Distributor of building materials
Charles Lecot founded Lecot in 1888. Today, this distributor of building materials has grown into an organization with 75 locations in Belgium and the Netherlands, where a total of 700 employees work. Among these employees are 100 representatives.
In 2021, Lecot contacted Involv to implement a new intranet. The goal was to gather all information in one central location and improve communication and interaction between employees.
700
Belgium
Distributor of building materials
Challenges
Lecot faced significant challenges prior to the implementation of the Involv intranet. Until last year, they used two different, highly outdated, and user-unfriendly intranets.
The biggest problem was that these intranets were primarily used as a location to store documents. There was no option to use the intranet as a communication channel to share announcements, newsletters, or enable interaction between employees.
In addition to the lack of communication options, Lecot’s two outdated intranets were not synchronized.
“One intranet was being updated while the other wasn’t, resulting in different information on both platforms. This caused a lot of confusion and inefficiency. It was a chaotic situation that urgently required one central platform.”
Solutions
At Lecot, there was an urgent need for a solution that would address these problems and improve the company’s efficiency. One of the five pillars of Visio 2025, Lecot’s strategic plan, is to simplify processes and systems. This, combined with the increasing need for digitization, created an urgent need for a solution. Ultimately, Involv proved to be the suitable partner.
It was important that the new intranet platform was built on Microsoft, as Microsoft365 applications were already being used throughout the organization, and the internal learning platform also relied on it.
“The newly implemented intranet is fully tailored to the needs of the organization. It is user-friendly and provides employees with a central location where they can find important information and communicate with each other. Additionally, it is fully mobile-friendly so that employees can access the information they need anytime and anywhere. The intranet has resulted in increased efficiency and one central location for all important communications.”
Launch
At the launch of the new intranet, a contest was held among colleagues at Lecot to come up with a name for the new platform. The only requirement was that the name had to be easy to pronounce in both Dutch and French. Ultimately, the name “Charlie” was chosen, which is a reference to the original founder of Lecot: Charles Lecot. The creator of the name was rewarded with a bongo voucher. The winner also made a video explaining the name and its meaning, which became the very first post on Charlie.
In addition, the launch of the intranet was successful thanks to teasers via email and internal announcements posted on various locations in the buildings of Lecot.
Current situation
Today, the intranet of Lecot is an active and versatile tool within the company. Weekly, different departments like HR, marketing, IT, etc. post around three news articles.
The most commonly used functionalities of the intranet include quick links, news articles, new hiring components, etc. Despite Lecot having used Involv tools for a year now and there being a significant improvement in efficiency and user experience, there are still areas for improvement. For example, news articles often receive a limited number of likes, and the company hopes to increase this number in the future. It is clear that there is still room for improving communication and interaction between employees. Therefore, Lecot continues to invest in the Involv intranet as a means to engage employees and encourage them to actively participate in sharing ideas, feedback, and collaboration