Why do you love your intranet?

on our Facebook Fan Page. The response was great!

“Coppermark Bank uses Intranet Connections as our go-to source for all company information. From company news to highlighting new products to sharing employee awards to staying inspired with our thought of the day… Intranet Connections does it all for us. And to have the support team there at the drop of a hat to handle our questions – it is truly the perfect fit.”

Here are a few ideas to motivate and keep your employees engaged.

Share Your Corporate Values and Mission:

Your intranet is the perfect place to promote your corporate core values and goals for the organization.  Ensure that your corporate mission and purpose are stated clearly on your intranet and use plain language. This keeps your employees aligned with your corporate goals and makes everyone feel like they are in the loop.

Recognize Employees:

What better way to inspire your staff than by letting them know about the achievements of their coworkers?  If you learn of an accomplishment or award that an employee in your organization is receiving, write about it on the intranet.  The achievements don’t have to be related to your organization at all.  Highlighting your employees’ accomplishments not only shows that you recognize their contributions, but it can also help encourage others.

Information Bank:

Create an area on your intranet where employees can share blog posts and articles they find online.  This can be a great source of information about trends in the market, best practices and innovation within your sector. You never know where a new idea will come from or what information with inspire others.

Thought of the Day:

Add a widget to your Home Page that cycles through a selection of pre-populated messages.  The messages can be inspirational quotes, tips to help employees perform their daily tasks, answers to frequently asked questions and ‘did you know’ topics.  The goal is to provide valuable content in bite-sized chunks, from the first page of your intranet.

Employee Message Walls:

Like Facebook walls, this is an excellent collaborative tool for conversation on your intranet. Employees can post questions, seek advice, learn from each other, and share/promote intranet content.

Sometimes, finding ways to inspire employees doesn’t need to involve complex initiatives.  Take a look at the tools available on your current intranet and provide avenues for employees to share, inspire and engage.

Check out our Facebook page and be sure to “like” us!

With over 450 employees, Brian and his team needed to set up a system to connect all 18 business units in the company. Each unit received a company home page with links to external sites they use frequently. This provides all resources in a controlled environment without having to use bookmarks. Each business unit’s home page is customized to serve the needs of the department and will have the same logo, color and design as their corresponding websites. With this format, employees know what resources are available in each satellite location.

The IT team created a tools form where users can post their ideas for the intranet. IT responds to all requests and gets working on the most practical suggestions right away. An employee used this form to suggest that they implement surveys on the intranet. As a healthcare company, Health Essentials employees have mandatory questions that they need to answer annually. With the added functionality planned for Form Builder this summer, Brian and his team plan on taking advantage of tallied results and reporting on survey data.

Rotating widgets help make lunch decisions easier.  Employees submit their favorite lunch spots and the widget automatically randomizes content, that’s how they decide where to eat each day. To cater to their satellite locations, the restaurant lists will change depending on the business unit location.

Brian spoke to the power of employee engagement and how they are launching their site with applications to promote and foster recognition.

“We used the ideas forum template to create a new recognition board, identifying employees who go that extra mile. These entries will then get reviewed by management and Human Resources”. They are in the process of designing an incentive system to compliment the recognition board.

Employees have control over people tags within the Social Employee Directory. They can share skills such as software ability and experience level so people can search and reach out to them. If someone needs help with editing a photo they can filter by the tag “Photoshop” to find an expert in that software or system.

Prior to adding users to the intranet, the Health Essentials team is making sure all pages are efficient tools for allowing comfortable communication between departments. Brian lent us some great words of advice on getting started with an intranet:

“Ask not what you can do for your intranet, but what your intranet can do for you. We are hoping our intranet not only pushes the use of management tools but utilizes the advantage of having a standardized system of communication for all employees.”

The intranet is not a static environment; it is dynamic and should be utilized to maximize its potential.

Brian works on special projects at Health Essentials and has a background in working on ways to digitize for paper reduction and increased productivity. Brian’s #1 focus is to build a business intranet that benefits the company.

A special thank you to Brian for taking the time to share their innovative intranet ideas and we wish them the best of luck with their intranet launch.

In the “pro” column for having a social intranet:

• Participation
• Contribution
• Collaboration
• People Helping People
• Leadership / Mentoring
• Empowers and Engages
• Drives culture

A social intranet can introduce an employee platform that facilitates the collaboration of thoughts and knowledge to benefit the business.

Two quotes to share with you from an excellent article on Social Media Today by Shel Holtz

The Payoff: “Most leaders understand the connection between the number of highly engaged employees and market share growth”

The Problem: “Internal social media strategy needs to be built from within – informed by the company culture, driven by distinct business needs and embraced by early adopters. Executives and leaders should not only align around strategy but embody the change they envision”

We wrote a blog post on how an Executive Intranet can facilitate executive leadership.

Create a business goal around social concepts and tools on the intranet. It will help focus the efforts toward a payoff. It can be just one initiative but it will make a huge difference to employee buy-in, value through education, and supporting the company culture.

Here are a few ideas to leverage your social intranet for business and engagement

1. Create a focus group of executives and ask that they regularly (and preferably on a routine schedule) post to their message walls or blogs, sharing company insights, customer wins, and future goals. Run a feed of these wall or blog posts on the intranet home page for maximum visibility. Encourage employees to respond and add to the conversation
2. Use the social tools on your intranet to support current business initiatives and programs. Create a survey with Form Builder to get feedback from employees on initiatives or new products. Place opinion polls on the intranet home page, team sites, or various landing pages to gauge the effect of customer service satisfaction scores
3. Use an ideas application or discussion forum to tap employees for new ways to generate revenue, how to improve customer programs, ideas on recycle initiatives, how to move towards a paper-less office. Allow employees to freely contribute ideas and comments, adding to the conversation and value. Moderate through alerts, subscriptions, content feeds or an approval process prior to publication. Create secured areas for confidential or sensitive topics of discussion
4. Offer professional growth and career advancement seminars, internal software training, new product training. Encourage feedback through course comments from students who registered and attended
5. Enable comments and thumbs-up “like” ratings on news articles and employee feature stories, showing how engaged employees make a difference to the company and the customers
6. Ask managers and supervisors to nominate their staff and give a very public pat on the back for a job well done
7. Create surveys or e-forms for mandatory questions or tests that employees need to answer quarterly or annually. Move job performance indicators online by building e-forms and routing annual goals and deliverables through workflow and automated notifications
8. Build a “Job Shadow” e-form where employees can register to shadow someone from another department
9. Assign an executive each month to be a “mentor” for employees through the intranet, engaging them with wall conversations and posting advice and thought-leadership

Social tools really should be called engagement tools. It boils down to wide spread participation and contributions versus a static intranet where a handful of publishers do all of the work. The marriage of business tools with social engagement and collaboration creates a high level of user adoption, stakeholder satisfaction, return on investment and a more informed and engaged workforce. Not to mention a successful intranet.

Don’t miss out on The HR Intranet and The IT Intranet in this blog series.

I recently received a call to participate in a fall intranet conference and my topic is how to leverage the intranet for change management. This isn’t exactly my area of expertise but through my business I have been thrown into the deep end of adapting to rapid change. Some of this has transferred into my favorite topic: company culture.

Executive teams are typically responsible for the company culture, company goals and initiatives. Yet the leadership voice often does not filter down and resonate personally with employees. Your intranet can change this and in very simple ways.

The Executive Intranet can:

1. Promote, foster and improve two-way communication from leaders to employees. If employees feel like the company leaders care about them it can shift culture
   
2. This makes employees more engaged. If employees are engaged they take better care of your customers. This produces happy paying customers, which keeps the shareholders happy
3. Executive involvement on the intranet can lead the way. The intranet CAN be your #1 tool to empower and educate your employees through leadership, mentoring and executive involvement

I’m sure you have read one or two reports over the past year on the impact happy employees make to an organization. Engaged employees feel connected.

The best way to tap into this magic is through an Executive Intranet.

Executives are busy people. How can you make this happen? Show them the impact just 20 minutes will make. Ask your managers, executives, or the company CEO to post a short, 3 paragraph intranet blog post that shares their point of view on any topic. Ask managers and supervisors to take 5 minutes to comment on an employee nomination.

You may have to facilitate. Make it easy for executives to contribute. On a weekly basis compile a short list of content: employee news, a 10 year anniversary, a great idea that was shared on the intranet. Email the links to executives asking them to comment. It might take perseverance but it’s worth the effort.

Let me take you off topic for just a minute. My 7 year old son is in grade one at Cleveland Elementary School. The principle Doug Beveridge is a blogger. He wrote a post recently that was touching, personal and I felt connected. I didn’t have to meet with him face to face. This happened purely by the power of writing a blog post. It is pretty cool. Check it out if you are interested. I learned all over again how storytelling and writing from the heart creates impact: http://blog44.ca/dbeveridge/2012/04/18/thoughts/

I am a bit of a reality TV junkie and so I am glued to American Idol. Last night Jennifer Lopez told the contestants your voice is amazing but it’s not enough. The audience has to connect with the emotion you have through the lyrics. Without emotion, without showing yourself, you can’t connect.

Your intranet can connect executive leaders to all employees.

Here’s one more idea to consider. I have often marveled over Twitter. It is a communication channel that has removed all barriers to powerful people. You can tweet to celebrities. I can connect with the guy at Mashable. I can get advice from intranet mentors much smarter than me. People who are normally untouchable are suddenly approachable to everyone. The CEO can be approachable through the intranet. This may be a departure from the staunch corporate hierarchy of old but when you talk about change management and fostering a collaborative culture, what a great (and easy) place to start.

These are very small gestures that have huge impact and shows that leaders are people too.

• They are on the intranet
• Their voices are being shared via the intranet
• They are just like you and me
• They are leading the way
• They are driving buy-in
• They are getting their message out through the company intranet
• They are no longer untouchable – they are now approachable

It starts in small steps and grows in strength and conviction.

Don’t miss out on The HR Intranet and The IT Intranet in this 4 part blog series. Next week we will share some ideas on leveraging The Social Intranet

This week we want to talk about the IT Intranet. As a vendor of Social Intranet Software there are trends we have seen over the course of the last 12 years and here is a big stat that may (or may not) surprise you: 84% of our intranet champions are from IT. That’s a big number!

Sometimes IT initiates the search for intranet software but more often we see the drive initially led by an Executive, HR, Marketing or Communications. Either way, these are your customers so let’s make them happy and you the hero.

Out of the 84% intranet champions in IT using our intranet software, pretty much all of them have another job to do. They manage the intranet as a side project. As de-facto Intranet Managers our IT customers only dedicate a few hours a week to ensure the intranet is OK and doing a good job. How do they do this?

The trick is to share the load. Find others in the organization who can be intranet champions. Delegate ownership of team sites to other business units. You will do a bit of leg-work in setting up these sites and areas on the intranet, but then farm it off to someone else to manage and maintain.

Seems obvious? It’s not! We see a lot of implementations where one person tries to maintain control of all areas on the intranet, while juggling their primary job duties, and wondering how they can find more time to get the intranet off the ground.

When you set up areas and delegate ownership remember to keep it small, keep it simple, and keep it targeted. Phase in added business tools over time, always asking three qualifiers:

1. How will this benefit the employee?

2. Is this feature/content/tool in line with our core intranet goals?

3. Will this provide immediate value?

Write a simple governance document. Simple! Short. Share it with publishers and your internal intranet champions. Write one line in your governance model that all publishers must set a future review and archive date (1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year). A simple content curation tool that should be utilized is content archiving. Any content that is date-related, older, not as relevant, or not current — archive it. Archived content can still be searched on, shared, bookmarked, commented on, rated and easily accessed. Archiving keeps your current intranet content lean. Keep it focused on those top tools that help employees most.

Consider expectations on how you write content for the intranet. People consume content differently online. We skim, scan, and jump. We are in and out fast. Some tips to share with your intranet champions for creating better content:

• Dumb it down: intuitive writing and labels
• Break up text with white space: more paragraphs, bullet points, numbered lists
• Use photos, images, slideshows, online presentations or embedded video to enhance content
• Write bite-size content: keep it short, link to learn more
• Write in a conversational tone

The best advice we can impart in launching your intranet is to have realistic expectations. Adoption will peak as you launch the site (everyone is curious to see it) then dip down – this is normal. The best route to adoption is word of mouth. It takes time and careful consideration when growing your intranet. Have a plan, but keep it simple. The intranet doesn’t have to be perfect; it has to be useful.

Intranets are meant to be tweaked. They are constantly evolving. It’s our job (as the vendor) to keep pace with new technologies and new tools to help you and your employees. It’s your job to upgrade and use the tools when you see the benefit.

You’re our IT champion, we feel strongly in rooting for you! We want your intranet to be a success, let us help you. Contact us any time, any question: no question is too small or too big. We can be your sounding board.

If you are interested in Intranet Connections please visit our Features Page or request a Free 30-day Software Trial

We could list 100 ways in which an intranet enriches a company but to condense it down, here are three common goals for the intranet:

1. Supports the company culture and collaboration

2. Improves and streamlines communication

3. Offers tasks, education and knowledge to employees

HR is tied into #3. There are so many ways HR can benefit from the intranet and streamline tasks for employees. Top of mind is vacation requests, benefits, retirement, career growth, workplace compensation, recruiting, safety, health & wellness, HR policies, grievances, conflict resolution.

Build an HR Intranet that will help employees, and help HR too.

For those of you who manage an intranet: turn off your computer monitor, get up, stretch your legs and take a walk – to the HR department. Ask HR where do they get bottlenecked? How can they better reach out to employees and educate them? What pain points do they have in getting information out to employees? Then think of ways in which your intranet and its many tools and functions can be leveraged to improve this bottleneck.

Remember to start small. When you first launch an intranet you don’t want to overwhelm. Focus on 10 high-value tasks or frequently requested material. Often 1000′s of documents and data are posted to the intranet before launch and it can be daunting to review so much material. Start small and very focused, and then slowly introduces more tasks and information based on feedback. Look for ways you can resolve current business pains and HR challenges. Create a survey in the electronic Form Builder tool and gauge the response on what employees want to see on the intranet from HR.

One of the biggest mistakes we have seen when building your intranet is to go too quickly.

Keep it small
Keep it simple
Keep it targeted

Phase in valuable business tools. When someone requests a new feature, always refer to three qualifiers in order to stay focused:

1. How will this benefit the employee?

2. Is this feature/content/tool in line with our core intranet goals?

3. Will this provide immediate value?

HR offers task-based needs and immediate value for employees that can really make your intranet useful. Check in with HR quarterly and ask their opinion on how the intranet is growing, how is it resonating, how could it offer more value. What initiatives does HR have on the go for employees and how could the intranet help support those initiatives? Get HR involved and invested in your intranet.

Next week we’ll post on The IT Intranet and how Intranet Connections can make life easier for IT.

Jeanne Meister’s presentation really stood out to me because she recognizes that businesses are finding ways to make information gathering faster for employees. Jeanne says that we can increase the speed of workplace innovation by changing the way employees work with each other. Providing social technology in the workplace will increase productivity and engagement which helps employees work faster and smarter.

If you are considering the addition of social technology in your organization, here are Jeanne’s 10 guidelines to consider in creating, organizing and planning the roll out of an enterprise 2.0 initiative.

Launching Enterprise 2.0

1.  Get senior executives to lead by example. Create opportunities for your leaders to share their knowledge. Blogs are an excellent way to have senior executives lead by example.

2.  Build enterprise 2.0 into the work flow. Rather than building a community supported by a social platform around extracurricular interests, ensure that the way people get work done relies on going to the platform. If the call center has a knowledge center, the social community and the knowledge center need to be combined. People need fewer places to go, not more.

3.  Develop and seed new communities with content through community managers. Social learning communities are not a case of “if we build it, they will come.” Communities need to be kick started by recruiting members, seeding the community with content, building performance incentives to contribute and introducing thought-provoking conversation starters.

4.  Consider creating communities as follow-on to formal training. Wherever there are cohorts, the ability to connect and support can be enabled by social learning platforms. There are many things to learn when starting with a new company or after promotion to a new management role. The ability to connect with others on the path to competence can accelerate performance while providing emotional support.

5.  Err on the side of creating an open culture. Allow as much learner access to communities as possible so that knowledge can pass virally across the organization.

6.  Create ambassadors to be evangelists. Online communities will not develop spontaneously. Implementing social learning requires change management just like any other new initiative. Ambassadors can lead the change and advocate for implementation.

7.  Trust employees to self-monitor. With internal corporate social learning platforms, users authenticate and gain access by using their real names. This is not the world of anonymous contribution like the wild, wild Web. The reputation capital of the employee is at stake, and nearly all employees will recognize that and act professionally. Those who don’t will be ousted by others in the community.

8.  Train employees on how to use social media responsibly and actively contribute. Intel has a complete curriculum on how to best represent the company via social media. In addition, knowing how to author engaging content, build viral videos and create a blog or Twitter following can help employees act as ambassadors for their company, their function or their community of practice.

9.  Link participation in enterprise 2.0 to performance management. Employees will one day be evaluated to some degree on their reputation capital. Encouraging people to add to the body of knowledge ensures that key information or knowledge is not lost as turnover occurs. Starting with a goal to contribute to a community is one easy way to integrate performance management with social learning.

10.  Focus on incentives that link to increases in employee performance. While prizes and contests may be fun for the launch, employees must see value in improving their performance and productivity in order to sustain usage of a social collaboration site.

What do you think of Jeanne’s 10 Guidelines for a successful enterprise 2.0 launch?

Thanks to Phillip and his team for sharing their intranet story!

We implemented the Harbor back in November of 2011.  Overall we have enjoyed the Intranet Connections product.  We’ve moved past the early adopter stage and we are trying to leverage in every part of our organization.

The Harbor is a central point of communication and information for over 300 employees at WaveCreste. It’s where users go to unload and get access to what’s happening in their organization.

The Harbor’s Homepage:

Co-Branding

We are using the Harbor to unify two corporations.  We have accomplished this by co-branding this site, providing information about other locations, and by unifying all communication.  It’s also being leveraged as we focus on process improvement and developing our own methodology.  The methodology resides on the Harbor and once it’s complete Project Manager will reference it to understand their requirements.

Location Pages

Our company is spread across the United States so we created intranet sub-sites for each city. These city pages create a sense of community because users can share their favorite venues for restaurants, entertainment and even information on local municipal offices.

San Antonio, TX Home Page:

Project Pages

In addition, we are working towards every project having their own department site where they can create custom applications and content.  This will improve collaboration between virtual teams that are spread across the country.  This also helps in knowledge transfer as employees are moved to new projects because the Department Site becomes the knowledge base.

People behind our Intranet

As I mentioned, the Harbor serves two different corporations.  One of the corporations has a majority of their employees at our customer’s locations.  The Harbor has allowed us to connect with those employees to not only share information but to see their faces.  With our intranet, employees have stories and images to associate with their company as well as their customers.

Do you use your intranet to unify two or more corporations?

Web Hosting Search aims to help and assist visitors and clients in choosing web tools that will improve their websites and their businesses. The site nominated Intranet Connections because “Intranet software is a must in every company since it makes connection easy, from employees to company resources, and the like. This is definitely an investment for every business.”

A big thank you goes out to Web Hosting Search for nominating our social intranet software for this award. If you want to make it easier to succeed with your web projects, check out their complete list of web development tools.

Social intranets are still struggling with going mainstream. We see it all the time being a vendor of social intranet software. Customers and prospects mostly answer that they are “happy to hear I have social networking but how do I turn it off?”

Jumping into social networking for the enterprise is a challenge and often requires a major shift in culture for an organization. A great piece of advice I took away from a webinar was to focus social interactions around a business goal or campaign. Leverage the use of social tools to facilitate business.

I would like to think that social is a stepping stone to something greater, and that the intranet of tomorrow will not have social as the ultimate destination but rather it be a part of the journey.

Traditional intranets have a bad rap for being a dumping ground of stale data that no one uses or trusts that it is relevant or accurate. Re-focusing intranets to be centered on people rather than data has moved intranets to be a more reliable center of knowledge. But eventually what do you do with all of that social business conversation? We thought the volume of published content on traditional intranets was hard to sift through, imagine trying to find a piece of information through 1000′s of archived tweets or wall posts.

James Robertson of Step Two Designs published a blog series about the future of intranets and it was fascinating to read about his vision on how a new employee would interface with the intranet during their first day on the job. Future Scenario: Starting a New Job.

If social is a stepping stone then what is next for social intranets? It’s not social that will fully transform our intranets but automated personalization and mobile will begin to drive that trend. Mobile will start to focus us on surfacing what is the most important tasks for the end-user and offering those tasks front and center no matter where, or what device, they are accessing the intranet.

Check out Laurie Buczek’s article The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business

Would you agree? What do you envision for the future of social intranets?