About the company

Hydro Quebec’s subsidiary, Hilo, has been setting out to build a unifying corporate culture focused on pride and results while keeping customer satisfaction at the heart of their energy efficiency operations since its launch in 2019.

Offering a complete smart-energy service for the home and businesses, the subsidiary, who aims to provide a product that breathes simplicity, doubled in size over the course of the pandemic. Thus, it was only a matter of time until they saw the need to shift from the typical workplace setting to organizing their workforce in a remote-first work culture.

On their journey to find the right match to help them implement this change, Hilo was approached by Archie, and shortly after meeting with our team it became evident that we not only grasped the requirements of the mandate, but also offered the best-suited solution available.

Challenges

As an affiliate government agency, Hilo’s main concern under the hybrid work model regarded privacy and security. Not only was it absolutely critical that the scheduling software they adopted operated on a secure network, they needed granular control of any authorizations related to their SSO integration with Microsoft 365.

Next, they needed to rethink the office configuration, previously designed to accommodate 150 employees to assigned desks, to one that promoted inter-team collaboration with specific areas such as brainstorming rooms hosting a few workstations and a certain amount of private offices.

On top of needing the typical interactive floor plans with zones and neighbourhoods, they also needed a system that would support a number of different booking dependency rules as well as the delegations of reservations where an assistant or team manager books a space on behalf of another employee.

Solutions

At the top of the list, security was Archie’s first point to address. To keep Hilo’s data secure and eliminate the risk of security breaches or data leaks without compromising the required smart integrations with their existing workplace systems, we proceeded with the integration under a service account rather than the usual admin account which enabled Hilo to have a full, granular control of the data flow between the two apps. Hand-picking each permission themselves via their Microsoft 365 service account made it possible to maintain a seamless connection between the two so that employees could benefit from SSO login and real-time synchronization of their bookings, meetings, calendars and so on without sacrificing security.

Archie then helped Hilo with their office space logistic requirement for a successful post-pandemic return. With our platform, Hilo’s management is now able to effortlessly set up different roles and permissions to grant or deny access to certain employees, all the while employees enjoy a premium user experience when booking a space. We also effectively answered Hilo’s need for flexible and customizable booking dependency so that the bulk of the work could be automated and easily tweaked when needed.

Before Archie, Hilo’s desire to shift to a remote-first work culture seemed more like a complicated jigsaw puzzle than a possible reality. However, with our entirely customizable scheduling software, the Hydro Quebec subsidiary was able to make the transition with ease and without having to compromise on any of their requirements. With more prospective growth on the horizon, Hilo is now confident that they possess the necessary tools to make hybrid work a lasting success.