I’ve presented on this topic at various conferences in the last few months and wanted to share three video examples which have been generating a lot of questions and admiring comments.

Expounding on the value of video is a good way to get both existing and would-be users excited about the potential of using their intranet more effectively and to look at how they can make changes to their current approach.

We challenge why so many organizations still use the cold nature of email as their primary news channel. Ragan made an estimate in “The State of Employee Communication”, that 98% of internal communicators use email as a primary channel (intranets only scored 80% in comparison).

So, why are people still holding on to email as their primary medium?

The digital workplace has given users the ability to convey a message in so many other ways. Video remains one of the most powerful and effective methods. And with all the stats to back it up, it’s clearly a medium that needs to be used a lot more regularly by businesses.

According to a report from VidYard, businesses using video grow company revenue 49% faster, year-over-year, than organizations without. But not only does video give buyers a great first impression of a brand, it also has huge value for use within an organization.

A common theme has emerged at the various communications, employee engagement and business change conferences I’ve attended over the last twelve months. How do we humanize our board members to move them from CEO to a more relatable, human figure?

Alternatively, how do you maximize the impact of a character, in a way which email certainly can’t and blogging may only have a limited effect on?

With the INT18 Interact Awards about to be announced, the team has been reading through the entries and ideas that individual businesses have devised to help connect and engage employees. We’ve noticed a lot of organizations focusing on video this year, so we’ll look at how our clients have used the medium to great success.

Using video to communicate change

Travelex’s award entry features one of my favorite videos for communicating change. It explains the business challenge – an update on company uniform and how employees can help. It also features subtitles to help the hard of hearing, those without computer volume or even those who just don’t like sound with videos.

It relies on a natural presenter but has a strong ‘Know, Feel, Do’ structure to it mixed with great humour. The Travelex team shot it using a simple iPhone app.

This is top-down information which is delivered really effectively. By incorporating the opinions and ideas of the workforce, it’s an organizational collaboration kickstarted in a memorable and engaging way.

Gonzo Journalism

How about turning the tables?

With Family Service League, you will see VP Jonathan Chenkin surprising employees and performing on-the-spot interviews. The videos not only show the reactions and ensuing conversation, but also allows Chenkin to show his relaxed, friendly side to the organization tuning in on the intranet.

So what next?

When you’re toying with video in your internal communications, the key is to consider what this particular tool allows you to do which you couldn’t achieve with other mediums. You also can’t rescue a painful presenter (we all have them) with video so for those people, consider blogs and other activities.

On the other hand, big personalities can be shown off really well on video, so take advantage of anyone who feels comfortable in front of the lens, and use the opportunity to experiment with content.

Are you winning at video content or have plans to start? Contact us and share your experiences, I’d love to learn more and feature you the next time we approach this topic.

The post How customers use video to make their leaders more human appeared first on Interact software.

When creating an internal communications plan–or, indeed, any business strategy – it’s our natural inclination to cater to the needs and priorities of our decision-makers.

They hold the purse strings; they dictate the direction and priorities for the business. What they say, goes. However, while catering what we call the ‘HiPPO’ – that is, the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion – is essential for the smooth running of any internal communications strategy, pushing their content may actually come at a cost to the wider organization.

When determining what content is most likely to support your IC objectives, adopting a bottom-up approach that places employees at the center is proven to deliver greater engagement. In this blog, we explore the reasons why.

The HiPPO: a driving force for internal communications, or a barrier?

While organizational design is undergoing a shift – thanks in part to the growing gig economy, remote working and a desire to fully optimize resources – the majority of organizations retain a traditional hierarchal structure.

Different tiers, ranging from the C-suite down to the shop floor employee, will have varying levels of power and influence.This impacts organizations and staff in a variety of ways.

On one hand, strategic direction and steering of business objectives from the top-down can help establish company culture, drive motivation and build the company brand. Employees look to the HiPPO to steer their decisions and priorities. Recognition from senior level is also shown to increase employee engagement, retention and productivity.

From an internal communications perspective, this has tremendous potential value. Many of us will recognize the repeated mantras of, “I want more transparent communication”, or “I want to be better informed” when we run global internal comms surveys. C-level communications and touch points such as CEO blogs or monthly ‘state of the nation’ updates can give the people what they want – insight, a feeling of inclusion, a sense of being appreciated or recognized.

However….

1. The ‘fear factor’: the HiPPO can hinder engagement or activity

In some circumstances, the HiPPO can stifle creativity or free communication. In face-to-face situations they dominate the room, communicating opinion as the accepted truth, often at the cost of collaborative or data-driven decision making.

In fact, the Rotterdam School of Management produced a paper titled, ‘We are (all) the champions: The effect of status in the implementation of innovations”, which highlights the superior success rate of junior managers’ projects compared to those run by senior managers. This highlights the risks the HiPPO approach brings.

This presents challenges from an internal communications perspective. C-suite decision-makers, by their level of seniority or experience, can cause grass-roots employees to feel unable to speak out or engage with the content they’re creating. In some organizational cultures this extends to a feeling of intimidation or fear. How many of your employees would feel confident disputing, challenging or even, in some cases, simply endorsing the opinion of a senior leader?

In the upcoming Interact State of The Digital Workplace report, I looked at telemetry data generated across over 100 million activities by 1.1 million users around the globe.

One of the areas of focus was the impact of CEO blogs in terms of engagement and encouraging collaborative behavior, from the relatively light effort of ‘Liking’ to the more committed activity of ‘Sharing’.

I looked at how likely someone in the business was to like at least one of those blogs over a month period, how likely they were to comment, then finally how likely they were to share that content.

Next, I took the most effective alternative approaches and ran them alongside for a comparison. The data showed that there are more effective ways to elicit responses:

The results show that when it comes to engagement with IC content, pushing senior management blogs won’t reap the greatest rewards.

2. The end goals of your IC content aren’t about management

What are your internal communications objectives?

To improve levels of employee engagement or retention? To improve the internal brand, or create employee advocates ? To give employees a voice? Keep them informed around the direction, goals and achievements of the organization?

The chances are, “keep the CEO happy” isn’t a primary objective (though admittedly, it tends to be the underlying goal for most departments). When creating IC content or drawing up your plan, it’s helpful to begin at the end – and consider how your strategy can support you in realizing those goals.

Our telemetry data shows that when 50% of employees are liking, sharing or commenting on IC content, retention increases by 12%. When this rises to 93% of employees engaging with content, as we saw with Interact customer Sport England, retention increases by 19%. Social activity – Liking, Sharing, Commenting – is the currency of digital internal communications. Therefore placing activity at the top of your KPI list is key.

Pushing HiPPO content rarely serves to empower employees with a voice; and as our first point and telemetry data shows, it doesn’t correlate to high levels of engagement or activity. A strategy that embraces bottom-up internal communication will better serve most IC objectives – and generate those much-needed indicators of engagement.

When it comes to keeping employees informed about the direction or achievements for the business, this by nature needs to come from the top-down; however as we explore in our next point, this doesn’t necessarily have to mean the top tier of management.

3. Employees are focused on the ‘what does this have to do with me?’ element of IC content

Our Digital Workplace Report data shows that if you want to encourage likes or engagement from employees, you’ll be far more successful by ensuring departments blog.

Communicating changes which impact employees or celebrating individual successes of people in departments will see almost double the chance of an employee liking at least one of these blogs in a month. The key aspect here is the ‘WIIFM’ – the ‘what’s in it for me?’.

While senior management blogs arguably do have relevance for employees, in our experience these are typically strategic or top-level. They talk about the business as a whole, and may use language unfamiliar to those at the grass roots of the business. In larger or dispersed organizations where individual employees may never even meet those operating in the C-suite, this gap can make content feel too far removed from their own roles or experiences.

Taking an employee-first approach, it may be worth considering a cascade for internal communications that looks to middle managers as the link between the top and bottom ‘tiers’ of a business.

For example, if the company needs to communicate change to employees, a management blog can give the top-level overview or essential information; from this, departmental blogs can translate what this change means in real terms for individuals in that particular department. Middle management or department leaders are also more likely to know the individual contributions to successes or achievements, and can recognize these accordingly – encouraging greater engagement with content.

4. Employee content plays a central role in building relationships and the culture

Our Digital Workplace Report findings also show that personal blogs of employees are more successful at generating comments or interactions.

In the social digital workplace, this is a trend we see time and again. People identify with people like them: in internal communications terms, this means they are more likely to engage with or respond to fellow colleagues who sound like them, act like them and have similar roles within the organization.

This also has a key role in driving employee engagement. As part of its globally recognized Q12 Employee Engagement survey, Gallup point to the importance of having ‘a best friend at work’ – the value of relationships with colleagues has a measurable impact on levels of employee morale, happiness and engagement.

However, in an increasingly globalized economy, many employees can now be found working remotely or even within different timezones compared to their peers. This makes the ability to create a common culture or nurture relationships particularly challenging. By providing non-work focused insights into personal aspect of their lives, employees can leverage internal communication tools to build these connections with their colleagues.

At Interact, this has included use of our intranet blog to share weddings, holidays or birth announcements; as part of our onboarding process and to familiarize new users with the intranet, new starters are also encouraged to introduce themselves with an informal blog. Informal forums also play a vital role in our IC content strategy: encouraging a digital culture where people can get to know one another and connect.

(Forums that have an informal basis, rather than focusing on role or project specific topics, encourage employees to engage and collaborate more than formal or structured senior level content).

5. An employee-focused approach to creating – and tapping into – a culture of innovation

Innovation is at the heart of business success. We don’t grow by standing still – in fact, a McKinsey survey shows more than 70 percent of senior executives agree innovation will be at least one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies in the next three to five years.

Getting great ideas from employees is one of the most powerful ways to stimulate innovation; 94% of senior executives agree that people and corporate culture are the most important drivers of innovation, according to the pwc report ‘Unleashing the power of innovation’.

As the champions for internal communications, it is our task to foster this culture and facilitate ideation. But if we put the HiPPO at the forefront of our IC content strategy, we actively hinder this – for the same reasons highlighted in the first point. If we’re relying on employees engaging with, or responding to C-suite content for ideation, we won’t truly tap into the potential of our employees.

(In its survey on innovation, pwc posed the question: ‘What do you think are the most important ingredients for successful innovation at a company?’. Having the right culture was ranked in the top 3 by 57% of respondents, while 37% pointed to the ability to capture ideas throughout the organization).

From our telemetry data, we see that ideation forums unsurprisingly are a far more effective approach – almost 50% more successful.

(Ideas, suggestions and discussions within a collaborative space such as an intranet forum offer a more informal, employee-focused approach to facilitate innovation).

So, should we be eliminating the C-Level Blog?

Definitely not! The C-level blog is shown to deliver value and plays a vital role in giving employees visibility of those operating ‘at the top’, as well as understanding the general direction of the organization.

However, limiting internal communications content to C-Level blogs, updates or campaigns will give you limited results and is unlikely to achieve the employee voice you are looking to nurture.

Supplement your C-level blogs or communications with content from people across the organization. Take the time to explain to management and staff alike why employees should like, share or comment. Explaining the basics can often have untold successes.

Consider investing in training your C-Level management and employees to blog effectively, and vary the subject of your blogs or IC content to cover different aspects of both business and personal interest.

Mixing it up with more creative comms ideas will also drive engagement and support you in achieving those long term objectives.

An employee-first mindset for IC content, as our findings show, can dramatically impact on how your staff respond to internal communications. What approaches have worked best for you? Leave us a comment and let us know.

The post 5 reasons your IC content must focus on employees – not managers appeared first on Interact software.

So, you’re sat in front of your execs, ready to pitch. Your weeks of planning to bring your organization into the 21^st century and ignite internal collaboration is looking polished.

You’ve researched the options, you’ve identified your ideal vendor and platform, you’ve weighed up all the pros and cons. You make your case and it’s flawless; you’re feeling confident.

And then you hear that inevitable question. The one every internal comms enthusiast dreads.

“But what if someone says something bad?”

Are you finding yourself slowly nodding at this point, fighting back the tears as you recount the terrible experience?

The fear of employees taking free license on your internal communication or collaboration streams is common. It’s stood in the way of many a project, ESN or intranet go-live. When scare stories circulate, it’s no wonder those in the C-suite shy away. Luckily, however, it doesn’t have to be like this.

Through years of board level consultancy, I’ve perfected a response for the cynics that can help get your collaboration project out of the boardroom and off the ground. It’s one I personally used three times in pitches last week and each time the response was acknowledged, considered and we progressed to the opportunities collaboration brings.

Guide

Create a culture of collaboration

Download this report and discover how to create a culture of employee collaboration via your digital workplace.

Download the free guide

What if someone says something bad?

..So what?

Seriously! If somebody says something bad, remember: it’s their name and picture against the statement. What’s more important is how you respond: the process for prevention and resolution.

Your acceptable use policy can cover the prevention phase. Set out clearly what is acceptable and a great way to work; more importantly, highlight what employees shouldn’t do. Host your policy centrally and ensure all new starters are pointed to it and acknowledge it.

Prevention failed?

OK, so one of your employees has put up a status update, a blog, a comment they shouldn’t. Perhaps they’ve overstepped by criticizing another individual in their team, department or the wider business. Perhaps they’ve got a chip on their shoulder about the way a certain project or initiative is going and they’re letting their thoughts be known.

Naturally, you don’t want the negativity of one person to damage morale, jeopardize a project or reflect badly on your company image. The key is to act quickly: think damage control. For this, you need a defined, simple process for resolving the issue.

Managing an internal communication ‘mishap’

Your comms management process depends on the collaboration platform in question and the culture of your business.

Setting effective user permissions and managing where people can post can help prevent bad messages from spreading beyond the immediate proximity of a Team or Department area, keeping conversations between immediate colleagues. For those ‘high risk’ public areas, deploying a moderation protocol where blog posts or content are signed off by an agreed moderator may be an option.

(Interact’s easy-to-use settings enable managers to quickly and effective assign user permissions, manage teams and organize content)

For a less ‘Big Brother’ approach, consider a simple cascade or response process. Ensure users know who to report ‘bad’ content to, and that named individuals have the necessary permissions and knowledge to quickly remove any offending comments. Complaints should then be escalated to the individual’s manager or a senior representative, and the disciplinary process defined accordingly.

Setting out the process for responding to internal communication crises should form part of your internal communications plan and be a safety net for any collaboration project or platform.

When your execs are erring on the ‘glass half empty’ side, it’s best not to bury our heads in the sand and simply argue “it will never happen!”. Showing you’re prepared for the worst is essential.

The danger of not having an outlet

What do you think happens to a person’s opinion if you don’t make an internal, controlled environment available? Does their opinion go away?

No. You’ve simply put your hands over your ears.

Their frustrations spill out in conversations with colleagues, impacting on employee engagement, morale and staff retention. Negative employee experiences bleed into an attitude with customers, costing your business customer loyalty and potential revenue.

Finally, and most dangerously, those public vents can quickly escalate into a PR nightmare as the frustrations are discussed publicly on the various business and social channels available for anyone with a grievance and a keyboard.

You may think you’re managing risk by limiting social communication internally, but that’s rarely the case. In reality, suppressing opinion can potentially lead to something like the renowned HMV Twitter firing incident, which saw employees hack the company’s official Twitter account to recount their disgust at the company’s actions after the music giant went into administration.

It’s a potentially catastrophic blow to company brand and reputation that will cause many an exec to quiver in their boots in fear. Communicating change should be a two-way process, using a managed environment for employees to give feedback: in this instance, an internal collaboration platform could save your company’s skin, rather than see employees throw the brand to the dogs.

Your business might be completely unique. Your execs might be thinking it’s ok for everyone else, but not my business – the risks are too high, the repercussions are too great.

However, every other business I’ve worked with was unique too. Even the most highly regulated of industries – finance, healthcare, public sector government agencies – have succeeded in rolling out social and collaborative tools for their organizations. What makes you so special?

So, how do we start to change attitudes?

Guide

Create a culture of collaboration

Download this report and discover how to create a culture of employee collaboration via your digital workplace.

Download the free guide

What does it cost us if somebody isn’t able to say something?

This is the critical question. We’re already talked about the potential damage of employees going external to vent their frustrations. But what does it cost us when our workers can’t share improvements, new revenue opportunities or the opportunity to feel listened to and considered?

Ideation and innovation are topical for 2017. It’s a competitive environment out there, with new organizations popping up daily to saturate the global market with yet more and more options for consumers. As we write in our recent blog post:

“Simply continuing to do what we’ve always done is no longer enough to sustain growth and business success: to survive a challenging economy and competitive environment, we must go further than ever before.”

If our employees can’t put forward their ideas, we not only miss a valuable competitive advantage – we risk alienating and losing those employees altogether. Studies show that employees who feel listened to demonstrate higher levels of engagement, productivity and retention. The cost of stifling collaboration may be greater than many of us realize.

Whilst it will be impossible to put an exact price on not doing this, it’s food for thought.

How are other companies benefiting from being collaborative?

We’ve looked at some of our own customers who have successfully rolled out collaborative technology and overcome “the fear”. So why not arm yourself with some real-life examples?

• Make-A-Wish Foundation used their intranet to encouraged 720 users per month to share knowledge and ideas, ultimately making their charitable causes wishes an even better experience. Their resounding success saw them take home the winning title for the ‘Best Value to Employees’ intranet in Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communication Awards.’

• Sport England see over 90% of employees adding blogs and content monthly, sharing ideas for great measures and giving a greater insight into the work they do.
• Dex Media were going through a complex merger, which could have posed huge challenges for employee engagement and their brand. Using their intranet as a collaboration tool, they could share the process and work they were doing, instilling a sense of collective pride amongst its workforce. Anyone for pizza?

• Wheatley Group introduced a “right first time” campaign via its intranet. As part of the campaign, engineers could highlight any process flaws which stopped them being able to fix a problem on their first visit to a customer. This shows the power of collaborative tools in driving innovation: tapping into collective intelligence and sharing ideas amongst colleagues who may otherwise never speak can have tremendous results.
• Meanwhile leading European food manufacturer Genius Gluten Free re-purposed Workflow and Forms on their intranet to enable them to share new recipe ideas, understand sourcing costs, marketing needs, product placements and every other step, drastically reducing the time between concept and getting to market.

So…what if someone says something bad?

I’ve packed in some evidence to help you back up your argument, but the idea is pretty simple. Next time you see that wry smile and the subsequent “what if…” question, smile back even more wryly and declare:

• It’s the responsibility of the individual
• We’ll be prepared for the worst
• An internal platform is more easily managed and reduces risk, compared to external PR disasters
• The cost of not collaborating will damage our ability to grow and innovate

Or for a simple take-away answer:

“We don’t need to worry, their name will be against it and we’ll be able to remedy any rare misdemeanors. It will be a lower risk alternative to them taking it onto public social media. So tell me, what is it costing us not being able to collaborate?”

Next objection please?

Guide

Create a culture of collaboration

Download this report and discover how to create a culture of employee collaboration via your digital workplace.

Download the free guide

The post The hidden cost of collaboration: Someone saying something bad is not your biggest worry appeared first on Interact software.

I’m often asked as Head of Customer Insight why our customers win more of the major intranet, comms and employee engagement awards than anybody else. Today I’m going to let you into their secret: people.

The ease of building an intranet using Interact is a given. There is very little need for specialist skills or even to involve IT, beyond connecting to third party applications or managing your Active Directory environment. However, there is one killer focus all of these awards winners have which sets them up for success: they ensure their company and its employees are mobilised to ensure success.

If you’re considering how to build an intranet for your own organization and want to to get the people in your business ready, you’ve come to the right place. We’ll look at how this simple model for success can translate into your business with its unique challenges and opportunities.

Have a clear picture of people’s roles and needs within the intranet

One of the foundational blocks when you build an intranet is the roles and responsibilities of those involved.

Creating clear groups will help you understand who sits where within your needs hierarchy. It’s very easy to be led by personalities (particularly strong ones!) so it is critical you understand what type of role people each person performs.

If specific individuals or a group are funding your intranet, or you are reporting the progress of the intranet to them, the chances are these people are the board or your stakeholders. What do they expect and need? What measures do they have to judge the success of your site?

The mission statements section of this blog provides a simple approach to determine this. It is also very important to recognize that this group may not be your everyday typical user, so avoid building an intranet solely around their requirements. You’ll be surprised how many businesses start with this approach and then wonder why their frontline workers aren’t using the intranet.

Next, we have those who are directly responsible for the whole or part of your intranet. This is your intranet team, which we’ll touch upon next.

If people are giving you insight into the workings of their departments, groups or locations, identifying requirements and acting as a cheerleader for your intranet, they are likely to be your champions.

Finally, we have the people using your intranet, who can be broadly referred to as your workforce. Within the personas section of this blog, we’ll look at why it’s critical to define the role types within this.

Who is going to be part of your intranet team?

Surely everyone knows this don’t they? Well, from experience the answer is probably not.

As businesses we tend to know who is going to identify the need for, give sign-off approval of, and undertake the process of building a new intranet. However, the bit where we decide who will be responsible for what within the intranet is one of those important things we plan on getting round to…eventually…this afternoon…one month later…panic!

Firstly, we need to know who is going to run our intranet. This isn’t to be confused with needing an intranet manager and a full time team; less than 5% of our award winners have this level of dedicated resource. If your business is of a certain size, it will undoubtedly help – but it is by no means essential for most.

When we look at our central intranet team, we are trying to understand who will do what within it. Therefore, when you set out to build an intranet, you need to define who will be responsible for a host of ongoing tasks including:

• News contributions from employees
• Ensuring people know how to use the site
• Gathering new requirements
• Engaging stakeholders, their functions and departments
• Encouraging collaboration

Ultimately we’re looking to ensure that “why isn’t this on the intranet?” is a question entrenched across our organizations.

It may well be that these tasks are handled by various people around the business, but typically there needs to be a central person or group who is ultimately responsible for making decisions.

This is something our strategists spend considerable time doing with customers to ensure they are set up for success.

Whilst the people in this group may manage your intranet as part of broader roles, they are likely to see it as an important task and not just something to leave until the last task of the day.

Your central intranet team is separate to your champions, who may be representatives from various employee groups, departments and locations. Whilst your central team is focussed on making your intranet better, your champions are dedicated to ensuring the intranet can solve the most common pain points for their group and act as cheerleaders to encourage the use and adoption of your site.

This central team could be made up of a mix of roles, typically employee engagement or a broader HR role, through to training and comms. However, the beauty of intranet teams is one person may be doing multiple roles or even something completely different to those named.

Selecting Intranet Champions – Think ‘Who do I need?’, not ‘Who is available?’

Intranet Champions are your representatives dotted around the business. They will identify opportunities for the intranet to make improvements to their area and the people using the services of that area, as well as acting as a broader cheerleader about the intranet to their peers. People tend to connect with people like them, so whilst your attempts to engage may be seen as an outsider, someone close to them championing the cause may well receive a greater reception.

For champions to be successful there are two key focuses:

1) You need the right person. Often departments will pick who is available, rather than the best person for the job. This person can sometimes be quite junior or not suited to the role at hand. If you were going to shortlist people within a department / location / group, who would you pick? The trade off to convince managers of this department is to provide resources which will help them drive efficiencies.

2) You need exec and middle management buy in. Do all involved realise the benefit of the intranet and ensure that its work is treated as a critical part of a champion’s role?

If you’ve ever taken the Prince 2 Project Management course, there’s a section where they inform you to ignore people’s availability and pick the resources you need when planning your project. You need the same approach when picking your intranet champions.

A good place to start for champions is to identify the top 5 admin pain points in their area. What are the five questions or actions you consistently have to do via email or phone?

Get your champions to identify the features they feel will be game changers to their teams then encourage them to shout about those features.

Think of your workforce as people

Ok, so we’ve defined our intranet team and have a hoard of champions ready to eulogise around their parts of your business. What about the guys who are actually going to use your site?

It can be tempting to think of your users as one group but really they are an amalgam. If you went on to Amazon and the suggestions for purchases were showing you what somebody in another country, of a different age with varying interests to you was buying, you wouldn’t use Amazon’s recommendations anymore.

When you build an intranet, you need to think of it in the same way. If the intranet looks like it is meant for other people and I’m an afterthought, seeing irrelevant news and functions, why would I bother to use it?

A highly effective way to overcome this is by using personas. Personas allow you to understand not just the breakdown of your workforce but their access to technology, their pain points, their user journeys and also the terminology they use.

Comms practitioners often make the mistake of ‘going corporate’ as a ‘one size fits all’ approach, but if your audiences don’t use the terms you are writing, they won’t use your intranet. Change the tone to reflect the terms they use. This can be particularly effective in launch comms when promoting specific features to specific personas. NSPCC provide a great example of personas:

Increasingly we are seeing customers printing out their personas, attaching them to a wall and talking at those personas’ faces to picture how that group would respond to a message or campaign (undoubtedly you’re now picturing how weird this looks, but trust me it works).

A mixture of workshops and surveys will help you gain this information, but nothing beats getting your hands dirty. Engaging firsthand with those who will be using your intranet will not only help you build credibility with front line workers, but also understand howthey work. These workshops will shape any face to face messaging and showcasing you look to do approaching and during launch.

What will the intranet mean to each group?

When you build an intranet, remember that it will mean varying things to various people amongst these groups. We haven’t touched upon middle management, but it’s important to engage and enthuse this group. It can often be picked up in conjunction with your intranet champion work.

Amongst each of those groups, consider what the purpose of the intranet is for them and define mission statements.

For example, you may focus on the measures of success (we’ll touch on this in a little while in this blog):

For middle managers, your focus should be on the benefits to them and those reporting:

Meanwhile your frontline employees’ purpose will be decidedly different:

These statements will prove a handy barometer to reflect upon when communicating with, reporting to or working with these groups.

Effectively measuring use and adoption

Once you understand your mission statements, what you should be measuring to ensure you’re supporting those groups will be clearer. For example, simply recording page hits will not mean much to those outside of your central intranet team. Instead, focus on the types of measures your stakeholders will want to see when you report and also focus upon the details which will enable you to judge success and risk areas.

% of active users can be particularly useful if you are building an intranet to be the primary route to self-service and accessing other applications using single sign on. However, this measurement will be even stronger if broken down by the persona groups we identified earlier.

Understanding your intranet’s role in broader business needs

By now you should have a clear understanding of who is required to complete actions and who requires receiving data.

However, there are a lot of activities which will occur outside of your intranet or in conjunction with it. A simple RACI model will help you understood who is responsible for which broad actions, who has an interest in its success, who needs to be spoken to before an action happens and who is the end audience.

How do you identify and engage the various groups of people in your business?

The process of building an intranet should center on your people. It’s an approach that has seen many of our customers achieve award-winning success, while managing to build an intranet that delivers on every level for their organization.

I’ve purposely kept this guidance broad, but would love to know the approaches you take to make your intranet a success. Share your top tips and ideas in the comments below.

The post 7 award winning cheats to help you build an intranet appeared first on Interact software.

This makes it all the more remarkable when I look back at my ten years consulting businesses around the world, that employee engagement wasn’t a staple term around most C-Level suites even five years ago; however we only need to look at recent changes in our organisations to see its importance, we have gone from the age of Human Resources to the age of People Services, Benefits and Rewards professionals have been usurped by Employee Advocacy and Engagement experts, and critically top down communications has evolved into collaboration where the ability to listen is as critical as the ability to broadcast.

Understanding the Engagement Levels of your employees

Employee Engagement can be a catch all term but Betty Bender masters this by summarising: “When people go to work, they shouldn’t have to leave their hearts at home.” But what does this look like?

In C-Level sessions I often break employee engagement down to four key activities: motivated, remunerated, collaborated and celebrated to allow for a strategic view.

For practitioners implementing behavioural change and measurement, Gallup’s Q12 gives us a great starting point.

The Gallup Q12 identifies key behaviours as the best predictors of workforce and employee engagement:

• I know what is expected of me at work.
• At work, my opinions seem to count.
• I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right.
• The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.
• At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day.
• My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work.
• In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.
• I have a best friend at work.
• My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person.
• In the last six months, someone at work has talked to me about my progress.
• There is someone at work who encourages my development.
• This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow.

When we look critically, most businesses cover aspects of this but how many of us can say we do it very well? If you can you are in an elite few, if you can’t, are you leveraging the technology available to make this easy? I want to share how leading organisations around the world use their Interact intranets to transform engagement and broader business benefits effortlessly.

“I know what is expected of me at work”

If your gut instinct was to respond that an employee has a job spec and annual reviews, you’re missing a large chunk of this motivator.

Linking to job and review details can be remarkably quick, and with so many web-based applications offering single sign on capabilities, employees can access their details within seconds.

However, this also has an unspoken element: what am I allowed to do at work? If I’m seen to be answering questions or blogging often on our intranet, is this viewed as a positive? Is it recognised?

When we look at organisations like Ragan Award Winner for Value to Employees, Sport England, we see that by enabling people to share what they do and the problems they face, 93% of all activity came from their non-author workforce i.e. those whose contributions were beyond their role, not part of it.

This enabled them to create new effective methods of working and a wider understanding of what was happening across the organisation in a manner traditional comms don’t allow, Tanya Joseph, Executive Director Business Partnerships at Sport England, commented:

“Staff feedback in late 2013 revealed that colleagues felt we could collaborate more and be better at sharing across the business. They told us that they got enough ‘top-down’ information but they wanted better ways to pick up on what was going on across the organisation. So, we made collaboration between colleagues much easier with our refreshed intranet.”

“At work, my opinions seem to count”

Many of us will have taken part in surveys at some point of our career where the results were never shared. Did my opinion count? Did the survey just get thrown away? Did you find yourself uttering “typical of this place” and ended up seeing the survey as a negative?

Your collaborative technology should be making this measure easy, not only can you create and conduct surveys quickly using Workflow and Forms, you can run a range of pulse surveys throughout the year using polls to understand changes of opinion and perception across the business.

Furthermore are you encouraging the ideas of your workforce to create success ? Organisations across the world readily pay for third party consultancy services to boost their products and services without stepping back to consider the creativity which already exists.

If you employ 5,000 people in your organisation with an average salary of $45,000, you could be missing out on $225 million of ideas, scary isn’t it?

Ideation forums allow for people to make suggestions and colleagues to vote and comment, allowing ideas to evolve from a suggestion to the next killer product or service for your business.

Paula Kenyon, a previous Ragan Social Intranet Award winner at financial services organisation Dollar Finance, reveals the power employee insight can give:

“Forums have driven business decisions. We asked Store Managers whether their store should open on a Sunday, and all 600+ came back via the thread to explain why they should or shouldn’t. When someone questioned why Store Managers in some areas got paid more than others, another store manager (not one of the highest paid ones) gave their view of salary and why it made sense for busier stores to pay more, no intervention needed! When we wanted to know if we should release a uniform, we asked our staff via forums.”

“I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right”

Frequently asked questions are the curse of any administrative team, meanwhile the person needing the information will be frustrated by the wait. Remove this by centralising the knowledge and tools your employees need.

Financial Services organisation Yorkshire Building Society ensured that their branch-based employees were delivering exceptional customer service with the information they needed immediately available. Rather than needing to leave a customer waiting whilst they read through extensive processes, simple techniques made it easy for the employee to respond in seconds.

Claire Brennan, Intranet Manager, shares: “These additions have gone a long way to addressing the previous issues of lengthy document scrolling and granular level detail – the latter welcomed by new starters, the summary favoured by long standing colleagues.

Standard features from the Interact product such as dynamically generated content linking procedures with appropriate system guides and other relevant content, and the search function, were also a huge hit with our customer facing colleagues.

Further though, our new policies and procedures section has created a sense of ownership among customer facing colleagues. For example, colleagues now regularly use the feedback button to flag issues with, or suggest improvements to, existing processes. They feel a great sense of satisfaction from being responsible for initiating change in the way we do things as a business.”

dying breed.”

will engender that sense of ongoing achievement.

“At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day”

Our skillset is often perceived to be intrinsic to our job title, but limiting your mindset to this misses out on the exceptional skills buried in the most unlikely places in our businesses.

Nielsen Norman Group recognised Business Environment (BE) in the Collaboration Annual for exceptional intranets. BE made extensive use of their People Directory’s skills to encourage employees to populate their skills and ensure talent was maximised within the business.

Employees have consistently been given additional roles from a receptionist who now takes all company photography and a security guard who went on to join the IT team. Skills save external expenditure and create new career paths for your employees.

“My associates or fellow employees are committed to doing quality work”

Collective pride is critical to a motivated workforce. A great way to do this is to not just list what departments and functions do but to share the experiences as story tellers.

Online marketers Dex Media are awesome at this.

As Paul Dang, Employee Communications Specialist shares, their intranet The Buzz “has allowed us to develop our own company voice, which we were desperately in need of in this post-merger atmosphere. The Buzz has been promoting the company culture, which many of our employees – spread across the country and in virtual workspaces – didn’t even know existed prior to the new intranet.

Everyone’s on the same page now and the proof for our intranet success is in the proverbial pudding. Our Analytics shows an immediate readership increase in the month following the launch. User engagement has been steadily increasing, with our most popular articles receiving more than 60 comments per page.”

Now we may not all have a department who taste test pizzas for Pizza Hut but great stories engage however they’re told. You may or may not receive 60 comments asking to learn more but conversations and new relationships will be formed which will benefit the knowledge and efficiencies of your company.

“In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work”

When was the last time somebody told you that you’d done a great job? How did it make you feel? It’s good isn’t it? Yet many of us work in businesses which are poor at this. However, there is good news, as encouraging this is remarkably simple using rewards.

Ragan Intranet Design Award winners William Grant, the world famous producer of whiskies around the world are masters of this. Labelling their rewards Cheers, employees around the business reward each other for great work and going beyond the day job.

“I have a best friend at work”

Friendships are built in a number of ways at work. It might not just be the people in your team or you work with, with a lot of my close friends having come from social groups at work, be that sports or activities.

Encourage this by enabling interests on your intranet, this is a great way to see who else is into the same things you are and can be easily transformed into a team which can plan events around an interest, whether that’s a weekly match or sharing what you love.

“My supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person” and “in the last six months someone has talked about my progress”

Managers and supervisors are people too and by their nature will vary in how engaged they are in their direct reports. Whilst you may not be able to turn every manager into a master, toolkits can be a great way to help people build on any inert people skills, teams are a great way to encourage this success.

“This last year, I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow”

Never underestimate personal growth, many employees do not move on because they dislike your company but often because they have hit a glass ceiling. We’ve examined how you can uncover hidden skills but you can also cultivate them.

ASPCA recently scooped the American Engagement Awards Project of the Year for their widespread success engaging a distribution workforce and was widely acclaimed for the way they create a virtual people driven support network.

They provide tools across their business to ensure that people are equipped for the role they have and the roles they want.

“How can I kick start engagement and adoption via our intranet?”

You may be at one of a variety of stages with your employee engagement plans. You may be masters of the art; you may be struggling with certain aspects or looking at how to start to be better at it.

A simple to use and highly flexible intranet will enable you to achieve a wide range of successes without needing to increase the size of your team. If you are looking for a simple technique to begin, why not follow March of Dimes’ 30 Day Engagement Plan?

Geoff Garcia, Director of Intranet Services and Business Analysis, used it as a great way to boost their engagement and collaborative behaviours “For the past year, March of Dimes has been undertaking a major strategic realignment to improve our operational efficiency.

Part of the communication plan around the realignment project involved using a 30-day challenge to engage employees in “micro-actions” each day for thirty days. The goal of the challenge was to focus on helping the Foundation establish a more open environment for communication and problem-solving…this challenge for cultural change has been an enormous success in terms of improving the adoptions and understanding of the tools available in our intranet.”

The post How 11 leading organisations used intranets to master employee engagement with Gallup Q12 appeared first on Interact software.

Once upon a time, the business elite controlled content, and commenting caused palpitations in the board room.

Now employees have a voice, and it’s something to be encouraged.

Interact research of over 550 global companies measured the intranet behaviors of more than 300,000 employees, unveiling what influences them most and which activities have the greatest impact. The results have changed the way we understand workplace collaboration and communication, and give us the opportunity to dispel three common internal communications myths that may be holding you back.

Myth 1: The Best Time to Deliver Internal Communications is Tuesday at 2 pm

Old-school marketers have lived by this rule for years, but at a time when information is accessible anytime, anywhere and on any device, is it still relevant?

The answer is no. Especially when you consider that our internal communications now happen with an increasing number of disparate teams working flexible hours, across multiple locations and time zones.

The Evidence

The survey turned up some interesting results. Almost one in four hits to the intranet happen outside of core work hours. This is all thanks to the cloud – giving employees an easy way to access information on their intranet at a time that suits them.

Looking at the remaining 76 percent, the results offer some guidance on when you should publish content to reach the widest possible audience within working hours. Four hourly periods claim a larger audience than the notorious 2 pm slot, which received 8.7 percent of total hits per day – 10 am (9.5 percent), 9 am (9.3 percent), 1 pm (9.2 percent) and 11 am (8.9 percent).

But reassuringly, usage is relatively uniform across the day, giving you greater freedom and confidence to post critical content when you need to.

There also isn’t a great deal of difference between the days of the week. While Tuesday remains on top (21 percent of total weekly hits), you can publish with confidence on Fridays (16.5 percent of total hits).

The remaining days all fit within these statistics (20.2 percent of hits on a Wednesday, 19.5 percent on a Thursday and 18.8 percent on a Monday).

Myth 2: Employees Won’t Engage Outside of Working Hours

Many communication strategies hold up user-generated content as a big goal, but this changes how you ask employees to share their knowledge, experiences and information. Pearls of wisdom don’t just spring to mind for employees during typical working hours, so the question should be – how do you get employees sharing content in their own time if they choose to?

And how can you ensure it is on the right channel, i.e. your intranet, as opposed to a platform outside of organizational boundaries, such as LinkedIn?

The Evidence

Employees do in fact share at all hours, and some of this is thanks once again to the cloud. Cloud-based intranets produce twice as much user-generated content as on-premises platforms.

While on-premises intranets average 15 percent of their content from users, 31.1 percent of content on cloud-based intranets is user-generated. That’s one in every three items of content coming from employees.

A number of reasons can explain this. The employee sizes were similar across both hosting options, but the cloud frees up users to log-in whenever they have inspiration, from any device. Not having to connect via VPN or be physically present in the office to access the intranet removes some of the hurdles to contribution. And ultimately, if you want people to contribute, you need to remove the barriers.

People – namely IT departments – have been wary about the cloud in the past, preferring to host the intranet on their own servers.

The cloud has come a long way since then. Firms are realizing it’s not only secure, it’s the easiest option to both implement, maintain and use. With ease of use being a key factor in the success or failure of your intranet, where you host your intranet can play a big part in making your internal communications strategy a success.

Myth 3: The Workforce Won’t Participate in Internal Communications

Intranets offer multiple content tools, but the level of employee blogging vs. company authored pages tend to indicate a shift towards more user-generated content. If employees aren’t as active on the intranet as you’d like, perhaps you need to look at the way information is delivered, and who is delivering it?

The Evidence

When it comes to content and employee engagement, a blog-first approach is best for many organizations. Fifteen times more employees will like, share or comment on a blog, as opposed to an authored page.

Even better is the effect this engagement has on an employee. If an employee’s blog is liked once or more, they are 45 percent more likely to blog again, and if their blog receives comments, they are 80 percent more likely to post again.

Even if you have to encourage a small group to reply to blogs initially, this will quickly encourage others to feedback, congratulate and share, and you can watch content production and engagement increase before your eyes.

The post The truth about intranet communications: dispelling the 3 biggest myths appeared first on Interact software.

Latest research proves it pays off to have a balanced site as collaboration increases by 11% on intranet sites which have a blend of collaboration, communication and business process, compared with collaborative only sites.

Of course to make this success happen you need to ensure your employees use the solutions you provide, so we have put together some simple steps to make sure that happens.

1) Group content together

Many organisations choose to have a central library for forms, policies, processes and procedures.

This approach ensures consistency for your employees, so they are not scrambling around not knowing where to find relevant documents. It also bridges the gap between you and your Compliance team, allowing you to work together to achieve the same end goal; easily providing employees with the most up-to-date and relevant information.

There is a temptation to organise content by department, but is this the best way for your users to find the most relevant information? Employees don’t necessarily associate a particular piece of content with a certain department, so by grouping information together, for example, all policies, they will know where to head for the information they need. You can still have sub categories containing specific departments’ policies but to the user their first stop will be a view of all relevant content to them.

Wandle houses all its forms and documents within a central library on the intranet

2) Make content findable

Employees need to be able to find guidance and processes as they need it. If it isn’t quick and simple to find, they will either do what they think should happen or email the relevant departments; an ineffective use of everyone’s time.

Of course using this approach means you have to ensure your meta tags are thorough enough to be searchable and key intranet content is highlighted to appear at the top of search results.

Having findable content will see your intelligent features surface relevant alternative content far quicker, ensuring your employees have as much information as possible at their disposal.

An example of search results displayed on Interact software

3) Use a consistent layout for pages

This is the traditional approach and one which British Red Cross use to great effect by ensuring users can see everything they need and enabling browser features, such as Find.

British Red Cross use a traditional page layout for its documents

Including shortcuts will also make pages far easier to deliver what an employee needs…

4) Use content shortcuts

Internal comms is moving to a user-first approach offering what is commonly referred to as the bite, snack, meal approach. This caters to the eight-second attention span of online users and gives employees a taste of what they can expect without overwhelming them with intranet content ideas they are unlikely to read. However, when it comes to our compliance documentation, we seem to completely forget this.

Adding shortcuts into your content makes your content more accessible and digestible

5) Enable feedback

Is your content working for your employees? Analytics will tell you this, but of course another way to get this information is to ask your employees directly by ensuring your content allows users to add comments. Plus, it will keep your Compliance team happy as it is representative of how you work, helping to adhere to ISO9001 accreditation standards.

You will find this works particularly well if you are planning to move your compliant documentation across to your intranet en masse, but do not have time to build fresh pages so make them viewable using in-line preview.

Trafford Housing uses document in-line preview to great effect

6) Alternatively, try a cascade approach

When you have a large amount of content, using a cascade approach will make it seem less daunting for your users. However, it also requires very clear headings or for the employee to have a good understanding of where the section they need will be.

Yorkshire Building Society employs a cascade approach for its policies and procedures

7) Try combining content together

Embedding content such as online forms into a page allows employees to complete tasks immediately without the need to go to a separate application or guidance. For example, you might choose to include a form and a policy relating to it in the same page to ensure the employee has everything that they need in one place, again increasing the chances of people working compliantly.

An example of how a form can be embedded into a page

The post 7 ways to manage and display your intranet content appeared first on Interact software.

Despite being a predominantly external B2C community focussed event, there were a number of gems for internal communications professionals. From communicating more like your audience, to frying eggs in socks, there was certainly plenty of food for thought (pardon the pun).

Here are the five biggest wow moments to consider and implement today:

1) Stop using ‘5 unbelievable ideas’ headlines, or start…

Richard took the stage with a bold statement, and one that sits quite uncomfortably with our content team; the ‘x ways to do…’ style of content was now dated! Richard’s claim was that people were becoming immune to its impact, however this caused concern amongst the audience who had come to rely on this great technique to increase the readership rate of their content.

Nathalie Nahai, author of Webs of Influence, put everyone at ease later in the day to counter Richard’s view with a formula for killer headlines which positively embraced the ‘x ways’ approach.

So what does this look like?

These discussions then make us question, where does this approach simply become click bait? Click bait headlines are only really click bait if you aren’t adding value or deliver what you promise.

Also look at your analytics to decide what works? Try A/B testing, publish similar content with different headline styles and see what your employees like.

2) Engage your employees with existing energy

This was where I had an epiphany! The concept of building on existing energy, rather than trying to create new momentum, should be common sense, yet many of us don’t even consider it. Well Judith Parker, Global Internal Engagement Director at GSK, brought it to the table, giving excellent advice on how to build momentum to enhance employee engagement.

The key to make knowledge sharing happen is to understand what makes people want to learn in the first place. Once you meet people’s learning need, you need to provide something which looks good enough to wow them. Think of magazines competing on a shelf and the techniques they use to make your content polished.

Keep your knowledge management groups small. If you’re looking to inspire, create lots of pockets of motivated innovators and then start to connect those groups whilst those members spread the message virally.

Most importantly, once you have advocates and champions, keep them involved and excited, as they provide the momentum for your community and engagement plans.

Put content where people already go, online and offline, be that posters, company magazines, lively forums etc. and link them to further information within your newer tools to take the fear out of change. Rather than building a rigid information architecture, look at where people are going and make sure those paths reflect their route. Information architecture should evolve to meet needs, not limit your ambition.

3) Make the most of your digital intelligence tools

Bridget Randolph of Distilled highlighted the importance of edging your employees towards a behaviour or path you’d like them to follow.

This highlighted how critical your intelligence tools should be to you. ‘You read A, but haven’t read B or C’ is a great way to ensure essential content is read.

These are a series of micro conversions, similar to someone clicking a B2C email through to an eCommerce site for the first time. They aren’t a brand advocate yet in most cases, but by a series of small, easy micro conversions, you can slowly shift this person’s behaviour to be a frequent user and advocate. This is often a common mistake in communications, as we often focus on major shifts in behavior, rather than edging people towards a new way of working.

Bridget then looked at the challenge of proving ROI; “Sometimes it’s not about creating value but proving value.”Getting collaboration going is great but make sure your actions make sense to your stakeholders in values they understand.

4) Create personas and use them consistently

Personas came up in over half of the talks. Try to group users’ actions together so you can start to plan your campaigns in a more informed manner – a common marketing technique.

For example, you may have one common group of a certain age, typically using certain tools more than others, contributing in distinct ways and responding to a small group of people. This would give you a persona. The next time you launch content this group will be a large part of, consider what this particular persona would make of it?

Laura Hampton of Impression discussed an agency example they used. Working for a ski holiday company, they created a group of personas, one was called Dillon. Dillon was under thirty, often went on holiday with friends, preferred snow boarding and would tend to travel at cheaper times of the year. Whenever the ski company went to launch a targeted campaign, they could now ask; “What would Dillon think of this?”

But, how many personas are enough or too many? It depends what you’re trying to do and how specific you are. Three appeared to be the bare minimum but as a maximum just ensure they remain relevant. There’s no point having twelve personas if they are complex and don’t help your decision making process.

Before you even try and reflect the behaviours of your audience, make sure you understand them. Speak to them, listen and observe what they do.

5) Be consistent in your communications, not uniform

Whilst having a template will give you structure, having a template followed 100% will often see you squeezing campaigns into approaches which don’t work, defeating the object of introducing the change in the first place.

Marged Cother, Group Head of Engagement and Social Media at the Cabinet Office, has a mantra to make services so good on www.gov.uk that people prefer to use them to the alternatives.

This was a masterclass in user-centric governance. Rather than considering what politicians and government want to be said, they focus on services which solve people’s problems.

They follow a simple formula for the user experience; ‘Here’s a service, here’s how to access it.’

Marged shared the changes she felt should happen during digital transformation which although they were targeted at an external audience can easily be applied to internal communications.

There should be four clear goals for the user too:

SPRINT 2016 was a great event. It’s given plenty to consider, and ideas which can be implemented quickly and easily to any internal communication strategy.

Oh and for you egg lovers out there, I never did solve the challenge of frying a small egg in a sock, however I learned a very useful tip for boiling one! Hopefullythis saves me from a click bait accusation!

The post 5 unbelievable ideas to wow your digital internal communications appeared first on Interact software.

2015 certainly delivered in regards to technology shifts in the digital workplace; Software as a Service (Saas) truly shook bought software from its coattails. However many of the usual culprits, such as eradicating email and the demise of the physical office, are taking longer to unfold for many companies.

We’ve waited with interest for Gallup’s latest employee engagement survey results (which ultimately reported no change) before we finalised our summary. We confidently predict 2016 will be a period of huge cultural and hierarchical change, particularly in the board room. Whilst these are exciting times for the majority of us, there will be groups dreading these changes.

With Facebook at Work’s loud announcement, followed by woolly results (has anyone defined what the 90% engagement figure in RBS is actually qualified by yet?), 2016 could well be a year of new names, same old challenges.

The post Digital communications: 6 trends for 2016 appeared first on Interact software.

When talking about effective intranet design, especially when you’re creating your intranet, it’s very easy to become blinkered and solely focus on your homepage. After all, it’s the shop window of your internal brand and values, it will be one of the areas your stakeholders have floods of opinions on and it’s visual, which always gets people excited, both those viewing and those creating it.

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We can share loads of intranet design examples, and have done, of great homepages – you just have to check out our Intranet Design Annual 2016. Just to share one more (you know I can’t resist), The Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) has produced a great example of what an engaging homepage looks like:

With all this mind and more, we are not saying it’s not important to get your homepage right – Jo Sullivan’s blog, There’s no page like home, includes some great tips and examples. What we are saying, however, is if you focus solely on your intranet homepage, you miss a whole host of opportunities to get your message across to your audience and create an engaging site which won’t just be looked at occasionally, but used every day.

The power of intranet background designs

Intranet backgrounds have been a long forgotten key element of design. Yet I confidently state that you will rarely, if ever, see a design awards finalist without a background. Where backgrounds may have at one time been deemed visual noise, it has reinvented itself as a key an element in intranet design as the name, logo and homepage design.

The Interact Customer Community has recently introduced a redesign and background image. We did this as I wanted to start people thinking about the appearance of their own intranet site and how to make it more effective:

However we aren’t innovators in this, this is something our customers have been doing for a while.

Take Stockport Homes. The background of their intranet, The HOG, changes with the seasons:

Verity Calderbank, Marketing & Communications Manager, Stockport Homes, explains how everything they do on their intranet software  is done to help achieve their objectives:

It’s not very corporate…No it isn’t! We wanted something different to improve communication between staff; helping those on the front line keep up to date with corporate news and helping those at the centre better understand how services are being delivered on the ground.

You might choose to use this approach initially for Christmas or a major company celebration to give a new identity to your site. However, it doesn’t necessarily need to be seasonal. Take University of South Wales‘ approach with an iconic view of their library.

Choose something that means something to your company. I’d extend this logic to naming your site too, which I explain further in my blog – 5 rules to choosing the right intranet name.

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Consider your intranet logo

Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has gone for a brave, striking background to their intranet site:

This has been highly effective, as Laura Wager, Internal Communications Manager confirms:

We’ve got a long way to go, but overall feedback from staff has been really positive, with one staff member telling me yesterday: ‘I love it when the intranet pops open every morning – the colours and everything, it’s so cheery! It makes me smile.

Not only is the background strong, the logo is distinct and impressive. If you saw the Space logo outside the context of RCN’s intranet, you would still recognise it. This gives that intranet a strong brand that employees can more easily relate to, building engagement and effortless adoption.

Laura will be appearing as a guest blogger very soon to share the differences their intranet software has made. Subscribe to our blogs by filling in your details on the left to make sure you don’t miss out!

Following the association with the change in seasons, David Groom, Optimisation Specialist at Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), shared the seasonal amendments they make to their site’s logo:

Simple intranet colour schemes

We are seeing more and more Interact customers changing the colour scheme of the intranet site according to specific events.

The Interact Customer Community ‘wore it pink’ in October 2015 on behalf of Breast Cancer Now:

Breast Cancer Now has kept the internal and external branding consistent to reinforce a newly merged brand, using pink and grey throughout their intranet site:

Carly Norton, Internal Communications Officer, shares more of Breast Cancer Now’s story in her blog, Embedding a new brand within the hearts of employees.

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Carol Maughan, Head of Digital Communications at Turley, has seven colour schemes which change from the default purple brand when a specifc area of the intranet has key breaking news. This enables users to instantly see that something critical has changed as soon as they visit the site:

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The post 9 engaging intranet design examples (beyond the homepage) appeared first on Interact software.

NYC kicked off our US intranet live tour series, put together for communications professionals to network, take away best practice hints and tips and see award-winning intranets in action. I was blown away by the level of engagement and contribution from the group – it made the Mets’ plight against Kansas City Royals pale into a support act (I’m just showing off with my baseball knowledge now).

Our host for the meet up was Orbis International, a nonprofit focusing on the prevention of blindness and the treatment of blinding eye diseases in developing countries. They’re a great cause and their intranet is shaping up to be quite something, one that I’m looking forward to sharing in the future. For this event, the intranet on tour was that of American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA).

ASPCA intranet live tour

The scale of innovation and technical excellence we see in live tours continues to astound me and ASPCA is no exception. Their intranet is simply amazing, not solely because they have more pictures of animals on their site than Facebook or because I got a sneaky tour of the amazing office (office cats and all). Or even that the business changes they’ve implemented via their intranet including integration with their finance and HR platform, Workday, is incredible (named Project Astro after the dog from The Jetsons) or because they are just great people… it’s because all of this and so much more! It’s hard to put their work and ingenuity into words.

“Our goal is that every ASPCA employee will need to login to the intranet and Workday every day (with) these two tools integrating and driving our strategy.” Claire Coveney at ASPCA

Claire sparked a wave across the audience of “I want that to be my intranet”, showing a site rich in content and imagery.

Their annual enrolment program was previously the stuff of nightmares and is now user-friendly and engaging, mixing their Rewards feature with ‘high five cards’ where employees download images of animals giving a high five to say thank you for great work. You can see why employees love their site.

Landing pages are rich in content and imagery and the levels of contribution are astounding.

The next steps for these guys will be rolling out the Workday integration, including training and quizzes to give them an insight into applied knowledge.

Amongst their various intranet projects, the ASPCA team are working on a project to redefine the cultural values, making values livable, rather than laminated – a common challenge we see our customers facing. The culture content area will contain blogs and video guidance to ensure everyone can learn and partake at their own speed. Claire summed this up beautifully “we wanted to make this process friendly, engaging and inspiring.”

The intranet has become an extra pair of hands

The Learning and Development team area has been a huge success. The team consists of two people, so to help with the lack of resource they built an area on the intranet to keep staff informed and heavily reduce admin. When creating the area, Claire and the comms team asked Learning and Development three simple questions:

• What do you want?
• What are people likely to need to do here?
• What do you need to be easier? Improving the auto enrolment process

ASPCA transformed a work intensive and widely disliked open enrolment process to a 100% paperless open enrolment for 900 people – “not one sheet of paper was used” – which was an incredible transformation.

Supporting internal campaigns

In March each year the ASPCA hold benefits awareness month. This year events were made available in the intranet calendars and staff could now access their information whenever required via the site.

Engaging a remote workforce

“One of the biggest challenges is engaging all employees as part of the ASPCA family.”

With five main offices and a lot of people working full time at home, this can be a particularly tricky challenge. However, creating an online community and actively encouraging people to network with others across the charity based on interests and causes has been a huge success.

A weekly round up called The Scoop directing people to various parts of the intranet has proved very useful in achieving this goal.

Becoming a key internal communications tool

When email was down for a whole day it was actually a blessing to improve adoption. The intranet was a great way to communicate issues and any workarounds, and helped with getting buy-in from the senior management team.

Naming the intranet – help required

ASPCA are looking for suggestions to name their intranet. We’re releasing a naming suggestion app on our website very soon, but it would be great if you could share your naming suggestions – add it to the comments below.

Intranet roundtable discussions

These have quickly become a much loved feature of our meet ups. We focused upon two topics:

Roundtable 1 – Overcoming senior management negativity

Roundtable 2 – Engaging those hard to reach employees

The headline findings were:

• As communications professionals we need to be part-salesman, part-facilitator
• We often need to overcome the divide between IT and comms first and then go to management as a united front
• To get execs to adopt the intranet, share the anecdote that once an email is out with an error or risk it can be difficult to recall. With a blog you can immediately edit
• Rather than expecting C-level execs to understand your needs and terms, talk in their language, demonstrating objectives, benefits and bottom line etc.
• Get them blogging. JCCA’s new exec team came in a month ago and they are doing a monthly blog as a way of working
• It can be tempting to focus on those last few % of non-adopters, but there comes a point where you must decide if you time is better spent actively catering for your captive audience. Peer influence can be an amazing thing
• Think of all employees as new starters, don’t make people search for information

Intranet award winners

We moved on to share the successes and killer ideas from some of our award winners and Ragan finalists, which I have discussed in a previous blog post. The day was rounded off with a couple of drinks and for me, an unexpected Devils hockey game.

It was really great seeing everyone at the event – the day was a great success and I look forward to hosting the next one. Follow us on Twitter to discover future dates as they’re released.

The post As a communications professional, how do you get the most out of your intranet? appeared first on Interact software.

Making the final in these awards is a major career highlight and we are incredibly proud of all seven customers who have been shortlisted for these awards. In the finals they will be competing against the likes of Yahoo and IBM, companies who don’t just have an intranet team, but an intranet army. An even greater achievement as none of the seven Interact finalists are full-time Intranet Managers.

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Winners will be announced within the next four weeks and given customers’ success in previous years, we’re expecting quite a celebration!

Best Viral Campaign Finalist: Magenta Living – YETI

Joanna Harvey’s YETI is understandably a hit with the judges.

He is a character displayed prominently across the intranet at Magenta Living. He is there as a friendly, recognisable face to help staff navigate across the intranet. YETI has his own profile, he uploads information and writes his own blogs, he likes and comments on other people’s posts, blogs and forums, which helps create further buy-in with staff by corresponding with him directly.

There is an Ask YETI section, which is like a FAQ area so staff can post questions and YETI answers directly. There is a video which gives staff a helpful guide around the intranet (narrated by YETI) with some hints and tips, which not only helps existing staff, but new starters too. At launch, all staff received a YETI branded pair of headphones so they can listen to videos posted on our intranet.

We had a cuddly YETI made and invited staff to take him on their holidays, day trips and conferences. To date, more than 50 members of staff have taken YETI away. He has visited some amazing places, including Hong Kong, Canada, Florida and the Dominican Republic, as well as the Grand Prix and the World Rally Championships. We upload YETI’s holiday pictures to the intranet for all staff to see. Having a YETI mascot has proven to be valuable to the success of our intranet.

To learn more about YETI, check out Joanna’s blog.

Best Use of Visuals Finalist: Wellington International Airport – 1634

How do you break the news of change in your business? Your intranet hopefully is the answer. However now you’ve started building your site, how do you make it stand out? Leanne Gibson at Wellington International Airport has nailed it.

Best Use of Visuals Finalist: Dex Media – The Buzz

Paul Dang and his team have produced a superb intranet at Dex Media. They used it as the vehicle for a merger between organisations and empower employees to discuss what they are working on and to share more.

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You only need to get a sneak preview of their homepage to imagine how good the user experience is.

Paul will be guest blogging later this week to share their internal comms success story. Make sure you subscribe to our blogs at the top of this page so you don’t miss out.

Best Intranet Use for HR Finalist: ASPCA

Engaging and effectively collaborating with volunteers is a common mission for a lot of charities. ASPCA has attacked this from a number of ways, from enabling volunteers to create teams of interest to simplifying the dreaded annual insurance submission via their site. Lindsey Callahan and her team have produced a great experience which makes the user journey enjoyable and ensures HR objectives are met on the way.

Best Design Finalist: Oxford Innovation – Voice

We were treated to some incredible designs at the Interact Intranet Awards 2015 and Oxford Innovation and Canterbury City Council sparked a tidal wave of intranet envy. Canterbury City Council won on the night but like all good (friendly) rivalries, they have been matched together again for Round two.

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When you look at Will Burnett’s Voice, you can see why the judges were wowed by it. From an instantly engaging homepage through to excellent Content Areas, Content and Teams, Voice is an amazing intranet example.

You can explore more of Voice in Laura Soper’s blog.

Best Design Finalist: Canterbury City Council – iCAN

In the white corner (well David Newell is a Leeds United FC fan!) is Canterbury City Council. With their lead character Dot, the site is bright, exciting and allows them to communicate a more open culture often desired by local government sites.

Look out for David’s blog next week as he will be sharing all the great stuff they’ve been doing.

Finally, the big one. Can Matt Phillipson of Sport England repeat his success in the 2015 Interact Essential Intranet Award against the likes of industry giants IBM and Citrix?

Grand Prize, Best Overall Intranet: Sport England – Inside Track

How do you begin to achieve 92% user-generated content across your site? By turning a Mini into a Porsche of course!

Meanwhile their author guidance has resulted in loved content being produced across the organisation.

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