who are used to Twitter and Facebook on a daily basis, we were offering them something substandard."

But Hopley believes that while it lacked sophistication, HutSpace proved the case for collaboration software.

"The way it was being used demonstrated that value," he explains.

"So we had a choice - put dramatic investment into the site to give it relevance, but end up back where we started every two years in redevelopment; or find an external supplier to host, run and maintain it for us; or go out and find somebody who has a sophisticated tool already in place that comes with ongoing development in the background in the way that Facebook, for example, already regenerates itself."

Yammer was the choice, and it was deployed in January 2015.

"It had the ability to interact with other Office 365 tools, and I've been delighted ever since," says Hopley.

"Before this we used Office 365 for SharePoint and email functionality anyway, and the need and desire to bring in Yammer made us start using it more effectively."

Pizza Hut integrated Yammer into Office 365. The Office 365 landing page became, Hopley explains, an environment almost like a traditional intranet - with the added benefit of external accessibility from anywhere, and on any device with an internet connection.

Usernames and email addresses were linked, with the employee's unique employee number serving as the password.

Hopley and his team found that the ecosystem could be used for more than communication duties - such as allowing employees to bring up shift rotas on their phones. Mobile phones now account for over 70 per cent of access channels to Pizza Hut's employee digital environment.

"In the past, a manager would print out a rota and pin it on a notice board, and now it's all accessible through the internet," says Hopley.

Hopley says that the idea behind the Yammer project was to make employees want to visit, not because they had to.

"[It's about having] something that's of benefit to me, something with content and cultural value," he says.

"I had a clear vision in my head of how the site would be. The thing we need is an engaged workforce. You won't get that if all you get is people telling you what you should be doing every day. It becomes top-down heavy. The key word is engagement. They'd go there because they feel valued and their voice and opinion counts. It had to be very well connected to our culture - ‘The best of me, the best of us'."

Something must be working, because since January, 3,000 of Pizza Hut restaurants' 8,000 employees are now serial users of Yammer - including the MD, who is apparently a keen poster.

"It's a space where [our values] can live and breathe," says Hopley.

"We don't recognise people with sales numbers, we recognise people through Yammer. So creating and sharing a space where people can [achieve] that is what we planned here."

Hopley says the Pizza Hut board frequently sit in a meeting and post a question relevant to the discussion straight on to Yammer, resulting in instant answers from all over the company.

"All sorts comes through. And we always said we'd never censor the site," he adds.

"There are some extreme exceptions, of course - if you wouldn't be prepared to say it to a person in a restaurant or out loud," he warns.

Hopley describes Yammer as "a platform to explore further development in Microsoft's other offerings in Office 365". But he's also keenly aware that the social network needs to be used "to the point where [it's] habitual and not just new and shiny".

"You can sometimes move too fast, but we're not at that point yet. The rate of growth is great, and we need to maintain that as we continue to grow and move forward."

By January 2016, Hopley is aiming to have "established a point where we don't remember not having it".

"I'm 37 years old - I've had to learn social media," he says.

"It arrived in the noughties and I had to decide to adopt it. But it's no longer a thing to discover - it's just life now. If you want to engage with that age, you have to talk to them in a language they'll understand," concludes Hopley.