With 15,000 employees in North America, United Rentals is the world’s largest equipment rental company. 80% of the company’s employees work on-the-go and do not sit in front of a computer. United Rentals’ Chief Operating Officer brought in the Talk Social to Me team (Rachel Medanic and colleague) to engage and then launch Workplace by Facebook to the entire company, including over 500 branch offices throughout North America. The project was initiated in parallel with ‘OneUR’, a strategic initiative to unify customer experience across branch offices and support those efforts with additional best practices sharing, stronger leadership communication, and in recognition of the company’s geographically dispersed frontline workforce.
Frontline Worker Change Scope
Historically, communicating local experiences or specialized knowledge across United Rentals was challenging. Scaling the adoption of operational excellence and standardizing the in-store customer experience across 900 stores required giving all employees a voice at the same time. In addition, safety was a core operational pillar that could benefit from the knowledge sharing made possible by the mobile-first platform. Alongside the OneUR manditory training program which enabled an in-person, personalized touch to making the app’s purpose clear in the lives of employees, each U.S. had a highly local, competitive culture to bring the spirit of competition into the initiative. Deploying Workplace by Facebook also meant finding meaningful topics for each region to discuss, while tapping into the competitive spirit at the same time–that’s where champions were instrumental.
Employee champions were identified and 200 were trained to evangelize and support what became a 68% field adoption rate in 5 months. In a dedicated a Champions community they learned platform functionality and best use of platform features to amplify scale and reach. United Rentals directors and C-suite leaders received personalized coaching plans, talking points, and communications recommendations (video, event stage, town halls, on location at branch offices) and digital “actions” they could use to model participation in the new network via mobile app.
Results
“Safety is about people, not statistics. We promote ‘active caring’ at United Rentals, and that, in turn, strengthens our safety culture. When people are seeing, sharing and liking pictures of ‘why they work safe’ (family, children, and pets), they are reinforcing and building value for the most important part of our business–whether they realize it or not.”
– Cheryl Wisenbaker, Director of Safety at United Rentals
The anytime, anywhere mobile communications platform impacted both leaders and frontline workers in branch offices. All were participants on the platform the the behavior modeling bounced back and forth to reinforce new lines of connection across hierarchy in support of more unified business results that everyone could get behind. Results included:
- Recruitment of 200 Regional Champions who were trained to support local initiatives on Workplace by Facebook; at the time of the project there were 900 UR branch offices in North America.
- A heavily and creatively participated in company Ice Bucket Challenge concept adapted for UR’s employee-to-employee Compassion Fund (communicated solely through Workplace by Facebook).
- 36% of United Rentals branch offices had 100% employee participation in the voluntary Compassion Fund.
- 200% growth in employee annual giving participation to the Compassion Fund over the previous year in 1/3 of the time vs. the previous year.
- Centralization and scale of the company’s safety campaign and “0 incidents” competitive metrics and motivations, delivered via morning branch office huddles and reinforced via digital messages on Workplace platform.
Sustainability
Two years after the launch, the internal network’s health was reported as: “going well and continuing to see strong, regular participation by company employees.”
About United Rentals
United Rentals, Inc. is an American equipment rental company. It owns the largest rental fleet in the world with approximately 4,800 classes of equipment totaling about $20.59 billion in original equipment cost (OEC) as of 2025. The company has a combined total of 1,625 locations, including an integrated network of 1,504 rental locations in North America, including operations in 49 U.S. states and Puerto Rico and in every Canadian province.