For 75 years, Pike Corporation has been sending teams out to service America’s infrastructure. Their gas, electric, and telecommunications companies provide engineering, construction, maintenance, and upgrades, to more than 400 utility customers.
And that work happens thanks to thousands of frontline workers who go into the field, often in extreme storm situations, to ensure the country has energy and power. Immediacy and safety are critical for Pike. But connecting their thousands of field workers was challenging, until now.
With 100 offices and 10,000 employees, Pike is a massive operation with different companies and divisions, like Pike Electric, Pike Renewables, and Pike Gas Services. Their field teams head into disasters to repair utilities and restore power. They’ve sent 35,000 workers to emergency response missions over the past decade, from hurricanes to tornadoes to ice storms. And no job is complete until every worker is home safe.
Charlotte Buffington, Beekeeper’s Director of Customer Success North America led a webinar with two members of Pike’s leadership team to talk about how the company has been able to connect with their geographically dispersed teams.
- Ashley Varnadore, Director of Human Resources, Pike
- Melissa Stevens, Human Resources Generalist, Pike
Ashley and Melissa revealed their three strategies for engaging their field workers and achieving an incredible 96% activation rate.
PikeToGo: Creating a One-Stop-Shop for the Frontline
When Pike had a soft rollout of Beekeeper in late 2019, little did they (or the world) know what would happen a few short months later. That led to a faster expansion of the app throughout the organization and what became PikeToGo, the one-stop shop for their employees.
As Ashley said, “We wanted to make sure we built this app to benefit our largest group of employees who don’t have company computers or an easy way for us to communicate with them.” So they asked their employees what they wanted most out of the app.
Their answers were:
- An easy way to access payslips and vacation time
- The ability to hear from leadership on company updates
- Recognition
With Beekeeper, Pike was able to deliver this employee wishlist which helped them get 9,600 field workers active on the platform.
“We were looking to create some kind of application that would make it easier to communicate with our employees, but what we were able to create with Beekeeper is so much bigger than what we could have even imagined.”
Ashley Varnadore, Pike
Improving Communications with Frontline Field Workers
For Pike’s workers, real-time communication is critical. But their old intranet was static and didn’t relay the information teams really needed.
With PikeToGo they improved communication with their field teams in ways like:
- Creating a fast, direct connection to corporate departments, like payroll and safety. A one-to-one channel for deskless employees to communicate via chat with leaders
- Using campaigns to communicate with 10,000 employees in PikeToGo on everything from finding fuel while they’re on the road to open enrollment and benefit information
- Creating streams for each division to connect to specific teams within each company
With multiple communication channels, all the information Pike employees need is in one place on PikeToGo.
Digitizing Paper Processes to Optimize Efficiency
Another way having a mobile workforce solution has helped Pike has been the ability to digitize paper processes. Melissa led the discussion, starting out by saying, “We have accomplished so much in digitizing processes since PikeToGo, this has to be my favorite topic of the webinar.”
“The perks of Workflows are just tremendous. It really helps us be that one-stop shop that is our motto and we drive to be every day.”
Melissa Stevens, Pike
From onboarding to distributing annual vouchers for new safety boots, most processes have moved to the app. There’s even a robust document library so employees can access the information they need when they need it without having to call anyone.
The employee handbook is also now on the app and can be signed by employees digitally, saving the company 8,400 sheets of paper every week.
Now, Pike workers only have to go as far as their mobile devices to be connected to their company, colleagues, and leaders.
