David Lloyd creates multilingual intranet to connect global staff

Health and fitness brand David Lloyd clubs has partnered with employee experience platform vendor Unily to create a multilingual mobile-first app that claims to provide company news and culture-building initiatives, employee experiences and productivity tools.

The new ‘DL Connect’ app aims to ensure that all its 10,000 frontline and five hundred desk-based staff spread across 133 clubs in nine countries have mobile access to the company’s internal communications.

Powered by Unily, the app, which is due to go live this summer, has been designed to connect its many deskless staff and create a sense of community among its diverse global workforce.

The app is described as a mini social media network in a press statement and the fitness firm believes that it will increase employee engagement and drive advocacy through stories and community groups.

The firm added that it hoped that the new app would provide adequate functionality so that it would “remove WhatsApp as a form of communication” for its staff. Like the Meta-owned messaging service, DL Connect also offers the ability to create target messaging of groups and can be used for two-way communication.

According to Juliett Cattermole, group people director, David Lloyd Clubs the intranet fits the fitness brand’s ethos of “fostering an inclusive workforce and creating a place where everyone belongs.”

She added: “That now extends to being able to provide all our international teams with a new raft of features, through the new ‘DLConnect’ app, including multi-lingual capabilities.”

Chris Ciauri, CEO of Unily, added that the partnership demonstrated why organisations need to invest in technology to connect and empower a diverse and distributed workforce.

He added: “Today’s employees are overloaded with technology noise; it’s imperative to streamline the vast number of applications employees have to switch between and provide a personalised experience by leveraging governed AI.”