Great Place To Work believes that supportive workplaces uplift people, businesses, and the world at large, and their UK team is a valuable resource for workers in the region. They offer comprehensive, data-driven consulting and coaching services to help companies become trusted, publicly-recognized workplaces.
In addition to their range of employer-related services, Great Place To Work is known for their Best Workplaces™ Lists, recognizing participating companies for their high trust and organizational wellbeing. To achieve this recognition, organizations must first earn Certification™. Each Certified oganization has a company profile page on Great Place To Work’s website, and the top-performing companies are also published online on Best Workplaces™ Lists.
Because of the high volume of Certified companies (over 18,000 globally) and Best Workplaces awards, the UK team needed a way to easily manage awards lists and company profiles.
Claire Knights, Director of Growth & Recognition at Great Place To Work, said of the partnership with Salted Stone: “When we came to S2, our primary objective was to reduce the amount of administrative work involved in company profile and list creation, so that we could invest more time and energy toward key marketing initiatives and our overall mission. After our initial conversation with Salted Stone, I had confidence that they understood the brief and would help us achieve our goal.”
Great Place To Work had already chosen HubSpot because they knew it was easy to use for marketing teams. They looked to Salted Stone to help figure out the best way to organize their CMS and leverage the power of HubDB to turn their extensive digital companies database into scalable content. The Salted Stone team used a three-phased approach to tackling the project.
The first step of the process was to design and develop an extensive set of custom modules that could be used interchangeably to quickly create website pages on HubSpot's CMS. These modules included testimonial sliders, global footer navigation, pricing tables, CTA banners, and more, which reflected the client’s brand guidelines.
The next phase involved using HubDB to create dynamic templates and pages leveraging these modules. Great Place To Work’s ranking lists and pages are diverse — from “Best Workplaces for Wellbeing” to “Best Workplaces for Women,” and more — and each list and individual company page dynamically pulls information from a number of tables, seamlessly combining the data into completely customized pages that feature easy-to-digest layouts and engaging animations.
Leonie Dunne, the Salted Stone account manager for Great Place To Work, reflected on this stage: “The main challenge for Salted Stone was using HubDB extensively to house all the data, and also connecting multiple HubDB tables together seamlessly, in a way that made importing data simple and continually updating the lists sustainable.”
Karen Cagape, a developer at Salted Stone, led the team that established a host of HubDB tables for the lists. “We initially got some feedback on these HubDB tables around their ease of use, so we had to make some tweaks to them in order to optimize their useability,” Cagape said. “The user experience, both customer-facing and internally, was the name of the game, so we were determined to get that right to their total satisfaction.”
Salted Stone’s development team used HubDB to create a main table, one which contained all of Great Place to Work’s featured companies. This central hub maintained a primary company index page, as well as individual company pages, one that would make content management that much more convenient.
The Salted Stone team also created HubDB tables for each of their 24 different rankings lists, making every list easy to update via data import and simple to maintain.
“For the rankings page, we created a template table that they can clone for the different rankings page,” Karen explains. “We also provided a template page that they can use along with the table. This way, the client can have total control over publishing a specific list on their own, which makes it easy for them to rank companies, according to a specific category.”
The final phase of the project involved building out the client’s Resource Center Index, which included pages and templates for blog posts and case studies, as well as the resource center home page and listing page.
All of Great Place To Work’s company profile pages and Best Workplace Lists can now be updated in minutes, through the use of the HubDB tables built by the S2 team. On the front end, the profiles and lists look like each one was put together by hand, and every page with dynamic content makes no compromises visually.
The time savings on the back end is tremendous. Time spent creating Certified profiles for companies has dropped significantly, from as many as six hours per week to just thirty minutes per week with the new system, a 91% decrease. This time savings equates to a cost savings of approximately £7,000 per year, which will only continue to grow as Great Place to Work’s number of Certified companies grows.
Kelly Ross, Senior Growth Marketing Manager at Great Place To Work, echoed this sentiment. “The dynamic pages that Salted Stone built truly are a win-win. They’ll provide end users with such a unique experience, while still being scalable and efficient for our team, on the back end. Just the sheer fact that it will speed up page creation and list uploads, for a company like ours, is a lifesaver.”