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BluEarth Renewables navigates 100% employee growth with Jostle

Canadian renewable energy company, BluEarth Renewables Inc (BluEarth), has experienced rapid and substantial growth over the past two years. As they doubled in size, the Jostle^® platform not only assisted BluEarth with their onboarding, but also helped them keep everyone informed on company news, connected to their culture, and living company values.

“Jostle helps keep everyone in our company, across multiple locations, informed, connected, and engaged.”

Dorreen Miller
Director, Communications

Goals

For 2018, BluEarth had five primary objectives for their intranet. These were to:

1. Build engagement and awareness of each team’s key initiatives.
2. Encourage employees to recognize each other for good work and successes.
3. Grow company culture through storytelling and regular communication.
4. Connect employees that are geographically dispersed.
5. Provide a central location to store searchable company documents.

We use Jostle to share our team’s priorities, goals, and key initiatives—our executive team leads the way. Our CEO, who travels extensively, uses Jostle to provide regular video updates to our team.

Dorreen Miller
Director, Communications

Solution

Dorreen Miller, Director of Communications at BluEarth, talked us through some of the solutions they’ve put in place on their intranet to address their goals and help them navigate such tremendous growth:

1. Awareness. To keep everyone abreast of each team’s key initiatives, BluEarth now uses their intranet for goal sharing. “Each executive shares a video on their team's goals for the year. Jostle provides an easy format for everyone to watch this. Also, it replaced a 3-hour all-company meeting, which didn’t have a good employee response.”
2. Recognition. “This year, we began to use our intranet to recognize employees who are living our new values. This is done through Shout-Outs, which are then collected and used to determine candidates for our annual Values in Practice (ViP) awards.”
3. Culture. BluEarth gave everyone in their company the ability to post and contribute to their News section, which has given everyone a voice and led to a boom in employee engagement. “We also use the Activity feed to share photos and quick stories about what an employee’s day looks like. This is especially useful for remote employees.”
4. Connect. “During our town hall meetings, we use Discussions for employees to ask questions. This provides an avenue for all employees to engage, particularly those who are in remote locations.” Jostle’s mobile capabilities have also been key in engaging nearly 50% of BluEarth employees who aren’t connected to a computer every day.
5. Documents. Not only is BluEarth’s intranet now the primary location for company policies, documents, and templates, they also used the Discussion feature for troubleshooting. “We use Discussions as a support forum where employees can post any issues they’re having with a tool. This allows the platform owner to respond, and provides everyone with the answer in case they experience the same issue in the future.”

Results

BluEarth has achieved some outstanding results this year, meeting all of their primary objectives and successfully handling tremendous growth with their Jostle-powered intranet. Here’s a brief overview of their achievement, with comments from Dorreen:

1. Participation. “The engagement at BluEarth has increased exponentially. They attribute this to making everyone a News reporter (which also helped to connect employees across locations) and migrating all of their documentation to their intranet.
2. Awareness. “There’s more awareness of what’s going on across the organization. People share more now, and there’s a better understanding of what each employee does at the company.”
3. Recognition. “This was the first year we started to use Shout-Outs to reinforce our values. In under two months we received over 50 nominations from employees. By using Jostle, we also increased the visibility of the Values in Practice program, which encouraged more employees to participate and gave recognition to those who were going the extra mile.”
4. Culture. “Sharing photos of what different teams are up to leads to replies, jokes, and conversations, which has led to more camaraderie, especially across various locations.”
5. Connections. “Before we implemented Jostle we had no way to view all employees or see an organization structure. Now it’s easy to put a face to a name, discover what people are responsible for, and ultimately to connect with co-workers.”