Building a Digital Front Door for 8,200 Frontline Employees
A century-old company redefined workplace communications: learn how Inghams built The Hatch so that all 8,200 people – regardless of role, location, or language – could feel like part of a unified, well-informed team.
3,000
team members activated in the first week of the launch
2.4×
higher activation rate in NZ Operations compared to their previous communications platform
60%
of the workforce engages via the mobile app
Workvivo has become the front door for our people to find what they need, when they need it. Having a platform that can grow with us is important as we continue to scale as an organization.
Sierra Crump
Senior Communications Advisor
A Proud History Meets a Modern Challenge
Inghams is Australia and New Zealand's largest poultry producer, with a proud history spanning more than 100 years. From a six-chicken family business in 1918 to one of the region's largest food producers, Inghams has grown into a business that feeds millions across Australia and New Zealand every day.
That scale and growth means keeping everyone informed, connected, and supported is genuinely complex, and over time, the company’s legacy tools became a bottleneck. Around 90% of Inghams' workforce is frontline, and most do not have company email addresses. The organization's Inclusion Survey found that more than 60% of the workforce identifies with two or more cultural backgrounds, with over 30 cultural backgrounds and 10 languages represented across the business.
Communication tools built with only desk and technology employees in mind were never going to be enough.
Inghams had been an early adopter of Workplace from Meta, using it as its primary employee communications platform. When Workplace announced it would be sunsetting, Inghams didn't just look for a replacement. The team saw it as an opportunity to do something more ambitious: consolidate legacy tools into a single platform, built properly for a frontline-first workforce.
People
8,200+
Industry
Poultry Producer and Supplier
Location
Australia and New Zealand
Org Size
Enterprise
For us, the return on investment isn't just engagement – it's time. Every manual process we move onto The Hatch gives our people and our teams time back to focus on doing their jobs effectively and safely.
Leasa Beasley
General Manager, Communications
Building The Hatch: One Platform for Everyone
Inghams found the answer in Workvivo. Branded internally as The Hatch, it became a single source of truth – a digital tool where everyone, regardless of role, location, or language, could find what they needed, feel connected to the business, and participate in its culture."We want it to be a one-stop shop," says Sierra Crump, Senior Communications Advisor. "We wanted one centralized, mobile-first platform where our people always know where to go. Whether it’s searching for a policy, reading a leader message, completing a form, answering a survey or viewing a roster, it starts by going to The Hatch.”
Execution of this vision matched the company's ambition. Working with implementation and change partner, VMG Connect and collaborating closely with Workvivo, Inghams laid the groundwork and launched The Hatch in July 2025.
The full transition was finished by November 2025, just under a six-month deadline to migrate all intranet content, retire legacy systems and establish The Hatch as a digital front door to the organization’s resources and communications.
The foundational design challenge was getting frontline workers into the platform without requiring a company email address. Working with VMG Connect, Inghams built a custom Claims Portal: a self-service verification tool where frontline team members activate their account using their credentials. It gave frontline workers a direct path into the platform, without the need for extensive IT support or a company email address.
Alongside the platform, Inghams established a network of localised champions to drive adoption and engagement. More than 150 Hatch Champions were recruited across all functions and locations — peer-level advocates who supported adoption on the ground and made the platform feel local rather than something pushed at an enterprise level.
The Results
The Hatch resonated from launch. Almost 3,000 team members activated their accounts in the first week, driven in large part by site leaders and champions who personally got behind the platform on the ground.
The platform delivered immediate value:
- Automatic translation supports the top 10 languages spoken across the organization, meaning critical safety and operational content reaches people in the language they're most comfortable in. HR policies added directly to platform pages are now translated automatically, replacing a manual process that previously relied on external translation services.
- Digital forms and surveys replaced paper-based processes across staff sales, expressions of interest and internal surveys – with significant reduction in processing time.
- Workvivo TV brings digital signage to regional facilities; workers can catch site updates in lunchrooms without worrying about network connectivity or being on their phones.
- The mobile app has been widely adopted, with approximately 60% of the frontline workforce using their devices to access the platform.
- CEO video updates are shared weekly from the CEO from various locations, a major driver that has boosted engagement on what was previously a lower-activity day.
- Billboards allow the communications team to customize what employees see first when they open the app, helping cut through the noise and highlight important announcements.
- The service award bot integration built with VMG Connect automates service recognition and delivers reward incentives directly within The Hatch, replacing a manual, admin-heavy process for the HR department.
System-wide, total page views reached 310,000 within months of the intranet consolidation — a signal that people were finding the platform genuinely useful, not just checking in.
From Access to Adoption in New Zealand
The New Zealand team's journey shows what happens when a platform is paired with the right incentive. By using Workvivo Forms to move poultry staff sales exclusively onto The Hatch, activation at the organization's largest New Zealand site reached nearly 80%. Across the New Zealand region, activation more than doubled from 30% at launch to 72%. On the strength of those results, the staff sales rollout is now expanding across the New Zealand team, with an Australian pilot planned soon.
For frontline workers across both countries, The Hatch also represents something less easy to measure: equity. They see the same company news as the office team, stay informed about their benefits, and are recognised as part of a business with a proud history spanning more than 100 years.
What's Next for Inghams
The Hatch has become the connective tissue of Inghams' digital ecosystem — the platform that brings together people and information that keep the business moving every day.
Looking ahead, Inghams is exploring Workvivo’s AI tools to improve search. This feature will allow employees to ask questions such as "How many weeks of parental leave am I entitled to?" and receive quick, accurate answers.
And as more operational processes move onto The Hatch, its role as an employee experience platform — not simply a communications or intranet tool — continues to deepen.