07 June 2024

Heathrow is Europe’s largest airport, powered by 6,500 employees, and welcoming more than 78 million passengers every year. The airport is home to more than 80 airlines and is Britain’s largest cargo port.

From engineering, customer relationship managers, and security personnel, to health and safety, baggage handlers, and other essential airport operations team members, the nature of work for Heathrow’s dispersed workforce is around the clock, 24/7/365, and necessitates a reliable, easy-to-use, and operations-focused mobile communication platform.

Moving beyond paperwork
One of the primary difficulties for Heathrow’s frontline airport teams revolved around shift scheduling and coverage. It was challenging for employees to trade shifts or find last-minute or coverage, and Heathrow’s shift management process involved substantial paperwork. Moreover, airport employees had no reliable way to track that requests were received or accepted by colleagues.

There was no digital access, including no email correspondence between Heathrow’s frontline colleagues and teams. This left staff largely reliant on word-of-mouth information sharing or constantly having to monitor and check break room bulletin boards. For shift-based, full-time employees, with teams working in three shifts per day who are on their feet all the time apart from rest periods, this was especially difficult.

After deploying an assessment to gather feedback from frontline workers on pain points and researching technology that could deliver solutions to address them, the airport’s internal communications team saw that Heathrow needed an operational communication tool to ensure employees felt connected, informed, and engaged.

Heathrow identified the most important criteria when researching, assessing, and implementing an operational communications tool for the airport’s workforce. These included a way to improve communications between airport operations staff; and to ensure a constant flow of communication between these teams and management.

The airport also wished to address shift scheduling and coverage inefficiencies; all with an easy-to-use, mobile solution, to help drive bring your own device (BYOD) policy and optimise accessibility.

Creating busy bees
Heathrow decided that what was missing from its internal communications was real-time capability. Heathrow opted to pilot Beekeeper – referred to internally as ‘Buzz’ – to assess usability and mobile functionality as key features. The team noted that whereas alternative solutions aren’t as well-suited to frontline colleagues, feedback pointed towards Beekeeper as a ‘very easy to use’ communication app that can be accessed directly from a mobile phone.

With Beekeeper, the airport created a digital workplace including an operational communication platform designed expressly to connect and engage the mobile workforce while being desktop accessible for the organisation’s office-based employees.

The rollout process was duly conducted by department, with each department having its own communication stream. Department champions launched the stream by posting content over a couple of weeks, and then facilitated training to launch the operational communication tool with other staff. Aided by a launch guide, content guidelines were developed and shared with department champions and staff.

Beekeeper is now an integral part of Heathrow’s digital workplace, used primarily for airport operations staff and for employee engagement purposes. Since implementing the operational communication platform, Heathrow’s company culture has improved, and has made Heathrow a more proactive organisation to measure and respond to feedback efficiently. Deploying Beekeeper as a delivery mechanism has made communication faster, and has made two-way, horizontal communication possible.

Given that employee engagement and providing a way for staff to weigh in on their daily experiences at work specifically, was a core priority for Heathrow, Beekeeper allowed employees to share photos and comments about what could be improved. Beekeeper provides ‘eyes on the ground,’ and the ability to surface issues. With employment at historic lows, improving work conditions allows Heathrow to better maintain employee loyalty and enables increased transparency. Conversations started within Beekeeper communication streams allows the organisation to make necessary changes to improve engagement.

In addition to sharing customer success stories and announcing new hires, management encourages employees to use the popular label, #lifeatheathrow, to tag photos from terminals, the runway, and all-around work at Heathrow as a fun and engaging way for airport employees to share what goes on during their shift.

Digitising the experience
The BYOD rollout has gone well for Heathrow, and the importance of good digital security is a key component of this. Aside from providing the workforce flexibility in how they receive and share work information, Beekeeper enables mobile, agile working for Heathrow’s operations teams. It ensures Heathrow’s employees are always up-to-date with any and all airport operational information, such as weather conditions, and passenger forecasts.

In addition to maintenance reporting, another core operational use case for Beekeeper is shift management. Formerly paper-based, since moving the process online with the app, the organisation has greatly reduced the time this process takes from a week to just a day or two. Push notifications ensure that the shift exchange happens quickly, and coverage can be facilitated peer-to-peer.

In alignment with one of the core priorities for implementing Beekeeper at Heathrow, the organisation now leverages the operational communication platform for employee recognition initiatives. One of the primary ways Heathrow uses Beekeeper is to demonstrate and promote excellent service. Another way Heathrow accomplishes this is to use Beekeeper to communicate airport safety messages directly with colleagues across departments and teams. This has improved safety by notifying employees instantly when safety communications are posted.

Coordinating schedules for in-person meetings for a rotating 24/7 workforce is extremely difficult, not to mention costly from a business perspective. However, Heathrow now ensures that frontline workers receive the need-to-know information for their shift by distributing daily briefing sheets directly through Beekeeper. Posted in dedicated communication streams, these briefing documents are accessible directly from their mobile device. From security personnel and gate agents to airport runway and maintenance teams, this form of digital distribution delivers on Heathrow’s goals to make internal communications easily accessible when they need it.