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How Canoochee EMC connects three offices, two warehouses, and every truck in the field

Canoochee EMC is an electric cooperative serving southeast Georgia. Over the past 22 years, they have grown from roughly 75 employees to 130, with more hired seemingly every week.

That growth spread the co-op out. Canoochee EMC runs three member-facing offices and two warehouses, plus the line crews who spend their days in trucks. Most of those employees never walk through headquarters.

The challenge: a workforce that couldn’t be reached

Canoochee EMC’s internal communication ran on email, and email had stopped working.

Their cybersecurity training had done its job a little too well. Company-wide emails came from only a handful of people and were being disregarded. “At the same time we're sending emails, we're telling people not to click on links,” says Joe Sikes, who manages communications for the cooperative.

The org chart was the second problem. As the co-op added locations, leadership was losing track of its people. Anyone from headquarters who visited another office had the same experience: everyone wore a company shirt, but nobody knew who they were talking to. They wanted that fixed.

The co-op had tried a couple solutions in the past. First, they tried Microsoft SharePoint, but it never got off the ground because “it was too complicated to make it work.” Then they moved to Slack but found that didn’t quite fill the gap, either.

The strategy

Sikes was first shown the Jostle platform through the co-op network. At a conference, a colleague from another Georgia cooperative presented how her organization used it. What stood out to him was how many employees were active in it.

Two things made it an easy internal sell. Jostle’s cooperative pricing and the fact that the platform was, in Sikes’ words, “relatively simple.” After SharePoint, that mattered more than anything else. “Learning a whole platform is not easy.”

Getting news read (and knowing who read it)

News is now Canoochee EMC’s main internal channel, used daily. The quarterly performance metrics the CEO asks for reliably draw the co-op's biggest readership, but they also share position announcements, new hires, birth announcements, safety items, and industry updates.

The clearest example of how News keeps Canoochee connected comes from the field.

One day, two co-op members wrote a letter to a Canoochee board member, praising a crew that had restored their power overnight.

Previously, that letter of praise might have reached a supervisor and stopped there.

Because of Jostle, it went out as a News Item, and that three-person crew got recognized in front of the whole cooperative.

Eighty-three of the co-op’s 130 employees read it.

“It would have been nice to have 130, but I don’t expect that. 83 is a lot,” Sikes says. “And before, I would’ve had no way of knowing how many people actually opened that.”

New hires get the same treatment. When the co-op brought on three people in one week, each got a post with a photo. Because their workforce is out in the field and dispersed across locations, that post is how everyone meets them.

News isn’t a one-person channel either. Five employees now post regularly, and departments including HR and safety publish their own items.

Putting names to faces

People and Teams gave Canoochee the org chart it had been missing, and one that’s easy to keep current as the co-op keeps hiring.

With staff spread across five locations, those views are how anyone at the cooperative, management included, figures out who does what and where.

One place for forms, manuals, and FR gear

Library replaced the co-op’s scattered paperwork.

Member services and the cashiers pull customer-facing forms from it. HR keeps its forms there. So do the events calendar and the clothing allotments.

Both office staff and field crews wear company uniforms. However, the field crew has flame-retardant gear that requires submitting a different form. Library makes it easy to only show the form to the right people.

The line crews use it too. Safety manuals and substation information live in Library, so a crew can look up how to proceed in a given situation without carrying a physical copy.

Where the crews post on their own

Discussions are the part of the platform Canoochee EMC doesn’t have to drive.

After Hurricane Helene, employees posted their own photos there. The co-op’s lineman’s rodeo team—which, to be clear, involves climbing poles rather than riding bulls—built a Discussion for all their pictures.

The project manager on the Fort Stewart contract runs a Discussion for his own group on a military base, where information doesn’t otherwise travel far.

“It’s kind of organic that folks will share information in there,” says Sikes.

What’s next: JostleTV

Canoochee EMC plans to put screens in its other offices so a message can go up the moment it’s needed.

The requirement is that it stays simple. “It would be nice to be able to use a similar platform, where I or somebody else doesn’t have to learn a new platform to get that to work.”

Results

Canoochee EMC traded an email channel with no readership and no data for an employee platform the whole co-op uses daily.

Line crews, warehouse staff on military bases, and office employees now read the same stories. Leadership can put a name to a face before walking into another office. Member services, HR, and the crews pull their forms and safety manuals from one place. And when a crew works through the night to get the lights back on, all 130 employees celebrate it.

The platform has also proven easy to hand off. A communications hire brought on last year picked it up on her own, “so easily, so simply.”