Thomas Cook North America (Thomas Cook) is part of Thomas Cook Group plc, which comprises of five geographical divisions. These divisions are UK and Ireland, Continental Europe, Northern Europe, German Airlines and North America. Their aim is to be the best source of leisure travel in North America. A young and dynamic company, their ethos is to promote employee satisfaction.

The Challenge

Thomas Cook’s existing intranet was quite technical and the organisation wanted to create a more user-friendly experience for their staff. The intranet was solely in English and, as Canada has a large French speaking community, Thomas Cook wanted to make all their staff feel more included in group communications.

To comply with Canadian legislation, the organisation needed to meet a deadline by which their multilingual intranet was implemented.

Selection Process

Thomas Cook decided that a new intranet was required to foster communities with social networking communication.

Their priorities were :-

• Engage employees whose native language is not English
• Have a central hub of information for all staff to access
• Ensure their new intranet was delivered within 3 months

The Solution

Thomas Cook looked at local and global intranet suppliers and whether all their needs could be met within the specified timescales. After careful consideration, Thomas Cook decided that SORCE offered them the best solution.

Kerry Sharpe Director, Corporate Communications at Thomas Cook said,
“We were very impressed by all the staff that we dealt with at SORCE. They quickly understood our requirements and with their knowledge and expertise were able to deliver our intranet within a very short timeframe”.

SORCE were selected for the following reasons:-

• They could deliver a multilingual intranet to deadline
• Offered extensive intranet expertise and knowledge
• Scalability – can roll out intranets to both large and small organisations
• A flexible intranet platform

The new intranet has been named “i connexion”. Everything from navigation, menus to content is now in both English and French. Some key features of the new intranet product are personalisation of home pages and social networking. When an employee logs onto “i connexion” it instantly recognises whether the person logging on is English or French. Content is then provided in the appropriate language.

With a young workforce, Thomas Cook wanted to introduce a fun and interesting intranet to encourage employees to interact with each other. The new site features ‘employee feeds’, which are similar to Facebook status updates, advising of what employees are currently doing.

Thomas Cook now has an intranet that is multilingual and very interactive. French speaking staff can now view content in their native language, resulting in employees feeling more included and valued. The new intranet embraces Thomas Cook’s objective of actively encouraging staff interaction on a social as well as work basis.