Sign In

Employee engagement and the rise of the social intranet

Are you the type of boss who inspires your employ­ees? If so, you are a rar­i­ty. The Har­vard Busi­ness Review recent­ly pub­lished research on employ­ees’ top com­plaints about their lead­ers. A thump­ing 91 per cent of employ­ees said com­mu­ni­ca­tion can drag exec­u­tives down. The employ­ees in the sur­vey list­ed the fol­low­ing fail­ings of boss­es: not giv­ing clear direc­tions (57 per cent), not know­ing employ­ees’ names (36 per cent) and not recog­nis­ing employ­ee achieve­ments (63 per cent).

The mag­a­zine not­ed: “The data shows that the vast major­i­ty of lead­ers are not engag­ing in cru­cial moments that could help employ­ees see them as trust­wor­thy.” It added: “This is star­tling, con­sid­er­ing how much mon­ey organ­i­sa­tions spend con­duct­ing employ­ee sur­veys and reor­gan­i­sa­tions, engag­ing con­sul­tants and imple­ment­ing change ini­tia­tives.” That last sen­tence is worth read­ing twice, as none of the solu­tions list­ed is like­ly to work. Imple­ment­ing change ini­tia­tives? When did that help con­nect staff?

Using social tools to boost com­mu­ni­ca­tions can raise pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by 20 to 25 per cent

The tra­di­tion­al way of con­nect­ing staff is through the com­pa­ny intranet. This should be the hub of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and a foun­tain of knowl­edge for staff. It should be. The real­i­ty is that many intranets are stale, under­used and not val­ued by employ­ees. “Tra­di­tion­al intranets tend to be dull and lim­it­ing,” says Pancentric’s prod­uct direc­tor Mar­tin Boswell. “Peo­ple are told to log on and find stuff. Employ­ees bare­ly use them.” So if it doesn’t engage staff and it’s wast­ing valu­able resource time, why both­er at all?

Research by the McK­in­sey Glob­al Insti­tute found that using social tools to boost com­mu­ni­ca­tions can raise pro­duc­tiv­i­ty by 20 to 25 per cent. In today’s dig­i­tal work­place, com­pa­nies such as Bluefin are replac­ing the tra­di­tion­al intranet with the social intranet and it’s easy to see why. The social intranet takes the core func­tion­al­i­ty of the tra­di­tion­al intranet – new starter infor­ma­tion, con­tact direc­to­ry, team charts and so on – and incor­po­rates the engage­ment fea­tures of social net­work­ing tools. This enables staff to form groups for par­tic­u­lar projects, com­mu­ni­cate online, share resources, “like” and com­ment on arti­cles, and cru­cial­ly, con­tribute con­tent them­selves.

Pro­vid­ing employ­ees with this kind of access auto­mat­i­cal­ly builds a com­mu­ni­ty and, like Slack, Twit­ter or LinkedIn, boosts engage­ment because they become part of the con­ver­sa­tion. For chief exec­u­tives and senior man­age­ment, a social intranet with clever report­ing and met­rics pro­vides instant infor­ma­tion on employ­ee engage­ment, with­out the need to wait for annu­al sur­vey results. You can see which projects and doc­u­ments are gen­er­at­ing buzz, who is con­tribut­ing, and vital­ly, which teams are real­ly engaged and which areas of the busi­ness have gone qui­et. Senior man­age­ment can com­mu­ni­cate via video mes­sag­ing and blogs – much more engag­ing than tra­di­tion­al meth­ods of e‑mail or newslet­ters that take weeks to com­pile and end­less resources to pro­duce.

So who’s using social intranets and what are the results? Pan­cen­tric Dig­i­tal recog­nised the need for a new type of intranet, and spent the past six years build­ing and devel­op­ing the Hub, a social intranet and flex­i­ble por­tal sys­tem used by FTSE 100 mem­ber RSA, as well as Ralph Lau­ren, Bluefin and Direct Line Group.

Mr Boswell believes the Hub can change the way com­pa­nies per­form. “The Hub is a pow­er­ful way to boost engage­ment in a short space of time,” he says.

Bluefin’s head of mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions Amy Smith says the main thing she notices is that employ­ees real­ly feel like it’s “their” intranet, not just a mar­ket­ing or HR tool. Empow­er­ing staff to con­tribute ensures con­tent is con­stant­ly chang­ing, retain­ing inter­est and spark­ing fur­ther engage­ment. Show­cas­ing results and high­light­ing employ­ee events, such as char­i­ty fundrais­ers, gives teams a boost and rein­forces the com­mu­ni­ty feel.

Mr Boswell main­tains that a social intranet must be eas­i­ly acces­si­ble and intu­itive enough for all employ­ees to use with­out the involve­ment of the IT depart­ment. It should be agile enough to allow rapid evo­lu­tion. “That’s essen­tial for the way mod­ern work­places func­tion,” he says. “Employ­ees can access secure resources and col­lab­o­rate no mat­ter where they’re locat­ed. Gone are the days when teams of key stake­hold­ers need­ed to attend end­less plan­ning ses­sions about the intranet. In today’s low-code world, com­pa­nies equipped with agile intranets empow­er employ­ees to par­tic­i­pate, enabling two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion that can offer real insight and build employ­ee engage­ment fast.”

CASE STUDY: BLUEFIN

Nation­al insur­ance bro­ker Bluefin employs 1,400 peo­ple, split across 49 offices. Bluefin oper­ates in a heav­i­ly reg­u­lat­ed, process-dri­ven indus­try with mul­ti­ple sys­tems and por­tals for staff to access. They are active­ly mak­ing acqui­si­tions, bring­ing on board teams and busi­ness­es across the UK. They need to induct new employ­ees effi­cient­ly, share best prac­tice, store infor­ma­tion and dri­ve staff to their intranet, known as BITE.

Using the Hub, Bluefin were able to rapid­ly reshape BITE into a social intranet with no inter­rup­tion to busi­ness. They cre­at­ed bespoke home pages and con­tent for new­ly acquired com­pa­nies, enhanc­ing the on-board­ing process. Video stream­ing and blog­ging gave senior man­age­ment the abil­i­ty to sup­ple­ment their tra­di­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tions chan­nels and give mes­sag­ing a more per­son­al feel, which is espe­cial­ly impor­tant due to the geo­graph­i­cal spread of offices. Their Hub pro­vides a cen­tral log-in for var­i­ous sys­tems, stream­lin­ing process and avoid­ing con­fu­sion over sys­tems access.

“One of the things that works best for us is that staff feel like it’s ‘their’ intranet. It’s con­stant­ly evolv­ing; a lot of the con­tent is gen­er­at­ed by the indi­vid­ual depart­ments. We have a small inter­nal com­mu­ni­ca­tions team so the abil­i­ty to pro­vide var­i­ous lev­els of edi­to­r­i­al con­trol is key,” says Amy Smith, Bluefin’s head of mar­ket­ing and pub­lic rela­tions.

To find out more about the Hub, e‑mail hub@pancentric.com or call 020 7099 6370
www.hub.pancentric.com
@thehubportal