Improving our intranet

As I write this, I can tell that this blog post is probably going to be a two-parter (you lucky things), therefore this post will be more about scene setting and our aims and ambitions for now.

So I’ll start with the context part. Once upon a time someone coined the term the ‘digital workplace’ (basically all of the tools and technology provided by a workplace to enable its employees to do their jobs) and ever since ICT teams and Internal communicators alike have been grappling with how they can improve collaboration, employee engagement, communication, finding and sharing of information, business applications and agile working (being able to work from anywhere at any time).

This is supposed to represent the digital workplace, hopefully you get the picture.

An intranet is one of the key components of a digital workplace and here at the University of Bedfordshire a project to review of our intranet in.beds is in full-swing (and long overdue!). It is also particularly timely as improving the ‘staff experience’ is a key priority on our new strategic plan which launches in the summer.

As part of our digital workplace offering, we’re also looking at developing other tools and encouraging the use of Office 365 and Yammer (for which I have somehow volunteered to run a fringe event about at our annual staff conference – gulp!) among others, but I will come to talk about this more in a future post.

Why is an intranet important?

Personally, I don’t believe that having an outstanding intranet is the answer to great employee engagement- there are so many factors involved here. However, I do think that it plays an important role in helping staff to do their jobs more effectively and adds to a positive staff experience (if done well!). 

What makes a great intranet?

Ideally a good intranet should include:

• An engaging and dynamic homepage
• Interesting, useful and engaging content
• An opportunity for collaboration and sharing
• A useful and intelligent search functionality
• A quick way to find important things which make it easier to get things done
• A more personalised user experience

A journey to improvement

We want to make our intranet a useful tool for our colleagues and aspire to the best practice components listed above, whilst also being realistic at the same time- it can’t all happen at once. It is something that will require continuous improvement and we will constantly need to manage a cyclical process of review, development and measurement. 

I’m pleased to say that we’re on the first steps to understanding what our colleagues need and how we can support that. We recently ran an online survey (with the help of our fabulous Market Research Manager Andrew Kingston) to identify how colleagues use in.beds and their likes and frustrations among other things. Using this, plus analysing our intranet usage stats and conducting focus groups (to come in the next few weeks), we should have a pretty good idea of where the gaps are and where we can make an improvement.

Unlike some big corporate companies out there, we don’t have masses of money to spend revamping in.beds, but with the help of our talented digital marketing team, we can go a long way to contributing to a better digital workplace for our staff.

In my next post, I will reveal what our research found and what exciting plans we have for the intranet going forward.