The results of Goodyear’s annual ‘Employee Loyalty’ survey, which is conducted amongst its worldwide staff, pointed to the need for improvement in internal communication. This prompted Goodyear Lastikleri TAS to conclude that a new platform was needed to improve levels of collaboration in Turkey. The survey results showed that employees were keen to be able to access information, such as news, announcements, activities and other useful information from a single platform. In addition there was a need for a common library to allow employees to access contact records.
One of Goodyear’s other goals was to use the platform to get employees working in Istanbul Adapazari and Izmit to build a closer working relationship and to help new employees joining the Goodyear family to adapt more quickly.
Building the framework
Goodyear’s IT Manager Sedat Korkmaz said, “We concluded that we needed an easy to use intranet portal that would respond to everyone’s needs. We planned the project after considering our main goals and priorities and then put it into action with the support of a reliable and highly experienced business partner, Innova.”
“Following the survey results we put together a cross-functional team immediately before beginning the project,” says the company’s Public Relations Manager, Lerzan Moral, who explained that the team was made up of communications managers from all business units, each of whom voiced the needs of their own teams and helped to draw a map of corporate needs to enable sophisticated analysis. She added: “We assessed the report that came out of this exercise and made a list of achievable actions and wrote down our priorities, before then moving on to the application stage. In the first stage, we chose a structure that we knew would focus on our key requirements.”
Internal information pooling
Sedat Korkmaz highlighted the timely completion of the project and spoke about its different stages: “We began the analytical work with Innova and determined our technical targets, prioritising the experience of our end users. Goodport, which was built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010, became very significant as it enabled all employees to access information very easily and from any location. I believe one of the key reasons for the project’s success in adding value to the company was the fact that we chose realistic targets from the very outset.” Korkmaz further explained that Goodport takes user information from an Active Directory and synchronises with Goodyear’s existing systems: “For the next phases of the project we are considering dual integration options for 
Goodport, in addition to Active Directory integration. In the first phase we have limited ourselves to targeting communication needs but in the future Goodport could also be integrated into our business processes.”
IT Specialist Salih Bulut has been monitoring the usage statistics of the portal since it went live and said: “We observed that following a steady increase in daily access, usage became stable at a higher volume. This is an important indication that the project was able to respond to user needs on a large scale and has gained very broad acceptance from employees.”
An employee-owned project
In all communication projects that impact people directly it is very important to include users from the very beginning:“In this manner Goodyear’s decision to open the system to all of its employees is an important step towards establishing a communication platform for the long term,” said Innova’s Business Development Manager Huseyin Yalcin Aydin, who added that the timely delivery of the project was the result of the systematic and target-oriented work carried out by Innova and Goodyear’s IT teams.
Kiosks may be next
Sedat Kormaz believes that the first phase of this project, which serves many of the needs of employees who mostly work in front of a computer, has been completed successfully, and is now signalling the start of a second phase that could help Goodport reach field workers by using kiosk solutions: “The second phase of the project will be for our blue collar employees. We are discussing opening Goodport to reach all our field workers using kiosk or similar solutions. We also continue to work to improve interfaces, authorisations and hardware.”