5 Questions with Parkland

Parkland may not be a name you’re familiar with, but their products and services power our world. As an international fuel distributor and retailer, Parkland operates in 25 countries with an employee base of over 6,000 people. It takes a concerted, unified effort for this trilingual company to serve over one million customers daily through their variety of retail and commercial brands like Pioneer, Chevron, and On the Run. Parkland operates everything from refineries on the supply side to gas stations and convenience stores on the retail side, all while working towards goals like low-carbon mandates.

Larissa Mark, manager of employee engagement at Parkland, took the time to sit down with us and explain how they use their Igloo, “Parkland Path,” to keep their operations aligned and successful.

Tell us about Parkland

Parkland’s purpose is to power what moves people. We like to say that “while you might not be familiar with Parkland, you’re probably one of the more than one million customers we serve every day through our variety of fuel retail brands and commercial brands.

What sets us apart is a really strong supply network; it gives us a huge advantage, because not only do we produce the fuel, but we also transport the fuel and we get it to consumers. We’re also one of Canada’s leading low-carbon fuel producers—we are the first in Canada that produces a low-carbon fuel at the refinery. It’s called “co-processing;” we take bio alternatives and co-processes that with conventional fuels to produce a low carbon fuel that serves a wide range of customers.

The Path has become our receptacle for information; it’s our single source of truth for corporate information, knowledge, videos, and everything else Parkland.

Tell us about your Igloo community and how it came about

We call our Igloo intranet “Parkland Path,” and we’ve had it since about 2018. We use it as a tool to tell stories about the company; we use it to keep everyone engaged and informed through organizational updates and for important communications. Since then, we’ve given control over to teams to manage their own spaces as they see fit, which can mean document repositories, policy guides, or collaboration spaces. While we (the communications team) are the owners of Path, but we like to give our other teams autonomy to manage their own sites. We also get a lot of valuable input from or D&I team and our HSE team, which is important because they have so much to share as it relates to our values of community, safety, integrity, and respect.

What are some of the problems that were solved with Igloo?

The Path has become our receptacle for information; it’s our single source of truth for corporate information, knowledge, videos, and everything else Parkland. We’re constantly driving people to the Path to ensure they’re informed and engaged with the organization, and to make sure we’re all on the same page.

This is particularly useful for SharePoint. Igloo has a great SharePoint integration that gets a lot of use at Parkland. We have a lot of teams that have a lot of files that need to be available across the organization, and Igloo makes it much easier to ensure everyone can access the correct version of these documents easily. This can be anything from preferred hotel lists for travel or policies on how to file expenses. The Path keeps us all on the same page.

I’d also say that for us, it’s really content. Blog posts have been a big win for us as they allow people to share information with the company. Our Igloo representative was very helpful last year when they put together a digital policy guide for the P&C team, which now serves as a destination where we host a lot of our policies around workplace conduct and the like.

Over all, Igloo has made it much easier to keep everyone in our organization aligned on the central values, policies, and knowledge that we need to keep so many moving pieces engaged, productive, and efficient.

How do you measure the success of your digital workplace?

We have a lot of work to do on our analytics. We just introduced a new homepage—new color palette, all that—as part of a digital refresh for the company. There are so many analytics to consider, from Path analytics to Google Analytics, and we’re looking into it to understand the success of the re-brand.

We also introduced a new email tool to get better understanding of the metrics on email, and overall we’re just pulling all these tools together in our digital ecosystem to help us see the complete impact of our re-brand. There are so many different ways to engage with our digital identity through the Path, and we’re constantly fine-tuning, expanding, and adapting our presence to ensure it’s a reliable source for the information people need.

Why do you like working with Igloo Software?

We really like the constant updates Igloo offers on their platform. Recently, the photo formatting and sizing changes have played really well into our website refresh, and last year, Igloo gave us a lot of good attention to support multiple different efforts and initiatives.

Whenever we’re worried we might be stagnating, we know we can always turn to Igloo for help ensuring the Path stays dynamic and interesting for our employees who rely on it every day. I think the recent updates have really driven that point home; they have offered another great set of changes that modernize our platform and update its capabilities.

So on the platform side, Igloo is always moving in a direction that helps us achieve more in our intranet space, and on the people side, we know we can always rely on Igloo for the support to put those software enhancements into action towards better engagement.

What does the future hold for The Path?

The next step for the Path is to make it more interactive. Right now, it’s a critical space where the integrity of information is maintained in an accessible way, but we’d like to make it a “digital water cooler” where people can interact and share in a more reciprocal way.

This year, we have really taken over with the new refresh; the brand is everywhere. With the support of the Igloo team, we’d be excited to see what else we can achieve to bring our people closer together in a digital space.