Building a better intranet: a journey from employee insights to implementation

Cases

Building a better intranet: a journey from employee insights to implementation

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Summary

In an evolving digital landscape, effective internal communication is the backbone of an organization’s success, especially for large, global companies. Our client — a multinational corporation with 50,000+ employees — was transitioning to a new intranet platform. The aim? To create a tool that fosters seamless collaboration, engagement, and information sharing across continents and a wide variety of roles.

To make this happen, they partnered with us to conduct a pre-study focused on the internal communication needs of their employees. Through a combination of in-depth interviews and on-site observations across various countries and working environments, we captured the perspectives of the diverse workforce. These insights were essential in crafting employee journeys and personas that highlighted key challenges and opportunities for the new intranet.

By aligning decision-makers around a unified understanding of these diverse needs, we empowered the organization to make informed decisions about the design, implementation, and support required for the new platform.

Without a well-functioning intranet, productivity plummets, communication silos grow, and employees feel disconnected. The risks? Missed opportunities, duplicated efforts, and a workforce that struggles to stay informed and efficient. A broken intranet is more than just an inconvenience — it’s a barrier to success.

Background

A company was in the process of switching platforms for their intranet. Recognizing this as a pivotal moment, they aimed to place their employees’ needs at the heart of the transition. The goal was to deeply understand these needs to ensure the new intranet would not only meet but exceed expectations, fostering better collaboration, engagement, and information sharing. To achieve this, a thorough mapping of employee needs was essential. Influence was brought in to conduct a pre-study, focusing on capturing the employees’ perspectives on internal communications. This pre-study was crucial for guiding the development and implementation of the new intranet, ensuring it was tailored to the diverse needs of the employees.

What we did

Choosing the right focus
The organization’s 50,000 employees are spread across 5 continents, encompassing a wide variety of white and blue-collar roles. This diversity posed a challenge: how can we ensure the new intranet met the needs of such a diverse workforce? To tackle this, we followed a fundamental design principle: by understanding the needs of the extremes, we will meet the needs in between.

The process started by looking inward at the organization, mapping existing assumptions related to internal communication, surfacing internal truths, and identifying where to put a specific spotlight throughout the upcoming employee deep dive.

Interviews and on-site observations
The next step was to conduct qualitative research and meet with employees to develop a deep understanding for their needs and realities. The team conducted 56 interviews across different countries and continents to ensure coverage of geographical and cultural variations in needs. The research included on-site observations with employees in vastly different environments – from offices to production sites – to capture the variations in behaviors, needs, emotions, and cultural preferences for internal communication.

We ensured a strong focus on blue-collar roles and employees outside of HQ, to build a more complete picture of the organization’s needs. When designing intranets, it is common for organizations to fall into the trap of only considering the needs of headquarters’ white-collar staff and fail to include the full diversity of the workforce (Intranet Adoption Best Practices, 2018). For this organization with ~50 % of all employees being blue collars, and ~75 % based outside of HQ, considering the variety of needs was of high relevance. By doing this we ensured that future intranet decisions were made with empathy and understanding for all roles across the company, not just those in traditional office environments.

Insights, journeys and personas
The substantial qualitative research resulted in employee journeys, insights, and personas. These deliverables weren’t just about summarizing data — they were carefully crafted to help decision-makers at HQ in Sweden, who rarely experience the realities of operations or other countries, to build empathy for the employees’ daily work experiences. This created alignment around the need for an intranet that addressed not only the functional but also emotional and contextual needs of employees. The alignment on employees’ experiences and needs as well as challenges and opportunities was key in guiding the development of the new intranet.

Result

The outcomes of the pre-study helped the decision-makers develop an understanding and empathy for the different realities that their employees are facing every day. Consequently, it helped them clarify what is needed from an intranet both in terms of technicalities but also implementation and support, to answer to the diverse needs throughout the organization. The pre-study enabled decision-makers to direct the efforts related to internal communication and the design of the upcoming intranet where they matter the most.

A key success factor to reach this result was collective problem-solving and involvement throughout the project. The Influence team and a core team from the client worked closely together to continuously visualize the employees’ perspective. The use of these early visualizations ensured a transparent process and created engagement and a sense of ownership of the results.