How Devoteam delivered a cultural revolution through employee advocacy with Haiilo

A leading EMEA IT consultancy with over 25 years of know-how and expertise, Devoteam is dedicated to helping organizations modernize their businesses. Home to more than 10,000 employees across 18 countries, the Paris-based company is seeing rapid growth while focusing strongly on digital strategy, platform technology and cybersecurity.

Soon after joining Devoteam in 2016, current Marketing Director Camilla Poulsen was exploring new ways to elevate the brand’s messaging and content as she readied the launch of what today has become a model and rock-solid employee advocacy program.

The majority of Devoteam employees and consultants are naturally focused exclusively on the company’s partners and customers. So, it had previously been challenging to get the brand’s messaging out in front of new potential clients and even out in front of future employees about the benefits of bringing their talents to Devoteam.

Haiilo as an easy, push-of-a-button employee advocacy solution

Since partnering with Haiilo in 2016, the ease of Haiilo’s employee advocacy solution was exactly what Camilla had been pursuing and has stood the test of time ever since, where they’re closing in on a 17 million-reach benchmark.

The initiative started small with a focus on the company’s Denmark market. Soon after seeing the results, there was interest from other markets, and it has since grown into 15 of Devoteam’s 18 country locations embracing the Haiilo platform.

“Seven years ago, the idea of employee advocacy was in its infancy, with very few business leaders knowing what it was, but for me, it was the word of mouth going digital, and that was really what I wanted,” says Camilla. “I was looking for an easy, push-of-a-button solution for our employees, which is what Haiilo offers us.”

Bursting with IT consultants who are true experts in their specific lines of work, Devoteam’s marketing group can leverage their expertise in the form of producing thought-leadership articles and videos and then easily sharing those through Haiilo. Soon after introducing Haiilo, Devoteam saw immediate results still taking on a snowball effect today. They are currently averaging nearly 20 new posts published to Haiilo each week.

“The simplicity of Haiilo has made all the difference for us, with the ability to offer our enthusiastic employees new content supported with pre-written teaser text, enabling our brand to develop just by being active on social media,” says Camilla. “I had a lot of consultants, even management level CEOs, that were previously not active on social media at all, let alone promoting our brand there, and Haiilo’s platform makes it effortless for them.”

Embracing a brand ambassador solution that unified a cultural revolution

While Devoteam is using Haiilo to promote its messaging around the company’s digital strategy offering, technology know-how and cybersecurity expertise, they’re also tapping into talent acquisition and are reaping the benefits of leveraging authentic content around their work and employees.

They’ve seen first-hand that it’s organically helped attract new talent to the organization.

“When an outside partner or future talent sees one of the videos from a consultant in our company, it’s very powerful and trustworthy content,” says Camilla. “Just sharing our day-to-day updates or communicating simple bits from the office all helps.”

Although they do curate some third-party content in the form of newspaper stories or blog posts that involve Devoteam or their industry, the vast majority of material that they’re posting to Haiilo is their own created content and then using the Haiilo platform to leverage that content through their employees.

“After all, I think our biggest assets are our employees,” says Camilla. “Both future colleagues and partners want to see real people, which goes deeper than marketing; it’s about our current people and future people, and Haiilo is doing a lot to support our talent acquisition and human resources simply by enabling us to share authentic and trustworthy stories easily.”

With employee engagement comes renewed exposure and thought leadership

While the journey began as an employee advocacy program, it became clear that something larger was happening where Devoteam’s internal culture was taking a monumental leap forward.

By naturally having employees expose the company’s authentic content to their own networks, new prospects and existing customers, they were also quickly realizing the benefits of Haiilo strategically helping them to stand out.

“Haiilo has played a significant role in developing our footprint across our markets, and our employees and consultants are clearly recognizing the positives that result from being seen as thought leaders in our industry,” says Camilla.

“Colleagues have even commented on how much they see the Haiilo platform raising their individual market values and that of Devoteam. It’s helping to not only bring exposure to our individual experts, but also our expertise as a leading IT consulting firm, which is very impressive.”

Employee advocacy as part of an overall company strategy

While Haiilo has helped Devoteam frame its content in front of nearly 17 million sets of eyes, Camilla and her team also know the importance of ensuring the content they share is genuine and sincere. Because it’s those trustworthy stories and storytelling that have helped most in generating engagements, including 80,000-plus clicks and more than 50,000 reactions when examining the results over a recent 12-month period.

“The content we put out there must be authentic — we’ve found that’s where we get the most traction, especially when our people are involved in the stories,” says Camilla. “It can be something as simple as celebrating an employee’s Devoteam anniversary or an employee going above and beyond for his or her team. And when people start sharing themselves also, that is where you get the snowball effect, and Haiilo is a strong and convincing tool that’s allowed us to amplify all of these stories we create.”

Trickle-down effect from employee advocacy onboarding at the very top

When introducing Haiilo to the company, it was important for Camilla to get the leadership of Devoteam to understand the benefits fully and to gain their support, which they’ve done and continue to do as management and employees alike embrace the employee advocacy program.

From their CEO and funneling through the entire organization, the feeling from Devoteam is that the company is on board and is seeing the benefits of their employee advocacy program with the help of the Haiilo platform.

Seven years into integrating the Haiilo platform, the enthusiasm remains very much there.

“Those like myself and others in my team running our employee advocacy program have to be excited and passionate about it to get everyone on board,” adds Camilla. “I can see what’s happening now in some of our channels that HR is getting involved, which has the potential to take us even further.”