Building and Supporting Communities with Riviera Utilities
Riviera Utilities provides electric, water, wastewater, natural gas, internet, and cable tv service to residents of Baldwin County, the seventh-fastest-growing county in the United States. Serving its community for over a century, this municipal utility company employs a talented workforce across a diverse range of roles.
We met up with Communications Coordinator, Lily Jackson, to learn what makes Riviera Utilities a great place to work, and how she and her team were able to deliver a digital employee experience that engages a diverse workforce that spans generations.
Although Jackson’s love for storytelling and building online communities initially drew her to a communications role at Riviera Utilities, she found much more there.
“I’m a former journalist, and was looking for a way to feel like I was contributing to my community—educating and telling stories. I saw a job opening for Riviera to be a communications specialist. I knew that it would be a really good option for me, but I had no clue the types of people I would meet, and how much they would change my life.”
Attracting and retaining employees are equally important goals, and Riviera Utilities continues to succeed in both. It’s common for employees to stay for many years, or even decades. Jackson was happy to share some of the key factors that keep herself and others engaged and motivated as a member of the team.
“The benefits are fantastic,” she began, “but all that aside, it’s the people and the mission. This is really hard work. Our crews are all so talented, and it takes so much effort every day to keep things going. We put in a lot more work under blue skies than we do under gray. If I’m able to tell that story and educate our customers on everything that really goes into turning your faucet on and having clean, drinkable water come out, it’s a good day.
This isn’t always the easiest industry to work in. A lot of times, people think about the utility when the power goes out, or they have an issue with their bill—but we really get a lot of opportunities to help people in their day-to-day lives.”
Members of the Riviera Utilities team take pride in not only filling an important role in their organization, but also within their local community.
“Riviera Utility is a municipal utility, and I love the spot we fill in our really close-knit community,” Jackson shared. “Some people have been for over 30 years. They start out as teenagers, and go all the way to retirement, and still don’t want to leave. There are even families who have worked for Riviera across generations.“
"We put in a lot more work under blue skies than we do under gray."
While many organizations strive to provide excellent service, Riviera Utilities takes a holistic perspective on what it means to serve its customers and community.
“It’s core to our organization to be excellent stewards of our community and our environment,” Jackson explained. “Because we’re a municipality, every dollar we make goes back into the infrastructure we have, providing a better quality of life for people who live in our service area.
It’s our goal to deliver excellent service at a reasonable price. Our board does a great job of keeping our rates as low as possible. We always put our customers first in that way, but also in the way we interact with our community.”
As that community grows and changes, Riviera not only provides a steadfast foundation, but also grows and evolves along with the people it serves.
“Baldwin County is the seventh fastest growing county in the United States,” Jackson said, “and it’s evident every day that’s the case. As we provide service to all these new families, it’s encouraging to hear from people hailing from across the country and across the world that we’re doing a great job.”
Riviera’s impact extends beyond the services it provides. Members of the team are also friends, neighbors, and members of the community they work in.
“We put an emphasis on the fact that our people aren’t just lineworkers, gasfitters, or techs in the water lab. They’re also your kids’ softball coaches, they’re hunters and fishers, volunteers at local gardens. We’re a growing company, and our employees are heavily involved in giving back to the community.”
“It’s core to our organization to be excellent stewards of our community and our environment.”
Providing utility service across one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States requires great communication, knowledge sharing, and teamwork. In order to support those essential needs and strengthen the relationships that support all that work as the organization grew, Riviera Utilities needed a comprehensive digital employee experience.
Jackson set out to find a modern intranet that could connect employees to the people, information, and resources they needed to do their best work, no matter where that work took them.
“Accessibility was a major challenge I set out to solve,” she said. “Fieldworkers make up about 75% of our company.”
As a small-but-mighty department of one, Jackson explained why it was equally important for this new intranet to be easy to manage and administrate.
“It had to be plug-and-play,” she said. “At the time, it was just me. I needed something that allowed me to easily pull all the data, resources, and files that every single department needed, put them in one place, and let it rock.”
While creativity is definitely one of Jackson’s strong suits, coding and IT weren’t areas where she could invest a lot of resources.
“I’m not an HTML designer,” she laughed. “I needed something that would be easy to work with on the admin side, and something that wouldn’t require me to spend a lot of time in the backend of the system.”
Finally, this new intranet had to meet the expectations of both non-technical users, and young workers who grew up steeped in top-tier consumer app design and experiences.
“I looked at a lot of other tools, and they all had a very ‘ugly corporate’ aesthetic,” Jackson explained. “Our industry, although it’s very classic and old-school in many ways, is driven by young people. People join straight out of high school. Many continue working for Riviera their whole life.”
“A lot of people on our team aren’t that tech savvy,” she said. “It’s not that they couldn’t be, they just don’t need to be. So I wanted our new intranet to be something so easy to pick up that people could use without investing a lot of time in learning it. We needed a solution that felt like we were getting ahead of the game, and that was Haystack.”
In 2022, Jackson and her colleagues at Riviera Utilities chose Haystack as their new modern intranet.
"We needed a solution that felt like we were getting ahead of the game, and that was Haystack.”
Before the reveal of their new modern intranet, the Riviera team had to migrate the resources and processes from their legacy systems to Haystack. Happily, there was no shortage of resources, strategic support and guidance from Haystack’s Customer Success team.
“I compliment Haystack’s onboarding process and roadmaps all the time,” Jackson shared. “I’ve looked to those documents for inspiration for building my own because they’re so thorough. As someone new to Riviera, I really didn’t want to mess this launch up. When I saw all the tools, the weekly meetings with our rep, I felt like ‘we’ve got this.’”
When launch day came, there was a sense of nervous excitement, tempered by competence and confidence in having made a great choice for the team.
“During my presentation to the company, I was really nervous, hoping people would like this big thing I was about to unveil. But I also felt confident, because of the roadmap, the tips, and all the resources the CS team provided me. It made a big task feel very manageable.”
After some thoughtful preparation, board approval, and an engaging presentation, Jackson launched Riviera’s new modern intranet, dubbed “Tailgate” to the whole organization. Since launch, feedback from colleagues across the organization has been overwhelmingly positive.
“I wanted full adoption as quickly as possible,” Jackson recalled. “The run-up had to be short, and it went really well. We had 100% adoption within a week of the launch. There was a lot of really positive feedback from people, saying how much they liked the design and how easy it was to use and find things.
I remember, there were several people who didn’t have social media accounts of their own, but even they were engaging heavily on Tailgate. Getting people to scroll on their company intranet is a feat!”
It was critical to earn adoption from employees across the organization, and Jackson ensured that senior leadership was also onboard from the beginning.
“Our senior leadership team loves Tailgate, too,” she said. “They use it a lot for reporting. They also love how the profiles allow them to get to know people better, even before they meet.”
"We had 100% adoption within a week of the launch."
In addition to connecting everyone in the organization with the information and people they need to thrive, Tailgate proved to be an excellent means for Jackson to use her deep knowledge of storytelling and media to craft a rich creative environment for everyone to explore and participate in.
“I love the way Tailgate’s feed is organized, because it makes reading about work-related things palatable,” she explained. “In the past, we had an internally-built website and a newsletter. It wasn’t getting any traction because the methods people had to go through to engage weren’t easy. Accessibility was a huge issue.”
Having solved the access challenge, Jackson is now able to focus her effort on supporting a digital space where the content is engaging, authentic, and inviting.
“I wanted to make the things that people read more like the types of experiences people get through the apps they love. Instead of a bland company announcement, it’s more like something you’d get from a friend. Photos, videos, GIFs, embeds, and all those elements make our internal content feel less stiff and stuffy.
Instead of a bland message congratulating someone for earning a certification, we intentionally celebrate all the work in the background it took to get it, and the funny stories along the way.”
I think these days people are so conditioned to seeing large amounts of content, so I don’t worry about overwhelming the team by sending out multiple posts. They can just scroll through it at their convenience.
That familiarity, the ease of use—that’s why I fell in love with the platform. It didn’t feel like another platform I had to learn for work. It’s an addition to your life that just happens to be related to your company.
After all, who wants to sit through another training? Not me, and I make some of those trainings.”
In addition to feeling familiar and inviting for everyone on the team, Jackson makes sure it’s easy for people to be able to access the content on Tailgate across different mediums, formats, and devices.
“Mobile has been really helpful to us. All of our trucks are equipped with an iPad, so even if people don’t have a company phone, they can still access Tailgate.
I have a lot of people who just love a good old classic email, too. As a company with generations of employees, It’s important for us to be able to speak to people in the ways they prefer.
We also release a monthly newsletter, and I can see a surge in the analytics every time.”
“Mobile has been really helpful to us."
After a resoundingly successful launch, the team continues to get lots of value from Tailgate.
“Tailgate’s one-year anniversary was a few weeks ago, and with that full year under our belts, I can say that it’s been 100% successful. People are conditioned to go there for important information.”
The new intranet and communication strategy have been so successful, Riviera Utilities won the American Public Power Association’s “Excellence in Public Power Communications Awards” in 2023.
“I really commend Haystack for creating a fantastic product that helped me deliver this kind of experience.”
As someone who built an extraordinary communication landscape, both internally and externally, Jackson had some priceless tips, and was generous enough to share them.
“In everything you do, find a way to communicate to your employees, your coworkers—your audience—that they deserve the space you’re asking them to fill. I work in a blue-collar industry with a lot of talented, humble people that don’t ask for much recognition.
An early hurdle for my communications strategy was people thinking, ‘why do I need to fill this information out about myself? Nobody cares.’ ‘Why would I need to be in this TikTok video? Nobody wants to see me.’ ‘Why do you want to profile me? Nobody wants to know about my life.’
It differs for everyone, but the goal is the same: find a way to reassure them that they deserve the space you’re asking them to fill. They deserve a moment for themselves. They deserve that recognition. What they do, who they are, and how they feel, matters.
People really do care what their hobbies are, where they came from, what high school they went to. People care what they bring to the company outside of their normal jobs.
If you can encourage people to fill that space, the overall health of your community, your company, and your brand will improve. Because once everyone understands that they’re wanted and respected, and they warrant that esteem, we all open up a little bit more to other people coming into our own lives.”
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