Back in 2016, before Workplace by Meta was officially released, OrangeTrail assisted Booking.com with a beta launch of the platform, then called Facebook at Work, for their global workforce of 14 000 employees.
This was one of our most successful Workplace launches to date, with 94% of employees joining the platform within one week. And there was more to the project – we were also tasked with training Booking.com’s leadership, communications professionals, and thought leaders on inclusive communication using social technology, and setting up communities of practice around key topics.
Challenges: our signature launch event
Rather than making the launch of a platform the main event, we organise dialogues around a meaningful topic for the organisation. We call these dialogues “Challenges”. They run over several days and are very effective in activating people on a new platform.
Booking.com’s CEO wanted the company’s mission, “Using technology to take the friction out of travel,” to be top-of-mind for all employees and to increase the pace of innovation by getting people to think outside the box. With this as the goal, we ran a challenge on Facebook at Work in which the CEO asked employees: “Everybody at Booking loves to travel. Our mission is to take the friction out of travel. What frictions do you experience when traveling?” The dialogue that followed yielded hundreds of friction points, some of which generated new product ideas. And, thanks to the challenge, 94% of all employees joined the platform in the first week. To date, Booking.com remains one of the most heavily used Workplace instances in the world.
Merging two digital worlds
In 2018, Booking.com bought Rentalcars.com and incorporated the company as BookingGo. OrangeTrail assisted Booking.com in integrating their Workplace instance into the instance owned by BookingGo and ensuring a smooth employee journey. OrangeTrail created a travel itinerary for the new joiners to help them feel welcome and find the right groups to join. Besides that, OrangeTrail transferred all the important content from the Rentalcars.com instance to the Booking.com instance.