Introduction
Communications are the bedrock of every digital workplace, driving information and knowledge across teams, departments, and locations to keep everyone informed of their responsibilities and aligned with corporate values. In today’s economy, internal communications extend beyond static information pushed out from the corporate team. Its value lies in keeping employees engaged by inciting conversations and feedback, helping physically disconnected employees feel part of the team.
How can your intranet help?
Perhaps the most important element of strong internal communications is your culture and content, but how can technology support your initiatives and solve some common challenges?
In particular, we’re looking at how your intranet platform can become the hub of your communications, consolidating a variety of channels for streamlined, device agnostic communications that hit the mark.
To give you some practical solutions, we’re looking at how intranet technology is helping to support global communications for organizations such as the Hershey Company, Premier League Football Club Tottenham Hotspur and Amec Foster Wheeler. Hopefully these real life examples will help inspire your own communications strategy.
1. How do I choose the right channel for the right message?
Your intranet should be the central hub for corporate communication, aggregating tools and channels into a single place. This could include existing newsletters, podcasts, social networks, SharePoint, or other external channels. By doing this, you’re providing a single point of entry for employees to stay connected while helping them understand how each of the channels can benefit different types of communication. Our clients’ intranets bring together several tools for internal communications: News Articles, Events, Videos, Insights, Social Feeds such as Yammer and Facebook, Newsletters, SharePoint, or links to other external channels. These different channels are brought together in a single platform with a consistent user experience, helping employees to focus on the message, not the medium. By weaving communications across your intranet, rather than confining them to a single space, they become second nature rather than an additional thing for people to read.
Success story:
Employees at Premier League Football Club Tottenham Hotspur used to rely on Twitter and external media sites as their prime source of Club information, with no centralized channel for internal communications. This often left people out of the loop and disconnected. To solve the problem, Spurs chose to implement a new intranet solution. This gave them a new centralized channel for corporate communication while enabling them to consolidate existing feeds such as Twitter and Spurs TV onto the same platform through integrations and a new video tool. Employees now have a single portal, available on any device, where they can catch up on both internal and external news in minutes.
2. How do I cut through the noise?
There is no longer a need to have multiple intranets for separate locations or functions. A single intranet can be used as long as it has the means to cut through the noise, delivering the right message to the right people. The way to do this is to provide a mixture of push and pull targeting options.
Push:
For content editors managing various channels and communications, different Audiences should be set up to represent locations, roles, and teams. Editors can then push out the communications to each relevant audience, with the articles and content populated on a user’s homepage.
Pull:
Employees should also be empowered to personalize their intranet experience further. This could be managed by enabling content editors to tag each piece of communication with Topics from a set list of metadata. A user then chooses the Topics they are interested in from the front-end of the intranet, which then filters the content that appears on their homepage accordingly.
Success story:
A global pharmaceutical organization was looking for a new intranet solution that would allow it to combine over 50,000 employees onto one platform. This meant bringing together multiple roles, languages and cultures. To ensure relevancy for every user and cut through the noise, the employee base is segmented on the intranet by location, business, and function. Content on the homepage is then automatically adjusted to their attributes, ensuring that relevant content is delivered on the News Feed and separate News widget.
This automation makes the vast amount of content that is produced by over 300 content editors around the world manageable, enabling the organization to come together under one solution. Employees can also personalize the information that they see by selecting Topics they are interested in from a Personalization tab in the top navigation.
3. How do I manage different cultures and languages?
In the modern day, companies should only need one intranet to serve as the single source of all content and collaboration. But in the past we have seen language and cultural barriers prevent a single solution. Your intranet solution needs to be equipped to handle not only multi-lingual readers but also multi-lingual content editors from across the business. This can be managed using a combination of machine translation and 1:1 translation editing.
For example, if an article is created in English, content editors should be able to auto-translate the article to any other language within the Content Management System. A local content editor can then review the communications in their own language, tidying the translation to ensure accuracy. This added layer of 1:1 translation gives content editors complete control over content, and avoids the risk of unreliable machine translations.
It is also important that intranet signposts such as navigation, tags, and titles are also translatable, allowing users to simply select their primary language and navigate, search, and participate on the intranet with ease. No matter where your employees are based, they should have equal ability to participate in the intranet in their own language without compromising on content or experience.
Success story:
The Hershey Company breaks down language barriers with a truly multilingual experience. For the Hershey company, non-English speaking locations of the business had become siloed, unable to participate fully in the intranet due to a language barrier. They’ve now been able to overcome this with modern translation capabilities as part of their new intranet based on Unily, named The Conche, engaging employees from every location regardless of their native tongue.
4. How do I give content editors the independence they need?
Content is undeniably the most important element of your intranet. Without fresh, relevant information to fuel the fire, engagement and interest will inevitably burn out. Your intranet needs to support a simple content creation process, not hinder a non-technical team with a clunky, over-complicated system. The content management system on any modern intranet should enable you to:
- Create content without code
- Deliver rich-media content such as video
- Schedule posts for particular times
- Target content to the right audiences
- Tag content with relevant topics
- Translate content with ease
- Approve content on the go
- Create pages and sites quickly
- Handle intranet administration tasks quickly and easily
Success story:
For engineering giant Amec Foster Wheeler, enterprise social networks are huge part of their internal communications strategy, allowing employees to contribute to business critical conversations from anywhere. They have over 22,000 people on Yammer and the engagement rate is around 14,000 people per month as many people recognize its value as a tool for collaboration. Tereza Urbankova, Global Head of Corporate Communications at Amec Foster Wheeler had this to say about their success:
5. How do I incite conversation from the masses?
Enterprise social tools have been around for a number of years now, providing a simple way to tackle employee engagement, feedback, and conversation. The challenge is often how to integrate this seamlessly alongside your other communication channels, ensuring employees understand what they can post, when they should use it, and how it can help them day-to-day.
To make this easier for employees, integrate your chosen social channel into your intranet platform, using it to power commenting, liking, and reacting functionality for all your corporate communications. In Unily, organizations can use either Yammer enterprise social functionality or our homegrown social platform to support feedback on communications. It also provides a dedicated feed for bottom-up conversations to start and flourish between colleagues.
When considering your social strategy, mobile users should be at the forefront of your plans. Often, social is a lifeline for disconnected employees who may work on the road or part-time for an organization, giving them direct insight into the happenings and conversations across the organization. Ensure that your social channels are not only accessible but designed to work seamlessly on mobile devices, regardless of OS, allowing users to participate, post, and monitor their conversations from any device.
Success story:
One of the drivers behind Informa’s choice of intranet platform was the opportunity to provide colleagues with better social and interactive tools and encourage their use as a way of enhancing participation in the life of the company and supporting a culture of collaboration.
Yammer is integrated across Informa’s intranet Portal. Various types of content are used to engage colleagues, including video, images, and short-form posts, and colleagues are also encouraged to create and share their own views and content.
Portal was used extensively to amplify the Group’s annual internal Awards ceremony. A live stream from the event featured on the homepage, with supporting news articles front and center. A dedicated Community and Yammer Group was created so everyone, in any location, could participate and engage by watching, responding to wins, joining conversations, asking questions, and connecting with each other in real-time as the event took place.
6. How do I bring people together across locations and roles?
Social networking can go much further than just allowing for likes and comments on corporate communications. It can also be used to support communities and groups across the intranet. For example, your intranet should have digital community spaces for employees to come together across locations, teams, and roles for global initiatives. These spaces can be the hub of news, resources, and documents that support the initiative. Embedding social feeds onto these static community sites can bring them to life, placing dynamic conversations and reactions at the forefront. This provides a platform for employees to initiate conversations around a particular topic that is relevant or important to them without having to navigate to the central social feed.
Social conversations can also be highlighted in other areas of the intranet, such as on the homepage, next to a new article, on information pages, and more. This gives you a greater chance of driving adoption from the tools while helping users to understand how and when to use them in context of a real-life scenario.
7. How do I engage the disengaged?
Sometimes, you have to look outside of corporate needs to understand how to drive engagement and participation using your intranet. We have found that some of the most popular elements of our clients’ intranets are often fun tools that are there purely to create a positive atmosphere and bring employees together. Examples include:
Cheers for peers
Areas designed for employees to highlight colleagues or receive recognition for activities related to work or external past-times.
Daily poll
Dynamic polls that change daily or weekly, asking employees to vote on anything from ‘What’s your favorite flavor ice cream?’’ to ‘What do you think of our new travel policy?’
Picture of the day
Employees can post a picture for the whole organization to see, with the ability for everyone else to comment, react, and like.
8. How do I keep adoption high in the future?
On a modern intranet, having up-to-date usage analytics is a must-have tool, helping you to understand all aspects of your intranet’s performance. These reports will give you insights into how engaged your staff are with the intranet and with your business goals. Our clients use their Unily analytics reports daily to shape their adoption strategy, operational governance, and to maximize their technology investment.
As well as the top-down approach to garnering feedback, it’s important to get feedback from users directly on the intranet and communications strategy, giving you more qualitative data. Using digital forms and surveys within your intranet is a handy way to execute this. For example, attaching a feedback form at the end of a must-read article or directly onto your social feed. This will help to educate users on intranet functionality while providing you with the feedback you need to adjust your strategy.
Top tips to transform your internal comms using your digital workplace
Choose channels for your culture
The type of communication strategies that work for you will depend entirely on your culture. Make a list of the channels at your disposal - this might include the intranet, email, notes in pay slips, internal messaging systems, face-to-face briefings, newsletters, and the old classics, like the back of restroom doors. Understand which groups each method reaches. Then, start with the business plan for the year. What do employees need to know and when? Whatever you choose, think about how these can be centralized using your intranet.
Content is king
No matter how impressive your content management system is, your communications will struggle to take off without interesting, relevant, and localized content to engage your colleagues. Invest properly in content creation and then use the tools at your disposal to bring this content to the most relevant people. Work with all your content editors to understand how the intranet can be used to make the content process simpler, not more complicated.
Keep everyone aligned
A clear content and governance strategy needs to be in place to keep everyone on the same page. This can be supported using intelligent permissions, only giving content editors access to the tools they need within the CMS. It is important to guide your employees but not stifle participation and engagement. Don’t be afraid of discussion and creativity.