Connected Company Stories: WW

Launching a new mission to 20,000 employees at the company formerly known as Weight Watchers

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION | 10 MINUTE READ
Launching a new mission to 20,000 employees at the company formerly known as Weight Watchers

Launching a new mission to 20,000 employees at the company formerly known as Weight Watchers

When Mindy Grossman became CEO of WW (formerly Weight Watchers), she wanted to launch a new mission and manifesto. But Mindy had no way to communicate her strategy to 20,000 employees around the world.

Untangle work with Workplace

From informing everyone about the return to the office to adopting a hybrid way of working, Workplace makes work more simple.

So she turned to Workplace. Two weeks later, 96% of WW was connected. The new mission launch event received 25,000 video views on the platform. Thanks to that alignment, this 56 year-old company was able to adapt to change at a speed that wouldn’t have been possible before.

Today, 70% of Workplace Groups at WW enable collaboration between teams that have never worked together. That allows the best ideas to gain global traction, like a virtual coaching pilot created in Sweden and adopted in Canada that will soon deliver impact for WW’s people around the world. We asked Mindy to share her insights from WW's Workplace journey.

Workplace: What does it mean to you to be part of a connected company?

Mindy Grossman: Culture and community are what really drive business results - married to strategy. If you don’t have a connected, collaborative, engaged culture, you're not going to be able to do that. And you have to build community internally as well as externally.

How do you do that?

You have to galvanize the people who work on the brand every single day. They need to be your most passionate evangelists, aligned with the mission and the focus and the strategy of the company. You're not going to be able to do that if you don't build community and culture.

What role does Workplace play in achieving that at WW?

When I joined the company, I knew we had to effect transformation in a pretty significant way. The first question I asked was, ‘How am I going to communicate our new mission and vision to everyone at the same time?’ And we had no way. The company had never communicated to the entire organization at the same time. We needed to figure it out. So when Workplace was brought to me, I made the decision pretty quickly. We had to connect everyone.

We launched at the end of 2017 and had 96% adoption in less than two weeks. That tells you just how hungry people were for us to bring them together around our own internal community.

How did Workplace help you launch the new mission?

We launched our new mission in February 2018. We needed to galvanize everyone, which meant we needed clear communication. We launched with a video on Workplace that got 25,000 views, but the most powerful thing was people looked at it as, ‘The company really cares about me. They want to communicate with me. They want my feedback and they want us to be able to lead this transformation.’ It was a very powerful event in the history of the company. If we’d had to do all that over several months, it wouldn’t have had the same effect.

What’s happening on Workplace today?

It's actually having positive business results because today, 70% of all our groups on Workplace are people around the world who never had the opportunity to work together. We're launching group virtual coaching this year. It was because the teams came together - Sweden had a pilot, shared it, it then got adopted in Canada, and it bubbled up that this could be one of our bigger opportunities. Now it's being adopted globally.

How do you use Workplace as a CEO?

I use it for a broad spectrum of communications. I love video. I travel a lot, so if I'm in France, I'm sharing the excitement of the work they're doing. We had three of my direct reports traveling through Australia and New Zealand - they were posting everything from scaling a mountain to the meetings that they were having. People really appreciate that because it humanizes people. It's not just about the work you do during the day. It's also the experiences you have with the people you work with that really matter.

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