WSP: Streamlining M&A with a personalized, extensible EXP
About WSP
WSP is one of the world’s leading professional services firms, uniting its engineering, advisory and science-based expertise to shape communities to advance humanity. From local beginnings to a globe-spanning presence today, WSP operates in over 50 countries and employs approximately 73,000 professionals, known as Visioneers. Together they pioneer solutions and deliver innovative projects in the transportation, infrastructure, environment, building, energy, water, and mining and metals sectors.
The business’s strategy focuses on unifying a diverse global workforce while celebrating local identity – an ethos reflected in their award-nominated intranet, Canopy.
The challenge
Before partnering with Unily, WSP’s intranet experience was disjointed, inefficient, and underused. The legacy platform lacked intuitive design, personalization, and functional search – making it hard for people to find what they needed or feel connected to the broader organization.
As WSP’s global workforce rapidly expanded, two of it's key priorities were facilitating smooth knowledge exchange and communicating to different regions with empathy and personalization.
Despite strong efforts to support internal communication and access to resources, WSP began to encounter growing complexity. Valuable information lived across multiple departments, and while email remained a key channel, it often led to message overload. With more than 100 apps and portals in use, employees had to navigate a decentralized digital landscape without a single, intuitive entry point.
These issues were magnified during mergers and acquisitions – a major growth driver for WSP. Onboarding new employees from acquired organizations was challenging. The limitations with the old intranet led to the creation of numerous SharePoint sites, with uncoordinated content and access controls.
It was clear that WSP needed more than just a new tool. It needed a platform that could unify a growing global workforce and reflect the company’s brand and values.
The solution
As the leading enterprise Employee Experience Platform, and the first platform to be named a Leader by all three analysts, Gartner, Forrester, and IDC, Unily is built to handle the complexity of global workforces and rapid expansion.
Guided by persona mapping and extensive stakeholder input, WSP and Unily launched Canopy in January 2023 - a global EXP designed for speed, scale, and connectivity.
Onboarding at pace, with precision
In the year following, WSP implemented a new acquisition framework, which has enabled the seamless integration to Canopy of 5 recently acquired companies (POWER Engineers, Lexica, AKF, Proxion and 1A Eng.). With mergers and acquisitions (M&A) being such a key part of the business model, having a platform that enables fast yet personalized onboarding for employees joining the business was a priority.
Unily enabled a real, intentional shift in how WSP onboarded and enabled new employees from M&A activity. Precise yet scalable governance, feedback loops, research, and an enterprise content strategy form WSP’s fast-paced onboarding framework.
Unily’s scalable personalization and governance frameworks ensure people get meaningful experiences based on where they are in the employee lifecycle. Newly acquired employees are automatically enrolled into tailored experiences via a real-time sync with Microsoft Entra ID, ensuring speed, precision, and scalability.
A prime example came when WSP acquired Power Engineers. 4,000 employees were welcomed into Canopy the next day – with personalized messages, regional resources, and engagement tracking right from the start.
Images and content shown are for demonstrative purposes.
What really made this work - beyond granting fast access - was the broader, comprehensive capabilities of the Unily platform, which enable WSP to deploy a scalable, enterprise-grade approach to effectively onboard new employees.
Driving business value with extensibility
Unily’s open, modular architecture empowers WSP to connect and extend the platform in ways other intranet solutions can’t. As a result, WSP can seamlessly integrate the platform with core business systems to solve for the most complex, bespoke use cases.
Images and content shown are for demonstrative purposes.
For example, Canopy integrates directly with WSP’s centralized real estate platform, which manages data for hundreds of offices and labs. This extensibility powers dynamic office pages in Canopy that update in real time, displaying accurate location content, maps, and news based on where someone is.
Ensuring your EXP can scale with you is critical for any fast-growing business. The ability to build custom features on top of the Unily foundation ensures this is the case, and is why WSP’s digital workplace continues to evolve.
Hyper-personalization with a purpose
Unlike many platforms that only allow for content targeting, Unily supports true, full-spectrum personalization from layouts and navigation to functionality, communications, and search results. With dozens of personalized homepage experiences, each Canopy instance feels uniquely tailored to a user’s team or region.
Images and content shown are for demonstrative purposes.
Persona mapping laid the groundwork for region- and role-specific experiences. Global and local teams now work in harmony, with employees receiving relevant news and information. This eliminates one of the most common pain points for employees at large organizations – having to dig through the digital noise.
Outcomes with Unily
By launching Canopy, WSP has transformed its employee experience into a scalable, strategic asset. What was once a fragmented and siloed legacy intranet is now a dynamic employee experience platform – one that supports speed and growth. It’s a shining example of the impact a leading employee experience platform can have on the overall business model of an organization.
Since launch, WSP has dramatically improved onboarding, strengthened cultural cohesion, and enabled a personalized digital experience for 73,000+ employees around the world.
Canopy has become more than just a communications tool — it's an enabler of global alignment, local relevance, and innovation.
Some of the key achievements of the WSP-Unily partnership include:
- Onboarded 4,000+ employees in a single acquisition cycle, with near-immediate access and tailored welcome experiences
- Streamlined global communications by unifying dozens of tools and regional channels under a single, scalable platform
- Increased employee engagement and early adoption among new hires
- Delivered real-time location-based experiences with dynamic integrations and content automation
- WSP’s employee experience platform, Canopy, is available in 38 countries and 14 languages, providing a consistent experience for all employees across the world, with content tailored to their region.
- Since onboarding all regions, WSP consistently achieves 94% adoption, 85% engagement, over 3 million page views, more than 200,000 searches, and a 77% search success rate each month.
- Employee sentiment toward Canopy is highly positive. Canopy is not a tool for core work, and yet it is integrated into the daily routines of employees.
- Canopy breaks down silos by delivering unified and targeted content experiences in which employees can feel connected from a local, regional, and global perspective.
Accelerating forward
WSP’s journey with Unily demonstrates the power of a truly extensible EXP. As the business continues its ambitious growth strategy, Canopy will play a pivotal role in enabling every employee to thrive.
“If you’re growing fast and your digital workplace can’t keep up, you’re going to lose people before you even onboard them. Unily helped us change that story.” Anne-Marie Ferrara, Global Vice President, Digital Experience
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