Rabobank provides a strong cooperative workplace experience to improve employee engagement and customer satisfaction

Rabobank, a cooperative bank headquartered in the Netherlands, has long prided itself on helping customers be more self-reliant and efficient, whether through providing financial advice to the community or delivering user-friendly apps for customers’ banking needs. The bank wanted to empower employees in the same way by enabling them to be productive whether they are at a bank branch or a corporate office, at home, or at a customer site. At the same time as it allowed for independence, Rabobank wanted to create a more unified workplace culture across the bank branches.

“With Microsoft 365, we’re creating a digital community where we do more than collaborate on documents. We talk about the challenges for our customers and for our roles and how we can make things better, which is helping us to change the culture.”

Boy Sleddering, Senior Vice President Corporate Communications, Rabobank

“As a cooperative, we all need to work together,” says Janine Vos, Chief Human Resources Officer and Managing Board Member at Rabobank. “We devised our One Digital Workplace program not as a way to sell technology to employees, but as a way to use technology to engage with people and support a shared culture.” Because Microsoft 365 is built with collaboration in mind, Rabobank saw it as a natural choice to help employees better engage with each other. That engagement makes the bank a great place to work—and, as Vos points out, “Happy employees make happy customers.”

Providing easy-to-use tools builds confidence and connections

Rabobank’s goals required that employees have a seamless experience using tools such as Microsoft Teams or OneDrive across devices. Boy Sleddering, Senior Vice President Corporate Communications at Rabobank, says, “Almost every project I work on is with people from different areas of the bank, and with Teams, we can work together and learn from each other in a very easy way.”

Interestingly, rather than getting a mandate from IT to use Microsoft 365 tools, many Rabobank employees saw how easy they were to use and started adopting them on their own. When Christel van der Pluijm, an executive assistant at Rabobank, started using Teams, she immediately realized how much more easily she could coordinate regional meetings. “As an assistant to six regional directors who manage 90 local banks across 14 regions, having the ability to coordinate and schedule Teams meetings makes me much more efficient and leaves me time to focus on other tasks,” she explains.

Van der Pluijm convinced her whole group to give it a chance. Teams supports ongoing dialogue and helps employees stay on top of planned meetings and schedule changes through features such as persistent chat, where people can review the chat history to see what they missed.

In planning and promoting events, Jochem van Hattum, a Marketing and Communications Coordinator at Rabobank in Eindhoven, frequently collaborates with colleagues to create promotional materials. He especially appreciates the simplicity of sharing and coauthoring documents in Teams: “Before, I’d get document revisions through email and have to merge all the changes and ensure everything was correct. Now in Teams, I share a document, everyone makes their edits, and we all see the changes in one place.”

Expanding the benefits of a digital workplace beyond the office

Employees across the Rabobank ecosystem are also finding that they can increase efficiency by getting work done on the go. Sleddering continues, “Before, I only had access to email while out of the office. Now if I’m traveling to work on the train or working from home, I can call colleagues and we can work together in the same document. The ability to be more mobile is a huge step forward.”

Van Hattum especially appreciates that he can coordinate and manage events from the road. “I travel to events all over the place, so having the tools in Microsoft 365 creates a lot of flexibility for me,” he explains. “When I’m on site, I can see everything that’s happening and who’s available. If I shoot a video or take pictures of events, I can easily upload those files to OneDrive so I can add them to PowerPoint presentations later. I have everything in my hand at the exact moment I need it.”

Managing remote corporate and departmental meetings and webinars has also gotten easier. “Different departments used to hire outside vendors to help run webinars. Not only was it expensive, but the technology wasn’t always the same,” says Sleddering. “Some had the option to let people comment live or to record or caption, but it was inconsistent. With Teams live events, we have a single shared platform that everyone knows how to use, and it provides all the capabilities we need. And if someone misses a session or needs to refer back to it, they can easily access the video on Microsoft Stream.”

From a human resources perspective, Vos sees Microsoft 365 as another way to help attract and retain talent, because Rabobank can provide the kind of modern tools that workers—especially younger workers—expect to help them do their jobs well. “Today, people want instant access to information, and they want technology in the workplace to be as advanced as it is in their homes, and Microsoft 365 delivers that experience,” she explains.

Creating a truly cooperative culture that gets the job done

Rabobank is using tools such as Teams and Yammer to help connect employees at hundreds of locations across the Netherlands and around the world. Not only does Vos think that employees can work better together for the bank’s customers by using Microsoft 365, but she also believes that technology can be a force for change inside the bank. “We want to be a more networked, more inclusive company,” she explains. “To do this, you have to change the way people interact, and having the right technology like Teams can help tremendously. It’s a huge enabler for change.”

With Microsoft Teams, employees can easily access corporate information or find colleagues from any location, using any device. Teams capabilities such as chat, voice, and video calling make a significant difference in helping to turn a digital experience into a more personal one. Using a shared technology platform like Microsoft 365 fosters communications between branches and departments, because different groups across the bank are no longer using disparate technologies. Instead, they’re working with the same tools, which means they can spend more time doing their jobs and less time focused on learning new technology.

Rabobank is fostering a culture of information-sharing across the bank with Yammer. “When people had technical questions or needed information about a bank product outside their scope, they used to send an email and hope to get a reply within a few days,” says Sleddering. “With Yammer, they can post a question in one of the service- or product-based communities and get an answer within minutes.”

This new way of working with Microsoft 365 is also helping to promote cooperative and meaningful relationships inside the bank. Sleddering explains, “My department has about 60 people, but in total across the Netherlands, about 350 people work in Marketing or Communications. With Microsoft 365, we’re creating a digital community where we do more than collaborate on documents. We talk about the challenges for our customers and for our roles and how we can make things better, which is helping us to change the culture. Now my colleagues at local branches feel empowered to make changes because they know they’re aligned with other teams across the bank who share the same vision.”

Creating an environment that’s high-tech and high-touch

Inclusion and diversity are important at Rabobank. “In the workplace, people want to feel like they belong and are part of a community,” says Vos. To help bring people together and create a more inclusive culture, Rabobank enables employees to create groups on Teams or Yammer that are based on shared interests and commonalities.

“We have a worldwide network of diversity groups using Microsoft 365 to connect with each other,” says Vos. “We give employees the opportunity to reach out to like-minded colleagues all over the world, which helps build communities and make people feel like they belong.”

For Vos’ role as Chief Human Resources Officer, the ability to scroll through a group chat in Yammer and see what people are discussing is also incredibly valuable. “High-tech is important, but let’s not forget about high-touch. I can’t be in touch with 40,000 people, but I can reach out to people personally through Yammer, even if I can’t meet with them face to face. That personal contact really helps someone who’s struggling to feel heard and included.”

With Microsoft 365, Rabobank leaders and employees have gained the capabilities that they need to communicate and create a shared vision to implement the bank’s goals. “With One Digital Workplace, we’ve promoted a new way of working, showing people how they can find colleagues with similar interests and concerns, or those working on similar problems inside the bank, and use different forms of technology to engage with them,” says Vos. “With Microsoft 365, people can work together better, and that’s what Rabobank is all about: people who work together to help our customers thrive.”

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“Almost every project I work on is with people from different areas of the bank, and with Teams, we can work together and learn from each other in a very easy way.”

Boy Sleddering, Senior Vice President Corporate Communications, Rabobank