In most U.S. states, the Manufacturing Industry is one of the most significant sectors of the economy. These jobs entail the creation of new products from either raw materials or components and are found in factories, plants, or mills.

There are around 12.75 million Americans in manufacturing jobs, according to the National Association of Manufacturers reported from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, many of them in the Midwest and California. 

Guide

The Unified Frontline – An intranet guide to improving frontline worker performance

Frontline workers are first in line to engage with customers. If disengagement is affecting your frontline workers then it’s definitely affecting your bottom line.

Download the free guide

These states have high concentrations of manufacturing employees in industries such as fabricated metal products, food, machinery, and transportation equipment manufacturing. (U.S. Census Bureau)

While manufacturing output continues to rise, the total number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. has decreased in the past three decades. This decline can be credited to their inability to meet not only the demands of their industry but also the demands of their frontline workforce.

Four of every five Americans (81%) know that the total number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. has decreased over the past three decades.

Pew Research Center

Sources place manufacturing employees as some of the most productive in the world, yet, job losses have been highly visible. 89% of manufacturers are leaving jobs unfilled. This loss of qualified applicants could leave millions of vacant positions between 2018 and 2028 — costing the industry $2.5 trillion by 2028. (Deloitte)

To experience a revival in the manufacturing sector, they must first address some of their major frontline challenges:

Recruitment and retention:

The importance of recruiting spans across each and every industry and Manufacturing is no different. In fact, given the specificity of many manufacturing positions, finding and keeping employees that possess the necessary skill sets and abilities is increasingly tricky. 

The conditions that these employees are subject to (poor culture, isolation, and more) do not help the process. Stagnant recruiting budgets and a lack of investment in frontline employees only further emphasize the issue. 

Manufacturers expect 2.69 million jobs to be vacated by retirees with another 1.96 million opening up due to industry growth. If turnover rates continue to be an issue, finding and keeping frontline manufacturing talent over the coming years will be more difficult than ever. 

High turnover rates, low engagement, and decreased productivity are easily blamed on employees, but the genuine blame lies with the organization.  

The survey, Understanding the Impact of Quality Candidates, found that nearly half of workers (45%) say that salary is the biggest reason that employees change jobs, followed by a desire for career advancement opportunities (32%), and then better benefits at 29%. 

Frontline Solution

The solution begins at the recruiting process. Bringing aboard new talent is easy, making sure they stick is the hard part. Find out not only if they fit your values but also what they are looking for within your organization. Ensuring an accurate cultural fit confirms that your employees understand the company mission and believes in the organization. But this faith should go both ways. 

Next step is to make it clear that frontline satisfaction and growth is crucial. Let them know what to expect from the role and in turn, listen to their needs and requests. A space for two-way communication and the right benefits can be the leverage you need to boost EX and frontline retention.

Engagement:

At an estimated 25% employee engagement level, the manufacturing sector trails the national average by 8%. In the face of an outwardly declining workforce, this industry continues to do a poor job of engaging their frontline employees.

These organizations are experiencing a significant rise in global competition, and the risk of losing staff is climbing along with it.  The threat is maximized by the lack of feedback and communication tools,  a geographically isolated employee base, and the detachment from management.

Bridging these gaps means creating an environment that increases productivity and inspires the commitment of every employee. To boost engagement, give your frontline staff the means to do their jobs efficiently. Integrating technology into manufacturing workplaces provides staff the tools to increase productivity and can streamline everyday processes to double efficiency.

Frontline Solution

In the manufacturing industry, frontline employees habitually struggle with inefficient communication methods, assigning and managing work orders and receiving pertinent information. This inability to access things when working on the line leads to frontline employee frustrations, miscommunications, and missed shifts. 

There are many different software applications available to help with project management and scheduling tasks. An intranet can streamline operations and management by making it easy for managers to assign tasks, dispatch work orders, and manage the daily upkeep needed to exceed user expectations. 

It’s simple to set up electronic forms, workflows and more, saving valuable employee time and improving accuracy and quality of information. Free your frontline team from the time you spend on recurring frustrations and inefficient team and organizational processes.   

Training and development:

Manufacturing employs a higher share of workers without a college degree than the economy overall. As relevant as recruitment and poor engagement are to high turnover rates, training and development are just as vital. 

Developing your frontline staff is critical to productivity and creating higher levels of employee satisfaction. Your employees need to feel not only valued but also that they are being invested in by their employer. Providing adequate training serves to keep them current with developments in the industry as well as prepare them to journey further along with their organization. 

Luckily, 80% of manufacturers recognize the absolute importance of meeting workforce demands over the next five years.

Frontline Solution

Due to their deskless circumstance, the traditional approach to learning won’t do for the manufacturing frontline. Frontline employees can benefit from training and development initiatives that are as mobile and flexible as the workforce. 

Online training programs and eLearning opportunities can be offered to employees looking to take their skills to the next level. Being virtual, programs allow staff to develop at their own pace while overcoming the everyday challenges of distance or timezone. 

Manufacturing organizations can even try microlearning, a technique that condenses training into short bursts of learning activities that range from 2-15 minutes in length.

This way, employees can learn and advance from any location, as well as receive support from online users. Online and mobile development options are precisely what frontline staff needs: short, convenient, and easily accessible training.

Conclusion

Manufacturing companies are hampered with many obstacles to optimal employee engagement and productivity on the frontlines. Adopting a frontline-friendly strategy to workplace culture and employee satisfaction is the most effective way to address these challenges. 

Implement the right digital and social tools in order to help your frontline employees grasp their full potential as the face of your organization.

Guide

The Unified Frontline – An intranet guide to improving frontline worker performance

Frontline workers are first in line to engage with customers. If disengagement is affecting your frontline workers then it’s definitely affecting your bottom line.

Download the free guide

The post Top solutions for your manufacturing frontline challenges appeared first on Interact software.

The best dialogues are balanced, consistent, and highlight the relationship between two or more individuals. Without a proper give and take, you are practically delivering a monologue that no one wants to hear.

In the workplace climate, change is inevitable, whether it’s in the form of a merger, change in leadership, or change in organizational policy. All changes affect your employees and require some sort of discussion to be successful. Employee morale depends on your staff feeling included, essential and listened to. To accomplish this, communication must be consistent, keeping the dialogue going between them and the organization’s leaders.

Communications, either top-down or bottom-up that engage and benefit everyone can prove challenging to craft. Communicators often approach IC as “I need to tell staff what is going on” rather than “I want to communicate with and understand my employees.” The latter approach inspires a dialogue that takes into account the organization’s mission as well as invites employee feedback and confidence. 

Effective employee communications cannot be a “one and don’t thing.” That means no annual company-wide meetings or yearly survey. Here are some tips for starting an authentic, long-term dialogue with your current and future employees.

Be available

The easiest solution is often the most overlooked. The first step to starting a dialogue is to be present. Management and executives often operate at higher levels of the organization. While this ensures that they are able to recognize and react to the ongoing of the whole company, this also distances them from their staff. 

Closing the gap between management and staff is imperative if you want to establish a culture of open communication. Being in the know will bring you a step closer to connecting and engaging with staff members who may otherwise feel invisible in an organization full of various departments and teams.

Distance and the dispersed nature of many large organization employees make it hard for leaders to always be available. However, social and collaboration tools make it possible for leaders to get in touch with staff regardless of location or time zone. 

Forums via the intranet can be a powerful tool in bringing employee needs to the surface. Forums allow employees to ask questions, start a discussion, share thoughts. This platform provides a higher level of visibility to the ideas and feedback of staff members. This can also work in reverse with leaders introducing themselves via blog posts and giving staff more straightforward access to them.

Free ebook – 14 steps to great internal communication

Discover the essential elements of an effective internal comms plan with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

Create a feedback culture

Sometimes it’s not enough to just be available. Genuine dialogue is only possible when employees feel safe expressing concerns to leadership. Staff will be reluctant to share or participate in discussions when they fear repercussion or think their worries will not be taken seriously. 

Open the door for all forms of conversation, even the more difficult ones. All opinions deserve to be heard, especially if it can open your eyes to the ins and outs of your organization. Take the temperature of your employee morale with surveys dedicated to gaining employee feedback. 

Asking questions that give staff members an outlet for their needs is key to building a two-way dialogue. Surveys are more than a list of standardized questions and multiple choice answers. It’s about setting up channels or processes that allow employees to be actively involved in decision-making and influence the direction of your organization. 

Annual company-wide employee surveys, while helpful, no longer makes the cut when it comes to checking in on your staff and their workplace experience. Pulse surveys are now a widely utilized tool for gauging real-time sentiment and engagement levels of staff. Asking short, concise, and specific questions regularly can allow employees to professionally put their opinion across on organization changes, company news, and even judgments on leadership. 

Find your Champions

Being able to tap into those who really know your business is critical to resolving challenges and keeping your organization evolving and growing. Who knows your business better than those who sell your products and services? Not only that, but the relationship between your employees is stronger and more stable than the relationship to leadership.

Speaking quantitatively, one single employee sharing three items of content a day can add up to 23 million in additional reach over the course of a year. Who better to share organizational messages and get a dialogue rolling than your own employee champions?

There are internal influencers in every organization – staff members who will go above and beyond to contribute to the goals of their business. By supporting and furthering their cause, leaders can turn these people into champions. These employees act as a vital go-between for staff and senior management, creating content that answers critical questions on behalf of leadership. Employees are more inclined to participate and become part of a conversation when a colleague is holding it.

Considering that 92% of people are more likely to trust a recommendation from another person over branded content, it’s clear just how much value is behind the concept of employee-generated content. Give these employees additional permissions or access on your intranet, connecting them to tools and information to support others, and increasing their online visibility. 

Don’t be a stranger

We all learned not to talk to strangers as children.  Believe it or not, talking to strange people is equally as uncomfortable in adulthood. When leadership is only a minute presence or a face on the company website, employees have no way of forming a relationship, however slight.

With such low levels of comfortability, employees do not feel safe joining the conversation or saying what’s on their mind. Instead, they prefer to stay silent or rely on light conversion and non-committal answers to carry them over. 

You cannot connect with staff that does not know who you are. Engage in activities that encourage feelings of trust and respect. Let your team know with your actions that you are there for them and that feelings of kinship and heart-to-heart conversations are more than welcome.

Free ebook – 14 steps to great internal communication

Discover the essential elements of an effective internal comms plan with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

The post 3 best practices for starting a dialogue with your staff appeared first on Interact software.

The modern workforce is a mix of individuals hailing from different countries, religious principles, political beliefs, and cultural backgrounds. More often than not, you can expect some of these diverse individuals to speak very different languages. 

The world’s population is already incredibly multicultural, and this fact is wholly apparent in the workplace. More than 40 million people living in America were born elsewhere. However, about half of all immigrants ages 5 and older have limited English proficiency, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. Even more, these numbers do not speak for the many employees staffed by organizations that expand their businesses across the globe.

Free ebook – Inclusive internal communication

Create inclusive communications for a diverse workplace with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

With location and time zones already a significant hindrance on communication between dispersed workforces, unaddressed language barriers only act as an additional hurdle. 

Language gap challenges

Although globalization has opened up new encounters, new relationships, and new business opportunities, miscommunication among staff is bound to happen. According to a survey by Rosetta Stone, 90 percent of organizations struggle with language barriers in their day-to-day work.

Misunderstandings in language, culture, or translations can potentially lead to damaging consequences in colleague relations as well as employee-customer interactions. Cultural understanding and acceptance in the workplace have gained importance in the last few decades. Establishing the most effective relationship between an organization and its multi-lingual staff means acknowledging the challenges born from this language gap:

• Every industry presents its fair share of safety challenges and warnings. When employees are unable to understand hazards or share warnings with others, the danger increases. An estimated 25 percent of job site accidents are attributable to the language barrier. (ehstoday)
• Employees often rely on one another to relay important information, share helpful advice, and distribute knowledge about a client, product, or service. A language gap prevents staff dispersed across global offices or on the frontlines from communicating efficiently.
• Procedures, practices, and role requirements are often presented in only a few languages. Misunderstandings in job expectancies can lead to a loss in productivity, lowered efficiency, and higher turnover rates.
• A diverse workforce without proper support leads to silos as staff with similar backgrounds isolate themselves.
• The customer experience suffers when misunderstandings based on language discrepancies occur. Frustrated customers quickly take their business elsewhere. 

Free ebook – Inclusive internal communication

Create inclusive communications for a diverse workplace with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

Considered as a lifeline for any successful company, communication is essential to establish an inclusive and diverse culture. Companies that recognize this notion must identify a path around these linguistic challenges and begin closing this language gap.  

Language training and programs:  

English is considered the top language of the business world, topping the list of languages learned in businesses internationally. However, the more diverse our workplaces become, the lower the chance that your entire workforce will be native English speakers. 

Companies may admit that language learning is a necessity, but very few invest in language training or applications for their employees. It is time for language initiatives to expand and become a priority for companies, especially those expanding into international markets. Organizations must be able to communicate across the cultural divide since the risk of intercultural miscommunications is heightened.

Offering language training not only increases staff productivity in their roles; it also has considerable impact on people’s personal lives. Learning a language is deeper and more complex than learning proper grammar and vocabulary. People who study new languages often learn societal behaviors, cultural norms, idioms, and more before fully understanding a new culture. 

Language programs are usually under the umbrella of workforce development programs. Yet, only a quarter of companies overall put language learning into individual development plans. To gain the most benefit to a diverse workforce, language learning needs to be flexible. Location shouldn’t be an obstacle. Technology like mobile intranets and e-learning programs enable staff members to learn on the go. 

Being virtual, employees can learn from any location, receive support from fellow users, train alongside equally motivated colleagues, and best of all, track their accomplishments at the click of a button. With these new skills, employees gain the skills necessary to advance in their organization. 

Employees who achieve the desired level of proficiency see an improved customer experience, and higher engagement at work.

Translation applications:

Language connects humans, creates a means for understanding and a way to build relationships. When workers cannot understand management, customers, or each other, they are operating at a social disadvantage. 

Not all companies choose to invest in language training for these staff members. Some attempt other means of defeating the language gap. There are managers that rely on bilingual employees to translate the needs of those who have trouble communicating. Others chose to rely on translation services to share information with employees with limited language proficiencies. 

As useful as interpreters are, it is not feasible to always have a professional or hired translator on hand. Translation applications such as Google Translate can be an effective and mobile supplement to language earning programs and bilingual staff. An intranet can also take out some work that comes with managing languages. Interact’s technology hosts a number of features that make the process easy:

• Product language can be assigned to members of a location or an individual user via their Profile. These language packs allow users to experience their homepages and communications in their native tongue.
• Language packs available today are English – UK, English – US, Spanish – Latin America, with 21 further language packs coming in the next two months and automatic product releases to ensure the functionality continues to evolve.
• A system text edit feature is available to access all product content and translate as needed. System text gives a better UX and a native experience with the software, ensuring they don’t face barriers trying to navigate around.
• Much like the translation button on apps such as IG or Facebook, on-demand translation increases communication and collaboration between teams. This machine-based translation will automatically detect non-language pack text and offer a ‘translate’ option for conversational, real-time translation; with built-in intelligence, it will learn as it goes, adjusting for in-house terminology for example. Users can read and understand the timelines of their international colleagues, building better connections.

When workers log on, they can read company policies, read pertinent homepages, and chat with colleagues in the language of their choice.

Encourage employees to close the language gap

Language is an inherent part of culture; developing a multi-lingual environment is the best way to generate a diverse and inclusive workforce.  Employees should be encouraged to learn other languages pertinent to their roles, supported by executives to explore differences in cultures including, idioms and traditions. 

Lack of time and motivation are some of the biggest challenges for employees attempting to improve their communication skills. Staff can be motivated by understanding the role of language abilities in advancing careers, encouraging promotions, and improving confidence.

Language gaps and cultural disparities in the workplace cannot be avoided. It is critical that companies prepare and give employees the necessary tools to overcome any obstacles.

Free ebook – Inclusive internal communication

Create inclusive communications for a diverse workplace with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

The post Diversity & Inclusion: Bridging the language gap in your workplace appeared first on Interact software.

Building the perfect intranet is like embarking on a journey. Twists and turns accompany you on the way to success. And like any grand adventure, you are bound to come across some significant obstacles. While not as dangerous as slaying dragons or fighting pirates, the wrong issues can be equally as damaging to your intranet’s health.  

But what makes a foolproof intranet planning and deployment? The process of building an intranet can be broken down into these simple steps:

• Building a business case for your intranet
• Determining the specific needs of your organization 
• Determining your intranet goals
• Establishing an intranet project team
• Designing and crafting content
• Launching our Intranet

However, even you can’t plan for everything. At any of these steps, you can hit a hurdle, falling victim to pitfalls that have afflicted other businesses. Whether starting a new project or relaunching an old one, an efficient intranet that engages users and increases productivity is a goal that escapes many. Educating yourself on the types of issues you may be facing is the best way to sidestep them. Here are X of the most common pitfalls of an intranet project, and how to avoid them.

Guide

Download the essential intranet guide today

Download our comprehensive guide covering every stage of your intranet journey.

Download the free guide

There was no initial strategy created 

So you’ve set out to build an intranet, but do you know exactly what you need? A significant part of the process is determining why you even need an intranet. This means defining not only what your stakeholders will get out of it, but also how it will affect your employees and organization as a whole.

Without a clearly defined plan, you are basically operating with a blindfold on. Unfortunately, working in the dark will only bring you farther away from your goal. How can you measure ROI with no benchmarks or expectations?

eBook

Intranets: are they still relevant?

As our employees battle a sea of different tools, applications, and communication platforms, where does the intranet fit? Can it still remain relevant and valuable, without adding to the technology fatigue? Our eBook explores why intranets should sit at the center of your digital workplace.

Download the free eBook

There a large number of questions that you need answers to before you even begin to build out your intranet. Getting started without a set plan guarantees you run into a setback further down the line.

Solution

Ask the right questions. Do your stakeholders have any defined goals? Perhaps they are aiming for a substantial investment in employee engagement. Maybe the site will serve as an easy to use network that can integrate other necessary applications. Whatever the reason, a clearly defined plan of action must be in place before beginning.

Consider surveying your staff or conducting an audit. This way, management can receive a first-hand account of what employees need and what they think the company can improve on. An audit will provide quantitative and qualitative data on what processes and content are well-received and what needs to be reevaluated or refurbished. It is essential when planning your intranet project to be realistic about the resources and time it will take to eventually reach the end goal. Only then can you build a solid foundation for success.

Too many cooks in the kitchen

The phrase,” too many hands in one pot” can apply to more than just the kitchen. For a chef at work, too many dissenting options and suggestions can take a well-prepared recipe and completely turn it upside down. While adding a hint of salt here or a splash of wine there can potentially take the dish to the next level, too many additions are bound to ruin it, especially when communication is lacking. 

The same goes for your intranet project. Building out the site is a team effort, usually consisting of groups like IT, executives, HR, or an intranet committee. While all opinions matter in the grand scheme of things, stakeholders may not always realize when their ideas are doing more harm than good. 

Solution

The first step is to determine who will make the final decisions. Do you hold open conferences for all your stakeholders? Do you leave the assessments and verdicts to a specific committee? Knowing who will give the final sign off makes it easier to conflicts before they even between. 

Introduce your intranet in stages. Leave different groups in charge of specific duties and then bringing the finished product together for revision before final stages take off. This leaves room for everyone to have input in the initial design stages while still giving different stakeholders visibility while changes can still be made. Once the design is decided, the key is to stick to it.

Your UX is not made a priority

Traditionally, an intranet is about pushing out corporate objectives to staff. With greater focus being placed on employee satisfaction and experience, one of the biggest mistakes companies make is ignoring their UX.

If you’re creating your intranet to gain higher engagement, why would you ignore the people who will be using it? If you don’t create something that is user-friendly, delivering searchability, easy to use widgets, and the content employees need, they won’t use it. 

Solution

If you don’t know what your employees want, then ask them. Introduce surveys into your intranet planning process. Including your employees from start to finish will ensure that you provide the features necessary to be productive. 

Find out what type of content and information they are asking for ad incorporate their requests into your intranet strategy. Use pulse surveys to stay up to date on employee satisfaction. This ensures that the end result remains quick, easy, and user-friendly. 

Who owns your intranet project?

You’ve managed to build out, design, and launch your intranet. It’s now finally available to all your staff—but who is managing it? A well-designed intranet can be easily governed, but without ownership, no one will take responsibility for your intranet’s success or failure. 

Keeping your intranet relevant and up to date means having updated files, procedures, and important information available for download. The absence of these things will guarantee a  lower percentage of engagement from employees. 

An unmanaged intranet does not allow proper content migration, functional documentation, or relevant searchability. Unattended, your intranet will leave behind more of a mess than the one it was trying to clean up.

Solution

Clearly define ownership and expectations during the planning process. Site administrators, content authors, everyone should have and understand their role. Breaking up responsibilities into teams can ensure that guidelines stay updated for both current employees and onboarding staff members. 

Make sure you arrange for proper training for your content authors and intranet managers. You want to be sure that they are able to do things like create pages, utilize widgets, update the directory, and more. 

eBook

An intranet is, undeniably, a significant investment. Is it worth it?

We probably think we know the main benefits of an intranet: communication, accessing information, finding colleagues. The classics. But the truth is, an intranet is worth more than you imagine.

Download the free eBook

Great intranet software encourages companies to create a tailored solution that meets the needs and wants of staff. Getting it right can change not only the ways users interact with each other but also positively impacts a business’s bottom line.  With these four tips, companies can seize all the benefits intranets have to offer while dodging the costly pitfalls that accompany implementation and launch.

The post The 4 most common pitfalls of an intranet project (and how to avoid them) appeared first on Interact software.

Across the globe, support and awareness continue to be encouraged for mental health. Organizations such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness and Mental Health Foundation raise initiatives specifically aimed at supporting the 1 in 5 people affected by mental illness in their lifetime.

Highlighting these issues during Mental Health Awareness Week provides a dedicated time for advocates across the nation to come together. But it shouldn’t end there. Organizations with strong mental health awareness strategies can work to erase negative stigmas and educate their staff year-round.

With improving the mental health dialogue as a goal, organizations must place significant support behind the proper resources and tactics. Progressive business leaders understand that mental health affects overall organizational health, yet some still struggle to get involved.

How can something be a priority if it isn’t an integral part of leadership’s agenda and behavior? Your leaders are your advocates, the voices that lead others down the path of change. Without their backing, the organization as a whole suffers. Mental illness costs the global economy $1 trillion in lost productivity, with over 300 million people suffering from depression (World Health Organization).

CEOs and high-level executives must lead by example and engage others in redefining and powering the mental health movement. Leaders can help build healthier workplaces and communities with these three actionable strategies:

Encourage top-down communication

The World Economic Forum projects that mental health disorders will cost nations $16.3 trillion between 2011 and 2030. Organizations absorb a large portion of this cost without any mental health policies in place.

Employees who battle mental health issues bring their struggles to work, often feeling powerless, depressed, and alone. These feelings are made worse when employers neglect to address or even notice declining behavior in their staff. While immediate managers may notice problems like increased time off or lowered productivity, they rarely speak to the employee in question. Instead, they resort to micromanagement and decreased workloads in an effort to re-engage their workforce.

Taking action is appreciated, but to properly assist their struggling staff, the first step is to listen to their needs. Communication is critical and should be encouraged by the executives and leaders responsible for defining the company culture. 

Creating a culture of inclusion, understanding, and support must begin from the top-down. Involved and authentic leadership cultivates a strong relationship between the organization and its employees. By leading by example, executives can ensure that managers and colleagues adopt the practice of listening to staff needs. With the help of a social intranet, leaders can take their involvement to the next level. Participating in forums via the intranet allows leaders and staff to share stories and communicate in an open, non-pressured environment. Employers can also monitor the mental well-being of employees using tools like confidential surveys.

Here employees who suffer from mental health issues can express their difficulties, needs, and potential solutions without fear. With a leader that promotes autonomy and communication, employees are less likely to experience feelings of powerlessness, anxiety, and depression. 

Inspire work-life balance

Adults spend most of their waking hours at work. That’s more than enough reason for employers to start promoting positive mental health in the workplace. 

Many times, the cause behind the mental and physical debilitations is the lack of balance between home and work life. The pressures of balancing office duties, healthy social life, and personal responsibilities can become overwhelming to even the most unwavering person.

Symptoms of poor mental health can be emotionally and physically debilitating, manifesting as decreased work performance, absenteeism, and high turnover. Knowing this, employers must be careful not to take the concept of work-life balance lightly.

Organizations focusing on positive employee experience and healthy company culture do not force employees to choose between life and work. These two are parts of a whole and should not compete with one another. Ideally, employees should be able to hold the same enthusiasm and engagement in both the office and in their personal lives.  

To assist them in doing just that, leaders and executives must adjust policy to support flexibility. This can be in the form of flexible working hours, extensive PTO packages, or offering the ability to work from home. Providing flexibility in scheduling is precisely the kind of freedom that can lower levels of anxiety and stress in your staff. Leaders that understand this truth will retain diligent, healthier, and more loyal employees that can manage their lives with less pressure.

Employ an effective wellness strategy

Employees suffering from mental illness may be reluctant to share their troubles with their immediate manager for fear of being misunderstood, judged, or punished. This perception reflects poorly on the ability of these managers and supervisors, but the fault lies with leadership.   Without introducing efficient training on the ins and outs of mental health in the workplace, leaders are crippling a large portion of their workforce. 

Training leaders and managers helps to reduce the negative stigma associated with mental health. According to the survey, “Employees’ Perceptions and Attitudes on Mental Health In the Workplace, “40 percent of employees want their employers to train managers and supervisors to identify emotional distress among workers.

The economic burden of mental health disorders is staggering. Giving managers the proper training on how to handle these situations can go a long way in increasing the quality of life for them and their employees. Provide teams with the necessary resources, policies, training forms, and information on mental health. All of this can be hosted on an intranet.  

42% of employees would like their employers to provide more information about mental health benefits and resources, even going so far as to answer detailed questions like “what is intrapersonal communication and how can it help me reduce stress?”

Informing staff acts as a preventative measure to the risk factors that accompany poor mental health. Assessing and understanding the needs, desires, and concerns of your employees is crucial in molding an effective employee wellness strategy.

The road to mental health awareness

According to the AHA CEO Roundtable-commissioned survey, 63 percent of employees diagnosed with a mental health disorder said they didn’t disclose it to their employers. Increasing the number of capable leaders can create a workplace environment based on trust and communication. This effectively improves the workplace experience for those affected by mental illness. 

The post Mental health awareness begins with your leaders appeared first on Interact software.

Motherhood has significantly evolved since the celebration of the first Mother’s Day in 1914. While President Woodrow Wilson was able to recognize and reward all the work that mothers do in raising their children, many companies struggle to do the same. Unlike the traditional role of women as stay-at-home moms and housewives, today’s mothers reside in the labor force.

Often the breadwinners of the family, today’s women are educated, hard-working, and are increasingly being recognized as such – Mostly. Although organizations have begun to push for more diversity and gender equality, they still struggle with equal treatment of expecting and new mothers. 

History and old age principles have left the caretaking of the family in the hands of the mother. Even with feminists and progressive thinkers trying to change the dialogue, the ideal stands strong. Women are discouraged from having multiple alliances. Instead, it becomes work vs. family – an unfair dilemma.  

Mothers in the workplace

Women are model workers, as capable as the men they work alongside — a detail proven by the fact that they make up almost half of the US workforce. However, once women become pregnant, organizations begin to view them in a different light. 

No longer are they the strong, reliable employee. Instead, they become the burden. The woman who has to take off too many days for appointments or is on leave for nine months. Knowing that failing to offer up fundamental rights like maternity leave falls under discrimination, organizations use other means to express their resentments and viewpoints on mothers in the workforce. (Laws like the Pregnancy Discrimination Act and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act are meant to prevent this type of bias.)

Since the beginning of time women have faced a lot of pressure to be involved mothers. Unfortunately, the increase in educated women and the growing ranks of stay-at-home dads have done little to change that. Roughly eight-in-ten adults (77%) say women face a lot of pressure to be an involved parent; a significantly smaller share (56%) means the same about men. (PewResearch)

This pressure places an unfair expectation on mothers. These moms are required to meet crazy deadlines and be available for meetings, yet they must also take the kids to school, handle housework, and still somehow make every parent-teacher conference. It does not help that male partners or organizations are not expected to help maintain this growing pile of impossibilities. With a lack of support on all ends, mothers grow frustrated, burned out before they even get to experience the wonders of motherhood.

Rather than deal with all the stress, 64% of women decide to leave the workforce before they have their child.

A mom-friendly intranet

Whether pregnant or a new returning mom, women face tremendous challenges while trying to manage or re-integrate into the workplace. The agenda for working moms, though different for every woman, is made up of a few expected components, including: 

• Heavy use of PTO days to attend appointments during pregnancy or while suffering the unavoidable sick days
• Severe sleep deprivation from juggling day to day deadlines and projects while on 24/7 baby duty
• Playing catch up with new policies, new employees and new company protocols
• An extensive child care plan that involves baby sitters or begging colleagues for coverage early mornings or evenings.
• A complete upheaval of their schedule, leaving very little time for social gatherings.  

A social intranet can work to effectively counteract these effects, providing some of the reasonable accommodations many mothers need to maintain their jobs and their homes. An intranet can support and perform numerous tasks required for moms in the digital workplace to gain some much-needed stability. 

Guide

Download the essential intranet guide today

Download our comprehensive guide covering every stage of your intranet journey.

Download the free guide

Get mothers up to date

Moms in the workplace are bound to miss out on some office days, whether it be a couple of days or months. Many women have an idea of what to expect when returning to the workplace but the reality can be more jarring than they realize. Suddenly, the manager of your department is completely different, and Bill is sitting at Martha from accounting’s desk. 

Mothers are accustomed to change, having spent nine months with an ever-changing body and more years of new experiences looming ahead. However, in the workplace the transition is rarely that smooth and, without organizational support,  it can be intolerable. 

In a recent survey on motherhood in America, (30%) of mothers claimed to be dissatisfied with their coaching/guidance about returning to work. Uninformed and unaware of new developments, your mothers have little chance to return to being a highly productive team member. Improving communications and knowledge sharing is imperative, and an intranet is a perfect well of information waiting to be consumed.  

Enterprise search functionality features put relevant information into working moms’ hands by offering a comprehensive search across intranet content.  Homepages can be utilizedfor returning mothers much in the same way they are for new hires, hosting must-know content. 

The speed and ease that users can access information gives hours of searching and wasted time back to these moms. They no longer need to feel like a stranger in their office with features like People Directories. Finding the right person or expert becomes as easy as snapping your fingers. An intranet can be an essential tool in getting moms back up to date and pushing them toward success rather than failure.

Put mothers back in the loop

Women who have mastered the first steps to motherhood and are excited to return to work often are shocked to find that they are outcasted. Almost like a pariah, your happy hour partners are suddenly too busy or worse, they’ve already assumed you were. Nights consist of running home to relieve the baby sitter rather than team building exercises. Seemingly frivolous, social moments like these, or lack thereof can have a severe effect on a mothers career momentum, especially for mother’s returning after weeks of leave. 

Thankfully, intranets and their relationship with social technology mean that the social aspect of the workplace isn’t lost forever. In fact, with a mobile and intuitive system, it doesn’t have to falter at all.  The ability to take your mobile intranet on the go means that mothers who aren’t in the office can still participate in some of the more collective aspects of work life. 

eBook

Why do I need social in the workplace?

Social technology has transformed how we interact in our personal lives. But does it belong in the workplace? Is it a productivity thief…or a collaboration gold mine?

Download the free eBook

Intranet forums and the ability to like, share and comment on posts ensures that mothers never have to miss out on the new inside joke. Timelines and @mentions can draw attention to a new policy or highlight the fact that a colleague just celebrated a ten year anniversary. Colleagues are even able to recognize and shout out staff, whether they are in the office or not. Interact’s reward feature allows employees to recognize and share success. Mothers can show their appreciation for their colleagues or even earn some much-deserved rewards themselves. 

Working moms shouldn’t have to miss out on any of the fun moments. With your intranet as the social bridge, free and secure communication across departments, offices, and timezones is fully possible and encouraged. 

Give mothers more flexibility

To protect the health of a woman and her child, adjustments need to be made. New mothers need the support of their partners and organization during this transitional time to develop a method of work that upkeeps their new way of life. But what if they do not receive it?

“Across women who returned to work, 23% felt unsupported by their employer’s postpartum schedule flexibility, and almost half (43%) of women who left their job felt that their employer could have done things differently to keep them in the workforce, such as providing support via flexibility.”

• Motherhood in America Report

Mothers who don’t receive the appropriate accommodations from employers are forced to work two times harder to maintain the balance between motherhood and work. Increasingly more and more complicated, the struggle inevitably results in moms leaving the workforce after giving birth. Flexible scheduling, breaks, and frequent time off for appointments are some of the top requests mothers have. Yet, among these women, more than one in four (26 percent) did not ask their employers for it. (Childbirth Connection Survey)

You don’t need to be in the office to be productive. Create an environment where employees aren’t afraid to ask for what they need. An intranet can act as a powerful tool to support a mother’s need for flexibility. Having a mobile version of the tradition desktop application can give those mothers who are always on the go access to all the information they need. Contacting them with relevant updates can be done and tracked with our Broadcasts feature, via SMS, push motivations and more.

Interact’s mobile app gives employees access to your digital workplace from any device. With these capabilities, managers should have no trouble providing flexibility and no question of a working moms ability to complete her duties. 

Encourage more understanding

Lack of understanding is a driving force behind the deficient support for working moms. Among all the societal pressures and hardships of motherhood, many individuals still don’t understand the weight that working mothers carry. Ignorance in how to best handle working moms creates an unspoken rule: avoid talking about how things have changed. Managers that adopt this mentality then fail to realize the systematic bias forming under the guise of “helping”

Mothers can experience several biased situations: 

• Managers expect mothers to immediately return to the exact level of availability and productivity they had before. This often leads to them denying certain levels of flexibility, placing unneeded pressure on moms or questioning their abilities to meet role specific requirements
• Managers being “overly” sympathetic. Managers will limit workload without warning or withhold invitations or company events or client meeting with the impression that they’re understanding or courteous.

This behavior appears designed to hurt new moms, pushing women out their roles with either tough love or over protection. 

More than one in four of women who had resumed work with the same pre-birth employer reported experiencing bias from their employers due to perceptions of their “desire, ability, or commitment” to doing their jobs. (Childbirth Connections)

The key to breaking these biases is to establish a culture of communication. Check-in with mothers to define what they feel comfortable picking back up or what they need to eliminate. Managers may feel uncomfortable having these conversations, unsure of what is permissible to say. An intranet can provide managers with the tools to best off and onboard mothers returning from leave. 

Forums can break down traditional one-way communication, allowing mothers to share what they need with management. Leaders can also use Discussion or idea forums as a form of gender bias training. Mothers sharing their stories via the intranet will generate a broader understanding of their plight as working moms. 

Keeping mothers on board

What working mothers want is the same equality and support that others are afforded. The workforce is evolving to involve a larger percentage of women. Its policies and tools should also involve to provide them with the best employee experience possible. 

Organizations can receive a higher return on investment by training managers to communicate with working moms and educating staff. Ensuring high retention of working moms is as simple as providing encouragement, understanding, and the adaptability they need.

eBook

7 useful tips for retaining your employees

Download this useful eBook and discover ways of banishing the job-hopping attitude and re-engage employees who may be considering a new start.

Download the free eBook

The post Working moms: 4 ways your intranet can support new and expecting mothers in the workplace appeared first on Interact software.

There’s no question as to why making a proper assessment of culture fit is necessary. 

According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), hiring an employee thatdoes not fit the company’s culture can cost the company 50-60% of that individual’s annual salary. Making the wrong decision can be costly but relying on your “gut feeling” can leave you dangerously close to some unintentional, unconscious bias.

When you make recruiting decisions that don’t take into account the culture fit of the candidate, you may find that:

• The candidate doesn’t fit in or feels isolated
• Satisfaction and  productivity steadily decline 
• Their values and behaviors are not representative of your organization
• The rate of employee turnover increases.

However, these negative consequences are no reason to become too selective. Diversity in people and opinions are critical for business success. More and more cases are arising of companies facing lawsuits over employee discrimination disguised as culture fit. This begs the question – Where does the borderline of culture fit end and the line of discrimination begin?

Guide

Empower and engage every employee

Social technology can empower and engage your staff, give them access to critical tools and information, support effective onboarding, build a positive employer brand and streamline crucial business processes. Discover how with our intranet for HR guide.

Download the free guide

What is culture fit?

Building the best team for your organization is often harder than it seems. In the process, there will be plenty of times where two candidates with similar levels of strength will face off. What determines the winner? Termed as “culture fit,” the best candidate is more than their qualifications. Instead, a suitable candidate is someone who understands and relates to the company culture, its personality, its mission, as well as how it operates.  

Assessing cultural fit throughout your recruitment process will help you distinguish which candidates will thrive in their new roles and ensure long term growth and success for them in your organization. 

When you hire with culture fit in mind, you’ll find that your new recruits:

• Integrate faster into your team
• Bring higher contributions to your team
• Are happier and more engaged in their new roles
• Stay longer in their roles

It is critical to hire employees that congruent with your corporate culture is vital, but because culture fit is such an ambiguous variable to it can be challenging to measure or define.

Because of this, culture fit can easily be an exclusive term. However, exclusivity in itself implies a restriction on who gets accepted. 

A problem can quickly arise – as much as culture fit is a reason to hire someone, it can also act as a reason to NOT hire someone. Favoritism then becomes a cloak for discrimination.

The many faces of discrimination

When assessing culture fit, it is essential to remember where diversity fits into the equation. 

Hiring for culture fit ensures your future employees respect and embody your company values. What it doesn’t mean is dismissing a candidate based on belief, culture, lifestyle, or any other personal values you may not agree with.

Luckily, overt discrimination in the recruitment process is mainly illegal. Undercover or covert discrimination, however, is still very much alive and well. Discrimination can be present in every single step of the recruitment process and can manifest in several scenarios that limit the hiring of people based on:

• Race, color, gender, religion or national origin: Happily this was made illegal more than 50 years ago thanks to The Civil Rights Act of 1964.
• Age:Usually geared toward people 40 years and older. This has been rendered illegal in The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. (which is why you can’t ask how old someone is in an interview).
• Pregnancy or women with related medical conditions: In the spirit of fairness, an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was passed to ensure that women are afforded the same rights as any other applicant.
• Disabilities: The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 prohibits discrimination against qualified individuals with disabilities. This provides equal opportunity to be hired and to be successful in their job function.

While cases of overt discrimination have decreased over the years, unconscious biases can still taint the recruitment process if no steps are taken to prevent it.

Guide

Empower and engage every employee

Social technology can empower and engage your staff, give them access to critical tools and information, support effective onboarding, build a positive employer brand and streamline crucial business processes. Discover how with our intranet for HR guide.

Download the free guide

Avoid discrimination when assessing culture fit

Many recruiters rely on the idea of culture fit to bring In the best new talent. One in five (17%) employers say they wouldn’t hire a candidate if they were not the right cultural fit for them, according to a survey by totaljobs. However, in the wrong hands, culture fit can be a weapon meant to be used against anyone that is considered “unsuitable.” In these situations, it acts as a smokescreen, hiding prejudice behind undefined and nebulous criteria that the applicant cannot meet. 

We don’t all have to have the same background, life experiences or abilities to focus on the values that guide our work.The following three tips can help make sure that you’re using culture fit to find the best possible candidates for your organization, no matter who they are:

Define your culture

The biggest misunderstandings surrounding culture fit occur because of its unclear nature. Often based on gut instinct or feeling, the true meaning of culture fit is hard to pinpoint. However, if you expect your candidates to live up to specific standards, you must first define them. 

If you want to hire people that fit into your company’s culture, then you must find out what your current culture represents. It is essential to establish quantifiable indicators that can be used to measure the culture fit. By assessing key KPIs and learning how your organization determines success, you can hold potential recruits to a scalable criteria — therefore lowering the chances that your recruiters can make and unjustifiable or prejudiced rejection.

To obtain the fairest idea, do not rely solely on your HR. Turn to your employees, the individuals that work and engage with your organization daily. Collecting feedback from these employees via pulse surveys or forums will allow you to get a first-hand account of what values your new team should possess. The focus then moves to how well suited the candidate is to current workforce rather than how likable they are to the interviewer.  

Recruitment panels

As much as we’d like to deny it, as humans, we are full of inherent biases. Based from our childhood or our experiences, these biases are there whether we recognize them or not. Problems are bound to arise when these viewpoints come to light during the hiring process.

The usual problem cases result from individuals hiring in their own images, choosing to reject candidates with traits that conflict with their vision. How best to override these partialities? By making your hiring staff as diverse as your candidates. 

Choosing to do a recruitment panel or group method as opposed to leaving the decision making to one person can stop discrimination in its tracks. With a hiring team made up of people from various backgrounds, singular bias can be diluted as recruiters are forced to work together to create the perfect persona of cultural fit.

 This method works even better when individuals from the hiring team are present. This allows for a more thorough description of the values and personality the candidate will need to have to fit into the team. The success of group process relies on the development of a diverse recruitment team. As the world grows, your workforce will be made up of different faces culture, and circumstances – your HR teamshould reflect this.

Guide

Empower and engage every employee

Social technology can empower and engage your staff, give them access to critical tools and information, support effective onboarding, build a positive employer brand and streamline crucial business processes. Discover how with our intranet for HR guide.

Download the free guide

Personality tests

Sometimes leaving it up to human opinion and preference is the wrong way to go. While that human element in recruiting is imperative, it tends to inject too many of their personal views into the decision making process. Hiring someone you’d like to have a drink with is not culture fit. Hiring someone because they remind you of your younger self is also not culture fit.

Managers often worry that the personalities of new candidates will clash with them or with the current workforce. However, it is almost impossible to tell all the characteristics of an individual based on a resume or a one-time interview. Instead, the choice seems more like a guess, with far too much relying on your gut instinct – an instinct that may be naturally biased.

But there are real ways to determine cultural fit. Remove the possibility of discrimination by integrating tools into the recruitment process. Tools such as personality tests can help gauge personality traits and assess culture fit. These tests can act as a supplement to traditional methods like in-person interviews.

You can also consider software programs that support blind resumes or blind interviewing. Going in blind places a broader focus on the candidate’s ability and less on what they look like, further evading the risk of biased hiring decisions. Diversity analytics and a great diversity strategycan keep a close eye on what equality and inclusion looks like for your organization.

Conclusion

Being aware of culture fit is essential. But, it’s even more important not to use it as a weapon against diversity. Getting hung up on looks or gender or medical conditions not only leads to discrimination but can also rob you of a great candidate who might thrive in your organization.

The more flexible and open-minded you become, the higher the chance you come across precisely what your company might need. Those who shift their point of view to hire for an individual’s potential cultural contribution will successfully challenge their own potentially hidden biases.

Guide

Empower and engage every employee

Social technology can empower and engage your staff, give them access to critical tools and information, support effective onboarding, build a positive employer brand and streamline crucial business processes. Discover how with our intranet for HR guide.

Download the free guide

The post The thin line between discrimination and culture fit appeared first on Interact software.

Wordstream data estimated that by 2019, internet video traffic would account for 80% of all consumer internet traffic. Now, video is a basic format for content on any of the best intranets. It can be a powerful tool for your internal communications, used to share knowledge, initiate onboarding, conduct training and more.

What’s the difference? Check out our Intranet vs internet article here.

The strength of video lies in its impact. Popular among those addicted to video-heavy sites like YouTube, or Instagram, a vast majority of your staff would much rather sit for a 1-minute video than read the same information presented on print. The content may hold the same records, but video injects a level of personality to the message that is not expressed in other formats.  

For those struggling with engagement on their intranets, sharing and playing videos is great for collaboration, appealing to your more mobile staff and, best of all, easy to produce.

For organizations looking to integrate video into their IC strategy, a successful video is:

• Detailed but short, packing information into an easily digestible bite
• Clear, concise and focused on a specific purpose
• Memorable with quality content and audio and visuals
• Able to be shared, liked and commented on

Video done right can be a powerful medium that conveys relevant and engaging information. 

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

An award-winning use of video

The 9^thInteract Excellence Awards sees entries spanning small non-profits through to international brands, giving a unique insight into the success of those at the forefront of internal communications.

These awards hold a category designed just for the companies that brought their intranets to life with video, The Best Use of Video Award.

The Best Use of Video Award highlights those intranets that have made video a part of their everyday toolkit to push the boundaries of design and improve overall communication.Judged by a 9-strong panel of nine global intranet, communications and engagement professionals, this year’s entries showcased creative and successful video marketing campaigns:

• Best Use of Video winner – Wheatley Group, W.E. Connect
• Best Use of Video Runner-up – Travelex,The Lounge
• Best Use of Video Runner-up  – Equinox, EQX Connect

Wheatley Group

Wheatley Group is Scotland’s leading housing, care, and property management group. They provide homes and services to around 250,000 people in 17 local authority areas across Central Scotland. 

Employing over 2,400 staff in locations all over Scotland, it has never been more critical for Wheatley employees to stay in touch, share knowledge and collaborate. 

Wheatley’s legacy intranet was built with software created before the first iPhone. A scattered workforce with inadequate software left Wheatley with an urgent need to connect and deliver information to their staff.

Wheatley is demographically and geographically diverse, with eight distinct but related organizations covering housing, property, and care. 

To develop an intranet that would be relevant and engaging to all staff and that would be accessible on iPhones and iPads as well as on PCs, Wheatley’s communication team began to use video to engage and inspire. 

While Wheatley’s comms team noticed an increased appetite for video content, they doubted their departments’ ability to produce this medium quickly and with quality. 

Success meant the department needed to produce bite-sized video content that could to tell stories from across the organization, keep people in the picture and build a strong sense of community across their diverse workforce. 

Tackling their primary source of information sharing, Wheatly decided to make mobile videos to complement their site photography and written news. News packages and vlogs were created to: 

• Highlight work done by different teams 
• Report on visits made by politicians to Wheatley projects 
• Convey key message relating to the industry 

Videos were kept short and to the point and were hosted on the front page of W.E. Connect for ease of access. A weekly teaser email was also sent to all staff, highlighting new content each week, effectively spreading the news.

An award-winning best video award  

Wheatley has done a great job of not keeping their methods confined to internal communications. On top of their news videos and vlogs, they encourage staff to tell their own stories through video, giving them the right support and training.

Their video showing Shetland ponies visiting elderly customers was a great example of the power of visual storytelling. The animals were brought in to provide pet therapy for the folk, and it made a heart-warming piece. Not only did nearly 6,500 people watch this video, but it inspired people to try new things at work.

By getting staff on board, they empowered staff to start creating their own engaging content. This has multiplied the amount of video the company produces and provided easy to make and easily consumable material to all areas of the business. 

These are well-crafted videos of human-interest stories, career tips, and company news – great ingredients for content that users want to see. Embracing video production and video content has proved a hit with the users of W.E. Connect. On average, a blog posted on W.E. Connect attracts around 100 hits, a news story around 130 – but their videos are watched in their thousands.  

 “W.E. Connect is not just how we communicate with staff – it is the heart of the organization. It contains the tools and information our colleagues need to do their jobs. It is an engagement tool. It underpins every major campaign. It is also a place for fun, to kick back, to share, to have a laugh and to say thank you. And it is transforming the way our 2,400 staff engage with one another.”  

Laura Hood, Communications Officer at Wheatley Group 

Travelex

Travelex is a global foreign currency company, operating in over 30 countries. Travelex is an established leading brand in foreign exchange.  

With over 10,000 employees, the organization has worked hard to create an intranet that connects their entire workforce. Their intranet, ‘The Lounge,’ was born as a place where people can learn, discover, share and collaborate in all areas of the business. 

Now in its second year, The Lounge team wanted to focus on how the content was being consumed in line with trends and demands. With video being listed as one of the more successful IC trends, the team decided to incorporate video into their intranet. However, their research found that 75% of the retail staff did not have audio on their computers.  

To combat these audio problems, Travelex added subtitles to videos on the intranet, allowing them to be watched by anyone across the organization. This simple adjustment made a huge difference, with overwhelming feedback from colleagues showing that the inclusion of subtitles has changed the way they receive information and interact with communications. 

Now, all video produced has subtitles included as standard. 

An award-winning use of video

With this new format, the team launched the ‘Transform Your Uniform’ campaign. This was a call to the organization to contribute ideas for the overhaul of the company uniform. 

Their ‘Transform your Uniform’ video was used to promote the revamp of the Travelex uniform. The final design of which will be a product of ideas, suggestions, and collaboration shared on The Lounge. The five-minute clip is an excellent example of how simple and effective videos can be. 

The campaign gave a little glimpse into the workplace culture of the organization. The five-minute video delivers a very detailed message without overwhelming the viewer. It is a personable, accessible and easy-to-watch video which can be watched and understood by all global teams.

The ‘Transform your Uniform’ campaign received more than sixty comments and the activity of people interacting and commenting on the news stories has increased.  

Not only are internal comms embracing video, but departmental heads are using this medium as a way of communicating updates, performances and interviewing key figures. Video has refreshed the way the intranet is used.

See more about Travelex’s journey to creating The Lounge here.

Equinox

Equinox, an American luxury fitness company, operates four separate brands – Equinox, PUREYoga, Blink Fitness and Soul Cycle. The company has its headquarters in New York City and employs more than 13,000 people, with 135 location within every major city across the U.S. in addition to sites in London, Toronto, and Vancouver.

In its 25-year history, Equinox had yet to experience an actual company-wide intranet for employees to share and disseminate information.  Instead, they suffered:

• Poor search function
• Inconsistent document management
• Difficult navigation

While Equinox used training videos and user guides to help employees understand their new intranet, they needed dynamic, engaging and emotionally compelling videos to convey how EQX Connect was the new digital community.  

Equinox knew the best way to grab the attention of their large workforce was through the production of quality videos. Employees were skeptical of the launch of yet another system they’ll need to navigate to find information. To create excitement around EQX Connect, the project team:

• Produced a series of short films to promote the launch
• Built a 2-minute intro video to EQX Connect designed to inform and inspire employees about the new system and how it acts as a digital hub for the latest in company news.

This video acts to increase user engagement not just for current users but for those people who are welcomed into the organization in the future.   

An award-winning use of video

Equinox’s take on video successfully highlights the role of EQX Connect within the employee experience. These videos are not ordinary corporate videos. A stylish brand with a focus on design pushes their visual representations in a refreshing new direction.

Avoiding the usual clichés that usually occur in a corporate video, Equinox instead focused on the needs of its staff and offering solutions to support their work.   

Their video strategy was a success, from outlining the role of EQX Connect in the organization to using the medium as a training platform.

The short films produced by the team received positive feedback from staff. They served to increase the profile of EQX Connect, to build culture, to inform and to be embraced by the organization as a whole.

“By creating excitement about the Intranet through a branded and compelling video, we plan to increase user engagement not only at the launch but also throughout the lifespan of EQX Connect.”

Henderson Chatargun, Product Manager  

Congratulations to all the finalists for our Best Use of Video award. For a closer look at the tremendous success of all of our finalists, download our “Intranet Excellence Award Annual” available here.

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

The post 3 Award-winning reasons to use videos on your intranet appeared first on Interact software.

Diversity & Inclusion are critical for success

Diversity is a topic that is making waves in all industries, from big screen projects that star historically underrepresented cultures to celebrities refusing to partner with brands that don’t have culturally diverse teams. 

Equal representation is a major player in 2019 and companies are finally beginning to grasp just how vital diversity & inclusion is.

When it comes to success, a strong IC strategy is crucial to representing and motivating employees to work toward company goals. However, the ability to connect and engage your staff depends largely on your ability to represent them. Without a diversity & inclusion strategy, companies risk losing business and new talent to more diverse organizations that prioritize these initiatives.

There is no basic formula to diversity as different places and cultures have wide-ranging definitions of what diversity & inclusion even mean.

Diversity in the workplace entails understanding, accepting, and respecting differences between people. This can be based on physical appearance, cultural, medical or educational background, and more including :

• different races, ethnicities or cultures
• genders, ages, sexual orientations
• religions and beliefs
• physical or mental disabilities
• differences in education, skill sets, and experiences

Tied closely to diversity, inclusion takes the process a bit farther with an aim to create a respectful and collaborative environment that all employees, no matter the differences, can partake in.

While most business leaders now believe taking advantage of these differences is what leads to innovation, they don’t always know how to reach that goal. 

Why has diversity & inclusion become so important?

Change is the catalyst. Not only does change in the workforce demographics play a significant role but outlook and temperament of the world have contributed to this shift in priorities.  

If you’ve kept up with any current events, you are aware that the current global political climate is best described as sensitive. Feelings of fear and separation have risen among debates of immigration challenges, nationalism, and gender equality. With reports such as this frequenting the press, it’s no wonder that employees have a heightened sensitivity to diversity and inclusion.

Your employees are consistently given reasons to be concerned based on what they read or hear and are looking to their employers for a different and positive take. Now organizations are expected to touch on and take a stance against issues of equality, fairness, and even social rights.

The pressure is even higher for those organizations that are considered global entities. The difference in time zones isn’t the only obstacle to employee engagement. Differences in religion, culture, and language have increased the likelihood of misunderstandings and unconscious bias. 

Workforces are demanding more transparency, more collaboration, and most of all an environment that breeds equal opportunities for success.  

Research from McKinsey shows that greater diversity in the workforce results in greater profitability and value creation. This knowledge should act as an incentive for organizations to start building a strong culture of inclusion and flexibility.

Organizations need both a diverse workforce and an inclusive workplace culture to realize the full benefits of diversity & inclusion. Here are a few techniques to make sure that your IC strategy is for everyone.

Free ebook – 14 steps to great internal communication

Discover the essential elements in an effective internal comms plan with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

Improve minority hiring

Aim for proper representation of your workforce from the start. This means that it’s time to take a look at your recruiting, hiring and onboarding processes. The workforce demographic has changed. Now, the generations that are running the show in current workforces are not only tech-savvy and innovative; they are also socially and culturally conscious. Unfair perceptions and biased stereotypes limit individuals with unique backgrounds, experiences, and talents.

Unfortunately, minorities still represent a relatively small percentage of people in the workforce, especially in high ranking roles and senior level positions. 

Statistics place women’s labor force participation rate at 48.5%, much lower than the men’s rate at 75.0%. Data also shows that, across all age groups, the employment-population ratios were much lower for persons with a disability than for those with no disability. 

In recent years, recruiting decisions have increased the incoming talent pool of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities. However, companies struggle to generate a workplace culture that can retain and eventually advance them. 

Take the necessary steps to ensure equal access and participation in the workplace. To foster trust with certain demographic groups., invest in diversity recruitment programs. Maybe even have them run by some of your most diverse staff. They will be able to speak to and for some of their more specific needs. 

Consider implementing programs that allow or blind interviews and resumes. Make an effort to begin removing bias from the equation altogether by incorporating unprejudiced software.

Leadership and accountability

Diversity & inclusion are often treated as a joint initiative maintained exclusively by HR. Regardless of tradition, leaving it to the responsibility of one department removes the element of responsibility from all others who have a stake in the outcome. 

Think of diversity & inclusion as another necessary piece of any organization, much like security and compliance. To succeed, all leaders must have a hand in the making and maintenance of these protocols. As such, tackling bias needs to begin from the top down

issues surrounding diversity & inclusion are challenges that leaders have a duty to address.

Hold your leaders accountable for inclusive behavior.  People today are slowly becoming aware of both unconscious and explicit bias – without executives to lead the charge toward a more inclusive culture, the reputation of the entire organization can be at stake. 

Thirty-eight percent of executives report that the primary sponsor of the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts is the CEO. Leaders should pursue changes in processes and systems that expand the definition of diversity and encourage a variety of persons and thought.

Begin by listening to your staff. Learning and making people aware that instances of bias are unacceptable can help determine the climate of the entire workforce. Consider immersing leaders in their workplaces to give them a full understanding of how bias affects hiring, collaboration, and overall business outcomes. This empathy will allow leaders to lead by example and ultimately improve the employee experience for every employee.

Work-life balance and flexibility

 Work-life balance, family time, and individual benefits are all considered part of the total employee experience. However, minorities often get the short end of the stick as their life circumstances often differ from their colleagues. Conflicts, personal requirements and more act to limit these individuals and distance them from their peers and organization. Without taking into account all their additional needs, it becomes unfair and almost negligent.

Flexibility is necessary to entice, support and retain minority talents. Employees that struggle with work-family or work-personal conflicts are plenty. However, these issues are experienced more heavily by underrepresented demographics like women or those with disabilities. Women are still the primary group tasked as the caregiver. Responsibilities like parental duties or caring for a loved one make it hard to maintain long-term employment. The same can be said for those with disabilities as their medical and care needs often take precedence.

To assist with balancing work with family or medical affairs, provide employees with the flexibility to manage their responsibilities. Benefits such as work from home days and flexible hours can work to make employees feel like a valued member of the team. Create a transparent work process that addresses the problems they may face while making it clear that their needs are recognized as important.  

The old understanding of diversity & inclusion is changing. With related issues happening globally, this movement toward a more inclusive and accepting culture will continue to accelerate.  Internal communication is playing a more prominent role than ever in connecting and uniting people behind a common objective. The workforce of today looks and works differently, and they require tools that can set them up for long-term success. Organizations must welcome the shift and find their footing in the new age or risk falling behind their competitors.

Free ebook – 14 steps to great internal communication

Discover the essential elements in an effective internal comms plan with this practical guide.

Get the FREE ebook

The post Diversity & Inclusion: how do you make sure your IC strategy is for everyone? appeared first on Interact software.

We are all aware of the many benefits to remote working – flexibility, work-life balance, etc. However, when your employees are all operating from different locations around the world, there are fewer opportunities to connect them with their peers, keep them engaged and provide visibility to your business direction.

According to Gallup, 43% of Us workers already work remotely to some degree. However, 85% of non-desk employees say the communication they receive on-the-job is not enough (StaffBase).To address the needs of every single member of your staff, a winning offline worker strategy is imperative. 

An offline strategy that prioritizes offline and hard to reach employees must:

• Determine employee needs, channels, and options for accessing information.
• give a personalized, tailored onboarding experience
• Have Mobile-optimized versions of corporate intranets, websites, or applications
• Encourage relationships with management and peers

For a company to succeed, it must be able to reach out to individuals at every level. 

An award-winning offline worker strategy

Our 2019 Interact Excellence Awards honors some of the most communication and collaboration driven intranets in our award category: The Best Offline Worker Strategy.

The Best Offline Worker Strategy award recognizes those businesses who have created innovative campaigns to overcome the barriers of distance and time and engage their hard-to-reach staff.

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

Out of this year’s contestants, the finalists were:

• Best Intranet Design winner:Magic Memories,Click
• Best Intranet Design Runner-up:Acadian Companies, Acadian Central
• Best Intranet Design Runner-up:The International Rescue Committee, RescueNet

These intranets successfully set up channels to connect hard to reach employees and nurture a culture of transparency and communication within their organizations. Here’s how:

Magic Memories 

For  Magic Memories, an organization that views its people as the secret to its success, the desire to connect their global staff was only natural.

Specializing in snapping pictures at attractions around the world and capturing memories, Magic Memories has enjoyed rapid growth in recent years. After acquiring a US company in 2016, the organization grew by almost 50% to over 2,500 members of staff.  

Their hugely diverse workforce ranged across countries including Dubai, Spain, UK & Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and North America & Canada.  The majority of staff work on-site at attractions, limited to no access to company technology to connect to the intranet or learning tools

The team discovered only 40% of employees could access the old intranet due to restrictions stopping it being mobile friendly. To make things worse, just 10% of employees were accessing the Learning Management System, which cost the organization over £50,000 a year.A change was due.

After selecting Interact as their partner to deliver on a new platform and vision for its workforce, “Click” successfully launched in 2017.  

Magic Memories adopted a phased approach to roll out features gradually.  They developed a global homepage and regional areas within the intranet to provide tailored information relating to individual areas and roles.  

Front line workers have made a spike in engagement levels since the creation of My Magic Story’: a popular monthly interview of a member of staff, bringing human interest and breaking down the pre-existing silos between the different regions of the business. 

Click is now used to centralize information, news, feedback, and training and create a single source of truth across every venue. 

An award-winning offline worker strategy

By building Click around staff demands and focusing on user experience,  Magic Memories created a single point of access for their hard to reach workforce. The result was a mobile-friendly, user-focused platform that can be accessed from anywhere.  

Content is updatedregularly, and new features continue to rollout, maintaining staff interest. The highly visual look and feel, which translates across every device, engages those on the front-line.  

They took staff engagement one step further with by utilizing Team pages, to create a Virtual Learning College (VLC) for Magic Memories’ global leadership program. Combining the use of video, uploaded resources, discussion forums and more, this program benefits offline workers by providing a valuable source of distance learning.

By integrating learning and development through the use of Interact as a VLC, Magic Memories was also able to retire its pre-existing Learning Management System (LMS): an additional saving in excess of £50,000 annually. 60% of those completing the Global Leadership Program on Click have been placed in a senior role within six months. 

See more about the way Click has transformed how traditionally hard-to-reach workers engage with the organization here.

Acadian Companies

Headquartered in Lafayette, Louisiana, Acadian Companies has grown to be recognized as the largest and most respected privately held medical transportation company in the country.  This company has more than 4,300 employees dispersed throughout the United States since being established as a small ambulance service in 1971, 

After initially launching its new intranet in April 2017, social features and improved accessibility have been reported by its users.  

However, despite improvements, the team received feedback that the new site was too cluttered, social and presenting difficulties when trying to find information. Despite efforts to serve the different divisions, many felt it wasbuilt for only one audience.   

“We hadn’t taken advantage of Interact’s dynamic ability to target specific audiences. We hadn’t explored all of the tools at our disposal. And because of that, we quickly realized we were alienating large pockets of our workforce.” – Beth Chiasson, Intranet & Digital Marketing Strategist, Acadian Companies.  

The Intranet team took some different approaches to improving Acadian Central, including:  

• Setting up keyword-rich titles  for all content to improve findability 
• Introducing Best Bets to prioritize popular pages 
• A redesign of the theme
• Removing excess social features
• Removed hundreds of duplicate and unnecessary pages  
• And more

However, the lack of optimization for each employee presented the greatest challenge. To meet this need, the team created customized homepages for each division – pushing tailored and relevant content and news.

An award-winning offline worker strategy

With various staff who are disconnected from the central organization, the clear focus on customized experiences of the intranet is what sets Acadian Central apart.  

Their remote, off-shore safety employees are often isolated and geographically dispersed. To meet their needs, homepages were heavily branded for the division, adding simple graphics and information the staff was used to receiving through other channels.

To build even stronger bonds with offline staff members, the team added Employee Spotlights. This not only showcased the great work of individual employees but also helped them each get to know one another: counteracting their disconnect.  

Since making these changes in mid-2018, Acadian has seen a 550% increase in views of the division homepage, with users now spending one-and-a-half minutes more on the page each session than they did before the changes. This shows more safety employees are spending more time viewing and engaging with content.

“To me, this approach is a better way to introduce and foster the more social aspects of our intranet – people love to share in the pride and happiness of their fellow employees.”  – Beth Chiasson, Intranet and Digital Marketing Strategist.  

The International Rescue Committee

For an organization with the goal of saving as many people as possible, IRC’s employees are tasked with supporting the needs of individuals scattered across the globe. Because of this diverse and dispersed form of work, staff members in IRC do not work in traditional methods. In fact, many of them do not even have a desk, leaving them cut off, and out of communication with their peers and organization. Thankfully, IRC’s creative, user-centric offline strategy found a way to close the gap in their workforce using their intranet, RescueNet. 

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) helps people whose lives and livelihoods are shattered by conflict and disaster and possess 11,000 staff in more than 40 countries. 

The diverse employee base and global nature of the work done by the IRC presents many challenges.  

Staff working for the organization speak 19 different languages and fall into the category of non-desk worker as their day jobs involve constant travel or on-the-ground work in refugee camps.Some locations also experience low bandwidth and accessibility issues.  

It was clear the pre-existing intranet platform was failing to meet their needs.— for those offline and hard-to-reach staff in particular, 

The team undertook a global content audit, seeking feedback from every department to help define user-centric navigation. The intranet was launched as a pilot to 427 staff from 26 departments and 91 locations.

The pilot survey results saw the number of staff who would recommend the site to a colleague increase from 30% for the old site, to 86% for the new RescueNet. 

An award-winning strategy for offline workers

The IRC’s inclusive approach to the design and delivery of RescueNet demonstrates a commitment to connecting staff, regardless of their language, location or device.  

They used a research, test and measurement approach to the implementation.This was accompanied by internet bandwidth projects and the first global engagement survey. Features like these have given offline or hard-to-reach workers better access to the tools they need to serve clients and do their jobs.  

TO support the language barrier between offline staff, Google Translate was incorporated. A team can write in their native language and still share their story – solving their language divide. RescueNet is unearthing inspiring stories that demonstrate the passion of its employees.  

Now fully launched analytics show increased engagement almost every month since launch. 

The enhanced connections between staff due to these enhanced offline worker strategies have led to a breakdown of silos between departments.  Incorporating more remote abilities and a tailored employee experience has led to great success.

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

Congrats to all our finalists for the Best Offline Worker Strategy. For a closer look at the overwhelming success of all of our finalists, download our “Intranet ExcellenceAward Annual” available here.

The post 3 companies with offline worker strategies that win appeared first on Interact software.

The formula for creating an effective intranet is made up of many different parts. Intranet managers must consider the right collaboration tools, communication strategies, launch plans and more. However, amid all those procedures, it is easy to lose focus of one crucial aspect – design.

Rather than new features or tools, the design of your intranet is the first thing employees experience.  A proper intranet best practice starts, not with a list of features, but with the users’ requirements. Without an intuitive design, your fantastic content will go unnoticed.

While every intranet should have its own style, traits, and character, there are a few common factors that are shared among award-winning intranet templates:

A well-organized and designed intranet offers users:

• Easy customization, navigation, and functionality
• A branded design that reflects the organization
• Great UX that considers the overall user experience
• Intuitive, mobile  and social intranet features
• A relevant and eye-catching homepage

Award-winning intranet design

Our 2019 Interact Excellence Awards honors some of the most successful and well-designed intranets in our award categories: The Best Intranet Design Award.

The Best Intranet Design Award celebrates best-in-class for creativity, user experience, and brand, and acknowledges the intranets that push the boundaries of design.

Out of this year’s contestants, the finalists with the best intranet designs were:

• Best Intranet Design winner:Institute for International Education, Eddie
• Best Intranet Design Runner-up:GBG, be/connected
• Best Intranet Design Runner-up:Curo Group, The Orb

These winning intranets focus on both user need and design to create an intranet that provides outstanding UX, intuitive features as well as an ideal visual design. Get inspired by these original design success stories.

Institute for International Education

IIE has  crafted an intranet design that is user-friendly, sociable and catered to employees that are uncomfortable with both technology and change.

The Institute of International Education (IIE) is a non-profit world leader in international education. Founded in 1919, they strive to build more peaceful and equitable societies by advancing scholarship, building economies and promoting access to opportunity. 

The institute had a legacy intranet platform, build on Microsoft SharePoint technology, which was failing to meet its needs.

More than just missing features necessary for social collaboration and communication, staff claimed the design felt too corporate. Furthermore, search functions were lacking and finding key documents provided a barrier to effective working.

To create a virtual community, IIE began their design from scratch. This started with a competition to name the new intranet as a way to garner user support and discover what they truly needed. IIE settled on the name “Eddie,” something informal that demonstrated the move away from their old corporate-style intranet. 

In line with this thinking, IIE’s focus lay with more social collaboration, improving the user experience and easier knowledge sharing.

Interact’s forums and rewards features easily grew collaboration on the site. IIE also made great use of their homepage, publishing organization-wide news to keep employees updated. 

With the help of their quirky mascot, Eddie the Owl, IIE produced an intranet that is friendly, approachable and catered to employees that are uncomfortable with both technology and change.

Eddie was hosted on almost every angle of the site since his “hatching.” 

Before designing Eddie, IIE would see two new blogs max per month. Now, in a month, six new blogs were published by staff across the organization on a variety of topics ranging from community service to social media best practices to women in education. See more about IIE’s challenges and successes here. 

GBG 

GBG is an identity management specialist organization, headquartered in Chester, England. Inspired by their brandguidelines on the color palette, style, and design, The GBG team designed and a site structure that was clean and simple, yet, visually appealing. 

As GBG contained to grow and evolve in tandem with their industry,  it was crucial to develop an intranet that improved internal communications, reduced email count and supported the distribution company updates. 

be/connected was created and launched in August 2017 with the support of Interact.

Since then, GBG has continually developed its platform to meet the ever-changing business needs. A large part of these growing needs was highlighted through their intranet design.

At the start of these projects, GBG hosted regular half-day research sessions where the champions and comms team gathered together to map out the site structure. 

The vision was that GBG would have the “best and most engaged team in the industry.”

To improve UX across all sections of the site, GBG enhanced specific areas of the platform including news subsections, content categories, and unique team pages.

In addition to this, they used Interact’s HTML capability to bring in external elements that would make the navigation of our platform easier. 

Many of the processes for the teams at GBG have been simplified, a massive difference for staff.

Their current site structure now focuses majorly on business requirements, news sharing and on-boarding new employees. Information is made even more accessible through their Knowledge Hub, a resource center broken up into different departments with the exact layout of each section depending on the nature of the resources available.

Keeping all employees on the same page takes work, but GBG makes all resources easy to find and easy to understand for all users. 

“GBG has done a great job with design, managing to retain their essential layout structure while including a broad range social of and collaborative tools. A really good design with a great model and great results.”

Simon Dance, Best Design

Curo Group

Based in Bath, Curo is a housing association and house-builder committed to providing excellent homes and high-quality care and support services. 

Before choosing to partner with Interact, Curo had a pre-existing platform built and managed internally on Umbraco software. However, not being maintained nor managed meant that users found it difficult to navigate the site. The staff saw it more as a tool for one way communication rather than overall collaboration.

A mobile version was crucial to pushing satisfy a range of access requirements and quickly provide colleagues with pertinent information. 

“We needed an intranet that would help our colleagues to find the information they need at an easy click of a button and something that could work for all of our colleague roles.” 

Becky Davies, Communications Officer, Curo

Curo launched their intranet ‘the Orb’ in 2014 and subsequently went through a design/content refresh in 2017.

The new design needed to cater to users who had limited time, who need to use their mobile device to gain remote access to content, or who want to get involved and feel like part of the Curo community.

Curo decided to design the Orb as a colleague platform. A place for users to contribute content, take ownership, and feel like part of the Curo community. 

A group of 13 Content Managers was selected to solve the issue of low search and navigation. Curo went live with the full range of features including Rewards, Blogs and more: 

GBG took a creative approach to their icon-led site. The design is dynamic, with content updating regularly as widgets pull through news, blogs and new starters to provide a snapshot of what’s happening in the business. The homepage is used to showcase fundraising campaigns, events and celebrate successes to drive positive news to staff.  

They continue to inspire a social vibe using fun, engaging imagery that showcases their values and brand.

Congrats to all our finalists and winners that competed for the Best Intranet Design award. For a closer look at the overwhelming success of all of our finalists, download our “Intranet Excellence Award Annual” available here.

The post Get inspired: 3 award-winning intranet designs to emulate appeared first on Interact software.

Planning and crafting the perfect intranet can take months, even years in some cases. User-centric design, training for intranet managers, essential tools and resources – many pieces go into the completion of your intranet project. Now that the building is done, it’s time to share the end product with your staff.

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

However, when introducing a new intranet to the entire organization it cannot be technical or tedious. You must propose a launch strategy that gets staff excited to use the tools your company has invested in. A winning launch recipe includes:

• Kickoff and planning
• Creative and intuitive launch campaigns
• Informed and excited employees
• Intranet training on how it will impact and improve the day-to-day
• Engagement that continues post-launch and beyond

Launch day while daunting, should spur feelings of excitement. This is the day where the intranet goes live in hopes of being embraced by the entire workforce.  With proper planning, there is only success in the cards.

An award-winning launch

Now in their 9th year, the Interact Excellence Awards sees entries spanning small non-profits through to international brands, giving a unique insight into the success of those at the forefront of internal communications.

These awards hold a category designed just for the companies that managed to launch with a bang, The Best Intranet Launch Award.

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

The Best Launch category celebrates those who are innovative in encouraging adoption across their entire workforce. Judged by a 9-strong panel of global intranet communications and engagement professionals, this year’s entries were some of the most dynamic and creative yet:

• Best Intranet Launch winner – Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare, Spark
• Best Intranet Launch Runner-up – FNZ Group, FNZ Connect
• Best Intranet Launch Runner-up  – Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust, Wally

These finalists create awareness of their intranets in a manner that answers “what’s in it for me?” with an inclusive rather than exclusive approach and gets employees invested, pre- and post-launch. 

Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare 

Best Launch winner, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare (TMH), created the ultimate social collaboration process for employees with an entertaining and imaginative approach to their launch of SPARK.

Founded in 1948, TMH is a private, not-for-profit community healthcare system committed to transforming care, advancing health, and improving lives with an ultimate vision of leading the community to be the healthiest in the nation. 

Serving a 17-county region in North Florida and South Georgia, TMH is expansive,  made up of a 772-bed acute care hospital, a psychiatric hospital, multiple specialty care centers, three residency programs, and more. 

To manage their care services, the support of a connected and committed workforce was needed. However, TMH’s former intranet left a lot to be desired.  Established in 1998, it originally supported around the 2,500 employees. In recent times, the site grew to support almost 6,000 colleagues.

Even with the original site being redesigned several times, navigating and finding information became an everyday challenge for users.

Content management, collaboration, and search function suffered as information organized by department created unwelcome silos, and text-heavy pages cluttered the intranet’s appearance.

Without a content management system, the site was difficult to manage. There was an abundance of outdated content and no easy way to audit the content.

Tracey Holleman, Webmaster, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare.

In 2016, rather than design another homegrown site,  Interact was chosen as the best solution to their internal communication challenges. 

Their  six-month launch journey began in February and progressed with careful planning and a solution oriented track:

• The auditing of 7,500 pieces of content from nearly 100 owners
• A new intranet information architecture to eliminate information silos
• Newly developed homepage and content areas

The result was a cleaner, more collaborative, intranet that launched on August 22, 2018.

An award-winning launch

TMH’s intranet committee began their launch campaign one month before launch. To get employees excited about the new developments they started with its leaders, sharing a 15-minute overview of the site and providing handouts and training schedules to distribute with their teams. They followed with a weekly employee email newsletter and training events where colleagues could learn more about SPARK and receive TMH giveaways.

TMH took an inspired approach to new beginnings with a launch both educational and fun. They threw a “retirement party” complete with a heart-warming send-off blog to say farewell to their old intranet.

The creativity continued through launch day  with a treasure hunt to encourage colleagues to complete profiles and a launch video for anyone that missed the festivities.

This is a great and imaginative launch which involved both humor and involvement from staff to build up interest and a sense of ownership. I particularly liked how the committee visited staff working shifts to promote the new intranet and holding a “retirement party” for the old intranet is a stroke of genius!

Steve Bynghall, Best Launch category

SPARK launched for all employees with remarkable results. On the first day alone, 34% of active users utilized the site. As of September 10, 153 people had 100% profile completeness. TMH solved their information sharing and communication issues, successfully obtaining widespread collaboration. 

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

FNZ Group

FNZ, founded in Wellington, New Zealand, provides multi-channel wealth management services to their clients across direct, intermediated and workplace channels.

Over the years, they have expanded to several locations across the globe, including the UK and Asia. Before deciding to partner with Interact, FNZ supported a number of individual, stand-alone, internal systems. With such a dispersed organization, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and engagement suffered. 

FNZ determined the need to create a single hub where employees can quickly connect and seamlessly share information. Navigation and connecting dispersed memberson the FNZ teams were main goals in FNZ’s new intranet journey. 

FNZ required a portable, easy to use, easy to navigate intranet that could represent FNZ as a community. They create FNZ Connect as a hub to connect staff with other colleagues.

It was crucial that the new intranet featured a simple, concise and easy to navigate and most of all, mobile.  FNZ lessened the gap between their dispersed workers with a site that was fully responsive and equipped with quick access links to information and updates. 

Different homepages provided the entire business with quick access to important materials while the “About” section highlighted the FNZ leadership team and shared company values.

An award-winning launch 

FNZ’s intranet gave staff exactly what they needed. They focused on identifying core issues, determining staff needs, and applying clean and transparent solutions with surveys.

For FNZ, creating buzz around the launch was crucial. They wanted as much excitement among their staff as possible. Awareness would ensure that all staff understood FNZ Connect and how it improved their day to day.

To spread this awareness, FNZ created over 20 launch communications to share across 20+ locations and 2000+ staff. “Launching soon” announcements spawned anticipation while global direct mail desk drops introduced top benefits of harnessing FNZ Connect. 

A 90-second launch video took launch materials to the next level. It showed a “quick peek” of everything users could accomplish with their new and improved platform.

Absolutely loved the clean, crisp design and the strong visual presence. A lot of information presented, but not in an intimidating or cluttered format.

Steve Crescenzo, Best Launch

Four weeks after launch, intranet results excelled. 17,799 total visits to FNZ Connect were counted. More stats showing the steady rise in views on social features like videos , demonstrated overall growth in engagement.

FNZ Connect has embodied the message behind its nameby fostering an environment of communication and collaboration between users.

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL)

Wrightington, Wigan and Leigh NHS Foundation Trust (WWL) is a major acute trust that employs around 5,000 staff and is dedicated to providing the best possible healthcare for the local population in the Wigan Borough and surrounding areas.

WWL’s former intranet was considered a “furniture piece.”

It acted as more of a document storage unit, rife with a challenges including poor search functions, lack of collaboration due to a dispersed staff with limited remote access, and a lack of engagement tools. 

Their biggest issue was the lack of content management. It increased frustration for many, as numerous content authors led to a surplus of ‘mini-microsites’ that often caused duplicate information within the intranet.

WWL, recognizing the need for more than a traditional intranet, partnered with Interact to create ”Wally”. Features of the new intranet included:

• Fully transparent communications and engagement strategy
• Full content cleanse and new content strategy
• New site structure with accessible quick links on homepage

WWL turned to their staff and learned that many were requesting a change in layout, data management, user-friendliness and more. Employees also wanted more social elements. WWL responded with a communications and engagement strategy where key messages would be shared at every stage. 

WWL first tackled the issue of content management. The inefficiency of the legacy intranet left an excess of 20,000 documents.

After the content cleanse, “Ask Wally” was created: a form that enabled staff to report missing content easily. Quick links, created from a list of staff’s top 10 areas, were made accessible from the homepage for easier navigation.

An award-winning launch

WWL’s launch mixed structure with an element of fun that was much requested by staff. Launch communications were set to engage staff on the completely new system. 

Collateral was formed around Wally’s mascot. The animated walrus was featured in all engagement material, including countdown banners, tip of the week blogs as well as an educational animated video. Wally booklets, “you said, we did” calendars, and competitions, exchanging staff participation for prizes were also shared with the WWL staff.

WWL even included their hard-to-reach staff. On launch day, WWL distributed emails and set information stands at hospital sites to inform frontline staff. The colorful mascot continued engagement efforts post launch. 

Since going live with Wally, WWL has:

• amassed 2511 unique visits (47%) and moved up to 80% within the first 6 months. 
• generated 23 fully functioning Team Spaces across the organization

Communications are reaching more staff than before, averaging 280 hits per individual item and 1500 hits for the weekly roundup.

One of the key success criteria for Wally was to move away from the negative and restrictive associations of a traditional intranet. Staff now refer to ‘the intranet’ as ‘Wally’ and many staff comment that they didn’t know what they did until Wally came along.

Rachel Holden, Staff Engagement & OD Manager, Wrightington, Wigan and
Leigh NHS Foundation Trust

Congratulations to all the finalists for our Best Intranet Launch award. For a closer look at the overwhelming success of all of our finalists, download our “Intranet Excellence Award Annual” available here.

Guide

Download the Interact Excellence Awards Annual 2019 today

Download the 2019 winners’ annual and uncover ideas and inspiration from a range of organizations

Download the free annual

The post Interact Excellence Awards 2019: 3 award-winning intranets that mastered launch appeared first on Interact software.