At Heathrow we have always looked at ways we can use technology to support efficiency and productivity and digitalisation is a key enabler. As part of the journey we are on, we rolled out a digital workplace initiative, with Microsoft Office 365 at its core, to all Heathrow employees.
This provides colleagues with the ability to connect online, anywhere across the airport at any time, it allows colleagues to work from any location and collaborate with colleagues in different locations.
As part of the roll out we wanted to encourage people to learn about all the tools and understand how they, as individuals, could use them to add value to their day to day work as well as grow their own skills.
An area we are hugely proud of is the response to Power Apps, which provides a no/low code capability for developing solutions by the individuals and teams who will be using them. This tool was picked up by one colleague who used it to develop a translation app to help colleagues communicate with travellers and what followed was a ground swell of interest that became a community of citizen developers across many departments at Heathrow.
The community developed apps that organisationally provided efficiency and improved productivity by removing 75,000 pages of paperwork from processes and reducing data entry by nearly 1,000 hours.
For the individuals it grew their confidence in digital tools and how they can be used to enhance their day to day working life. This confidence and the initiatives they took led to promotions, as well as career changes into more technical roles, where they could deepen their understanding of the technology and take on more responsibility of supporting colleagues in building more tools and digitally transforming legacy processes.
This has helped build a more creative and empowering culture amongst the workforce. We continue to offer comprehensive learning and development opportunities for Power App developers as well as a Digital Academy offering content from our different platform providers for all colleagues. We have an area for training, a thriving Yammer community and a busy Teams group all sharing ideas and knowledge. We have events running almost weekly, showcasing different skills as well as show and tells to inspire others at Heathrow. We are continuously learning.