Running blended learning through your Microsoft 365 digital workplace

Posted on 2 September 202114 November 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

For a long time learning was at the periphery of the digital workplace and away from the daily flow of work, for example centred on a Learning Management System that was not easy to access and had poor usability. Given the importance of learning and training to employees and organisations, this has always been an anomaly. Thankfully a range of digital tools mainly available through the Microsoft 365 digital workplace are at last integrating learning right into the heart of the digital workplace. With the current focus on employee experience and on enabling people to better use digital tools, there has also never been a better time to initiate a project to deliver better learning through Microsoft 365.

Another advantage of Microsoft 365 is that because of its wide variety of channels and tools, it can support different types of learning. Most organisations have blended learning programmes with a mix of classroom training, e-learning, mandatory training, mentoring, Communities of Practice and more. Microsoft 365 can support blending learning through a mix of different channels. It can also help learning administrators to manage learning and support managers who need to keep on top of the training within their teams.

In this post we’re going to explore the different tools and channels that can be used to support blended learning programmes, making learning more accessible and discoverable.

A core learning platform and LMS through LMS365

The most important part of a digital learning ecosystem is a core learning platform or Learning Management System (LMS) that allows users to access a course catalogue of training available, book courses, access course material, and carry out e-learning. They can also then view a record of the learning they’ve taken and what they might need to take in the future.

For administrators, a learning platform provides the core tools to manage learning, including an administration module, and extra features such as learning paths, certificates and points to deliver on the learning requirements of different organisations. There may also be tools to create learning content.

LMS365 is a fully featured learning platform that integrates seamlessly into Microsoft 365. It is an additional product to a 365 license and not provided by Microsoft, but many teams tell us it feels like part of the 365 suite, and it is gets excellent reviews. With LMS365 installed, it means most of the barriers associated with learning are removed and employees can reach and discover learning via different tools such as Microsoft Teams. In fact, the integration is so seamless that employees may not realise they have left SharePoint. There Is also a good LMS365 mobile app.

LMS355 is also very good at supporting blended learning, as you can manage both classroom training enrolment and e-learning from the same catalogue.

Learning hubs and pages through SharePoint

The flexibility of building SharePoint sites and pages means you can create dedicated learning hubs that guide users towards all the learning opportunities available for them, and then also include links, resources and even embed feeds for example from a Yammer learning community to make it easier for users to take action such as enrol on a course. Blended learning programmes cover a range of options, so a learning hub based on SharePoint provides both an overview and a starting point for employees.

Typically, a learning hub might be integrated into a SharePoint intranet, but it could also be a standalone communication site or even team site. Some LMS365 clients also choose to build a learning hub as a seamless entry page into LMS365. Some learning hubs may also be dedicated to specific topics for example learning about how to use digital workplace tools.

Learning discovery though Microsoft Search

A major advantage of bringing learning resources into your Microsoft 365 digital workplace is that it means you can include learning within your Microsoft search. Here the results of blended learning including specific courses, a community or even a specific learning asset can be returned, making learning more discoverable though an intranet, Teams and SharePoint search.

Automation and enrolment on learning through Power Automate

Learning is an area where automation can help streamline the administration of learning, for example in registering users on to different courses and updating learning records. A platform like LMS365 will do some of the automation for you and here the ability to leverage AD groups in Azure is particularly useful for example in rolling out mandatory training for all managers. Within 365, Power Automate can help you to create other automated and custom flows that can support blended learning; these might include automatic enrolment into a particular Community of Practice, or automated reminders for people attending a course.

Learning analytics through Power BI

Analytics are important not only in measuring the effectiveness of learning, but also in administering mandatory training. While some products within your learning ecosystem will include handy analytics built-in (such as our Xoralia Policy Management tool), integration with Power BI means it is very straightforward to create bespoke learning dashboards and reports for learning administrators, managers and even senior leaders.

Communities of Practice through Yammer or Teams

Communities of Practice (CoP) dedicated to professional topics are a solution that can support the less structured and more social elements of blended learning by providing access to experts within the community, facilitating interaction and discussions, and sharing learning resources such as videos. The best tool to use for a CoP is Yammer particularly if a community is large – but it is also possible to use Teams, particularly if the community is a smaller and more focused.

Policies and mandatory reads through Xoralia

A blended learning programme and also the learning elements of an employee onboarding programme may require employees to read particular policies and documents. Here the mandatory reads capability within a tool like Xoralia can help keep track of which employees have read a page or document; the tool lets employees know they have something to read, asks for confirmation they have read it and then delivers reports to administrators to track progress. Xoralia is built for SharePoint so again integrates seamlessly with other 365 tools.

Learning events calendar via SharePoint or LiveTiles intranet

Blended learning programmes are likely to include learning events such as webinars. A central calendar of learning events can also be a good way to display upcoming opportunities for employees, particularly if it is available via the intranet. This can be achieved in different ways including using SharePoint calendars or using the event calendar functionality within a LiveTiles intranet. At Content Formula client RSSB, the latter is used to display learning events on the intranet homepage.

Frontline enablement through PowerApps, LiveTiles Reach or LMS365 app

Learning is also an important component in enabling frontline employees and delivering a good employee experience. Being able to access learning materials including training videos on a personal device is an excellent way to support wider learning, especially when it can be carried out a time convenient for that user. A variety of different options across Microsoft 365 can deliver learning to the frontline via mobile apps including custom PowerApps, LiveTiles Reach or the LMS365 app.

Social learning through LMS365 for Teams and Microsoft Viva Learning

More informal social learning and sharing is another component of blended learning. With Microsoft Teams usage so high, making sure employees can access learning through Teams and then have conversations about learning opportunities and resources can support blending learning. Here, LMS365 for Teams can make learning discoverable and allow peers to share learning resources within their discussion thread. Microsoft Viva Learning is also bringing learning into Teams, although this offering is still evolving, but we can expect this to play a major role going forward.

Blended learning through the digital workplace

Microsoft 365 provides excellent support for blended learning from LMS365 as a core learning platform through to Yammer-based Communities of Practice through to Power BI learning dashboards.

If you’d like to discuss how to support learning in your organisation and make sure it is in the flow of daily work, then get in touch!

What is a social intranet and what are its main features?

Posted on 19 August 202130 December 2022 by John Scott

When we speak to intranet teams about what they want to achieve with a new or existing intranet, they sometimes tell us they want to introduce a social intranet. Although some teams use terms such as modern intranet or even digital workplace which can cover similar ground, social intranet is still a commonly used term.

Generally, a social intranet is regarded as one that includes a high number of social and collaborative features and tools which enable participation from employees, therefore distinguishing it from a more traditional intranet purely focused on internal communications and static content. Many organisations wish to introduce a social intranet to help drive employee engagement and support a less hierarchical organisational culture.

In this post, we’re going to explore in more detail what a social intranet is, what its main features are and the advantages it can bring.

What is a social intranet?

There is no formal definition of a social intranet. However, a social intranet is generally considered to be an intranet where there are a substantial number of social tools and features accessible across it that allow users to publish content, add comments, post contributions and interact with each other. It can also include social networking capabilities such as the ability to follow other employees. A social intranet might additionally integrate external social media, such as a corporate Twitter feed.

These social capabilities are usually visible and well-adopted to a degree where they counter-balance the more formal, top-down elements of an intranet such as corporate news and more static evergreen content. On a social intranet, bottom-up, user-generated content will be highly prevalent, and should make a site more dynamic and livelier with a constant stream of employee contributions from right across the organisation.

The social features of an intranet might be either built into the intranet software you are using, integrated from a separate platform or even both. For example, many social SharePoint Online intranets include a Yammer integration as their main social element.

What are the features of a social intranet?

There are a number of common features of a social intranet, although not every social intranet will include all of these.

Activity streams and feeds

Social intranets tend to have activity streams and feeds from social platforms like Yammer embedded into pages. These may appear on the homepage, which might aggregate feeds from different groups and be personalised, or as a feed relevant to the subject, topic or community on a specific page. These feeds will not only surface conversations, but also be a point from which users can interact and make contributions.

Commenting, sharing and liking on messages

Social intranets tend to allow users to interact with more formal communications such as news and leadership communications by commenting, sharing and liking. This can be an important mechanism for driving dialogue and asking for feedback on initiatives and topics.

Blogs and other user-generated content

Social intranets open up publishing for everybody, ensuring everyone has a voice. Typically, on a social intranet, employees can post blogs, localised items relating to their own team (news), user-generated videos and even photos. The chance of finding a cat video on a social intranet will be much higher than a traditional intranet!

Social networking features

Many social intranets include social networking features such as the ability to follow colleagues, use @mentions and add #hashtags. These can be very useful in utilising social networks for messaging and communications.

Communities, groups and discussions

A core component of a social intranet is support for communities, groups and discussion threads which allow interaction between different employees. Ideally, these should be open for all to view. A social intranet might support professional Communities of Practice, Communities of Interest, user groups for software, Employee Resource Groups and even non-working communities such as sports and hobbies forums.

Employee directory

The employee directory on a social intranet can feel quite different from those typical of a normal intranet, with sections completed by employees to give a more rounded overview of their life both inside and outside work as well as their past experience, providing a profile more like LinkedIn. Their profile might also show their contributions across the intranet.

Polls and surveys

Polls and surveys provide opportunities to solicit the opinions of employees and gather quick feedback on different issues.

Gamification

Gamification is not always a common feature, but some social intranets include gamification elements such as points, badges and leader boards to encourage contributions and other desired behaviours.

Analytics

A good social intranet provides comprehensive analytics on content and engagement in order to deliver insights about user behaviour and opinion.

External social media feeds

Some social intranets include external social feeds from platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These are usually the corporate feeds used externally by the company.

What are the advantages of a social intranet?

A social intranet can prove to be an excellent investment to help organisations and digital workplace teams meet both strategic and tactical goals. By bringing social collaboration to a key channel accessed by all employees like the corporate intranet, general digital workplace adoption can be given a significant boost. Strategic benefits can include:

Supporting a strong employee experience by ensuring every individual employee has a voice to give opinions and publish stories, thus demonstrating that this is encouraged by enabling it via the intranet
Supporting a less hierarchical organisational culture by encouraging social interaction and dialogue between all levels
Driving a one company culture and sense of community by allowing interactions across different locations
Enabling a listening and more inclusive style of leadership and management
Facilitating collaboration and a corresponding culture of collaboration
Supporting Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DE&I) within an organisation
Underpinning employee wellbeing through more social interaction.

More operational and tactical benefits can include:

Driving adoption and usage of both the intranet and social tools
Helping to support ROI in social tools like Yammer
Making individual communications more impactful by presenting commenting and discussion as priorities
Allowing leadership to get a temperature check of employee sentiment on specific issues
Making it easier for employees to communicate with each other by presenting options for contact
Supporting networking and strong connections between individual employees
Streamlining communications for individuals by aggregating messages across social channels and communities
Supporting decentralised publishing on the intranet through blogs and local news publishing
Facilitating a range of communities of practice and interest with benefits relating to specific processes, working practices and initiatives
Allowing conversations to be presented in context with related content and vice versa, enabling better dissemination of information
Enabling user support communities to ask questions relating to different IT tools and HR services.

Need help with your social intranet?

Social intranets can be powerful in supporting engagement, adoption and culture. If you have any questions about implementing a social intranet or want to make your SharePoint intranet more social, then get in touch!

Will Microsoft Viva Connections replace my SharePoint intranet?

Posted on 9 August 202129 January 2023 by Joe Perry

Microsoft Viva is a brand-new employee experience platform from Microsoft that is piquing a lot of interest across HR functions, IT departments and Internal Communications teams. There are currently four apps within the Viva universe, all of which are delivered through Microsoft Teams:

Viva Insights: Personalised analytics and related insights for individuals, managers and leaders that support wellbeing, collaboration, productivity and more.

Viva Topics: A knowledge discovery platform that uses AI to source experts and resources on different topics concerning Microsoft 365 tools and other digital channels.

Viva Learning: A learning hub that aggregates learning resources from a variety of different sources including LinkedIn Learning, Microsoft Learn, popular third-party providers and a company’s own learning content.

Viva Connections: A gateway to internal communications and company resources including policies and HR information, as well as the ability to participate in different social communities.

In particular, Viva Connections is proving to be of interest to internal communications teams as it provides another way to access communication-led content. In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at Viva Connections and try to answer a question that we’ve heard asked a few times: Will Microsoft Viva Connections replace my SharePoint intranet?

What exactly is Viva Connections?

Viva Connections was originally announced at Ignite 2020 as the Home Site App – a way to access and navigate resources and sites from across your organisation within Microsoft Teams. It was subsequently relaunched as Viva Connections in a move that contributed to the observation that Microsoft Viva is to some extent a rebranding exercise for initiatives that are already in-flight.

It’s still pretty early days for Microsoft Viva and there are a lot of developments to come, but at the moment Viva Connections is essentially designed to be a kind of intranet experience within the Teams environment. This is an explicit aim of the app expressed by Microsoft in a video called Living in Microsoft Teams? Now, so does your intranet!, and follows a general trend to make other applications and channels accessible from within Teams, making it a convenient entry point to the wider digital workplace.

Other intranet software providers have worked separately on apps to make their intranet accessible within Teams, including LiveTiles. For example, we recently ensured a fantastic new LiveTiles intranet for Entain was also available from within Teams.

Sam Marshall at ClearBox has done an excellent overview of Viva Connections and points out the main features of the app, including a global navigation menu that can be accessed from within the app, a main landing or home page which is a linked SharePoint home site, and a search facility that allows for the a wider search into SharePoint content. A new dashboard and mobile app are also in the pipeline, due for release later in the year.

Will Viva Connections replace my SharePoint intranet?

Some executives have expressed the hope that Viva Connections, and the Viva Suite as a whole, will provide an opportunity to replace existing services and applications with new apps that are covered by the Microsoft 365 license. This might lead to both a reduction in licensing costs and an extension in the value of a company’s investment in the Microsoft 365-driven digital workplace. This world view is particularly attractive for IT stakeholders who may be under pressure to streamline resources, and wish to make the most out of Microsoft 365 in doing so.

These stakeholders are going to be disappointed – Viva Connections does not replace your SharePoint intranet. However, it does offer some interesting options for digital workplace and internal communications teams, particularly for smaller organisations where disparate SharePoint communication sites have taken over an existing intranet as the main vehicle for employee communications.

Let’s explore some of the reasons why Viva Connections is currently not a replacement for your SharePoint intranet.

1 Viva Connections is not plug and play

One misconception about Viva Connections and other Microsoft Viva apps is that they are plug and play. The idea is a seductive one – somehow you would be able to switch everything on and you’d have an intranet that works instantly and continues to work through automation, saving you time, resources and licensing fees. This is often the thinking behind the question of replacing a SharePoint intranet, considering the potential reduction in costs and effort.

Whilst you’ll certainly be able to leverage the power of Microsoft Graph with Viva Connections, you will actually need to do considerable preparation work and ongoing management to get any value out of Viva Connections. This is not plug and play: you need foundational work, ownership, governance and continual effort, just as you would if you were managing an intranet.

2 It’s still early days

Viva Connections is still relatively new, and we can expect there to be improvements and tweaks. In fact, some core components the mobile app and dashboard are still being rolled out. One of the things we love about working with the Microsoft 365 platform is the continuing investment that Microsoft put into every tool; this means the Viva Connection app of today may be quite different in a year’s time, with potential for additional capabilities.

We are always a little wary of diving into a new technology and replacing what has gone before when it has only recently been released. Even if Viva Connections does evolve to a point where it becomes the primary way for employees to access communications, replacing your existing SharePoint intranet with Viva Connections at this early stage is not something we would advise.

3 Viva Connections is accessed through Teams

The desktop experience for Viva Connections is accessed through Teams. Although Teams usage has exploded in many organisations, particularly during the pandemic, there are still some organisations where Teams usage is still growing or patchy across the entire workforce. In some places, it hasnt even been rolled out.

At the moment, replacing an intranet with Viva Connections is only going to be an option within organisations where Teams is the centre of the digital workplace and employees are already in Teams all day, yet there are still not that many organisations who have reached that kind of status. Moreover, in our view, the digital workplace needs to be accessed through multiple front doors, including both Teams and the intranet, so switching off a browser-based intranet may well be a retrograde step.

4 Viva Connections does not cover all an intranet does

Intranets, and in particular SharePoint intranets, provide a multi-faceted platform for internal communication, content publishing, dialogue, engagement, collaboration, transactions, HR self-service, search and findability, learning, access to digital workplace tools, communities of practice, knowledge management and more. Why are intranets still a staple of the workplace technology environments provided by organisations after 25 years? Because they are versatile, flexible, convenient and essential for both everyday working and deeper digital transformation. We’re excited about what Viva Connections can do, but it simply cannot compete with the wide number of use cases in which an intranet provides value.

If you’re in a position where it looks like Viva Connections will bring more value than your current SharePoint intranet, the key issue is not to do with Viva Connections it’s more likely that you are missing out on all the benefits a modern SharePoint intranet could bring you.

5 Internal communications don’t have enough control over comms

Viva Connections is set up in a way that assumes a less hierarchical, top-down view of news throughout your organisation, typically characterised by a group of communication sites and related hub sites with more distributed ownership. While it does attempt to aggregate news in a way that is more controlled, it lacks the kind of publishing features and central news formats that internal communications teams want to achieve with an intranet.

This is where an intranet product like LiveTiles is also superior to using SharePoint straight out of the box for an intranet. Viva Connections simply does not deliver on the expectations of internal communicators compared to a SharePoint intranet.

6 The set-up for Viva Connections means you’re creating an intranet anyway

When you create the set-up for Viva Connections, you’re effectively setting up an intranet anyway, with a SharePoint home site and global navigation you need to consider. When you begin to design a homepage experience and consider a global information architecture, you are starting to define an intranet, and when you then create the governance to make that work, you’re going even further down the intranet road. If you want to make Viva Connections work, you may also want to define a SharePoint intranet that works.

Where could Viva Connections add value?

While we don’t see Viva Connections as a replacement for a SharePoint intranet, we think it has great potential. We can see its utilisation as a way to:

Integrate some of your existing SharePoint intranet content into Teams, particularly in companies with high Teams usage
Act as a catalyst to create or invigorate a SharePoint Online intranet where most communication is currently dispersed across multiple Communication sites
Experiment and innovate to keep your digital workplace evolving, for example, using the mobile app and dashboard feature with frontline employees.

Need advice on Viva Connections? Get in touch!

It’s still quite early days for Viva Connections, but it’s definitely one to watch and experiment with. While it’s not a replacement for your SharePoint intranet, we think it will bring value. If you’d like to discuss using Viva Connections or your SharePoint intranet, then get in touch!

8 ways your intranet and digital workplace support employee wellbeing

Posted on 28 July 202130 December 2022 by Dan Hawtrey

Over the last few years, health and wellbeing in the workplace have increasingly come into focus, with HR functions rolling out wellness initiatives to support a wider employee experience agenda. COVID-19 and the stress it has caused has placed physical and mental health high up on the agenda, and over the past eighteen months, organisations have been active in trying to support the wellbeing of employees though the pandemic.

Supporting a healthier workforce is not just a nice thing to – a happy and healthy workforce has potentially enormous benefits, with various studies suggesting it can reduce employee absenteeism, support productivity and even decrease staff turnover. There is also research that links organisations who support wellbeing with higher employee engagement; surveys have shown that in companies which actively support wellbeing through initiatives, 89% of employees are likely to recommend it as a good place to work, compared to only 17% in companies that don’t support wellbeing.

With the combination of the focus on wellbeing and the scaling up of remote working, intranet and digital workplace teams are playing a greater role than ever in supporting employee health and wellbeing. In this post, we’re going to explore eight ways your intranet and digital workplace supports the health and wellness of your workforce.

1 Promoting wellbeing content and benefits

An obvious role that intranets and other digital communication channels can play in supporting wellbeing is promoting relevant wellbeing content and making it discoverable. On intranets that we have recently implemented, some organisations have chosen to publish content about how to stay healthy, such as providing tips on good ergonomics. Sometimes, intranet teams choose to house third party content such as factsheets about health-related matters.

An intranet or HR service portal should also provide information on health-related benefits provided by the company, including gym subsidies, cycle-to-work schemes, eye tests, health insurance and more; these may be gathered within a wellbeing portal. News items might also provide examples of what people are doing to stay healthy.

2 Online wellbeing events and activities

During the pandemic, many HR and internal comms teams organised virtual events across the digital workplace that were geared to support health and wellbeing, including mindfulness, yoga, gym and dance sessions and general social events, all run through digital channels such as Teams, Yammer and even intranets.

There have been instances of senior leaders leading fitness workouts for furloughed staff on social platforms, and companies using Yammer for people to share mental health experiences. One of our clients runs regular mindfulness sessions which can be booked through the intranet. All these events not only promote healthy practices, but also have a social side and help provide a sense of community and connection.

3 Reducing information and app overload

A major source of employee frustration is information and app overload, which can make people feel overwhelmed and even contribute to technostress. Having to open six different applications all with different passwords just to complete a relatively straightforward process, or having over 1,000 unopened emails in your inbox are not conducive to a good employee experience.

Intranets and portals that provide a single integrated digital ecosystem or front door to the wider digital workplace, underpinned by single sign-on, can help reduce overload through a one stop shop approach, helping employees feel more on top of their workload. When employees already have a lot on their plate, a great intranet or digital workplace environment can actively improve wellbeing and reduce frustration.

4 Supporting communities

Online communities and discussion forums are a great way to support employee wellbeing by providing a connection between people across your organisation. Working remotely can be lonely, particularly if you’re working alone at home, and maintaining that human connection can make a difference. Many organisations already support professional Communities of Practice, but social groups relating to non-work interests can also drive connections. From sports clubs, to recipe swapping, to sharing cat videos, online communities on intranets, within Yammer or even on Teams can help strengthen your employee network. During the pandemic, many organisations created Teams channels for more informal social interaction. Some communities can also be specifically dedicated to wellbeing areas such as running, yoga or healthy eating.

5 Wellbeing related analytics

People analytics is a growing area of interest for HR and digital workplace teams, especially with more opportunities to gain insights from the data that is generated by the increase in remote working and the use of platforms such as Microsoft Teams. Health and wellbeing are focus areas for analytics; in our personal lives, health-related data is being popularised through fitness and health trackers and information about our device usage. In the digital workplace, Microsoft MyAnalytics produces a wellbeing edition that takes information about meetings, collaboration and time spent on different systems, and comes up with a personalised report.

This is an area which we see growing in the future, with an increase in health-related reporting featuring data to avoid burn-out and stress, and to prevent mental health issues. Microsoft Viva Insights, for example, include data relating to wellbeing, while other organisations are supporting and even implementing health tracking apps that support fitness or include health diagnostic tools. There are some challenges around data privacy here, but with most organisations very mindful of these, it is possible to generate useful data that is of value to both organisations and individual employees.

6 Supporting the hybrid workplace

At the moment, the hybrid workplace is a very hot topic, particularly with the imminent return to the office, and many organisations are figuring out how hybrid working patterns are going to work in practice. The digital workplace will continue to play an essential part in successfully facilitating hybrid working, empowering employees to work from anywhere.

Before the pandemic, being able to work more flexibly across different locations was often positioned as supporting wellbeing through the ability to balance busy working and non-working lifestyles. Arguably, being able to work flexibly and remotely will still make a sizeable difference to wellbeing. For example, if you have a young family or are a carer for a family member, then the ability to better manage your hours across the week can help you avoid becoming overstretched. Simply avoiding the commute for half a week which can take up as much as three hours of a person’s day could have a tangible impact on health and wellbeing, as well as productivity.

7 Supporting dialogue

Intranets and the wider digital workplace support dialogue and provide a voice for employees through numerous channels including intranets, social platforms, apps, surveys, polls and feedback channels.

Establishing dialogue supports wellbeing in two ways. Allowing employees to express themselves is good for engagement and employee happiness in general, but more specifically, it allows leaders and HR functions to get a sense of employee sentiment and identify any issues which might be impacting wellbeing. When employees can report on issues that are impacting their welfare, employers can then make the necessary interventions. HR functions can also create regular mechanisms to get a pulse check on how the workforce is feeling. This was something that is being seen frequently during the pandemic, with many employers running polls and surveys to check in on employees and see how they are doing.

8 Reducing dangers and hazards

In some organisations and across particular sectors, health and safety is very important. Construction, mining, engineering, manufacturing, energy, utilities, transport, logistics and healthcare are just some of the sectors where there are strict safety procedures that must be followed to protect employees, and sometimes customers. Invariably, safety is promoted as a priority, and is even reflected in company values.

Digital workplaces and related tools and channels can play a part in reducing dangers and hazards. An intranet may provide basic information on safety procedures, as well as run campaigns to make employees aware of the potential hazards they face. We’ve also seen intranets that include health and safety statistics prominently on the homepage, including the time since the last incident, in order to promote a safety culture.

Mobile apps for employees to report potential dangers on site play an active role in reducing the number of incidents and raising vigilance surrounding the kind of hazards that cause accidents.

Wellbeing and the digital workplace

Employee wellbeing has never been more important, and your intranet and digital workplace tools can make an active difference. Want advice on how you can use your digital channels to support health and wellbeing? Then get in touch!

We need a new intranet. Where do I start?

Posted on 12 July 202116 November 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

We need a new intranet. Where do I start?

Investing in a new intranet, or an upgrade in an existing intranet, is something every organisation needs to do from time to time. But if you’ve never been involved in creating or delivering a new intranet, it can be difficult to know where to start. How to get a new intranet project off the ground is an area we get asked about from time to time, and it is important to ask the right questions and follow the right steps before you dive into a new intranet project.

In this article, we’re going to explore what you need to consider if you are looking to implement a new intranet, and some of the steps you need to take.

We cover:

The key questions you need to consider and the conversations you need to have before you begin the formal steps in setting up an intranet project.
The five major steps you need to take to set up your project.

Note that there are no hard and fast rules here, and the way things pan out might actually be quite different; the process of implementing a new intranet is not necessarily linear. However, this article will lay out the kind of areas to think about, as well as the typical steps that we have seen taken across hundreds of intranet projects over the past two decades.

Why intranets need replacing

Before we explore the questions to consider, it’s worth looking at some of the reasons why you might need a new intranet.

Like any technology, intranet software can become end-of-life or need an upgrade. The average lifespan of an intranet can vary from around three to seven years, with a project to launch a new iteration eventually required. However, some intranets can last for over a decade, although this is usually only viable if they receive continual investment. Many intranets need replacing because the value the software delivers depreciates over time, and a new iteration should be expected as a natural consequence of this product lifecycle.

Inevitably, employee, organisational and communications needs will also evolve and change, and sometimes an existing intranet can no longer effectively support those needs. Here, the need to create a new intranet can be very obvious, as employees and stakeholders line up with multiple complaints about finding information or the inability to issue communications. Sometimes, the need for a new intranet is also triggered by a major organisational event such as a merger.

Many organisations are moving to the cloud and investing in Microsoft 365. This change can trigger a desire to implement a new intranet, where a team wants to take full advantage of their investment in the digital workplace with a new SharePoint intranet at the centre.

Very occasionally, there are clients who have never actually had a proper intranet. These may be smaller companies who have never felt the need to implement one, but have now grown rapidly and need to take a more structured approach to information and communications. Quite often there may be a platform that has acted as a kind of quasi-intranet and provided a place for communications and content, albeit delivered in a non-optimal way. Sometimes, there may be a plethora of local solutions which are not optimal.

Five questions to consider

Whatever the reason, you will eventually need a new intranet. If youre in that boat right now, there are some initial questions to consider which can help you initiate the right conversations with the right people to set the ball rolling when setting up a formal project.

1 Do we know what a modern intranet can do?

The word intranet doesn’t normally provoke a wave of excitement (unless you’re an intranet nerd like us), and can even illicit groans. Many people have had bad experiences in their previous organisations where the intranet has been a dreary, static website with out-of-date content where it’s impossible to find anything.

Actually, modern intranets are vibrant, people-centred platforms which help people get their work done, and which fit seamlessly into the wider digital workplace ecosystem. They are a strategic investment which make a real difference, as we have seen during the pandemic, and have a wide range of features. It’s important to get some idea of what a modern intranet can do during conversations so that stakeholders don’t hold negative preconceptions about what an intranet looks like and what it can deliver.

Doing some desk research is a good start in getting an understanding of the intranet market and some of the choices available. There is a lot of information out there on the web about planning an intranet, but it also helps to speak to other companies about what they’ve implemented. There are various networking groups and conferences around, as well as awards and publications with detailed case studies. We’re also happy to talk about intranet options and what a modern intranet looks like feel free to get in touch!

2 What problems is our intranet trying to solve?

To start the right conversations about your intranet and consider its scope, you need to know the why. What problems is your intranet trying to solve? These can be multiple to drive engagement, to enable effective communications, to drive adoption of Microsoft 365 tools, to promote a one company culture, to provide content to help contact centre staff serve customers, to enable frontline communications and many more.

Later, when you carry out user research (see below), this question will be answered in far more detail, but it’s good to have an idea of the general areas you want your intranet to deliver from the get-go.

3 Who is going to own the intranet?

Intranet ownership is a question that people tend to defer until later on, but it actually pays to work this out before you undergo the project, as it will determine the nature and scope of the intranet, as well as the project team involved in the build. The most typical configuration we see is for Internal Communications to own the intranet content, design and strategy, and for IT to own the technology, but other functions owning the intranet can include the digital team, a Knowledge Management function, HR or business operations.

Ownership also implies some responsibility. If a senior stakeholder doesn’t want to take on the responsibility of an intranet, then it is unlikely to be wholly successful. They need to be prepared to pay for some kind of resource to manage the intranet on a day-to-day basis and provide stewardship.

In considering ownership, you may find some stakeholders start to worry about costs, particularly in smaller companies. Ultimately, a good intranet will save you money by increasing efficiency and improving processes. Smaller organisations are unlikely to need a full-time intranet manager, especially if some attention is given to getting the processes, rules and roles associated with the intranet spot-on from the outset.

4 Which stakeholders should be involved?

All great intranet projects have cross-functional support, involvement and alignment to ensure the intranet delivers maximum value. If you’re starting out on a new intranet, it really helps to involve your major stakeholders right from the beginning to understand their needs, views, agendas and roadmap. When you have cross-functional buy-in from day one, you’re setting up good foundations.

Involve your major stakeholders in any initial intranet discussions: IT, Communications, HR, Knowledge Management, major lines of business and your leadership function certainly need to be in the loop. Two other essential stakeholders that are frequently missed out are Legal, Risk & Compliance, and your Facilities / Real Estate team. The former is crucial to ensure you navigate any potential risks, especially if you are in a regulated industry, while the latter is important, particularly in a new era of hybrid working, to make sure your intranet is aligned to how people are going to be working across different locations. At this stage, it will also help to speak to your users and get a sense of what’s important to them, even before you undergo a more formal user research exercise.

5 What kind of intranet or intranet project are you looking for?

It helps to have an idea of the type of intranet that you are looking for, as this will set the expectations across your stakeholders and determine the path to your new intranet.

A related question here is do we actually need a new intranet?, because it’s perfectly possible that the requirement you’re trying to satisfy might not be fulfilled by a new intranet. Perhaps you need an employee communications app to engage your frontline staff, a service portal to ease pressure on your helpdesk or a collaboration and social platform. It’s also possible that you need an intranet refresh or upgrade rather than an entirely new platform, although the extent of that refresh might effectively comprise a new intranet. Your issue might actually be content-related, and could be more to do with an overhaul of your content or your information architecture.

A key decision will be whether you implement an off-the-shelf intranet solution or a more custom-made solution do you buy or build? In the past, this would have been a key decision, but most teams now opt for an off-the-shelf (also known as an in-a-box) solution that delivers a ready-made intranet which has pre-installed templates, designs and features you will need to deliver an enterprise intranet. For example, we implement the market-leading solution from LiveTiles. It’s easy and speedy to implement, and can meet most organisational needs, although in some cases you may require some further limited customisation.

If you’re on a Microsoft 365 path, a key decision will be whether you implement a SharePoint Online intranet. In our view, the answer to this question will almost certainly be yes, as it will allow you to leverage the power of all the other M365 tools such as Yammer and integrate them into your intranet experience. You’ll also be able to access intranet content from Microsoft Teams. If you are likely to be implementing a SharePoint intranet, a further decision is whether you choose to deliver an out-of-the-box SharePoint intranet, rather than using intranet software.

While we would never advocate making a final technology decision before working out your requirements, it is worth thinking that this is the most likely path, as it will help to illustrate the possibilities of a modern intranet that is fully integrated into the core of your digital workplace.

Five steps to start your intranet project

Once you’ve had the right conversations and there is a broad agreement that an intranet project should go ahead, it’s time to take some more formal steps.

Undertake formal user research

The best intranets are based on a thorough understanding of employee needs and how they work from day to day. What are the pain points? What are the business problems you’re trying to solve? What are employees real world experiences of current technology?

By answering these questions, you can ensure the intranet contains the right features and is designed around how employees actually work, not how you think they do.

Undertaking user research needs to be a formal, structured process which incorporates surveys, interviews, workshops, observation and examining various metrics; it’s different to the more informal conversations you may have had before. You might need to get external help when we implement an intranet for a client we include workshops, interviews and other studies as part of our methodology.

Construct a strategy and business case

Eventually, you’ll need to conglomerate your research and findings into a more formal strategy and potential business case. These may well build upon earlier conversations you’ve had with different stakeholders, and you may also already have some requirements that have emerged from your research.

Many intranet teams make the mistake of rushing into an intranet project without formalising the strategy. Clearly articulating the business benefits of a new intranet and the priority areas are crucial in selling your intranet inside and getting buy-in, making a formal business case, helping external parties in an RFP process and then shaping the requirements and implementation plan.

Talk to intranet vendors and experts

Agencies like Content Formula who understand intranets can help you at all stages of your intranet journey. For example, when we implement a project, we conduct user research, formulate your strategy and even facilitate an exploratory discussion about the value an intranet could deliver for you. We also often talk more informally to prospective clients.

The critical point to remember is that you should always talk to somebody who understands intranets and the process of implementing one. There are some excellent general digital agencies out there, but they may not necessarily have intranet experience or knowledge. Building an effective intranet is very different from building an external-facing website; intranets have multiple uses, and the needs of an internal audience are very different to those outside

Speak to an agency which has a proven record of working with intranets and clearly understands the channel. They will help you in the earlier stages, and can then potentially be on your shortlist of implementation partners when you run a more formal RFP process.

Select a product and partner

At some stage, you’ll need to select a product and an implementation partner; usually, you’ll have a standard approach to doing this in your organisation. Whether you’re running a formal RFP process or something less intensive, take a structured approach to ensure you’re involving the right product and partner. An intranet is a strategic investment, so getting the right tech and people involved is essential.

Implement a project

Congratulations on getting to this stage! Sometimes it can feel like an age from the early conversations to getting underway with the formal implementation, although we’ve known this to happen within a matter of weeks!

Usually, the formal project is the most straightforward part of your intranet journey, and you’ll easily progress through steps such as appointing the team, setting the timeline and establishing the costs. Generally, intranet projects are much faster-paced than they used to be. Your implementation partner or software vendor should have a set methodology and be able to help you with the actual implementation, including conducting further user research. At this stage, you’ll likely need to start planning your tactics for launch and beyond; always plan for change management, not just during the project, but also to support the intranet once in business-as-usual.

Need advice on a new intranet? Get in touch!

Setting up a new intranet can feel daunting if you haven’t been involved in an intranet project before, but we hope this post has given you some pointers. If you need advice on your new intranet, then get in touch!

How to ensure compliance with policies and procedures using the digital workplace?

Posted on 8 July 202116 November 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

We now offer a SharePoint policy management product called Xoralia

Xoralia helps you push out and track mandatory policies in a simple, intuitive interface.
Target and notify users of their policy tasks
Track policy reads
Automate the policy lifecycle
Keep everything in SharePoint and Teams
Go to Xoralia.com

So, youve made a ange to the company travel policy and the team has updated the company travel policy document. How do you let employees know about that change and ensure they comply with the new process?

This is easier said than done. Employees are already bombarded with information and have little time as they have multiple digital communications channels to navigate. There might be a different travel policy for different locations and groups, and it may not be the most inspiring or engaging document to read, so its hard to get the attention of employees.

This might sound like a problem thats not that pressing, but collectively getting employees to comply with policies, particularly when they have changed, is a real headache for support functions, compliance teams and risk departments. Some policy changes can have major implications for regulatory, legal and compliance processes, while others can have a considerable ripple effect on employee behaviour.

At the same time, employees often want to comply with policies, but struggle to find the details to do so. Even if they are able to find the right document, they may not be confident that they have the latest version, or know when and what aspect of the policy has changed.

The good news is there are solid approaches you can take across your digital workplace and other key digital channels to help ensure employees do comply with key policies and are made aware of updates.

Lets explore eight of these.

1 Establish clarity around policies in your content strategy

Having good content is critical across your intranet and digital workplace as a whole, but not all organisations have a content strategy that defines the content that is important, how it can be accessed and how it is going to be kept relevant and up to date.

If you dont have a content strategy, you should define one! This should specifically address different types of content: for example, news, operational evergreen content, documents and so on. The content strategy should also define how policies are going to be managed, and cover issues such as:

What is a policy and what is not a policy?
How do we deal with procedures, guidelines and other related documents?
How can we ensure they are managed effectively?
How do we ensure they are accessed by all employees?
Who is responsible for keeping them up to date?
How do we ensure policies are actionable?

By providing clarity on all these issues in your content strategy, you can design the channels, processes and tactics that are going to support effective policy management in your company.

2 Create a central policy library that is easy to access with strong findability

Compliance starts with providing easy access to the policies and procedures that employees need to comply with, and making them easily findable and discoverable. All too often, policies are difficult to find because they are scattered across many places, such as multiple SharePoint sites or intranet pages.

The tried-and-tested way to make policies more accessible for everyone is to provide a central policy library that is available through your main digital workplace channels likely your SharePoint intranet, Microsoft Teams and search. In this way, everybody can easily find and reach the policies they need. The library itself needs to remove any barriers to access and findability; it needs to be easy to use while simultaneously maintaining elements such as security-trimming on particular policies if applicable.

Sometimes, the details behind the library can prove important here. For example, we designed our Xoralia Policy Management solution to make it super-easy for employees to connect to the right policies with various elements such as:

Targeting to different AD profiles so the right people can see the right policies
Clearly presented information about each policy with title, details, owner, function, version, when last updated and more
Seamless integration with Microsoft 365, SharePoint, SharePoint intranet and Microsoft Teams, as well as the related mobile apps Xoralia is built on SharePoint
Notifications with relevant alerts
A powerful search facility through one interface with the ability to apply relevant filters including policy owner, location and mandatory / non-mandatory reads.

3 Drive trust in policies with robust content governance

At the centre of policy management is making sure you have robust content governance around each policy. This can help to build the trust that is essential for employee compliance with your policies, so they are 100% confident that the policy they are accessing is the definitive and latest version available. Important content governance principles include:

Having a clear, visible policy owner for each individual policy to drive accountability
Ensuring there are robust access rights and any necessary approval workflows
Scheduling regular content reviews to ensure policies are up to date
Making sure there is version control and numbering of different versions
Having standards such as naming conventions for policies.

For example, in our Xoralia policy management solution, weve ensured there is support for content governance with:

A visible department or function and named contact to establish clear ownership for every policy
Robust content life cycle governance with version control, numbering and automated review notifications (that also support auditing)
Strict access control and flexible approval workflows
Useful and intuitive interfaces to help admins and policy owners manage their content.

4 Make your content readable, scannable and acceptable

Lets be honest, most policies are dreary, lengthy documents that hardly anyone reads. When was the last time you read the small print on a usage policy or on some Terms and Conditions? But actually, policy documents usually contain some very important details that employees need to follow, or would want to access if they knew about them. Often, this is the how to element of the policy or its main, salient points.

Structuring your policies so they are more readable, scannable and actionable for users is essential to get employees to follow them. There are several ways you can do this, for example:

Creating simpler and more concise summary versions, with access to the full version below to allow people to dig deeper if they need to
Having clearly headed sections, and perhaps including jump links to these
Incorporating links to related policies and guidelines
Using inclusive and accessible language, and avoiding legalese at all costs
Highlighting sections that have changed
Ensuring content meets accessibility guidelines.

5 Establish a mandatory reads capability with tracking analytics

A critical capability for ensuring employees comply with policies is to enable mandatory reads, where employees have to confirm that they have read and understood a particular policy. With analytics to track who has read a policy and who hasnt, compliance teams or departmental managers can take additional action if there are employees who are yet to read an important policy document. In this way, employees are alerted when there is a change, and wont forget to read and digest the relevant information.

Mandatory reads are a core feature of the Xoralia solution, where employees receive a personalised list of the policies they need to read and when, as well as relevant notifications; mandatory reads for specific policies can be targeted to different groups. For admins, the whole mandatory read process is automated through notifications and a tracking report with enterprise-wide reporting, while for policy owners, the progress of who is reading their policy is tracked. For more detailed reporting, analytics can also be integrated into custom Power BI dashboards.

6 Personalise the experience with notifications

Personalisation is a key aspect of digital workplace experience, and needs to be included in any central policy library. It should make a user aware of the policies relevant to them (preserving security-trimming) as well as any updates or mandatory reads they should know about, but also take into account the policies they have already read. Flexible notifications are also crucial to remind users when an action is required.

7 Make it easy for your admins and policy owners

Getting employees to comply with policies requires a holistic approach that makes sure compliance teams and policy owners have the right tools to manage their policies effectively, with intuitive interfaces and automation where required.

Making policy management easy for your admins and policy owners is just as important as making it easy for users. For example, within the Xoralia solution, there is a simple view for policy owners that shows the status of the policies they own, including when they are up for review or have expired. Clients have told us that even a simple report like this can make all the difference.

8 Leverage all your digital communication channels

For important policy changes that require a change in user behaviour, there may also need to be a broader communication effort. Here, you can leverage all your digital communication channels to ensure to get the message out, including through intranet news items, relevant Teams channels and even your learning management system.

If your digital workplace is based on Microsoft 365 and your policy library is based on SharePoint, the ability to link to specific policy pages is much simpler. For example, some of our clients amplify messages to major updates in their Xoralia policy management library via both intranet news and activity streams within Teams.

Compliance with policies is possible

Getting your employees to comply with your policies is possible with the right approaches and solutions in place. If youd like to discuss policy management or would like a demo of our Xoralia Policy Management solution, then get in touch!

15 more intranet best practices for success – part 2

Posted on 29 June 202116 November 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

We sometimes get asked by our clients: What are the intranet best practices we should follow? In our first post, we covered fifteen intranet best practices – the approaches, techniques and tactics that we have seen work time and time again in helping intranets to be sustainable and deliver value for both employees and organisations. In this second and final post, we cover fifteen more intranet best practices across different aspects of intranet management, including design, adoption and content.

Of course, every organisation and intranet is different, and a tactic that works well in one place might not be so impactful in another. However, the intranet best practices weve listed here are all approaches that were confident will have a positive impact if applied in the right way.

1 Focus on user experience with user-centred design techniques

A strong user experience is at the heart of a good intranet. An intranet that is not designed primarily around the needs of employees will not be a success, and will end up with low adoption. Here, applying various user-centred design techniques to the research, design and build phases of an intranet project is essential.

These techniques range from running user interviews, to drawing up personas, to mapping user journeys, to rapid prototyping and carrying out various user testing. Essentially, they are all about involving users in your intranet project. Over at UX Mastery, there is a comprehensive list of user experience methods that is worth referring to when youre considering your overall approach to an intranet project.

2 Have a user-focused and task-based information architecture

One area where its particularly important to apply a user-centred focus is your intranet information architecture and site navigation. Unfortunately, we still see intranet navigations that just mirror an organisational structure. This means that to navigate to a piece of content, a user needs to know which function manages that area; this is less than obvious in large, global organisations and even harder for a new joiner, making it hard to find the right content. Essentially, a navigation that is mainly an org structure is focused on the needs of content owners who own individual pages rather than on the needs of users and the way they think

To drive good findability, its essential to have an IA that helps employees find what they need and to get things done. Using intuitive and sensible labelling, avoiding acronyms and obscure brand names for different areas and shaping an IA around popular user tasks will make it easier for employees to find what they need and get the best out of your intranet.

3 Get users to help design and test your navigation

The very best way to ensure your intranet is focused on users is to involve them in defining and testing it. There are a variety of well-established techniques that can be applied here, including card-sorting and task-testing (sometimes called tree-testing) in order to define, validate, refine and improve the navigation. Whilst these techniques are often applied during an intranet project, applying them on a regular basis, along with insights from other data such as analytics and search logs, can help keep your navigation fresh and relevant.

4 Take a holistic approach to improving search

A key attribute of a successful intranet is having good findability; this is not only covered by a good user-focused intranet navigation, but also by having a robust search. Managing and improving search is a wide and complex field, and will depend on the tools, content and resources you have. Whatever you do, you will need to take a holistic approach and apply a range of tactics to improve your search.

A misconception about search is that you can just switch on a powerful search engine and youre done. Poor search can be as much a content issue as it is a search engine issue; reducing the amount of content you have, teaching content authors to tag content correctly and using sensible headlines will have a significant impact on findability. Improvements may require foundational work like creating a taxonomy and establishing content types. Optimising the layout of search can also make a difference. Ongoing management such as examining search logs and making tweaks, collecting search feedback and adding best bets may also move the needle on findability. Realistically, you will need to employ some or all of these tactics to improve search.

5 Make your site accessible

Accessibility is a neglected area in the digital workplace, and its surprising how few intranet sites actually meet the AA level of the WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 guidelines – the acceptable level that most external-customer sites aspire to. Ensuring that your site and content is accessible is not only important from a diversity and inclusion perspective, but also improves the general usability of a site.

Making a site accessible is rarely a priority in an intranet project because it requires ongoing efforts such as testing and reviews, as well as commitment to considering the content that is added, such as providing transcripts of videos, ensuring you have alt text for images and considering colour contrast when adding images to a page.

Working with your D&I team or the right Employee Resource Groups can raise awareness of the importance of accessibility for your internal digital channels, which can in turn support the business case for investing in accessibility.

6 Engage and support your publishing community

Good intranets need good content. Most intranets are based on a decentralised publishing model, with small central intranet teams especially relying on the actions of their content owners to produce good quality content. In our first post about intranet best practices, we prioritised having good content governance with named content owners, as well as ensuring clarity surrounding their roles and responsibilities. However, you also need to keep them engaged and supported. Generally, managing their intranet area is going to be an additional activity that is above and beyond their day job.

Spending tine on an ongoing training programme, providing an online community, driving engagement through recognition and providing the right resources and tools which make life easier for a content owner can all make a huge difference.

7 Include user-generated content and social elements

Modern intranets are lively and dynamic channels that stimulate dialogue, facilitate collaboration and drive a sense of community. Including user-generated content with conversations and contributions is a must. There are multiple ways to do this, for example: promoting employee blogs, adding news commenting, embedding social feeds, introducing models where everyone can publish, featuring peer recognition, using polls, having photo contents, including communities of practice or interest and more.

If your intranet is top-down and only focuses on dreary corporate content, adoption will suffer and youll miss out on opportunities to engage employees, amplify culture and get valuable feedback from employees.

8 Use newsletters to drive adoption

Often, an aim for an intranet is to reduce the proportion of email notifications which end up unread and clog up everybodys inbox. However, email is still an important communication channel. One common practice is to send out a weekly email newsletter that contains a round-up of the key intranet stories with links back to the relevant items. This helps keep employees who still live out of their inbox informed, but also successfully drives traffic back to the intranet.

9

Use a SharePoint intranet if you have Microsoft 365

We anticipate that not everybody is going to agree with this point, but we think its important! If you have a Microsoft 365 digital workplace, your intranet should be based on SharePoint. Successful intranets integrate with other elements of the digital workplace, and a SharePoint intranet has completely seamless integration with the Microsoft universe.

A SharePoint intranet means you can use Microsoft search on your intranet, embed Yammer feeds, provide a personalised list of Microsoft Teams, utilise SharePoint document libraries and facilitate integration with Communication sites. It also means you can embed access to the intranet within Microsoft Teams more easily, meaning the intranet is brought into the daily flow of work. To put it bluntly, if you have Microsoft 365, an intranet based on SharePoint is a no-brainer.

10 Limit intranet customisation if possible

Nowadays, the generally accepted practice for most IT teams is to limit customisation of platforms and applications as much as possible. This view is heavily influenced by the development of cloud-based services and platforms like Microsoft 365 which are constantly updated, but also offer more flexibility around configuration to meet the majority of potential needs.

This approach has completely flipped the world of intranets that in the past were heavily customised, very expensive and arduous to develop and then virtually impossible or too expensive to upgrade. The combination of Microsoft 365 and intranet software like LiveTiles likely provides over 90 percent of what you need on your intranet, with room to configure to your specific needs. Where there are gaps, you can usually find an app, a plug-in or customisation options to suit. The days of heavily customised intranets are over, and thats definitely a good thing.

11 Have a brand for your intranet

If your intranet is bland and corporate, youll likely miss out on an opportunity to give your intranet some personality and make it engaging enough to drive adoption. An intranet should always have a brand typically one that mirrors your organisational culture with an appropriate name, logo and design.

Perhaps your intranet is social and informal, or maybe its more work-focused. Perhaps its mobile-first, or even a bit of everything. Considering your intranet brand and aligning it with your intranets core objectives and how you want it to be perceived by employees will make it more memorable with your audience, and youll consequently be better placed to position it to drive adoption and craft a consistent and impactful experience.

12 Accept that an intranet is never finished

An intranet is never finished. There are always features you can add, content that can be improved, adoption levels to improve, integrations to create and gaps to fill. Employee needs and expectations are constantly changing, and organisations are always restructuring.

When you accept that an intranet is never finished, you can start to focus on a process of continuous improvement that ensures the intranet stays fresh and sustainable, and drives value. Continuously improving through small, iterative changes based on analytics and feedback also means your intranet stays closer to the needs of employees, and further supports adoption and growth.

13 Involve your security and compliance teams early on

Its essential that your intranet ticks all the boxes from a security, privacy, legal, regulatory and risk angle. This spans everything from data security, GDPR, where data resides, sector-specific regulatory issues and more. Of course, most intranet teams already know this, but there can be elements that get missed or emerge late in the day, putting an intranet implementation date at risk. There are also lesser-known ongoing issues, such as educating content owners and users not to add copyrighted material and images onto your intranet.

One thing weve learned from hundreds of intranet implementations is to involve your security, risk and compliance teams early on in an intranet project, and to maintain dialogue with them as new issues arise. This approach usually catches any potential issues that could block or delay an intranet project, and also means actions can be taken to mitigate those risks with less impact on the user experience.

14 Manage your intranet within the digital comms ecosystem

An intranet is often the central platform for your digital communications, but they also exist within a wider multi-channel ecosystem of other digital channels including email, social platforms, apps, digital signage, HR systems, IT service portals and even your corporate website. The opportunities for duplication and information overload are high, leading to disengagement, inefficiency and missed opportunities to drive more effective campaigns. You may also want other channels such as email to drive visits back to your intranet.

Therefore, an intranet should never be managed in isolation – it needs to be regarded as part of the wider cross-channel landscape where content and communications are co-ordinated to drive engagement and efficiency.

15 Network with your peers

The thing about intranets is that they are hidden from view and not available for everyone to see, so it can be harder for intranet teams to pick up tips, best practices and the latest innovations that can really help to get the best out of your intranet. It can also be quite lonely running an intranet; teams are often actually just one or two people, and the rest of your organisation doesnt usually understand exactly what you do.

There can be great value in networking with your intranet peers in other organisations to swap approaches and tactics, get inspiration, or even just have someone who understands intranets with whom to let off steam. The good news is that there are a lot of networks, communities and events that offer opportunities to network, and most intranet people are very friendly and open to help! We certainly love working in the wider intranet and digital workplace community.

Want more information? Get in touch!

Thats a wrap for our intranet best practices. Dont miss the first part of the series! If you want more information on any of these intranet best practices or would like to discuss your intranet project with us, then get in touch.

Webinar video: Yammer best practices

Posted on 18 June 202130 December 2022 by John Scott

85% of Fortune 500 companies are now using Yammer, but we regularly hear about poor adoption and failed implementations. What does Yammer best practice look like? How can you ensure that it works in your organisation?

In this Webinar we’ll share our experience and insights into what makes Yammer succeed within different organisations. Including:

Aligning Yammer with your company strategy
Establishing the right roles
Why and how to run pilots
Yammer for Internal Communications
Yammer for Leaders

Panelists:

Richard Gera, a Digital Communication and Engagement Consultant with a wealth of Yammer experience. This includes rolling out and managing enterprise collaboration as an external consultant and an in-house practitioner.
John Scott has worked across both design and technical disciplines – a rare combination that allow him to build a bridge between the user experience and technical teams. This means that feasibility, usability, delivery and ease of maintenance are baked-into all of our solutions.
Joe Perry oversees the technical delivery of all Content Formula projects. He works closely with our UX consultants and clients to understand requirements and design appropriate technical solutions.

15 intranet best practices you should follow

Posted on 14 June 202130 December 2022 by Dan Hawtrey

We sometimes get asked by our clients, What are the intranet best practices we should follow? This is not a straightforward question. Firstly, there is a very wide range of approaches, techniques and tactics that can be applied to make your intranet successful. These cover different areas from adoption, to design, to content; there is a lot a team can do that will make a difference. Secondly, the term best practices always needs to be caveated. What works brilliantly for one intranet is not necessarily going to work for another. Sometimes good practices is a better term – best implies there is no room for improvement, but thats not always true. You might disagree with us in some of our choices, too.

Having said that, we think there are some accepted common practices in managing intranets that weve seen work consistently over a number of years in helping deliver a successful and sustainable intranet. Weve put our heads together and come up with 30 which were going to share with you over two articles. so, here goes for our first set of intranet best practices.

1 Always have an intranet strategy

Intranets are strategic-level investments that deliver strategic benefits. Therefore, you need an intranet strategy! Having a well-thought-through overview of what you are trying to achieve with your intranet that aligns with your overall company strategy, as well as an accompanying plan and roadmap of how youre going to achieve it, allows you to maintain focus, prioritise efforts, win over stakeholders, unite different team members around the same goals and ensure your intranet keeps moving in a strategic direction. Without a strategy, an intranet is in danger of becoming directionless, running out of steam and ultimately holding less value.

2 Involve cross-functional stakeholders from across the organisation

Intranets facilitate different organisational processes including HR self-service, knowledge management, internal communications, leadership communications, collaboration, providing access to the wider digital workplace and more! Because of the intranets wide use and impact right across the enterprise, you need input and ongoing involvement from a range of stakeholders including HR, IT, Internal Comms, Business Operations, Leadership Function and more.

This involvement should usually be reflected in some kind of ongoing governance perhaps through representation on an intranet steering committee or as part of an intranet working group. When different stakeholders from varying functions are continually involved in your intranet, it has more buy-in, relevance and value, and can fulfil its full potential to enable and improve a wider range of organisational processes.

3 Ensure you have an intranet manager

Not everybody may agree with this, but we think every intranet needs an intranet manager. A named person should have overall responsibility and oversight of the intranet as a whole, both in its everyday management and its longer-term development.

An intranet manager doesnt necessarily need to be full-time; smaller organisations may have an internal comms person who is responsible for more than just the intranet, for example. Its tempting to give different areas of responsibility for the intranet to different roles this is certainly true for differentiating between content and technical areas, for example – but someone needs to be able to ensure all parts of the intranet are coordinated. Every single really successful intranet weve seen has had an intranet manager.

4 Provide clarity on whos doing what

Even with a dedicated manager and central team in place, intranets are essentially an ensemble effort, with a wide range of roles involved in looking after different elements of the intranet. A typical intranet team in its widest sense could involve content owners, the technical team, communications professionals, product owners involved with integrations, digital champions who promote the intranet and more!

With central intranet teams invariably small, they are usually reliant on this wider group; it really helps to provide absolutely clarity on who is responsible for what, clarifying what each person needs to do, the associated processes and any expectations, while also keeping people engaged. A RACI Matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) applied to all the sections of the intranet can be hugely helpful.

5 Carry out user research

You cannot define an intranet strategy or design and launch an intranet that is based on assumptions. Intranets must focus on the needs of users and be wrapped around the way they work; you need a thorough understanding of your employees, including their information needs and how they interact with technology, to design an effective intranet.

The only way to do this is to undertake user research; there are a plethora of technique options here, including interviews, workshops, surveys, observation, time studies, user testing, observation, reviewing relevant analytics and more. Taking this data-driven approach will also help legitimise and prioritise decision-making on your intranet, and is a good way to counter ill-informed stakeholders with strong opinions about the direction of your intranet that might not be beneficial.

6 Leverage digital and intranet champions for launch

Many of our clients have used a network of voluntary local champions to launch their intranet, invariably with very good results. By leveraging the energy and enthusiasm of voluntary champions, small central teams can get more reach in spreading the word about their intranet. They can also better explain its value through peer conversations which are usually conducted within a frame of reference that is relevant to the work done in a particular location, department or team, and resonate better than centrally-driven messaging. Ultimately, using voluntary champions gives momentum to an intranet launch and drives adoption.

7 Put content governance in place

An intranet is only as good as the content published within it. For content to be relevant, up-to-date, well-written, accurate, engaging, purposeful and on-brand, you need some kind of content governance in place. This includes a variety of different elements including defining publishing standards, ensuring each page has a named owner, carrying out content owner training, supporting content owners with appropriate page layouts and templates, applying approval workflow if necessary and having regular reviews of content, using automation if possible.

8 Act on what you measure

Using metrics to track the success of intranet is a given, and many intranet teams collect analytics on adoption and usage, reach, engagement, user satisfaction, search results, the individual performance of different content and more. However, while everyone may have to produce pretty charts for a quarterly report that goes to senior management, there is little point in measuring in detail unless youre going to act on what you measure and deliver a better intranet as a result.

Measurement works best when there is a regular process focused on continual improvement. When you measure, ensure you take time to analyse and understand what the numbers mean, make changes or adjustments, measure again to see what the impact was and then make further changes. In this way, measurement is part of the process to drive improvement and becomes a powerful tool. You also need to make sure youre measuring the right things that will drive long-term improvement.

9 Use employee feedback to drive improvement

Another essential approach in improving an intranet is to utilise employee feedback and suggestions regularly to inform changes. Getting employee feedback not only provides highly valuable and relevant information about how your intranet is used and perceived, but also engages employees who can see their opinions are valued and make a difference, meaning theyre likely to continue contributing feedback. There are various techniques to support gathering feedback, including creating a regular user group, running polls and surveys and creating feedback mechanisms via the intranet itself.

10 Use personalisation

Intranets are a channel that everybody should access, as they help underpin transparency and accountability and support a level playing field by giving everybody access to information. During the pandemic, it has become clear how important is it for everybody to be able to access up-to-date digital communication channels.

Your entire workforce should have access to the intranet, either via the desktop or a mobile device. In the past, frontline workers were often excluded from accessing the intranet, creating a digital divide, although they are generally far more connected now. Outsourced or seasonal parts of a workforce sometimes still do not have access, although there can be some logistical or compliance-related reasons for this.

12 Make your intranet available anytime, anywhere on any device

Intranets can play a significant role in helping employees work from any location, as well as providing the information employees need to carry out their role and complete tasks. We are now in the era of the hybrid and flexible workplace where employees will be working at home, in the office, from a client or on-the-go, with the location potentially changing throughout the week. An intranet must be available at any time, from anywhere and on any device to support hybrid working going forward.

13 Make sure your leaders are visible

Intranets provide a highly effective vehicle for leadership communications, particularly during the pandemic. Leaders should be highly visible on your intranet, not only through news updates and videos, but also through participating in social channels and setting a good example for other senior management by exhibiting digital behaviours. This drives intranet adoption and participation, and demonstrates the importance of the intranet through effective senior leader endorsement.

14 Balance homepage news with features

An intranet is a digital communications channel that keeps everyone updated with the latest news, but its also a platform for completing tasks and finding information to support everyday work. The truth is that most employees do not primarily visit the intranet to view news, they go there to complete tasks; however, when accessing a link to an app or checking their annual leave balance, they do view news. Resist the temptation to dominate your intranet homepage with news – balance out these items with features, integrations and information that employees will find useful and make them want them to return to the intranet every day.

15 Make your intranet the front door to the wider digital workplace

Over the past few years, intranets have been morphing into front doors to the wider digital workplace, providing the single-entry point into the wider portfolio of applications used by employees throughout the enterprise. This helps save time for employees and supports good intranet adoption.

There are several ways to achieve this, including integrating apps with your intranet such as Workday, encouraging employee self-service; providing a central directory of apps through which employees can bookmark favourites and easily access them will also help. Additionally, deeper integration with other platforms, especially across Microsoft 365 with embedded Yammer feeds or links to Microsoft Teams spaces, will further promote the intranet.

Want more information? Get in touch!

Those are our first fifteen intranet best practices. Watch out for the next part of the series!

If you want more information on any of these intranet best practices or would like to discuss your intranet project with us, then get in touch.

For intranets to succeed, content and experiences need to be relevant to different roles, divisions and locations. Internal communicators also want to be able to target items to different sections of a workforce to deliver effective messaging. Leveraging personalisation so that relevant, targeted content appears based on an individuals profile (usually based on Active Directory) is now a must-do approach for a successful, modern intranet.

11 Give your entire workforce access

12 Make your intranet available anytime, anywhere on any device

13 Make sure your leaders are visible

14 Balance homepage news with features

15 Make your intranet the front door to the wider digital workplace

Want more information? Get in touch!

Those are our first fifteen intranet best practices. Watch out for the next part of the series!

If you want more information on any of these intranet best practices or would like to discuss your intranet project with us, then get in touch.

How do you improve digital employee experience?

Posted on 7 June 202113 February 2023 by Dan Hawtrey

Employee experience is an important topic for senior leaders and HR functions, but also for digital workplace and intranet teams. Digital channels and workplace technology continues to have a prominent influence in how employees experience their work, particularly since the start of the pandemic and the increase in remote working. The projected future of hybrid working patterns means that improving digital employee experience will be a key objective for digital workplace teams going forward. Opportunities created by Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) such as Microsoft Viva also mean that there has never been a better time to start thinking about digital employee experience.

In this article, were going to explore some of the ways teams can improve digital employee experience. In reality, there is no single magic ingredient that improves digital employee experience; you need a combination of different tactics, underpinned by joined-up thinking, to make a difference. Improvement also doesnt necessarily happen overnight its about taking a longer-term, strategic view of the digital touchpoints that impact employees.

What is digital employee experience?

Recently, we tried to define employee experience and digital employee experience. We concluded that the term concerns the way employees experience workplace technology, and that it takes in a more a holistic and strategic way of thinking about the role of technology at work.

Creating feedback mechanisms and channels to capture ongoing input
Establishing formal groups of employees who are prepared to provide ongoing feedback over a prolonged period
Building employee feedback into project delivery and product management processes
Committing to more agile and iterative approaches to workplace technology.

In introducing these sorts of measures, you also need to clearly communicate and demonstrate that employee feedback is valued and makes a difference in order to encourage ongoing input.

7 Take an empathetic and human-centred view

Improving employee experience means thinking about the range of factors that impact our experience of work. This goes way beyond user-centred design, interface design or improving productivity. We need to think about elements such as health and wellbeing, diversity and inclusion, flexible working, personal development, career growth, employee engagement and more. We also need to contemplate the needs of different groups in terms of roles, locations, culture, background and demographics. On top of that, we must consider the scenarios and conditions people work in, including frontline employees who are on-the-go, knowledge workers sitting in an office and remote employee working at home.

This sounds straightforward on paper but is actually pretty complex, and an empathetic and human-centric view is needed to improve digital employee experience. This is especially true as we come out of the pandemic and senior leaders are more focused on peoples needs.

8 Measure in the hybrid workplace to drive continuous improvement

Using metrics to measure different aspects of digital employee experience is a prerequisite for introducing continuous improvement, gaining insights to make meaningful changes, and then testing the impact through further measurement.

Measuring for digital employee experience requires different approaches to looking at adoption or the success of internal communications, alongside a wide range of measures right across the hybrid workplace. People analytics, for example, is starting to look at the connection between health and wellbeing and the time spent on different systems. Using more creative and broader approaches to analytics is necessary, although this is an area where new practices are still emerging.

9 Properly resource your efforts

Digital employee experience is of strategic importance and requires adequate investment, not only in the technology solutions but also in ensuring there are people in place to launch, manage and improve these solutions. Investing properly in an employee onboarding solution, as well as in people to provide stewardship of that system, can have a significant impact on reducing employee turnover. All too often, organisations fall short on digital employee experience because they are simply not resourcing their efforts properly; unfortunately, ensuring availability of the right level of investment and resourcing is sometimes out of the hands of the digital workplace team.

Improving digital employee experience

Improving digital employee experience is an important area, and we hope this article has given you some ideas. If you would like to discuss any aspect of your digital employee experience, get in touch!

Understanding employees will inevitably mean bringing in a diverse set of needs that reflect not only the diversity of a workforce, but also individual perspectives and circumstances. One of the major challenges of digital employee experience is trying to design solutions that will meet everybodys needs. Of course, thats not always going to be possible, but incorporating principles such as personalisation, targeted content and experiences, the ability for individuals to configure their experience around their needs, flexibility and choice will help.

Flexibility and choice are hugely important in the hybrid workplace, allowing employees to work from anywhere and at any time, giving them autonomy in defining their own employee experience.

6 Keep on involving employees to ensure better solutions

Improving digital employee experience must involve employees. Information and insights from ongoing employee feedback and input is like gold dust, and helps align your digital workplace to employees real-world experiences. Here, it is best to apply some kind of structure to gathering feedback, doing so through:

Creating feedback mechanisms and channels to capture ongoing input
Establishing formal groups of employees who are prepared to provide ongoing feedback over a prolonged period
Building employee feedback into project delivery and product management processes
Committing to more agile and iterative approaches to workplace technology.

In introducing these sorts of measures, you also need to clearly communicate and demonstrate that employee feedback is valued and makes a difference in order to encourage ongoing input.

7 Take an empathetic and human-centred view

8 Measure in the hybrid workplace to drive continuous improvement

9 Properly resource your efforts

Improving digital employee experience

However, there is no exact consensus on the definition, and the term can incorporate different meanings and vary from organisation to organisation. For example, some define it as the equivalent of digital customer experience, while others place more focus on the lifecycle of an employees time at an organisation.

Lets explore some of the different ways digital workplace teams can improve digital employee experience.

1 Align with your organisations strategic view of employee experience

You cant improve digital employee experience without knowing what your organisations strategic view of employee experience is. What are the key elements of employee experience within your organisation? What is important for employees in your organisation? What are your strategic objectives around employee experience? What are the priority areas? Even if the strategy is not necessarily called employee experience, there will usually be some kind of equivalent which you should analyse.

The strategy and roadmap for digital employee experience must align with the overall strategic view of your organisation and follow it, otherwise your efforts can lack focus, might not get the necessary support from other stakeholders or may prioritise the wrong areas. Improving the digital employee experience is a huge topic and there is a great deal you can do to achieve it, meaning its sometimes hard to know where to start. Aligning and following the wider employee experience strategic view should help define your digital employee experience strategy and the related areas for prioritisation.

2 Involve the right stakeholders

Digital workplace teams will know the importance of involving key stakeholders in your digital workplace strategy and roadmap – the same is true of digital employee experience. Here, you absolutely need to involve HR for the employee experience element, and both IT and HR for the digital aspect. HR are going to be driving your employee experience strategy forward, and HR tech including your HR system of record like Workday, employee onboarding solutions, learning platform and more are going to be integral parts of your digital employee experience. You need consensus and joined-up approaches with these stakeholders to ensure you are working towards a common vision of digital employee experience, leading to a collaborative effort which can direct the specific tactics and measures that can enrich your strategy.

3 Focus on the moments that matter in the employee lifecycle

A common focus for improving digital employee experience is the employee lifecycle, following the journey from the time an employee is first hired to when they leave. Throughout the lifecycle, there are some key moments that matter that make a real difference to the employee; these include the onboarding experience, learning and development, internal career moves and being supported through key life moments such as starting a family. Identifying these moments and then optimising the digital employee experience around them can be a good way to prioritise and focus actions. Employee onboarding, for example, is often ripe for a better digital employee experience, and is an area where improvements deliver substantial value for organisations in helping to reduce employee turnover.

4 Understand your employees

You cannot improve digital employee experience without a thorough understanding of employees. If youre a regular reader of our blog, you wont be surprised by this, as we advocate undertaking user research for any digital project. Never design or build a digital solution based on assumptions! You need to understand the way employees work, their pain points, how they use technology, their information needs and what is important to them.

This is particularly important for a digital employee experience strategy that considers the wide series of factors that are combined to form the overall employee experience. Of course, there are numerous ways to undertake user research including surveys, interviews, workshops, quick polls, analytics, observation and more.

5 Craft individual experiences around different groups

Flexibility and choice are hugely important in the hybrid workplace, allowing employees to work from anywhere and at any time, giving them autonomy in defining their own employee experience.

6 Keep on involving employees to ensure better solutions

Creating feedback mechanisms and channels to capture ongoing input
Establishing formal groups of employees who are prepared to provide ongoing feedback over a prolonged period
Building employee feedback into project delivery and product management processes
Committing to more agile and iterative approaches to workplace technology.

In introducing these sorts of measures, you also need to clearly communicate and demonstrate that employee feedback is valued and makes a difference in order to encourage ongoing input.

7 Take an empathetic and human-centred view

8 Measure in the hybrid workplace to drive continuous improvement

9 Properly resource your efforts

Improving digital employee experience