Intranet best practices and trends webinar (with intranet examples)

hi everybody thanks for joining us today for modern intranet trends and best practices webinar my name's Ben Skelton I'm the vice president of habañero and my name is Katerina Sanders and I'm a senior consultant here down there so we're live on Twitter and we want to hear from you so please we are at habanero consult and the hash thing we're using today is modern intranet so please tweet away so I thought I'd start with just a really brief introduction of habanero for those of you that don't know who we are a habanero we're incredibly passionate about helping organizations become better places to work we think there's so much untapped potential in today's society that can be unlocked by helping people build exceptional careers and ultimately help organizations perform at higher levels this is what inspires us to come to work each and every day have an arrow has been ranked one of Canada's top workplaces and The Globe and Mail best workplaces in Canada list for seven years and we place number one in the country twice we've got a relentless focus on creating high-performing engaging teams both inside our organization and yours and we get immense pride by being on this list but ultimately we're prouder to see our clients there we spend a lot of time helping organizations understand how they can become better places to work and supporting them on this exciting journey when you think of what we do it's really kind of three different areas the first is we help organizations with culture and transformation the second and really why we're here today is intranets in the digital workplace and finally collaboration and content solutions and I think what these all have in common is really we're helping humanize the workplace we've got offices in Vancouver Calgary in Toronto and we're very proud to touch down and Winnipeg last year over the last 17 years we've built over 200 intranets and we're really proud to be recognized as building some of the best Internet's in the world we've got four nielsen norman awards and four intranet innovational words for our work we also create the go internet accelerator and many of the examples you're going to see today were created using go so today we're going to talk about three things we're going to talk about the new world of work and ultimately how the world of work is changing we're going to share best practices from the world's best intranet and then we're going to talk about emerging trends that we're seeing from an internet perspective okay so let's jump into the new world of work so I think this is actually a line that people have been seeing for a while now that the world of work is changing and we're actually at the mind that it has changed the the next few slides that I'm going to share with you are some things that I think probably all of you have experienced personally and it's kind of individually you say okay it's when you put them all together though then you really start to get a feel for the context of where our workplaces are at right in this this moment in time so one of the first things I want to talk about is how we have moved into a post-industrial world so back in the day way more people were working in manufacturing they were building things for a living or providing services to other people whereas today we have this new area it's called the knowledge area what interesting about it is that even those roles that were in manufacturing have taken on this knowledge era flavor so if we stay with the car example you know it's not just you're on the assembly line and you're putting a car together the expectation is that everyone who works on that line has the ability to stop the line because something isn't meeting standard something isn't working as it should and that's actually a real switch if you think about it so workplaces are expecting people to act with autonomy and to be able to make decisions inside a broader context and that's not trivial and how do you create a workplace that can actually fuel that ultimately everybody is knowledge worker now well exactly yes related to that impact then is this idea that we're moving away from hierarchies so back when it was more about a concentration of power at the top and that knowledge meant power quite little trickle down to the rest of the organ nation and that was actually by design whereas now what we're seeing is organizations that are are actually trying to break down silos they're trying to encourage as much you know cross-pollination of ideas as possible so you're seeing the emergence of some areas called your wire our keys which is MIT more of that lattice or matrix model organization there's still definitely companies out there that are classic hierarchies but even they with very strict reporting lines and solid lines and dotting lines and all that good stuff but even they are working really hard to make sure that if somebody over in one corner the organization has a good idea that it can find its way to decision-makers and that it isn't sort of being held up along the way because that's the path to success for organizations as they need to be able to be agile so with that comes the fact that there's all of this information that is around us workplaces have been focused for many years now about giving employees more and more data in whatever format it might be the internet being one of those main channels what we're now hearing though from employees is not I wish I had more information but rather I have too much information what I need is the right thing in the right moment that I can apply in the way that I want to apply it so it's not just about creating intranets that are dumping grounds it's about being really thoughtful and deliberate so that people can get what they need when they need it personal and work lives are absolutely getting mushed together in a way that hasn't been seen before so even the fact that there's backlash now against work-life balance it's not about one or the other it's about work-life integration and so what the modern workplace is trying so hard to do is to fuel that blurring together because in fact it's what people want people want to be able to do work when it fits in with all the other things that are going on in their lives and workplaces want to allow that partly because it absolutely allows for greater engagement but also because it does mean in the end greater productivity because people can fit stuff in when it makes sense well the aging and retiring workforce yes this has been sort of hanging over our heads for a long time it's here now the boomers are retiring although granted you know lots of them are staying in the workplace longer than ever before some of them because financially they have no choice son because they still are vital and relevant and have lots to contribute and they want to continue to do that and by and large employers are happy to allow them to do that what many of them are doing is not exiting with retirement they are at least dropping their hours and there's a whole surge of professionals coming in behind them and they need to be able to learn and understand and be as productive as many of those retirees are and so again the modern workplace is trying to figure out how do we get information from those people who are leaving and put it in the hands of those that are coming in and there's been a shift from let's just take everything that's in their heads and dump it on the internet with a bunch of documents and policies and procedures there's been a shift from that because it kind of didn't really work people didn't want to consume information in that way and it is still very much about connecting people to people and what you'll see when we get into our best practices as many intranets are really taking that to heart and trying to figure out how can they connect their people to people bit of a cliche but it's true so here we are constant the only constant is change the pace of change is increasing at all around us but in our workplaces more than anywhere and in fact you can see so many organizations talking about how so if they're not startups they want to be like startups they want that agility they want that nimbleness if they are startups they want to be they want to have repeatable processes but they don't want to lose any of that agility as well and so what you're seeing is a pressure to create tools to create a digital workplace that can flex and change with whatever requirements come that way and how to do that in a way that that isn't completely discombobulating to the people trying to work inside of it so yes so these forces they have pushed the workplace into some new territory and I think it's partly because we are now so so completely awash in all things digital the place that everybody goes to is they say okay we're going to deal with all of these forces by by undergoing a serious digital transformation we're going to take all of our legacy systems and move them forward the things that we don't have currently in digital format or a way to interact with digitally we're going to go there so that's all great and I would say that in fact this is this was probably what we were hearing even five or ten years ago was it was all about the technology but really what's emerging is a lot of data and evidence to support that when you go technology first you tend to lose out on the elements of the humans that are messing everything up so it's a strategy challenge it's a systems challenge and the way that we kind of view it here at have an arrow is that the digital workplace is about a people first orientation but of course this critical pervasive technology layer I think we see this in our personal life and we're seeing it in the workplace and I would like to say for the purpose of today that we can consider our intranet as almost a microcosm of that digital workplace and that Internet's need to be viewed from a people first point of view in order to really truly be effective and I think that the best practices will really underscore this point as well something very interesting that's happening as well is that there's a consortium of emerging and that would be this collection of effort coming from IT HR and communications and what we found when we've done this presentation in front of live groups of people well as opposed to did maybe was um they were all alive because they're varying but what we found when we asked the audience was that it was pretty much a third a third of third of people coming from an IT perspective a people and culture perspective or communications perspective and I think that that one thing I take away from that is it's really interesting to see folks attending an intranet presentation from HR communications that would have been unheard of just a few years ago but also there's this recognition that each one of those groups have really important perspectives to bring to this whole intranet universe namely you've got IT who of course deep chops in all things technology and the tools then you've got your HR people in culture folks who are probably the ones who are most tapped into what's happening within the employee experience and what is it that employees are are needing and wanting and where they're coming from and then you've got communications who of course I mean they're the experts in content and sharing ideas and getting key messages out and so when you put those three together that that's where the magic happens with an intranet so why don't we now look at some of those practices and look at lots and lots of screenshots thanks guys I was awesome so we're going to cover nine best practices of modern Internet's and let's just jump in so the first one you know it may seem kind of simple actually probably the hardest one and that's starting with great timely content at cat said we had a live audience in Toronto Vancouver and Calgary and we presented this quote to the audience and said how many of you would say this is true of your intranet and I think in most or I think in all the audiences there was maybe two or three hands if that and they weren't bold hand no they were elated halfway up and I think that's really telling is the fact that you know ultimately you should think of your intranet as that single source of truth it should be the place where you get the information and you know it's up-to-date that's pretty sad that that's not the case the first example I wanted to show you the day's Gold Corp Gold Corp is a mining company they're based here in Vancouver and they've got mining operations in north and south America and this is the goldcorp intranet one thing I want to note too is that all the examples you're going to see today you're going to see mocked up images and mocked up text and this is ultimately to protect client privacy so goldcorp came to us and they were really interesting they came to us with this challenge and they said you know we want to do something different we want you to break the rules we want you to create a really exceptional intranet and they gave me some I wouldn't say free range they gave us a lot of rope to try some new things and so I think the team does a really exceptional job in the creation of conveyor so ultimately you can see here conveyor if you look at the top it's got six hubs a news hub my Goldcorp hub a safety have sustainability departments and teams and policies and procedures so the interesting thing about this intranet because it doesn't have a homepage you actually land on the news hub which is very very different another interesting kind of area of this intranet or part of this project was originally gold court had 13 portals and they were integrating all these portals into one experience so you could imagine as a communicator what a challenge that would be so this is the the news hub and you can see at the very top we've got three these are our corporate news stories so we've got the safety corporate news story and ethics corporate news story and a sustainability one below that we've got our stocks and quotes and below that we've got gold coral gold corp at a glance and this is really your KPIs this is all the information you need to know that's happening around the organization so this could be safety statistics this could be production or really anything else that Gold Corp feels is important for the employees if I go further down the page you can see here this is all my local news so in this case I'm actually at the corporate office so I'm seeing all the news that specifically for me at the corporate office I think one thing that's interesting about the goldcorp example is they were able to commit to having a picture for every news item and I think often when we think of internet content we think of words and text but really we should be thinking deeper and video it's all these different elements below that you can see we've got more recent news and if I scroll down we've got video as well so I can see the latest videos that are happening I think gold Corp is a really great example the news hub is fantastic I think a lot of internet people focus on the homepage I don't actually think that's an area but a lot of organizations have trouble I think where Internet's really fail to perform is when you dive deeper when you need that specific piece of information and you can't really trust it right now we're on the sustainability hub and I think this is what Gold Corp does a really great job of as you can see here sustainability is in a couple of pages it's not a you know a pissy statement about sustainability it's not a link to PDF it's not a link to a PDF exactly it's a really robust deep section with really great content and I think this is what makes Goldcorp's intranet an award winner is the fact that it has great content throughout and they put the time and effort into it when we were doing our sessions we got a lot of questions on people that you know how do you do this how do you actually it's all great to say in create great content how do you actually make this happen I think the first is to create a really awesome information architecture and the key with the great information architecture is co-created everybody has to understand why the information architecture works the way it is why all restructuring the internet like this because it's very important when your content authors are adding information they know where that information should go as well a really really robust content strategy is important you need to understand who you're creating for what kind of content people are looking for or those audiences are looking for how often you should create content everything around the content strategy is really important it's also important to have an internet manager and enlarge internet projects we often see especially during the design and development phases sometimes there's a content Wrangler who's really a project manager for content an area that we see that's missed so much is content author training and best practices I think far too often we see people train content authors on the technology but they don't actually train them on how to write really great compelling web content and I think that's an area that's a real miss and then finally collect and use content feedback there's many ways you can collect feedback on content in your live intranet so it's really important to collect that that feedback and use it so number two create a great mobile experience so when Kat and I were doing the session we asked people how many organizations had a mobile optimized intranet or responsive intranet it really did surprise us how few people put up their hands especially with our experience around IT departments and really figuring out mobile device security mobile device strategy we're seeing more and more I keep departments become very comfortable in this area to have a long way in the last few years yeah so it really did kind of catch us off guard and what we've done definitely four I'd say the last three years or so is every intranet that we create is responsive even if the organization isn't ready for it yet because organizations are moving really quickly and so we really do believe that the best practice to have a responsive intranet this example I'm showing near here is the junction this was an intranet we created for the Royal College of Dental Surgeons in Ontario they regulate dentists in the province and what you can see is the homepage of their intranet when you use desktop PC they haven't figured out their mobile device strategy yet but what we said is it doesn't matter we're going to build a responsive intranet for you anyway so you can see here this is what the internet looks like from a responsive perspective we've got the weather we've got our TTC updates we've got areas like what's new below that we've got what's happening so you can see all the various events in the that we've also got kudos Corner and cat we'll talk about this in another example later but ultimately this allows you to post a Kudo for anybody else in the organization below that we've got a people spotlight and then finally we've got a photo gallery where people can submit photos on their mobile devices using an email address and they get posted to the internet so I think this was a really great example and it was really bold movie the college to say you know what it's really important we want a responsive even though we're not ready for it and want to be ready for the future when we are yeah and so it's it's actually kind of an interesting segue into people and culture being at the heart of your internet because in fact a mobile device then means that people can interact with your internet in down time so that means that sometimes those human interest stories are the ones that that's what they want to look at when they're on the bus and that can drive a much stronger employee experience it has it has value for that reason so this is a paraphrase from an interview that I did with an employee for a project a recent project and basically what she said was when I first started I didn't get a sense of our culture from our internet at all but I did from our Facebook page and that struck us is kind of a real missed opportunity there is no reason for your internet to not reflect who you are in a really bold way and so here's an example that we did for while manisa large insurance firm across Canada so in this case the design that we created for them really features a lot of imagery and a lot of that imagery needs to be our recommendation it should be of people and so you can see here that the colors used all of it does speak to a certain corporate presence that people can look at this and feel like this is why when you saw in this panel here this is what Ben was talking about so here they got a whole panel dedicated to recognition so this is their homepage right this is hotly-contested real estate and they've chosen to use part of it for recognition which is fantastic and in this case a few things to point out one that you know every time there's a recognition given the individual who is receiving it and the person giving it you can see that their avatar is there so we're making a connection between people and faces then we're also we've got social features enabled here so folks can interact with these recognition comments with their own comments or with likes and so that also then deepens the connection so then this photo gallery here is really quite neat because what well when you sit doesn't show in this mock-up but what they ended up doing with this photo gallery is they turned it into a replacement for an inter branch newsletter and people love receiving a newsletter but they didn't love having the extra volume in their inbox so this allowed people to upload images from the branch happenings events what-have-you with a little description so they were still getting that cross branch sharing but they were doing it in a way that actually everybody now could participate in even if you weren't in the branches I mean it's a lot more visual and super easy this is an area that we see time and time again we tend to put photo galleries at the bottom of the page and ultimately people are so drawn to it and I think you know every so often we get comments on you know the pages are quite long will people see this information and kind of one of our tricks of the trade put some of those people focus content at the bottom because what we find is people will scroll down my big joke is if you've got a cafeteria menu put it in the footer everybody will see your KPIs and everything else is yes you'll notice the corporate Metro above that so absolutely backwards so this example here is from the Alberta Treasury branch and this around you know connecting people to people so here you can see somebody did a search for the internet committee and these are the results so just to talk about the search for a second you can see that it can be split between everything and specifically people so that's kind of a nice touch also the search can be you can use a whole bunch of different facets to filter what you're getting and so if somebody is kind of trying for one of those shot in the dark things they can use this to find a person who might be able to help them what we like about this example here is at first glance you get to see picture the people you get to see their title you see their phone number if you then hover over you get a whole bunch more information if you look at the bottom of that hover state box you'll see a link for a view profile and a link for follow so the follow piece we're all very familiar with from our you know Facebook social media worlds and so that's another way of connecting people to people and then if you hit view profile you get this which is now a whole bunch of information it should allow you to not only know if this is a person that you should be reaching out to to answer your question but hopefully it will make it more comfortable to do that and in many organizations there's also connection here too you know you can see presents you can connect with them with Skype so there's a whole bunch of different ways in which you can make this very easy and seamless the next example in the people in culture piece is from quadrille quadrille isn't interesting it's in real estate property management and it was it kind of came out of hiding off from a bunch of other organizations so they had a very unique challenge which was they were going to have a whole bunch of people coming together as a company kind of in short order and because it was a brand-new company people were the leadership team was really excited and very much wanted to promote a culture of openness and transparency so you can see that a little bit just even in the visual design that they went with very open clean again lots of imagery and definitely that they wanted to be able to highlight people so you can see they you know have certain areas around lead the transition team get to know your colleagues here also they they use some of their real estate to include polls this was where they wanted to be able to connect with employees often and easily to get their opinion on how things were going and what they were what they were seeing what they were doing and then they had this panel called introduce yourself and this was quite unique to quadrille but basically the idea was you join the organization and you post a virtual introduction and just to make sure that people would take the time to do this before the internet was long there was a little bit of time spent with the leadership team to get them to model the behavior so they all put in their introductions so that it would be populated when people came to the Internet in those early days and what we're finding now a few months post-launch is that this whole section I've introduced yourself so this panel and then if people click up more people are doing that it's one of the more heavily trafficked areas and and people are finding it's been really great as a way of connecting with one another and you can see that we also turn the social features on here so people can like and they can comment and that's just yet another sort of way to make people interconnect related to quadrille still and they're in touch with the name of their internet you can see here their employee essentials homepage for this section and around people in culture what I wanted to point out here was this area called transition Center where they spent a lot of time thinking about the employee experience of transitioning into a brand new organization what are the questions that people might have how do we make that transition as seamless as possible and also they had a pretty lean HR team to start with and they wanted to make sure that people were getting the information that they needed without having to constantly be pinging HR for those answers so they did a really nice job on this page and again just putting forward this we're here to help kind of a vibe that was so important to the to the culture they were trying to create so our next best practice leverage the power of social one of the interesting questions we got in I think a couple over sessions was you know a lot of the examples you show have likes and commenting but what if our executive team isn't really ready for that or what happens if you have these destructive employees who post bad things and there's a really interesting discussion because her response was you know what we typically find in organizations where we spend a lot of time discussing this issue is that a thing that happens when they launch their intranet it is actually it's tumbleweeds nobody posts anything and it's ultimately because you don't have a culture that's accepting of it and I think that's one of the most important things for social to work you have to model that behavior from your leadership team on down I think in my history here at habanero which has been over 17 years I've only seen two examples where a client has had to basically remove a post but has a bad behavior so it's a really really really really rare occurrence and that's why you'll see so many of the internet examples we have have likes and they have comments yeah and and you know I think it's related to this as well as that none of this stuff is anonymous so it's not like The Globe and Mail comment yes people's names are associated with it and we've always seen that that people have treated it responsibly perfect so I just wanted to touch on Goldcorp again this is their safety hub and this was an area for us safety is incredibly important at goldcorp having a culture of safety ensuring that everybody understands that safety is the number one priority that's something that the organization is relentlessly focused on and what I found interesting is the bull corp has turned on liking and commenting and they've got articles for example they've got this article on the Day of Remembrance and the type of conversation and the level of the conversation that happens in these articles is just absolutely amazing and when we want to change culture culture change happens often through dialogue it happens through discussion it happens when you understand somebody's point of view and you have a really great conversation about it and so from our perspective goldcorp actually has one of the most successful social implementations on their intranet so during our sessions we got a lot of questions around enterprise social networks and specifically in our case EMR Yammer is a really interesting one for us I think there are a ton of benefits from using an enterprise social network and I wanted to cover few of those today the first I think is networks like Yammer a really great place for both work conversation and personal stories and I think what's so powerful about the personal stories in Yammer is it takes it out of email and I think this is one of the most fundamental things about a great digital workplace is you have the right tool do the right thing and ultimately emails not the best place for a birth announcement and anniversary a birthday female is the place ultimately where we kind of want our most urgent time-sensitive messaging to happen whereas Yammer is an awesome place for those conversations that might not be as time-sensitive this is a great example from our own Yammer Network here at habanero and you can see that Curtis has done what I think is amazing is that he posted this at 104 a.m. kinda hilarious but I also think that shows the you know mobile device and kinetics I'm going to yam this well and you can see all the congratulations and the likes and it's just a really awesome spot for these personal stories and it really does take them out of email I believe since we launched Yammer habanero my personal email dropped by about 50 percent or might have been even a little bit more than that well if you consider all of those congratulation replies would have been you know because everyone loves to reply exactly so you come in if you positive is it because this is an email at one o'clock in the morning then you would have come in to that at 7 a.m. I look at it as that whole push-pull I hope email is you can push information out whereas with a social network it's more pull people in yeah for sure I think often we have executives that are worried about an enterprise social network you know this is going to be a place where we trade cat pictures and we've got all the stuff that's not work appropriate but I actually think especially its have an arrow what we've seen is that the end social network yes there's personal stories yes there's things like that the primary use of the enterprise social network is actually work I just wanted to share this example because this is one of many we could have pulled a you know thousands of these but we thought this this was a nice one where James in our Calgary office he wanted to get the latest future thinking views on the role of IT in the enterprise to help serve his client and so this is his post from Yammer you can see here James posted his question of the company newsfeed at 8:40 4:00 a.m. he tagged people from around the company he would have otherwise emailed and then you can see here all the resources he shared can be seen by anyone and a handful of people gave him suggestions by lunchtime I think the most powerful thing around an enterprise social network and around Yammer is this example if this was an email thread our book was accidentally left off the email thread she wouldn't have been able to see this conversation but this was in Yammer and so barb was actually looking at the the Yammer at the point or at the time and she said you know I've got an answer to this question or I can contribute to this discussion I think this is super powerful because email really is that place where conversations go to die and Yammer is the place where conversations contrive also what's amazing as this conversation can be searched somebody new joins the organization they can see these previous conversations and participate and as you can see here by early afternoon James had five replies and this was likely more than if you had emailed everyone so I think it's a really good use case I do want to give a warning about Yammer though yeah or really any enterprise social network what we found I have Narrows we're super progressive we love technology everybody likes trying out stuff but we found an interesting fact which is approximately two-thirds of our company absolutely love Yammer they adore it I think if you took it away they quit and be like I'm out of here because we use in our day-to-day lives so much but there's about a third of the company that absolutely hates it they say you know I've got too much to read already it's noisy I don't want to participate in all these conversations and so I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing again this goes to the digital workplace and using the right tool in the right way so what this tells us is that your intranet is still very important even if you have a thriving enterprise social network and the Internet is that place for a single source of truth for all of that information that you need to know what the answer is for essential company information that everybody has to view and has to know the intranet is the place for that meanwhile Yammer is the place for those conversations to happen and so I think it provides a nice bit of context of how we should separate these things perfect so number five be iterative and agile I thought I'd share a really fun project that we worked on to kind of explore this best practice WestJet came to us with a bit of a challenge they said you know we've got an intranet but it's not necessarily doing the job we want to communicate to westjetters worldwide and so they brought us in for a week and they had us do this Co discovery work with them so we came in and we actually figured out how can we improve communication the organization with westjetters and that can be everything from a flight attendant to a pilot to somebody working in an airport and so we have some ideas and we came up with some prototypes and what I really loved that the team did here is you know in this this kind of scared of agility exactly it spirit of agility are they created this paper prototype for a responsive website and this was really cool because ultimately we created this they went down to the Starbucks and WestJet headquarters and they grabbed people and can we test this with you and they move the paper up and down as people scrolled and as they learn things like cap paper out and cases on but it allowed us to really rapidly prototype something that would work and what was really neat is WestJet then said you know this is a great idea let's build this and so this rapid prototyping along with tools like Argo and trim that accelerator allowed us to create something really exceptional in a matter of months this is the hub as you can see here this is that one place people can go for news and updates and really all of that essential information that westjetters need to know I love the idea or I love the fact that westjetters are all owners and so you can see here you've got the WestJet stop right but probably my favorite part is the joke of the week you can see here jokes are such an important part of WestJet culture and ultimately this was something that we built into the hub for them I think this is just a great example of you know that old concept of we're going to build an intranet and going to take us a year this is a really neat example of using tools like office 365 in the cloud and go doing agile prototyping and really iterative design allows you to create solutions to these problems really quickly so best practice number six which is target content when possible this quote here is a phrase from somebody we interviewed where she kind of flat-out said I really think that the intranet and the people who run it are dumb what she was expressing was her frustration that there was so much content on there that wasn't relevant to her and so to summarize it's not everyone has the same information needs so don't treat them the same this is the power of segmentation segmentation being where you have a really deep understanding of who your audience is and that you know people in certain roles certain geographies they're going to want different information and so as an example here is I'm bridges intranet this is their homepage what I want to show you is behind the scenes here this is a template from their people section that they're about to do a little post based on the they do a president's corner so the president can share information with employees so the piece I want to highlight is here where you can see a whole bunch of men information that the authors can use in order to make sure that this content hits people according to these different filters so when we say don't forget about the authoring experience I guess the one caveat is a segmentation very powerful but don't go too crazy with it if you have too much metadata that the authors have to fill in it makes authoring really laborious and probably for not you're not getting the right value trade-off but if you hit the right amount of facets then it becomes great then people are seeing information they want to see and your authors can manage that easily the next best practice is around findability and search so here this is the internet for first west credit union there are a fairly recent amalgamation of three different credit unions and what I want to highlight here under the heading of findability is if you look at their main navigation there's really just four areas serving our members running our business employee essentials and collaboration sites very slim nicely labeled so that it's very intuitive of what you'll find in those areas I love that you could be brand new to this organization and totally figure it out it's not about Department it's not about you know does Finance do this or dis operations do this it's dead simple and I think they really nailed it exactly yes for so long Internet's for being organized according to Department and like every usability test has proven that's not how employees think or work so that's fabulous that's great findability this little piece here is kind of a neat twist on search so what they've done with their health and support contacts is they've created a separate search index where they were able to think of kind of hot topics that people routinely looked for help on and they could populate specific contact information to help with those problems and so you can imagine in this case like if you look at the far one that says ATM technical support so here you are your branch manager your ATM has gone crazy on you super quickly you can jump in get the information that you need and start to get that problem solved so very powerful and really pretty straightforward to implement also under the heading of findability and search is this is from black McDonald's internet the wire in this case you can see a lot of effort putting being put into the search experience so on this page a few things I'd want to highlight one is you can see the green box highlighted everything and beside that you've got people and beside that you've got project and team so right off the bat you can do a search and you can decide from three big buckets what you're looking for if you look at the far left you'll see there's a whole bunch of filtering that you can apply as well so you can try and narrow things down you can also then on the right you've got some information on trying to find a point legacy site and I think maybe one of the neater pieces is what we kind of call our find ohmmeter if you will so did you find what you're looking for and people can give you feedback and say yes or no but also the why and this little chunk of feedback here is very powerful to go back to and be able to refine your your search results because then the last two things I want to point out is you can see a box called definition for Fe D and what that means and then below that recommended that takes effort on the part of an intranet manager to go in and add you know it's kind of like creating best bets but if you're collecting feedback if you're seeing what people are searching for you can now really make it so that it's almost like a Google experience if not as good as I think this is such a powerful example so much effort and time is put into your global navigation and structuring it and what we see is happier users just do search anyway so really you should be investing as much time and effort in your search engine as you do in creating that beautiful amazing easy to use navigation absolutely I would definitely I like that it's an or because I don't think don't put all your eggs in the search basket either because for a while there there was a movement that intranet home pages would just be a search page oh no do that is that deductible that's exactly not go well another example then here is just done very quickly for service credit union if you look at the far right using meta information they've been able to have it so that you're looking at a piece of content but on the right you can see all related additional pieces of content be it related products procedures policies etc so rather than having the standard boilerplate you know maybe a little did you know or a valid time repetitive piece of content that you have an every right-hand bar exactly use that real estate to make to make something to create that findability and to create that almost browsing experience where you find you're looking at a piece of content and you're seeing things you didn't even know that we're relevant appear so that's really powerful number eight number eight so measure analyze and report so oftentimes what we find with Internet's is if people are getting really good on the measurement side they are embedding the tags required they're hooked up to Google Analytics they have a sense of who's clicking on what and generating great dashboards like this which is fantastic but without additional context this information will fall flat so this is a this is a dashboard you can see that it's showing pageviews you can even see the trend lines but how are you meant to understand what's causing those blips what's causing the ups with causing the down so in this example what I want people to take away is fantastic you've got dashboards but please don't just leave it as I created a dashboard you can look at it now you understand how our internet is functioning you need to pare it to a narrative one thing around views that we wanted to highlight here with goldcorp is along with the social features we've talked about the likes in the comments what you'll notice is a little eyeball in that same area of icons so this is very subtle but what it does is it gives both the internet manager and the Internet team an understanding of what content is getting viewed but also it gives that same information to the people who are on the internet that there are some areas that look to be hot that they should be checking out because look at how many views there are so that's kind of a neat does double duty I think it's pretty progressive and really shows them as a transparent organization when you're exposing data like that I used to be hidden in Google and actually showing people how many people are viewing pages and looking at it completely pretty cool yeah because there's a sensitivity to what if I have a page with no views quietly today because it wants to change it exactly use that information so this next example is from our own intranet and here at the footer if you look under the share a photo button you'll see a link says view page analytics and here we've decided to do a little experiment we've taken what Goldcorp is doing which is making views available to everyone and we've just sort of pumped it up a little so that now people can see much deeper analytics on a per page basis our hypothesis is that this is an interest to everybody but we're going to let it run for a bit and see what kind of feedback we can measure okay well measure it and then we will analyze the new report and so don't forget about your qualitative data and so the same area here if you look to the bottom right you'll see a little feedback button and what we are doing is asking for people to give us feedback in the moment about the page you know what did what was their problem and what have you and this will then go into what I was saying before which is you have a dashboard you want to create a narrative tools like this are a way of creating that narrative and so just to close if there's one thing I can leave you with it's to please implement a measurement framework because this will be one of the most powerful ways of tying the detailed measurements that you're collecting back to the corporate strategic direction that your intranet is meant to be supporting and this is a step that many organizations skip which means then they end up with measurements that they don't have a why they care or what to do next so number nine our final best practice is that great design matters and hopefully you saw this peppered throughout all of our best practices but I just wanted to tell one brief story so this is an example from provincial health services authority and this is their intranet pod and what I think was neat was pH sa understood that they had the development capability to build their intranet they used our NGO developer edition and they were able to do that all themselves what I thought was really neat is they said you know we want to invest extra time and extra money in the design to make sure that we're designing a really exceptional experience for their employees and this to me was a really really inspiring project because they did spend that time in that effort and that money to create a really great experience and so I think this is a really good example of that so now we're going to cover four emerging trends and I think the first is the trend around the digital workplace and I really believe tools like office 365 have really brought this conversation to life I'm going to scare you right now and show you this chart kind of funny this is the periodic table of office 365 it shows all the various tools that are available I don't I never think of a periodic table as being a good or a fun thing on generally they're complicated and I think what this shows though is that the number of tools that are available and the number of tools that are coming every day I think this is such an interesting part of the digital workplace discussion around what tool do I use when do I use that tool and when you think of the traditional intranet going back a number of years ago it was really about creating a portal and embedded every piece of content in it and it was kind of that one-stop shop and when we think of the new digital workplace tools they're really centered more on what we would consider an app model where you going to various abs to do that function and you kind of jump between those apps pretty seamlessly and I think with the new set of digital workplace tools you you really see that come to light this is office 365 here you can see I've clicked a waffle icons on the top left and I can see all of my areas as apps there and I think from our perspective this is an emerging trend but there's really a best practice in this which is building connections between this app these apps so users don't really have a very kind of fragmented experience I just want to share one example from this so this is the WestJet example we showed you earlier but this is actually the desktop view so somebody sitting and WestJet tight quarters if they went to the hub they would see this experience obviously they have the same functionality on mobile as well but what I think is really interesting about this is WestJet said to us you know Yammer is our social tool that's where we want all of our conversations to happen and from when we look at our digital workplace we've got office 365 and we've got Yammer and we've got SharePoint Online and we want each tool to do the right job but we didn't want to just jump users off and say well if you want to have a conversation about this you know you've got to go to Yammer and do this so I think this is a really neat example where when WestJet publishes a piece of content it gets published as a conversation in Yammer as well and these are linked together so you can see here that I can like this and if I like this article alleged in Yammer and I can see the comments from Yammer but if I want to comment on this I click to join the conversation button and I pop over to Yammer and this just makes it a really seamless experience to jump between these two digital workplace tools another example here is from first west credit union and i think this is a great example of a team site directory and i think this is another thing that we see time and time again where people have hundreds if not thousands or tens of thousands of team sites and you know it can be a really cumbersome experience to find them and so I think this is a neat example of allowing people to filter by audience or type or department you can favorite a team site and at and so it's always there for you you can get more information on it so just making the experience of finding that team site a really really great one and I think this is an area where in goldcorp the team spent a lot of time and a lot of energy really taking this digital workplace concepts to the next level so this is where you can see here we've got the michael corp area and at the very top we've got my notifications so these are things that maybe my dictation request was approved or various areas I email my calendar invites my tasks my news feed obviously if you click on email your email is not going to be in the conveyor portal that will take you to the web version of Outlook where you can actually see your email I think what's the most interesting of this area the common actions area below and this really follows that digital workplace experience that we want a model where I want to report an incident or submit expenses or request a team site or book a leave request this is amazing because I don't have to know what sistah I don't need to know that some boom is an SAT or another system and this is important because different minds may use different systems all I have to know is what I want to do and the tool will take me to the right app or experience to complete that action and so I think it's a really good example of how a really great intranet can be really that the key pinning of your digital workplace experience the second trend we're seeing is really the move to the cloud I really like this quote from Gartner if you're a Microsoft shop you will be moving to office 365 in the future the questions to ask are which parts when and in what order I think when people talk about the cloud they really tend to focus on the obvious things you know you can save money that's that's one of the biggest parts of that cloud conversation also agility you no longer have to wait months to order the server hardware and get those servers spun up but I think what the cloud gives us is so much more these are the kind of less obvious things but actually the more interesting ones things like machine learning and natural language processing and network analysis these are all cloud capabilities that are allowing us to create these pretty exceptional digital workplace experience and this has been going on for years and years and years but now we're starting to see these technologies come to life inside the workplace so Amazon from the get-go and delighted people with its recommendation engine and it's learning on you know it was almost seen as magical you know how does it know what I'm going to buy a matter from what I know and I think that was a really great example we're seeing tools like Siri for example that can take our language and parse that into commands and actually act on them and I wanted to show a little example from habañero so this is from our kind of research lab we love experimenting with technologies and we created a chat bot to solve some of these problems we really think that chat BOTS and AI will power the digital workplaces of the future and so we created this a little experiment to show everybody you know what a chat got to do so we created a chat bot called a bot and I am going to show it to you today so today we want to show you something from the lab we've been doing a lot of experimentation on how AI and some of these technologies fits into the digital workplace and so I wanted to show you how bot which is a little chat bot experiment we have so right now you can see I'm just going to jump into Microsoft team so I'm in Microsoft teams and this is where I can have a conversation with a bot and have both kind of interesting because have BOTS connected to Active Directory is connected to our CRM solution it's also connected to our ERP system so how long can actually do some fairly interesting things also because have lot have bot lives within office 365 it's connected to all those services using the office 365 API is in the Microsoft graph so let's take a spin I love to meet a lot so the first thing I'm going to do is type in let's find the contact so I'm going to find contact Jon so what have us doing is it's actually going Active Directory and saying de Jong has been live in Active Directory but John's not in our Active Directory he's in CRM so because how I couldn't find John and AD it goes to CRM and right away it brings me back all the contact details I need now here I have an arrow we give people Fitness allowances we think that this is a really important part of a healthy way to employee experience so I'm going to check this might be a little embarrassing but I'm going to check my own haha Fitness allowance balance so alone and I'm going to type that in so in this case that data is actually stored in our DRP system with my account so how that's actually going out there and saying oh wow I've got a technology allowance yeah and I have been using my wellness blackberry just pretty good yeah but you can imagine for a lot of these scenarios we hear from a lot of customers where in order to check your vacation balance for example you have to click a link on your internet then you go into a site even you have to remember different credentials and you've got nine links to click on and finally you get your vacation balance so you can imagine one of our experience this is you can also tell how about things like I'm running late so half off test here would you like me to inform the meeting organizer that you'll be late for the review Roundtable deck over drinks yes or Malorie that's Oh Mallory's going to get oh look at that is that Mallory no etcetera email and it tells me to drive safely I probably shouldn't be using how about when I'm driving yeah and then finally a few more things we can do maybe I want to get my recent document I'm going to click in here again my recent amen this is really neat because this is using the office 365 API is in the Microsoft graph and you can see here I've got my go QuickStart documentation an in-text licensing clothes and a career site and so these are the documents I've worked on and what's really neat about this is you know I could be on site as I'm my momma might quickly say hey hatbox give me the last things I've worked on and one click and I get my document which is really neat now I don't like presenting that much so I feel a little sick so I'm going to type in I feel sick so sick to Canton I know I'm done horribly sick on our second I feel sick and so what you can see here how about says I'm sorry to hear that would you like me to file a sick day for you that's really nice so how about going into our ERP system yeah assigning me a sick day and flagging that which is really cool so I don't have to do that because I'm sick but how about goes one step further would you like me to turn on automatic replies in Outlook as well so kind of a really neat example I know when we show this to people their eyes really light up because there's a lot of potential as you can see here on how we can create these new I turned on my automatic replacements highly concerned Mallory's going to think of various you have to do the presentation tomorrow by yourself Valerie um but as you can see here there's a lot of potential with this technology especially as we look at these all of these integrated digital workplace experiences so kind of a fun example one thing we've learned is really with bots and chat bots in general keep them simple you can focus on one area of the business creating a bot that does too much is just it's not going to be successful so hopefully you enjoyed that and we're going to jump to our third trend so our third trend is in the area of employee experience design and I think maybe the easiest way to explain this is it's kind of borrowing from the lung while now long-established customer experience work so this idea that your customer interacts with your company in a variety of ways many touch points some of them virtual some of them physical and how can you create a overall holistic wonderful experience for those customers so everything I just said with place customer with employee and workplaces are now very much aware that they need to treat employee experience with that same kind of design aspiration so there's this whole new frontier that's being focused on the employee so one interesting example is the area of onboarding and one of the reasons why we like talking about onboarding is because onboarding is usually thought of as a process it's about if only I had a better checklist I had a better spreadsheet then everyone who joined would be on payroll would have their business cards and would have the computer on their first day what we found is you want to actually broaden your view they don't think of it as a process think of it as an experience and what I'm going to show you right now are just some tools that we've used to create employee experiences so one of the first things we do is get understand your employees we come from a fancy way of putting it as we do a lot of empathetic research we're very much about wanting to walk a mile in another person's shoes because that's what allows us to really meet their needs and and satisfy their requirements so what you're looking at right now are some personas that we created for our own onboarding experience these are some of the key players in onboarding there there are others but just for an example and so how did we create these personas partly through some empathy mapping interviews observations feedback from new employees then what you want to do is you want to map what the experience is so again thinking of onboarding you this is just a snippet of an overall broader experience map but here you can just quickly see that there are these milestones where overall we're in the area of pre on boring you can see there are times where the candidate is feeling great and then there are times where they're feeling really stressed out and unhappy and not don't really simplify but when you're creating an experience you want to try and turn the frown upside down what exactly we want all happy faces or at least recognized really well you can recognize that there are going to be experiences where people will feel how they feel and and you don't have to that's not necessarily something you've got to squash but there are opportunities to prove upon it or give them support in those areas where they need it so that's an experience map so so just some examples of tools that we use when we're doing employee experience design if if this is perked your interest by all means please reach out and happy to share templates with you or just talk more about what it is that you're trying to create a number for the power of road map so road maps are another tool that we use in all of our engagements really they are probably the best way to make sense of the barrage of information that can go into kind of any engagement but certainly when it comes to planning an intranet there are so many moving pieces we found road maps to be one of the most effective ways of monitoring all of that so if we imagine say you've done a bunch of research you know your Internet's pain point you have a you know your corporate priorities you have this vision for your modern workplace and now you've even got some ideas for features and functionality but you're sort of not sure what to do with it all you've hopefully gotten to this place with your team so not only is it that you know these things but it's also spread out amongst a whole bunch of different people's heads so what we like to do then is use roadmap and so for instance here you can see some examples of either areas feature areas or activity areas that would go into an intranet project and what we do is we get them you know somewhere easy and visible and we get people to by people I mean the intranet team start to make a note of you know is this high-impact medium effort broad audience just to get a sense of things and then you can start to really lay out what your future could be along the lines of dealing with those various feature sets or activity areas and so this is you know just like a for realsies view of it but here might be a little easier to take in so don't with it clearly don't try reading the text but basically roadmaps are broken into phase there are these feature areas that I was mentioning in this case it's about wanting to surface key communication for each of these feature areas you can see how they align with the design principles that were established early on love like this is the high level anchors to what kind of an Internet experience you're wanting to create and then by using colors and iconography you can then map out each of your feature areas and how they align with those design principles and that's just a nice quick visual to see that there are certain there are certain things that align with everything there's some that only align with one and that may in fact start to give you some sense of priority maybe you want to shift the columns around move them into different phases and what-have-you then you've got the description of those features you've got how do those features tie back to some sort of value to the employee because you always want to stay grounded in who is it that you're your intranet is meant to serve right some of the best for a map 15 are the ones that actually phrase that in employee quote Saturday you know this is what this does to me that value to my life absolutely and the reason why we use those we often express the value in quotes is because it's one it's a subtle way of getting you to put yourself in the shoes of your and consumer if you will so again it's that empathetic lens but can't ignore there's got to be value to the business and often we do these as quotes as well but this is where you are you can articulate you know this particular feature is totally going to align with you know XYZ corporate priority or direction or what have you then you definitely want to take time to start to sketch out what some of the success metrics will be this is almost a precursor to creating that measurement framework I talked about earlier and so this becomes kind of a good source of information for building out that measurement framework and then this whole bottom section are around success requirements so it can be about you know your content communication change management training key adoption etc and if this was a vinter we do have a post on our insights blog that talks all about road mapping and so if you just google this using a rope after in your portal for life you'll find a link to that so that brings us to the end of today's webinar if you've got any questions on roadmaps chatbots or anything Internet related please feel free to reach out our email addresses are on the screen and of course we just want to thank you for taking the time to tune in for for today's presentation a great day

Channel: Habanero Consulting Group

Views: 9,742

Rating: 4.5662651 out of 5

Keywords: intranet, office 365, sharepoint, intranet best practices, intranet trends, intranet examples, webinar, sharepoint intranet examples, digitial workplace, digital workplace trends, digital workplace strategy, intranet features, intranet example, intranet demo, habanero, habanero consulting group

Id: gRqR528Soj4

Length: 68min 29sec (4109 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2017