In 2022, intranets, digital workplaces and digital employee experience are proving to be areas for strategic investment that makes an essential contribution to the working life of employees and the organisations they work for.
With hybrid and remote working patterns still continuing from the pandemic, we continue to lean on the digital workplace as a critical enabler of our day-to-day work. Employees also expect better experiences from their workplace technology, closer to the apps and websites they use in their consumer life; sometimes these are accessed via mobile devices. And while not every intranet or employee app is ‘consumer-grade’, leading examples are focusing on DEX and equalling the experience of their external-facing cousins.
The 2022 Intranet and Digital Workplace Awards show the very latest trends in intranets and digital workplaces. This year we received 44 entries from 43 organisations in 13 countries. Entries covered the full range of organisations of different sizes, from different sectors and in different territories.
Significantly, the general standard of submissions remains as strong as ever, with many entries demonstrating excellent execution and high impact, with well thought-through approaches to everything from design to change management.
Full details including hundreds of screenshots can be found in the Intranet & Digital Workplace Showcase report.
Here’s six of the key highlights:
1. Global intranets that are better, not just bigger
Global intranets bring challenges of their own, beyond addressing intranet fundamentals. They have to address very different business needs between locations, and navigate the complexities of large firms. Successfully launching a global intranet that supports a diverse and dispersed workforce based in multiple countries is therefore a real achievement, which requires laser-focused strategic and tactical thinking.
Global intranets that are better not just bigger need several elements in place: robust governance that delivers the right balance between global and local needs, effective audience targeting and personalisation to ensure relevance to a global audience, a range of business features that make sense across multiple locations, and change management activities that engage and coordinate networks of intranet publishers.
MAN Energy Solutions employs people in around 120 global locations so any intranet that serves employees has to appeal to a highly diverse workforce. The team ensured all the right ingredients were in place to deliver a global intranet including a wide-reaching champions network, a clear governance structure, a mix of global and local news on the homepage underpinned by personalisation, and more.
The team also navigated challenges around balancing global and local content and ensuring relevance, by using audience targeting. For example, in the ‘Employee hub’ area users see a mix of global and local pages relevant to people-related processes and support, but see the right information based on their profile. These smart, integrated approaches to local and central content are what makes an intranet truly global.
At TC Energy, the team delivered an excellent global intranet that supports employees scattered across Canada, the US and Mexico. What makes all the difference is a strong training and support program for distributed publishers, empowering and motivating a high number of local content owners to create their sites. Also key was ensuring that the new intranet would be available in Spanish as well as English and French, a move driven by a strategic aim to make the intranet appeal to all employees. This has ensured far greater adoption from Mexican employees.
Strong support for a decentralised global intranet team was also shown by SAP and BCD Travel. Both focused on strong governance frameworks with the right bodies and approaches to content lifecycle management. Each achieved this with the clarity to sustain an ambitious global intranet with a decentralised publishing model at its heart.
The homepage of #CULive, the intranet from MAN Energy Solutions. Screenshot appears courtesy of MAN Energy Solutions.
2. Multi-level governance for modern intranets
Robust governance is a requirement for a modern intranet that delivers sustainable value. Governance has to happen at several different levels, including the strategic, content, technology and intranet management levels.
A modern intranet is a critical strategic investment and needs ongoing input and involvement from a range of cross-functional senior stakeholders including IT, and HR. This requires a robust and nuanced governance structure.
At the same time, a modern intranet must deliver accurate, valuable and engaging content managed by a diverse set of publishers who need training, support, clear rules and processes to support this activity. Again, governance is the key.
At German software giant SAP, a strong governance framework has been applied to ensure content on the new SAP One intranet is of high quality. The team has taken what it calls a ‘multi-pronged approach’ that is focused on ownership and accountability: indeed a main rule is ‘no owner, no content’.
A cross-functional steering committee, an operational working group and a network of content coordinators with defined roles and responsibilities underpins clear ownership.
Meanwhile training, resources, automated site reviews triggered by certain conditions, and a useful editing experience all help enforce strategic and content-level governance. These are all helping to maintain content quality on the new intranet.
At global travel technology company BCD Travel, the intranet team established a comprehensive set of rules and management practices to ensure the new iteration of the company’s MySource intranet based on SharePoint Online is a success.
As well as working with a number of different groups across the business, the intranet team also operates a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to pinpoint levels of intranet involvement. Publishers are supported with resources, training and an innovative sandbox environment, and the team regularly works with user groups who have a say in signing off changes.
The creation of a bespoke ‘MySource Admin Center’ as a ‘command centre’ for the team, and an advanced approach to managing feedback and change requests, also ensure that the governance in place is focused on improvement as much as on keeping standards high. Similarly, at Dutch utility company Alliander, a comprehensive set of rules and guidelines ensures the intranet is set up for continuous improvement.
SAP’s multi-pronged approach to intranet content governance and lifecycle management. Screenshot appears courtesy of SAP.
3. Smart strategies that ignite Yammer adoption
Getting great levels of adoption on Yammer and other similar collaboration platforms has always been a struggle. Many digital workplace teams have tried to move the needle on usage, but failed to make it happen. But if you have the right strategy in place, it is perfectly possible to achieve and sustain active usage rates of over 75%.
When considering a strategy to increase Yammer adoption, teams need to cover a range of tactics including communications, training, support and engagement. More left field approaches such as gamification can also have an impact. Through all these aspects, targeting and tailoring efforts to specific groups that matter is crucial.
Picking the right use cases for Yammer is also important for driving organic growth of the platform. Employees will only join groups and communities that they find engaging and interesting, or that have real business value.
Financial services company Suncorp Group achieved a huge uplift in Yammer usage from 44% to 80% in 14 months thanks to a brilliantly executed change strategy that focused on those groups who would have most influence on driving wider adoption.
By providing highly targeted training and support resources to leaders, change & comms specialists, and community managers, the team was able to equip these groups with the knowledge and confidence to be able to use Yammer successfully. Other well-judged interventions, such as a leaderboard showing Yammer use by company leaders, also galvanised people into action. The use of Yammer as the go-to channel during a flood crisis shows just how far Yammer use at Suncorp has advanced.
At global technology and media giant Comcast, the team produced a lively campaign to launch a number of Yammer pilots, again with targeted communications and training. The selection of initial communities that drove value and engagement was key in stimulating adoption; these included three Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), a group supporting frontline help and a company-wide news group.
The genius decisions that meant Yammer usage grew organically to a rate of 78% active usage over a few months were activating licenses for all 100k employees from day one, and focusing on the 2020 Olympic games as the focus for Yammer activity. This helped employees discover Yammer but also want to keep on using it.
Images and assets from Comcast’s #JoinTheBuzz Yammer adoption campaign. Screenshot appears courtesy of Comcast.
4. Using SharePoint to unlock knowledge
SharePoint is a ubiquitous and flexible platform that delivers exceptional business value when it is used in the right way. Delivering the right content and knowledge at the right time to support critical business processes and better decision-making is an area where SharePoint makes a real difference.
Smart teams know that making this happen requires real attention to detail, with well thought-through approaches to tagging and metadata management, content management, and the underlying governance.
At Canadian construction company PCL Construction, the team has used a new SharePoint intranet as the delivery channel for accessing and sharing corporate knowledge. This includes a very well-designed project centre with salient details of over 30,000 current and past projects that are at the heart of the company’s work for clients. The area is critical for key business processes including tendering and team selection for new projects.
Meanwhile, a knowledge area includes controlled documents for policies, procedures, templates and tools. Extensive metadata means that users can filter across multiple fields to find what they need.
To make the project and knowledge centres effective has required customisation and advanced approaches to metadata management. The PCL team is also using SharePoint to support its innovation program, through Communities of Practice, an ideation tool and an area for TED-style talks, all available via the intranet.
On UNICEF’s newly revamped private fundraising intranet based on SharePoint Online, users are able to view a range of highly useful topic-based landing pages that include links to relevant content. Each topic page is curated, but clever use of tagging means that a link to a content item can appear on more than one landing page, which also remain updated.
This approach not only smartly delivers relevant content to users in a strong experience but allows content owners to feel like they own their content, while also aggregating, across different hubs, pages which might otherwise have multiple owners. The smart but sensible customisation and definition of user-centric tags is very well executed. It’s also been combined with strong governance to provide on-page information about the content to establish user trust. Again, SharePoint used in the right way is helping to deliver content in a highly valuable way.
The Projects landing page on the PCL Construction intranet. Screenshot appears courtesy of PCL Construction.
5. Continuous improvement fuelled by user data
Continuous improvement for intranets driven by small iterative releases or constant tweaks and changes is an often stated aim of intranet teams, but few deliver it convincingly. Those intranet teams that do pull it off always have a particular element in place; a constant stream of analytics and feedback that comes from user behaviour and input.
Having detailed feedback from users on new features they’d like to see, as well as analytics that show the content and experiences that engage them, can be the fuel that informs and powers continual improvement.
Dutch utilities company Alliander has created an intranet that has evolved through continuous improvement and agile delivery over more than six years, sustaining high adoption and value. Users are embedded into intranet management processes, including the continual use of feedback loops to assess the impact of releases. Until a level of satisfaction has been reached by a user group then a change won’t be released, a process that has even resulted in two features being junked.
Additionally, there is annual usability testing to drive improvement, an annual engagement survey, and the ongoing collection of intranet feedback. Around 40 suggestions for improvement are received per week, and the team calculates at least 2,000 users have been involved in influencing the intranet.
Meanwhile at BCD Travel, the team uses SharePoint lists to track user feedback, suggestions and requests, with the status and action taken open for everyone to see, again fuelling a program of continual changes that moves the intranet forwards
At the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) the intranet team is carrying out innovative work with advanced analysis of the performance of communications and blogs. They are using a set of predictive analytics for performance based on different criteria, ranging from author to topic to readability.
Armed with this data, the team has been able to show leaders which types of content will have impact – and the result is a significant uptick in blogging. Currently these insights are being turned into a dashboard that will help guide content contributions, leading to a truly data-driven intranet.
The Alliander intranet homepage. Screenshot appears courtesy of Alliander.
6. User-centric approaches to frontline DEX
Digital services and communication channels for frontline employees have lacked the maturity of the digital workplace offered to knowledge and office-based employees. However, frontline DEX is catching up fast and increasingly there are exceptional intranets, apps and channels that are focused on the needs of frontline staff.
The one thing that these digital projects have in common? They are all highly user-centric and ruthlessly focused on the specific, everyday needs of the frontline workforce.
Australian facilities management company GJK Facility Services has a frontline workforce of cleaning staff. Although their new intranet serves the needs of back office staff too, it now has a specific homepage targeted to the needs of cleaners, which is also optimised for a mobile experience. A peer recognition feature also supports engagement and a sense of community.
There is extensive procedural information that this group may need to access to do their job. However, because English is a second language for the majority of the cleaning staff, the team has introduced an automatic translation feature which means users can read documentation in their preferred language to ensure clarity. The team also introduced accessibility features such as high contrast mode to ensure this is an intranet that supports inclusivity.
Australian utilities company TasWater has a large number of workers out in the field. A digital transformation program based around forming a ‘virtual workplace’ has delivered a number of tools and channels, including a new intranet. However, some of the most notable work has been combining PowerApps, Power Automate and SharePoint lists to deliver business-focused apps that improve the lives of frontline staff.
Most notable is a fittings and weight calculator that calculates whether loads to be picked up will require more than one person to lift them. This simple but very well designed device supports health and safety. There are also a number of apps based around forms and workflow that can be accessed via a mobile device. This means field staff no longer have to return to the office, for example, to submit environmental sample information to the laboratory, or even just submit their timesheets.
At Alliander, the intranet is based on extensive user feedback and involvement, and has sustained high adoption. This includes a high proportion of frontline staff who have their say, and subsequently are using an intranet that is better serving their needs and can be viewed through a mobile app. Again, frontline DEX is delivered by user-centric approaches.
TasWater’s fittings and weight calculator app on a mobile device. Screenshot appears courtesy of TasWater.
Get inspiration from 13 great case studies with screenshots
The full 2022 Intranet and Digital Workplaces Showcase report features detailed case studies of all 13 winning entries, each detailed with multiple screen shots of the sites in question. At AU$299/€206/US$210 it’s exceptional value, helping to both inform and inspire intranet and digital workplace teams. Report sales also support the effort it takes us to keep on running the Awards (which have no associated fees).
Enter next year!
If you’re currently doing great work on your intranet or digital workplace, visit the Awards page, and sign up to be notified when next year’s Awards opens for entries in January 2023.
