How Grainger engages its global team

How it started

Certified as a Great Place to Work since 2021, Grainger, the leading industrial supply manufacturer, headquartered in Lake Forest, Illinois, knows how to keep its 26,000-strong global workforce connected and engaged.

Reaching their globally dispersed, multilingual, and largely deskless employees has always been essential to Grainger’s success. So, as the landscape of the digital workplace evolved at a rapid pace, Grainger knew it was time to go beyond a traditional employee communication ecosystem.

“The need for [more intelligent] communication was growing leaps and bounds,” Brodie Bertrand, Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs at Grainger, recently told Firstup. “But we didn’t have the right infrastructure.”

Where they landed

Now, with Firstup, Grainger can ensure important information reaches all the way to the frontline, not only to employees with frequent access to email or a desktop computer. And the results of equipping Grainger’s entire workforce with an omni-channel intelligent communication platform—including a mobile app that can be accessed anytime, anywhere—speak for themselves.

“Email was what we typically used, and we do have high viewers on email,” Brittany Hoerdeman, Communications Leader, Channels and Change Management at Grainger, told Firstup. “But if you look at how people are engaging with the content, it’s on the mobile app—and that’s 10, 12, as much as 15 times more in some instances compared to email.”

From streamlining access to critical information for frontline employees, to automatically translating employee content into a user’s preferred language, for Grainger, there is no doubt about the benefits of an intelligent communication platform.

“We definitely see that Firstup users are more engaged,” Bertrand said.