As a leading global appliance company, Electrolux’s family of brands provide over 60 million household and professional products every year to customers in 150 countries. Founded in 1919 and headquartered in Stockholm, the business has grown to 55,000 employees.

Building, selling, and supporting appliances internationally required an enterprise-grade collaboration solution for the company’s growing workforce. Today, Electrolux is a BlueJeans power user — connecting thousands of endpoints via video and averaging millions of meeting minutes every week.

Prior to partnering with BlueJeans, Electrolux used ATT Connect for their communications needs. According to Enea, the video quality was too poor for general adoption and external meeting participants needed to download an app to make it work. “We’ve really liked the BlueJeans browser-based option for those joining outside our organization. Another reason we switched our conferencing to BlueJeans was to reduce dial-in calls and increase VoIP usage. That has been a benefit of leveraging a SaaS product rather than a traditional audio carrier like ATT,” Enea said.

Two years after implementation, Electrolux surveyed 3,600 end users about their experience with BlueJeans Meetings. Enea is extremely happy with the results — a 95% satisfaction rating among respondents. “We’ve compared this metric to our previous survey when we were using Skype for Business. At it’s very best, our employees only rated Skype with a 50% acceptance rate. Even before mandatory work-from-home measures, we experienced a very high volume of usage with 11 million meeting minutes per month, 58,000 meetings per month, and over 280K participant endpoints joining per month.”

Reaching a 55,000-strong workforce takes a concerted effort by the communications and IT departments and is only possible with a large-scale streaming solution. “The BlueJeans Events solution is used for any large presentation, typically hosted by our C-level executives. CEO/CFO quarterly town halls, business performance, product launches, and sustainability of HR initiatives—we use BlueJeans Events for all of these,” Enea said.

The ongoing Coronavirus pandemic has required establishments all over the world to make rapid organizational changes, and Electrolux is no exception. Since the majority of the 55,000 workforce shifted to working from home back in March, meeting minutes, endpoints, and monthly meetings have increased by more than 2X. Meetings have also increased in terms of size, yet decreased in time on average of 5 minutes per meeting which speaks to the increased productivity. In March alone, that’s 605,000 minutes/10,000 hours saved just by being at home and focusing on essentials. Electrolux has also seen a 17% increase in user population now using video, likely because employees want to connect with colleagues that they can no longer see in person.

Maintaining employee engagement despite physical distancing mandates has been mission critical for the Electrolux HR team. Global Learning and Development Specialist Konstantina Held has moved several in-person professional development programs to BlueJeans. These virtual workshops for new hires and manager training are critical to reinforce the Electrolux mission and collaborative mantra. According to Held, these sessions have created a welcoming and educational atmosphere. “We’re able to host these meetings on BlueJeans as if we’re all joining in the same office location. For more personalized learning, we’ve used BlueJeans Breakout Rooms to divide the class into smaller sections.”

Electrolux’s Group Risk Management team has also adjusted operations due to the pandemic by rolling out virtual site visits across the Electrolux Group—including factories, warehouses, offices, call centers and stores. Systematic management of operational risks is a crucial part of Electrolux’s operations, which includes assessing everything from fire hazards and natural disaster risk to theft and security. As such, the team developed the ‘SMART Site Visit’ concept where a virtual tour takes place with the Chief Security Officer, the survey team in Stolkhom, and the Facility Manager through an iPhone with the BlueJeans app pre-installed.

One thing COVID-19 has taught Electrolux is a new, smart way of working that is both cost effective and provides business continuity. There are even plans to continue some of the adjustments they have made due to the pandemic once the crisis is over, as they feel they can reach more sites and involve more people by doing so.

To learn more about how Electrolux turned to BlueJeans to scale their communications technology, which has become critical for internal collaboration, read the case study here! To learn more about how other customers are using BlueJeans, check out our Customers page. Plus, try out BlueJeans for free today!