Operational efficiency International case study
AirAsia takes
comms to the cloud
Staff were having to grapple with a multitude of comms platforms,
so the business brought it all in house, hears PETER CRUSH
The organisation
Malaysian low-cost airline AirAsia,
headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, has rapidly
grown to become the country’s largest airline
in terms of fleet size and destinations offered.
Initially starting in 1996 as a partgovernment
founded carrier operating
between Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the
Philippines, India and Japan, it now runs
domestic and international flights to more
than 165 destinations in 25 different countries.
The airline has been named Skytrax’s
World’s Best Low-Cost Airline 11 years in a
row. It was also awarded the World’s Leading
Low-Cost Airline for seven consecutive years
between 2013 and 2019 at the World Travel
Awards. It currently employs more than
20,000 people, who are internally referred to
as AllStars.
The challenge
Over the years AirAsia has made a strategic
decision to grow beyond just being an airline
by offering hotels, holidays, activities and
shopping on an online platform. It also
provides digital financial services via its
money app BigPay and has an extensive social
media presence.
All of this has meant that the technologies
its employees have to engage with have rapidly
multiplied too. This has created not only a
need to massively simplify things, but also to
train people on a stripped-down single
platform that would also serve as the basis for
boosting employee engagement, productivity,
feedback, wellbeing, L&D, sense of inclusion,
and creating better communications.
The strategy
AirAsia AllStars defaulted to using social
media to talk to each other, pass on advice and
share learning, but it became apparent that a
better way of communicating and engaging
with each other was needed.
According to Yuashini Vellasamy, product
manager of group digital, product and
innovation at AirAsia, this behaviour reflected
that internal processes were now so numerous
staff were expected to be familiar with more
than 100 different pieces of software – which
was creating too much confusion.
After scouring the market, the company
decided to partner with employee engagement
platform provider Eko in September 2019 and
bring all employee communications back into
the business.
It gained more control, but this also
presented a good opportunity for AirAsia to
re-emphasise its entire AllStar employee
proposition. It rebranded the Eko platform as
‘Chili’ – an app that staff could download to
their smartphones and smart devices.
Email has been completely closed down as an internal “We felt it was important for the company
to have a standardised work platform
that AllStars could use to access all workrelated
information, as well as a tool we could
use to strengthen our entire workforce
culture – for instance by enabling staff to
recognise each other for jobs well done
through its ‘thumbs-up’ feature,” says
Vellasamy. “Chili gave us the perfect way to
do this.”
But rather than decide to release all
functionality at once – and risk some of the
features going unnoticed (a ‘big bang’ was
initially planned) – the decision was taken to
drip-feed specific areas of functionality at a
time to encourage usage and bed in desired
behaviours before adding new areas.
Initially AirAsia launched the app’s
‘Discover’ banner, which allows the business
to make broadcasts to all staff or designated
clusters that will appear as a message on
the app.
A chat feature followed, which allows sets
of employees to post information in online
chatrooms – either for work or social
purposes. As an example, the PR team
now uses it to collaborate with various
external clients. All chats are stored in the
cloud, and those with the right permissions
can access it whenever they need to refer back
to something.
Other features have since followed,
including ‘tasks’. Not only does this feature
enable managers to assign specific projects to
people, but AllStars are themselves equally
encouraged to create tasks between each
other, to foster collaboration and shared
ownership/co-creation of work.
48 HR April 2020 hrmagazine.co.uk
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