Case study details

Challenges

AL Hokair Group was facing several challenges related to employee management, including difficulties with manual processes for tracking employee schedules, time off requests, and pay information. The company had also seen high turnover rates among employees, which was affecting productivity and morale. Among the top challenges faced are

Not all employees are connected to the corporate network
some do not have email access, and the workforce is diversified, ranging from maintenance staff and shop floor sales executives to IT professionals.
The demographic is also varied, with different languages spoken.
Communicating with such a diverse and geographically dispersed employee base is a challenge as there is no single channel of communication available.
One of the key issues is finding ways to effectively listen to employees' feedback, concerns, and complaints.

About Company

Established in 1991, Company is the largest franchise retailer in KSA, MENA, Central Asia and Caucasus region and is the only public listed business of its type in the Middle East. Quality, innovation, service and trust are the guiding principles. It has grown considerably and now trades in more than 1,750 stores across 100 shopping malls in 13 countries, with a retail platform operating on a total GLA of over 530,000 m. It has a workforce size of more than 10,000. The company currently represents over 75 fashion brands, across a diverse platform covering womenswear, menswear, kids & baby, department stores, shoes & accessories, cosmetics, f&b, and entertainment.

Situation

The company has the urgent need of two-way communication with all its employees. The need arises out of enforcing corporate policy framework across the regions, communicate with employee with new announcement, news etc. Also, enable employee to company communication through complain or concern to understand local operating environment, removing the communication gap with corporate hr.

Solution

The solution was deployed using a mobile application (IOS & Android) development ‘We hear you’ that enable company to communicate to employee through announcement, news and policy with multi lingual interface. The company has both Active directory employee and non-active directory employee. LDAP authentication was done through AD integration and ERP (Oracle 10.1G) were done to view the personal details, payroll, attendance and apply for leave. For employee, not on Payroll, the ERP details were blocked, however, other functionality like announcement, news, policy, posting a complaint and checking complain status were made accessible.

The technology used were PHP, Node.JS, HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript, React Native. The hosting of software were done on AWS cloud with IPSEC VPN connectivity to their DC.

Benefits

The initiative ‘we hear you’ was greatly appreciated by employee across different geography. The confidence of employee in company’s transparency increased and the productivity gain were achieved. The adherence to some of the workplace policy drastically improved.