“I don’t give a dam about the color… it’s about how you get things done.”
Poignant, but all-true words of Alan Huish, Employee Self Service and Intranet chief at British Airways in his presentation “Connecting Frontline Employees Globally” at IBF LIVE 2006 in London.
Despite the force of his words and practiced conviction, the sage wisdom is delivered with a dry wit and warm if not collegial appreciation for the attentive audience. And he’s right. The British Airways intranet is proof positive; nothing fancy, flashy or cool, just highly effective.
“Connecting Frontline Employees Globally”, 2006)
Here’s a telling statistic of how connected employees are at BA: there are 48,000 employees worldwide, many of which are in the sky, in airports, on the road, and despite the lack of desk jockeys, the intranet gets up to 23,000 unique visitors a day. Wow.
How do they do it? They don’t give their employees laptops to travel with. There are few kiosks for them to access. In fact, BA has about 120 intranet kiosks at their big hub at Heathrow International – and their barely used.
“The key,” says Huish, “is home access: the lion’s share of access is from home.” Employees access the intranet from home – or from any browser – via a .com address with a user id and password.
Some other measures of success:
- 300 trained publishers using Lotus Notes as a publishing tool
- 94% of all employees access the intranet every month representing 6.5 million page views per month
- 100% of internal (and external) recruitment is done online
- 100% of employee travel is booked online
- 75% of pensioner (retiree) self-service is done online (wow!)
- 80% of employees update their own contact information online (from 10% in 2003)
- 33% of all training is conducted online
- $80 million in savings in the past year and a $110 million annual target
The number one application is e-Pay where employees access their paystub – delivering savings of $180,000 per year.
Huish adds that the keys to success include planning and governance with strong governance from a small cross-representative team fueled by clear transformational targets and measures.
ON A PERSONAL NOTE:
E-MAIL ALERT!! Apologies to anyone who sent me an e-mail last Wednesday or Thursday and didn’t hear from me. Please re-send as my computer broke on the way back from
A belated Thanksgiving to all my fellow Canadians who rightly celebrate in October –not on football day in November! Thanksgiving was a lot of fun with family but I am rather sick of turkey. I need a big Christmas ham this year…
My baby girl is getting more teeth… and she said both ‘dada’ and ‘mama’ on the same morning (only minutes apart!). What a sweetie J
Here’s an interesting factoid(s): the MVP of the NBA is Canadian Steve Nash (BC); the MVP of the NHL is Joe Thorton (ON); and the probable MVP of the American League (MLB) is Canadian Justin Morneau (also from BC). Ahhh, we are quite the breeding ground…