How Mimecast made 2,200 global employees feel heard
From fragmented channels to a single connected culture: Mimecast built a virtual home for its global workforce and achieved over 95% employee activation doing it.
95%+
employee activation achieved shortly after launch
75%
reduction in time spent supporting employees with content creation
50%+
of the entire company now reached by the HR newsletter each send
Mimecast is a global cybersecurity leader serving more than 42,000 organizations worldwide – protecting every person, across every channel, from every threat, human and AI.
With approximately 2,200 employees across offices in Massachusetts, London, Australia, South Africa, and beyond, keeping a rapidly growing workforce aligned – and genuinely connected – had become one of the company's most pressing internal challenges.
The problem wasn't a lack of communication channels – quite the opposite.
Before Workvivo, internal content creation was so cumbersome that only a handful of employees could do it effectively. Everyone else depended on those few individuals – or defaulted to email and instant messaging tools that were already overloaded. Critical company announcements competed with team updates, project pings, and everyday noise. Nothing had a lasting shelf life.
"If folks are being flooded with emails ranging from company announcements to project work, it quickly becomes impossible to differentiate what you truly need to know." — Bryan Vermes, Director, Employee Experience & Communications, Mimecast
Single points of failure were everywhere. When a knowledgeable employee left a team or was unavailable, content simply stopped being created. The culture Bryan's team was working hard to build had nowhere reliable to live.
People
~2,200
Industry
Cybersecurity (B2B)
Location
Global
Org Size
Mid-Market
When we launched, it felt like one of our biggest culture wins as a company in a couple of years.
Bryan Vermes
Director, Employee Experience & Communications, Mimecast
Too many channels, too little connection
Mimecast is a global cybersecurity leader serving more than 42,000 organizations worldwide – protecting every person, across every channel, from every threat, human and AI. With approximately 2,200 employees across offices in Massachusetts, London, Australia, South Africa, and beyond, keeping a rapidly growing workforce aligned – and genuinely connected – had become one of the company's most pressing internal challenges.
The problem wasn't a lack of communication channels – quite the opposite.
Before Workvivo, internal content creation was so cumbersome that only a handful of employees could do it effectively. Everyone else depended on those few individuals – or defaulted to email and instant messaging tools that were already overloaded. Critical company announcements competed with team updates, project pings, and everyday noise. Nothing had a lasting shelf life.
"If folks are being flooded with emails ranging from company announcements to project work, it quickly becomes impossible to differentiate what you truly need to know." — Bryan Vermes, Director, Employee Experience & Communications, Mimecast
Single points of failure were everywhere. When a knowledgeable employee left a team or was unavailable, content simply stopped being created. The culture Bryan's team was working hard to build had nowhere reliable to live.
Choosing a platform employees would actually use
When Mimecast evaluated solutions, four things mattered most: user experience, robust analytics, a strong mobile app, and deep system integrations.
Workvivo stood out on all four. Its familiar social media-like design meant employees could get started without training. The analytics package offered granular visibility into what content was resonating – by team, job level, and behavior. And integrations with Mimecast's HRIS, Microsoft 365, Confluence, Jira, and Zoom made it a natural fit within their existing tech ecosystem.
The rollout moved fast. Within 12 weeks, Mimecast went live with over 12 Spaces and dozens of pages of content already built – thanks to Workvivo's intuitive tools and a strong onboarding team. Mimecast also leveraged Workvivo's AI features early on, using them for content generation and for answering employee inquiries, including Workvivo-specific questions to reduce reliance on the Help Center. Executive sponsorship was non-negotiable: the CEO and senior leadership team were expected to actively post, react, and engage from day one, creating a visible multiplier effect for company culture.
A teaser campaign, All Hands announcements, and carefully planned communications did the rest.
Key features that made the difference:
- Push Notifications & Billboard Banners surfaced need-to-know content without adding to the noise.
- Newsletter Templates brought consistency and reach to team and HR communications.
- Journeys automated new hire onboarding touchpoints that were previously handled manually.
- Spaces gave global teams a dedicated home for collaboration across time zones.
- Workvivo Analytics turned engagement data into recognition campaigns and smarter content decisions.
Mimecast success in numbers
The results were immediate and have continued to grow.
Activation crossed 95% quickly and held. Around a third of Mimecast's office-based workforce (roughly 700 to 800 employees) voluntarily downloaded the mobile app, despite everyone having access to a laptop during the workday. That kind of opt-in adoption, Bryan notes, is a testament to how intuitive and modern the experience feels.
The HR newsletter, which once went out into the void with no way to measure impact, now demonstrably reaches more than half the company each time it's published. Analytics go beyond measuring success and actively drive it, helping Bryan's team identify top contributors and recognize them through engagement campaigns.
And for Bryan personally? He now spends a fraction of the time he once did supporting colleagues with the basics of content creation.
“It is very rare now that I get folks reaching out asking how to use functionality on Workvivo. That's been a huge difference.” — Bryan Vermes, Director, Employee Experience & Communications, Mimecast
Building one team across a global company
Workvivo has become more than a communications platform at Mimecast – it's the place where the company's culture actually lives. From Halloween costume contests and holiday decoration sharing to an Earth Month campaign where every employee post triggered a tree being planted, the platform has given Mimecast's global workforce a space to show up as their whole selves.
Looking ahead, Bryan's team is expanding Spaces to team-level collaboration, exploring new use cases for Journeys beyond onboarding, and continuing to explore how Workvivo’s AI and Search capabilities can help employees more easily discover relevant knowledge, answers, and content across the platform.
The vision? A platform that intelligently surfaces relevant content and knowledge to help employees find answers faster.
“It truly creates a virtual connection space – for communications, for recognition, for culture. It shrinks the world a little. And for a global company still growing into new countries, that matters.” — Bryan Vermes, Director, Employee Experience & Communications, Mimecast