Empowering people living with diabetes
People living with diabetes (PWDs) know how hard life becomes once you get diagnosed with it. Constantly watching over your diet, monitoring blood sugar levels, knowing when to take insulin shots, and the list goes on.
But one company is changing that, and they’re investing in their employees first to produce quality medical devices, helping PWDs overcome hardships tied with diabetes. Here’s their story:
Creating pages that people engage in
Ascensia Diabetes Care, a global company focused entirely on helping people with diabetes, is on a mission to empower those living with diabetes through innovative solutions that simplify and improve lives. They’re home to the world-renowned CONTOUR® portfolio of blood glucose monitoring systems and are the exclusive global distribution partner for the Eversense® Continuous Glucose Monitoring Systems from Senseonics. These products, combine advanced technology with user-friendly functionality, to help people manage their diabetes and make a positive difference in their lives.
Carved out from Bayer Medical Care, Ascensia became a standalone company in 2016 and they’ve used LiveTiles from the beginning with their SharePoint-based intranet. Originally, their communications team partnered with LiveTiles because of limited resources, and their functions and local teams were responsible for building and maintaining their own intranet pages.
SharePoint, in their words, was complicated and required skills to make it look good. To create easy-to-use, aesthetically pleasing, compelling pages for their employees, they used LiveTiles.
Featuring Reach both inside Microsoft Teams and on the SharePoint Intranet homepage helped increase the speed of getting a majority of employee sign-ups
In 2021, they adopted Reach to streamline communications, eliminate emails, and provide a one-stop-shop for all the important information they share worldwide. As a global organization, instant content translation into an employee’s local language is key to keeping them in the loop and engaged, writes Barbara Sennrich, Global Head of Internal Communications at Ascensia.
Lost in the shuffle
Relying on emails to send global communications, important messages are lost in their employees’ inboxes, with a constant flow of daily work emails and notifications. Plus, several different group mailboxes where they sent communications made finding previous conversations difficult.
“We didn’t have a tracking mechanism that allowed us to understand how many employees would actually open and read our communications. Even though officially our company language is English, in reality, information that does not get translated into local language doesn’t reach all employees. Translating information is both resource- and time-intensive,” describes Barbara.
We didn’t have a tracking mechanism that allowed us to understand how many employees would actually open and read our communications.
Seeing the bigger picture
“I love how easy it is to navigate, both from a management and user perspective,” explains Barbara. “It streamlines our communications, eliminates emails, provides a one-stop shop for important global information, and provides instant translation,” she adds. “And we finally know how many employees open up our communications and how they engage with our content through likes and comments,” Barbara says.
They haven’t fully tapped into Reach’s full potential as currently, they aren’t doing a lot of targeted communication through the tool, but they’re looking forward to rolling out updates in an upcoming phase.
Barbara concludes, “this will support our mission to reach our employees on the device they want, in the language they want, and at the time they want because they are able to easily access the information that is relevant to them.”
