Building community and activating the employee population is a frequent goal in many organizations seeking to boost employee satisfaction and morale. By involving your employees in the communications process and putting them front and center – be it in the form of pictures and/or stories on the intranet, portal or employee publication cover or home – can be a positive step in the right direction.

However, there are good and... errrr, stupid ways of activating employees. Steve Crescenzo recently wrote a hilarious blog, Ask a stupid question... about playing the ‘roving reporter’ within the company and asking stupid questions of employees that could only lead to stupid answers.

Among Steve’s favorite ‘stupid’ queries:

·         What can always be found in your refrigerator?

·         What book is on your nightstand right now?

·         Who is your Greatest American Hero?

·         If you could be a candy bar, what kind of candy bar would you be?

To the latter, I think I would have to say a Skor bar. I have no idea what’s in it nor comprehend its preservation effects on my inner organs but it so dam good! (My inner organs – except maybe the pancreas – also agree).

I’ve come across some pretty stupid answers in my days too. Particularly answers from senior managers and executives to business analysis questions about the intranet and its value to the organization. A sampling of this stupidity...

·         A Director of Human Resources: “I don’t understand why we need an intranet... I mean we have a pretty good phone system that cost us a lot!”

·         A CEO of a major financial services company with a horribly pathetic intranet that barely earns the title ‘intranet’: “I think we’ve invested too much in technology already.”

·         An SVP of Communications for one of the U.S.’s biggest energy utilities who has an email address and uses it... sort of. He has his assistant print every email so he can hand write responses to each and then snail mail replies back to the writer. This is the SVP of COMMUNICATIONS...!

·         An intranet manager who put an animated cartoon caricature of a jogging Bill Clinton on the intranet HR home page of a Canadian company. Said the intranet manager when asked the value to the business of an animated U.S. President, “But he’s sooo cute!”

Oh there’s plenty ‘stupid’ out there.... heard any good ones lately?

HALIFAX, NS - If you build it they will not come. Of course, there will always be the curious and keeners and those that inherently understand it, but an intranet firing at maximum value requires marketing.

In a survey of 500+ intranet managers by Melcrum Research, the number four issue or challenge facing intranet managers was low take-up or usage (the number one issue was ownership/politics).

One of the reasons why even the best intranets need to be marketed to employees is that computer-based workers are often exceptionally busy and do not have time to explore and surf the intranet. They need to be educated as to what is there and why it is of value to both them as individual workers and also to the organization as a whole. Employees need to be ‘sold’.

A couple of years ago I was undertaking some research on an insurance company’s intranet. My research included a company-wide survey which included the participation of some 2700 employees. One of the key findings underscored one of the ubiquitous findings at many organizations – people like the intranet but weren’t using it. In fact, employees rated the intranet a 7.5 out of 10.

So if the intranet was rated so highly, how come employees weren’t using it? I dug deeper in employee focus groups and found the answer: the average employee had been to the intranet home page and liked what they saw but they hadn’t spent much time on the intranet and therefore didn’t know what was there. As such, the average employee didn’t understand that the intranet was a valuable resource because they didn’t know better. Mystery solved; employee use was not for a lack of value, but for lack of knowledge. The employee population needed to be better educated as to what the intranet offered and why it was of value to them. The intranet needed marketing.

In short, every intranet needs a marketing plan followed by execution with results. Sodhexo USA knows this all too well. The leading provider of food and facilities management in North America and 110,000+ employees has a built a marketing plan that is critical to the success of its intranet portal, Sodhexonet. Angelo Ioffreda, VP, Internal Communications Sodhexo USA, shares their intranet marketing plan that focuses on six major components:

1. Promote ongoing SodexhoNet name recognition and key wins.

2. Highlight the variety of useful content through on- and off-line.

3. Increase essential content and applications available only online.

4. Increase content – including fun content – that drives repeat visits.

5. Encourage continued endorsements from senior leadership.

6. Support content owners – increase skill level and enthusiasm, identify and leverage best practices.

As far as tactics go, dust out your old marketing texts. Marketing tactics could include:

·         E-mail broadcasts

·         newsletter stories

·         internal press conference

·         executive promotion

·         hosted chats with the CEO

·         posters and mousepads

·         premiums (handouts)

·         screensavers

·         etc.

A regional subsidiary of a large financial/investment services company embarked on an ambitious marketing campaign to promote the launch of their redesigned intranet portal. The campaign included an email campaign, promotional cookies for each employee, posters and even a professionally produced 10-minute promotional video replete with a famous voice as the narrator. The CEO personally launched the new intranet with an internal press conference for employees. In total, the company spent about $20 per employee on promoting the new portal.

As for results, Sodexho can bear witness. As a result of their efforts, those never using SodhexoNet dropped from 19% to 1% and registered users who visit the site monthly increased from 55% to 90% (see Best practices case study: Sodhexo USA for more details).

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Large companies with many thousands of employees dispersed across great regions and dozens of locations require an effective intranet. Communications, connection and community are critical making the intranet a mandatory requirement for success.

Sodhexo USA provides a solid example of how to deploy just such an intranet for a large diversely situated organization – and it’s one of the biggest companies you may not know. Sodexho USA (www.sodexhoUSA.com) is the leading provider of food and facilities management in North America, with $6 billion in annual revenues and 110,000+ employees. Sodexho runs cafeterias, housekeeping in the hospitality sector, grounds keeping, plant operations and maintenance and laundry services to more than 6,000 companies principally in health care, schools, and the military.

Headquartered in Gaithersburg, MD, Sodexho has employees spread out across and in all corners of the continent. An even greater challenge than the geographic disparity of its employees is the nature of their work. The vast majority of these employees are hourly workers who are not desktop workers with their own computers – they’re on the frontlines rather preparing and serving food, cleaning, and performing site operations. The intranet home page, SodhexoNet, is a tying bond that links most of the managers and management of this diverse and disparate group.

While most employees are not registered users with access, the value of the intranet drives the growth in the number that do use the intranet. Registered users have grown from 2,000 in April, 1999, to more than 14,000 users today.

Like all effective systems, SodhexoNet has a vision: SodexhoNet is a one-stop shop for all of our managers’ information needs and an indispensable part of a Sodexho work day.”

Accompanying the vision is some practical but key goals:

·     Essential business and communications tool

·     Robust, timely, relevant, accurate content

·     Intuitive navigation

·     Quick access

·     Easy to search

·     Feedback capacity

·     Cost-effectiveness

SodhexoNet’s greatest strength however is its management team, lead by corporate communications. To be specific, the strength lies in the team’s understanding that the intranet must intimately understand its target audience and constantly measure its performance. By measuring its success, Sodhexo knows where to concentrate its efforts and resources and constantly strive for improvement.

Among the many measures the intranet team tracks (for the last year measured compared to the previous year):

·     User behavior and how usage is trending (those never using SodhexoNet dropped from 19% to 1%)

·     SodhexoNet as a “valuable resource” to employees (from 74 to 84%)

·     Registered users who visit the site monthly (from 55 to 90%)

·     Most visited pages (career center, HR, health care, phone book, and search)

·     Most searched terms (forms, recipe collection, performance appraisal)

·     Return on investment (where possible)

One of SodhexoNet’s more innovative and successful tools is its SuperSleuth sales lead program. SuperSleuth is an intranet web page and application that encourages employees to submit sales leads and prospective clients via the intranet. Successful leads submitted via the SuperSleuth intranet page generate cash rewards of up to $1000 for the person making the submission. Sodhexo says it has contributed to a 100% increase in sales leads in the past year. Let me repeat: a 100% increase in company sales leads. Wow!

While the site has evolved considerably and its value has grown measurably in recent years, it hasn’t been without considerable effort and some lessons learned, says Angelo Ioffreda, VP, Internal Communications.

Amongst the key lessons learned:

·     Create a vision

·     Partner with IT (“big time,” says Ioffreda stressing the importance of a healthy working relationship with IT) – and HR

·     Establish clear standards for the site

·     Make end-users the center of your universe

·     Incorporate real-time feedback from end-users

·     Track user behavior

·     Make content ‘king’

·     Involve, support, and communicate with your content owners

·     Develop an editorial / programming mindset

·     Strive for intuitive navigation

·     Improve your search and speed

·     Commit to continuous improvement in product and processes

·     Make your site a business tool

o        Reduce costs

o        Raise efficiency

o        Bring in revenue

Sodhexo also knows that just simply creating an effective intranet is not enough. Successful intranets also require marketing. More on Sodexho’s efforts and how to market your intranet in the next installment.

IBM’s intranet portal is one of my featured best intranets, and favorite intranets, at this year’s The Best of the Internet and Intranet 2005 presentation at the 2005 IABC International Conference in Washington, DC.

W3 is the intranet home page to IBM’s to approximately 300,000 employees worldwide. W3 is a key component of IBM’s “Workforce Transformation Strategy” that lists the following as key objectives:

·     Reduce complexity

·     Bring the marketplace inside

·     Drive individual control and productivity through new tools

·     Unlock the company's collective knowledge[1]

The complexity includes a proliferation of intranet sites that numbered nearly 10,000 in 1998 and now is approximately 5,000, more than 11 million pages, and a plethora of tools and applications.

W3 provides a single starting place for the workday that is personalized by the individual and profiled to their role in the corporation. Home page personalization features include Links, News, Stock Tickers, and What’s New.

A companion section to the home page called Working Knowledge serves up relevant content based upon their employee profile (geographic location, business unit, personnel role, etc.).

Working Knowledge is driven by a network of “cross-function, cross-unit Information Brokers or content advocates” that volunteer their contributions. These IBM brokers’ primary role is to understand and identify the relevant content needs for IBM's employee groups and delivering that desired content through working knowledge portal.

“It's searchable, and there is feature that allows you to create custom categories using key words,” say Michael Reiter, Managing Director of W3. “WK is organized by more than just topic. Content is delivered via the profile, so users can get information based on their job role, organization, location (site), country, geography AND topics of interest in the employee profile.”

“The end game is to create an ever growing, organized, searchable, archived resource of information specific to their assigned audience segments..”

The site features a wide abundance of productivity tools including:

·     E-meetings1

o        36,000 employees every month

o        Saves travel & setup costs

o        Combines instant messaging,
presentations, voice

·     e-learning1

o        48% of employee training delivered on the Web

o        $284 million in annual savings

o        200,000+ received education and training online

·     e-HR1

o        Employee sat from 40% to 90%

o        Health care enrolment

o        Performance measurement, skill & career development

o        Compensation, stock options, pensions, insurance

o        Time off, transfers, eldercare, adoption, community programs

Despite their size the results have been impressive:

·   80% IBM employees visit w3 at least once per day

·   Productivity savings estimate of $80.6 million

·   Every major web project potentially saves over $200K in develop & deploy costs

·   68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs

·   Employee retention: 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3

·   3 million page views per day on average1

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