Santander Bank
Challenge
After significant growth through several acquisitions, Santander Bank needed a platform to unite a large team across institutions and cultures.
Solution
Santander and ADK built a powerful and secure Intranet where employees could connect and foster a common experience across offices.
Impact
Santander Bank has been able to promote their One Santander message, helping to welcome new teammates into a unified culture and promote engagement in their communities.
After a series of acquisitions, Santander Bank had quickly become one of the largest banks in the United States. With their impressive growth came the challenge of uniting disparate teams into a cohesive culture.
A major concern with any acquisition is ensuring that the sum of the company cultures is stronger than the parts. All parties need to feel united behind a common cause and supported with clear and consistent communication. With swaths of employees from different companies across the country being pulled together under the Santander banner, the team knew they needed to prioritize a strong employee experience platform that could be accessed anywhere.
Beyond seeking a partner to build and launch this digital platform for employee collaboration and community, Santander was also looking for a long-term engagement that would ensure the solution would be optimized over time and scale alongside the bank’s growth and internal changes.
Applying design, technical, and project management expertise, ADK built an employee experience platform and has continued to optimize the experience for employees over time.
Throughout a more than six-year (and ongoing) partnership, ADK has supported the Santander employee Intranet experience, which was built based on extensive research from interviews and focus groups to ensure it includes functionality that benefits every user. Inclusion of a weather widget, for example, was highly requested to help facilitate conversation between individuals in different parts of the country.
For ADK, the partnership has always focused on optimizing the Intranet experience by gaining ongoing insights into employee needs across all departments.
For major changes that impact Santander employees, like company expansions or the COVID-19 pandemic, our continued involvement has helped maintain the employee community and open lines of communication from coast to coast.
Santander is able to connect its more than 17,000 employees across the U.S. and rely on a long-term partner to support the corporate communications team and create a great employee experience.
Through its partnership with ADK, Santander has gone from a crash-prone, difficult-to-use Intranet to providing its more than 17,000 U.S. employees a high-performance, engaging communications tool.
The employee Intranet has become a beloved and important part of Santander’s employee culture, and ADK continues to improve upon the user experience. We have tested the tool with participants across all banking departments, which is critical for our process and for creating a tool every employee is excited and able to use.
