IKEA, the Swedish company reinvented the furniture business with its famous low-priced furniture that customers assemble themselves. Looking to improve retail coworkers’ engagement and incorporate more environmentally conscious business practices, the company deployed Microsoft 365 to all 166,000 coworkers. Coworkers have quickly adopted Microsoft Teams to collaborate internally and externally, with the Teams mobile app especially appealing to store coworkers. Teams adoption has helped the company support its sustainability efforts by reducing paper-based processes and replacing travel with digital collaboration.
IKEA is well known for its yellow and blue logo, ready-for-assembly furniture, and delicious Swedish meatballs. It has a passion for making everyday life better for people around the world and takes a lead in pushing for corporate responsibility around issues such as climate change and equality. As part of this effort, the company focuses on developing sustainable business practices through material selection, product design, and efficient operations, with many design and process improvements coming from store staff.
Thanks to Cineca, we’ve adopted new working styles, which have reduced travel and supported people to achieve a better work-life balance.
“We are not a top-down company. We encourage people to initiate change in the company,” explains Jesper Brodin, CEO of Ingka Group, which includes IKEA Retail, Ingka Centres, and Ingka Investments. “We strive to tap into our organizational intelligence and unleash the potential of our people to achieve our goals and values. We can’t bring all of our 166,000 coworkers together physically, but digital transformation has created new opportunities for us to bring people together and enable them to collaborate.”
Seeing an opportunity to unleash collaboration
With a widely distributed workforce spread across 30 markets, IKEA had taken a traditional approach to IT with on-premises solutions that coworkers could only access on corporate desktops or laptops. In stores, managers had to rely on paper-based processes to deliver information to store coworkers or handle processes like shift changes. “We saw the opportunity to connect people and help them take part in the ongoing improvements in our company by sharing their knowledge, but it was simply not possible in our previous environment,” says Brodin.
Transforming with the cloud
IKEA turned to Microsoft for a cloud-based solution that would help the company bring communication and collaboration to new levels and avoid the need for costly hardware and software upgrades. It chose to deploy Microsoft 365 because it delivered the capabilities IKEA wanted on a highly secure platform that didn’t require extensive IT management and upgrades. And because Microsoft 365 offers a complete, intelligent solution for Firstline Coworkers, IKEA gave store coworkers access to the same capabilities that its staff at central headquarters enjoys. In addition, IKEA coworkers have the option to use Microsoft 365 mobile apps on their personal devices.
