Limeade: How do I reach all 50,000 employees of a corporation?
On April 6, 2019, Markus von Aschoff (photo), Managing Director Limeade Europe, gave a lecture on Digital Marketing at the invitation of Professor Hans-Christian Riekhof at PFH Private University of Göttingen. In the following interview, the manager provides insights into the strategic and operational measures of the company.
Limeade is a young company that takes relevant employee topics to a new level: Well-Being, Engagement, Inclusion, Diversity and Communication. As an integrated platform or as an individual solution, on mobile devices or on the desktop: with Limeade ONE, companies show their appreciation for their employees.
Prof. Riekhof: Microsoft and the Otto Group are among Limeade’s customers. What prompted these international companies to use the Limeade app?
Why did Microsoft and the Otto Group choose limeade?
M. von Aschoff: Strategic reasons led to a collaboration with both companies. With Microsoft, it was the ability to integrate across multiple systems, which means that Microsoft employees can see news, holiday overviews, time accounts, holidays and employee incentives from five different systems in one place. With Otto, it was the digital transformation and the change from mail order company to e-commerce market leader. With an employee newspaper in two languages, you can’t reach and take along 50,000 employees. An employee app in over 60 languages on the private smartphones of the employees is the only solution.
Riekhof: Are there no competitive products for Limeade? Microsoft could also create and offer its own solution with the existing development power. Aren’t you afraid of a new competitor?
von Aschoff: We observe the market very closely and maintain close contact with the CEOs of the “market companions” and the top decision-makers at Microsoft. This helps us to sharpen our profile and to articulate the added value for the customer convincingly. At the end of the day, it is the customer who decides and chooses the most suitable concept. But not only the concept is relevant, especially customer satisfaction and proximity to the customer is one of our great advantages. Customers like Otto, thyssenkrupp, Dr. Oetker and Galeria Kaufhof have just confirmed this to us again at our ONE Usergroup. All our customers are reference customers and actively recommend us, which makes us confident in the face of competition.
Time records via app: it couldn’t be simpler
Riekhof: You emphasized in your lecture that the installation of the Limeade app is extremely simple. Can you explain using a concrete example how the installation works in practice and where the advantage of simplicity comes into play?
von Aschoff: Some of our customers have technically implemented the Limeade app within 10 working days and then started the rollout. We can achieve this short implementation time because we can create a complete, preconfigured customer system at the push of a button. This includes numerous best practices and scenarios from other customers, which then only need to be adapted.
Riekhof: How do corporations ensure that the app is not forgotten once employees have gotten used to it and the novelty value no longer pulls?
von Aschoff: The most important thing is to put the employee at the center of considerations and campaigns. Employees use the app when they benefit from it. Global corporate news is important, but often only really relevant for a few employees in everyday life. Much more relevant are, for example, location news, disruptions, canteen plans, shift schedules, employee discounts, actions in the employee shop, remaining vacation, raffles and much more. But simplifying routines and processes is also a great added value, for example, offering frequently used forms in the app, vacation requests, quality reports, idea submissions, etc. Thanks to the ECJ ruling, the topics of time recording, time correction and time records are currently very topical. Making this as simple as possible via the app so that it can be done quickly every day is a real added value.
What are snippets for?
Riekhof: You highlight that snippets as short news and video messages work particularly well and get a lot of attention. Can you quantify this effect?
von Aschoff: Our customers report 30 to 40% more likes and comments and 60 to 70% more detailed views for short news, both in text form and as video. Several short teasers, which refer to a longer article, generate two to three times as many views of the long article. Videos also work very well. We have many customers who are in a strong state of change, and with short explanatory videos from the CEO, the message is demonstrably better received than through a text.
Riekhof: What does an editorial team look like that creates the content for the Limeade app? And where is this team usually “hung” or anchored in the organization?
von Aschoff: As a rule, there is a core team that primarily drives the employee app topic, and then of course editors. For example, Enterprise Rent a car has a decentralized network of over 3,000 editors for over 100,000 employees with a core team of four employees in the internal communication of the holding. On average, the core team consists of two to three employees from the internal communication of the headquarters with 20 to 60 editors in all areas of the company – down to trainees.
Riekhof: You are Managing Director Europe of Limeade, and you are also a shareholder and thus an entrepreneur. Does it make a significant difference not just to be a senior employee?
von Aschoff: Yes, for me it makes a big difference. I work not only in the company, but also on the company.
What is “Product Market Fit” all about?
Riekhof: You have reported a few iterations that were necessary to get to today’s product and also market success of the Limeade app. What are your key learnings from these “loops” you had to turn?
von Aschoff: The key learnings are “Product-Market-Fit”, “Seeing is believing” and “Guardrails not Handcuffs”. At the beginning, we focused too much on the technology and the brilliant idea, and ignored the real problems of potential customers. Only a process in which we analyzed the findings from interviews with over 200 companies brought us success. The Product-Market-Fit is elementary, and a product should always solve a real problem for the customer. In our case, it is the problem of really reaching and involving all employees.
After we had articulated this insight, we set aside 20% of our developers to create a demo system that allows interested parties to test the app on their phones with real content. To this day, “Seeing is believing” is one of our major advantages over the competition.
All this is only possible by giving the teams as much freedom as possible, but still establishing “guardrails” so that everyone works in the same direction. We have converted all innovation processes from “implementation of specifications” to “quick implementation of an idea to minimal solutions (so-called MVP)”. So we replaced the “handcuffs” with “guardrails”. In this way, we were able to implement customer ideas and visions in the shortest possible time that were not perfect, but good enough. The ideas that were used the most were then further developed and made more perfect iteratively.
Riekhof: Limeade is a medium-sized company of manageable size, at the same time you have international corporations as your customers. Do you notice differences in management style?
von Aschoff: There are many differences that I have observed in almost 20 years – ranging from generalists vs. specialists, agility vs. analysis to business sense vs. intrigue sense (cf. Gunter Dueck and Gerald Hörhan). Regardless of size, the most important thing for the success of the company and each individual employee is whether there is a culture of “We are a team” or whether there is a culture of “Us against Them”.
Thank you very much for the interview!
Photo and photo excerpt: www.limeade.com
