Shell powers employee experience with a Unily intranet
Royal Dutch Shell PLC, commonly known as Shell, is an international energy company headquartered in the Netherlands and incorporated in the United Kingdom. It is one of the oil and gas “supermajors” and the third-largest company in the world, measured by 2019 revenue. Shell came to Unily looking for a platform that could support their Internal Communications team in aligning employees against their digital strategy, whilst driving productivity and innovation across an 82k-strong global workforce.
Shell's digital vision: To move towards a more social, seamless, and digitally-enabled employee experience with the intranet at the center of the digital workplace as the window into Shell.
The vision
For Shell’s Internal Communications team, the impetus for a new intranet was born out of a need to align a global workforce against a compelling company strategy and purpose, while giving employees the tools to fulfil their contribution towards Shell’s vision for the future of energy.
In the words of the company’s VP Internal Communications, David Harrington, “The key role for us as Internal Communications is to make sure that we enable everyone in our organization to understand the unique contribution that they can make to bring that strategy to life.” Shell’s new digital workplace plays a central role in allowing Shell employees to understand how they can help lead Shell towards their vision of the future of energy. Putting the scale of this challenge in context, Harrington says, “Like any company, we have a strategy and we’re trying to align our employees against it, but, for Shell, that requires us to align 82,000 employees across 70-plus countries.”
Empowering employees to unify under a shared vision required a robust communications solution, while enabling employees to deliver on their unique contribution required a powerful digital workplace. Unily provided the optimal platform to achieve both objectives with a single, multi-purpose solution.
Shell’s digital vision for the platform, which they called The Hub, was, ‘To move towards a more social, seamless, and digitally-enabled employee experience with the intranet at the centre of the digital workplace as the window into Shell.’
Harrington explains: “We wanted to make sure that our employees are equipped to have at their fingertips the data, the information, and the resources they need to do their jobs. At the same time, we acknowledged a real opportunity to make our digital space more efficient and to put some productivity back into the system by making things easier to find, more accessible, and more relevant to the individual.”
Shell’s new digital workplace delivers on every front with features to support both engagement and productivity. The Hub delivers a social platform that unites people, business systems, knowledge, and timely communications in one intuitive space. The result is an enhanced digital employee experience that empowers every employee with the tools to do their best work, and helps the enterprise to continue to attract, retain and nurture top-tier talent.
The challenge
Bringing this vision of seamless, digitally enabled employee experiences to life relied on overcoming key challenges brought about by Shell’s previous intranet, that lacked the functionality to deliver on the key business drivers laid out in their digital strategy.
Prior to partnering with Unily, Shell’s legacy intranet was static and fragmented, housing vast amounts of outdated content – around 20,000 pages, more than half of which had zero views. The former intranet didn’t have any collaboration or engagement opportunities, and so lacked the social aspect that Shell laid out in their digital strategy.
Shell also identified that, across their entire workforce, employees all seemed to share the same daily challenge: information overload. Harrington understood this challenge to be indicative of the size of the enterprise, “There’s so much information in organizations these days that stuff that’s vitally important often doesn’t find its way to the end user in a way that’s obvious and relevant.”
Shell saw the opportunity to improve employee engagement and productivity by eliminating the excess noise that was proving distracting for staff with a highly personalized digital experience. The final piece of the puzzle in effectively communicating Shell’s corporate vision involved utilizing Unily’s content targeting capabilities to drive relevancy and engagement with content. To enable the granular targeting needed to deliver on this, Shell would need to migrate data from Shell’s previous, siloed SharePoint systems to transfer to the new platform. Unily would be required to sync user profile information from several databases to meet Shell’s strict governance requirements. This would ensure The Hub contained the relevant data to effectively target content to engage individual users and perform effectively as a holistic digital hub.
Platform highlights
Shell sought to build The Hub into a ubiquitous single pane of glass experience for all employees. To achieve this, various platform features were leveraged.
News Central
The News Central site is a hub for all internal communications, aggregating content from across the intranet and external feeds to surface stories based on user preferences. News Central provides users with a bespoke blend of critical global updates and targeted content with its News for You Widgets. The site supports Shell’s focus on culturally enriching communications, leveraging the digital newsroom to play a key role in their engagement strategy. Built-in analytics tools surface insight that allows Shell to adapt their approach and remain agile to employee response. The result is a consumer-grade newsroom experience for every user that drives engagement by highlighting global updates and content personalized for the individual and their unique interests.
Targeted experiences
Due to the sheer size of Shell’s workforce, encouraging engagement with targeted and personalized content was a key area of focus. Unily’s sophisticated targeting allows Shell to direct content to specific audiences based on their business, function or country. Employees are given control over their own experience with the ability to select topics of interest that further drives content relevancy. To ensure universal access for every user, The Hub harnesses Unily’s AI-powered multilingual translation to deliver content in the user’s native language. The result is an inclusive communications platform that enables Shell to unify employees spread across over 70 countries.
Tools and Resources hub
“One of our main objectives for The Hub was integration. If you’re looking for any services, you can quickly find them on The Hub,” explains Cindy Vosselman, Shell’s Intranet Product Owner. A searchable directory of Shell’s 600+ business applications, the Tools and Resources Hub fuels productivity by streamlining access to business tools. Employees can search the directory or select from the ‘Relevant to You’ bucket, which surfaces tools based on the user’s role. Single-sign-on security makes access a one-click process, while users can pin apps and tools to their homepage to maximize efficiency.
Ethica chatbot
Ethica, The Hub’s aptly named Ethics and Compliance chatbot, was developed to making ethics and compliance a business priority. Ethica is capable of answering dynamic queries unique to individual users, such as “Who is my Ethics and Compliance manager?”. This drives efficiency by simplifying access to knowledge and supports Shell’s business aim to enhance ethics and compliance.
People finder
The Hub’s People Finder is a searchable directory of all Shell employees that makes it easy for people to connect with colleagues, grow their network, and find experts with specific skills. Users can search the directory by employee location and line of business, or use the Advanced People Search link to search Shell’s SharePoint database for users with specific skillsets and experience.
Yammer integration
Before teaming up with Unily, Shell had successfully launched Yammer to their workforce. Unily were tasked with identifying opportunities to expand and enhance Yammer’s successful outroll and integrate it within Unily. As a result, The Hub integrates Yammer feeds into the homepage and links users directly to Shell’s Yammer portal to drive engagement. In addition to Yammer integrations, the platform uses Unily’s native social capabilities to enable reactions, commenting and sharing across all content.
Leveraging the Microsoft stack
With its focus on streamlining access, from any page users are only one click away Microsoft 365 applications with the My Tools & Resources drop-down list. Integrations Unily built within The Hub surface information from these applications to further drive use of Microsoft 365 tools, facilitate collaboration, and boost productivity.
- The Hub integrates with Shell’s Yammer network so users can connect with people across the business by liking, sharing, and commenting on posts directly from the ‘My Yammer Feed’ widget on the homepage
- The Hub’s enterprise search collates resources from various sources, such as Shell’s existing SharePoint database, allowing intuitive navigation of the DMS to locate resources
- People Finder integrates Outlook, Skype for Business, and Yammer, enabling seamless communication and collaboration with colleagues via buttons on user profiles
Homepage deep dive
The Hub’s homepage delivers a considered balance of engaging content and productivity tools. On its left side, various widgets and news rollups boost engagement by spotlighting articles, social activity, and targeted content. To the right, integrated widgets like My Tasks and My Tools and Resources give users one-click access to tools and information, improving efficiency as a result.
Content feeds
The homepage uses personalized content feeds to encourage engagement with communications by surfacing content relevant to individual users. This targeted approach to communications has been vital in addressing information overload by driving content relevancy.
My Tasks
My Tasks integrates with Shell’s third- party business applications to compile a view of the user’s upcoming tasks, which is visible from a custom widget on the homepage. By eliminating time spent gathering information from separate siloed systems, My Tasks provides an efficient overview of outstanding actions such as mandatory training, leave requests, or safety tasks.
My Tools and Resources
The My Tools and Resources widget is a custom Unily integration extended from the Tools and Resources searchable directory. Users can pin their most used applications as favourites, which are easily accessed on the homepage within the My Tools and Resources widget. As one of the most used features of The Hub, this integration is a key driver of the median 82 seconds saved by users per task.
Goal Zero
The Goal Zero widget is a custom integration built to meet Shell’s ‘Goal Zero’ safety objective, “to achieve no harm and no leaks across all operations.”
Share Price
The Share Price widget, visible on the homepage, provides a visual overview of the performance of Shell stock. The integration pulls live data from global stock indexes to show the price and recent performance of RDSA shares on international markets.
The results: 5 ways The Hub transformed an energy giant
#1. Changing perceptions of internal communications
One of Shell’s key objectives for The Hub was to align 135k users under their corporate vision and engage them with targeted communications. Harrington believes that the introduction of The Hub has underpinned a change in perceptions about the value of internal communications. “We’ve made a huge change in what people believe internal communications should be and a huge change in helping leaders understand that the way to really drive performance and engagement is through conversation and dialogue,” he explains.
The Hub has led to a significant increase in the reach and impact of communications and allowed Shell to adapt their approach to communications, focusing on creating quality content that resonates with The Hub’s audiences, as opposed to a traditional catch-all approach. With multi-lingual translation, users are empowered to consume the same content sources in their native language, delivering a truly united workforce. The impact of this strategic shift is evident in the response from employees. Over the last 6 months, article views total over 840k at an average of 140k per month.
Across all content, whether brief updates or longer articles, an average dwell time of 49 seconds indicates strong engagement. Further proof of engagement can be seen in the dialogue this content generates, which the team view as a key driver of collaborative innovation. In total, social analytics reveal 2.3k comments and 1.4k reactions over a 6-month timespan; a clear sign that Shell’s new internal communications tactics are being responded to by employees.
#2. Transforming productivity
The second mission of The Hub was to support productivity by providing an intuitive and integrated digital workplace that could support agile working. The Hub integrates with Shell’s third-party applications to provide seamless access to tools and resources from anywhere in the world. User testing revealed The Hub increased productivity by 66%. This enhanced efficiency resulted in savings of $41.6m every year in time saved, or $80k per week.
Users save, on average, 82 seconds on each task in comparison to with the previous intranet. This equates to over 3.5k hours saved across the enterprise each day, equating to approximately $160k per day. For an enterprise of Shell’s size, this dramatic increase in efficiency speaks to The Hub’s profound impact and provides tangible proof of return on Shell’s investment.
#3. Driving adoption of third-party tools
The Hub’s ease of access also increased adoption of tools across the business. The Hub sees an average of 113k unique visitors each month logging on 2.5 times a day. Within its first five days alone, The Hub experienced around a million hits on the home page as well as 83k unique users logging on. Looking further ahead, in The Hub’s first 6 months, its highly active community generated over 120k pageviews, 94k visits and 49k unique visitors. Today, 85% of all users frequently engage with the platform.
#4. Fueling collaboration
The Hub’s integrations with collaboration technology makes it easy for employees across the business to work together. Harrington summarises this: “We’ve really understood how powerful technology is in driving collaboration across an enterprise that’s as dispersed and different as we are. In the past it could be difficult to find the help you need. Today, it’s almost instant.”
The Hub’s integrations with Shell’s Yammer network and collaboration tools has helped to encourage communication and interaction across Shell. The People Finder has made it possible to locate and connect with people with specific expertise, resulting in a digital environment where, as Harrington elaborates, “Any boundaries are gone. It doesn’t matter where you are in the organization or what your seniority is. It’s created a freedom for folks to reach out and ask for help.” Employees are kept in the loop with the business and with their colleagues better than ever before, and, Vosselman identifies, Shell’s workforce is now better informed about what’s going on in their business, in their country, and Shell globally.”
#5 Supercharging employee experience
The effects of The Hub can be felt across Shell, with the digital employee experience vastly enhanced. The Hub replaced an outdated SharePoint experience with a consumer-grade digital workplace that delivers opportunities to improve engagement, collaboration, and productivity. Considering the transformation brought about by The Hub, Harrington concludes, “It was such a contrast between our old platform and the new one. It brought us forward. When we flipped the switch, I felt like, ‘hey, this now is a company that’s here, as opposed to in the past’.”