About the company

Since being founded by journalist and politician Henri Bourassa on January 10, 1910, Le Devoir set out to be a newspaper of opinion, ideas, and debate. For over a century, the traditional media outlet has remained true to its roots whilst continuing to adapt to ever-evolving digital world around us. As its founder wished, the newspaper has stayed entirely independent, never being sold to large media conglomerates; its commitment to defending the ideas and causes ensuring the political, economic, cultural and social advancement of Quebec’s society is what makes the journal a cornerstone of the Quebecois media landscape.

Challenges

As the majority of the global workforce was forced to shift to remote work at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Le Devoir quickly realized that, in order to keep up with the time, they would continue to enforce a remote-first work culture even after a post-pandemic return to normalcy.

However, a shift of this scale for the news outlet meant a substantial reconfiguration of the logistics of operations. They knew they needed a secure software that would facilitate collaboration under the hybrid work model without disturbing most of their internal processes. The challenge of rethinking the existing floor plan was in ensuring that it would answer to the various needs of the different departments of their large editorial staff.

Due to the nature of the field, the newspaper was also accustomed to receiving a high volume of visitors and knew that the logistics of this habitual occurrence would need to be revisited in order to keep individuals safe.

In addition to this, considering the potential data-sensitive nature of the work, it was paramount to have a system on a secure network to protect the journal from any data and privacy breaches.

Solutions

After meeting with Le Devoir, Archie immediately understood their particular needs and quickly helped them put in place the right hybrid strategy.

With Archie’s desk and room booking platform, Le Devoir employees have full visibility of the office layout, including all the distinct neighbourhoods for each department. Archie’s configuration of the space allowed their employees to navigate the interactive floor plan in such a way that everyone could clearly see where their peers were sitting which facilitated the collaborative aspect the newspaper desired.

Furthermore, with our solution, they were able to seamlessly integrate with Outlook, which allowed Le Devoir’s personnel to book from their desktop’s outlook app, with both syncing instantly with one another.

This reduced the friction of having to introduce new processes and having to train employees on them.

Our visitor app, Archie Visitors, enables employees to invite visitors on-site with ease and minimal contact. Visitors complete their health check electronically, 24 hours prior to arrival and then check-in using a QR code provided to them by the app or via email to notify their host. For Le Devoir, this aspect of the overall solution was a must since a log of all the visitors needed to be kept and updated in real-time to avoid spreading illness and keep everyone safe.

Finally, in regards to security, Le Devoir required a reliable system that guaranteed an 99 % uptime. Archie’s hosted environments use clustering to provide server redundancy and extremely high availability and was therefore able to meet this criteria without any difficulty.

Archie’s scheduling platforms and visitor management system helped Le Devoir achieve its hybrid work goals. The Montreal-born journal, assisted by the dedicated support team at Archie, was able to implement the strategy promptly. The solution was enthusiastically adopted company-wide, immediately displayed improvements in the workflow and operations and continues to help them increase success.