Situation

A Fortune 250 global consumer products manufacturer was reinventing itself under the dynamic leadership of a new executive team.  The previous leadership had used a loose holding company management model which led to inefficiencies including redundant operations and many outdated paper-based systems. Further complicating the situation, the old model encouraged employees to identify with their brands, so there was no common identity, and the lack of common systems meant there was no platform to centrally disseminate news and information to employees across the company. Since employees identified with their brands rather than the company as a whole, they saw the corporation and its CEO as irrelevant to their work.

Communication Strategy

The leadership team implemented a more centralized management structure, establishing a new corporate communications function.   This team created internal strategies to align employees with the new corporate model: A core strategy was to create a company-wide intranet portal and make it a centralized, user-friendly platform for employee communications and business applications.  The new portal would:

• Create a common identity by leveraging a balance of corporate and business sector news
• Be the primary access point for frequently used company-wide business applications
• Expose employees to company news and other messaging as they visited it for expense reporting, travel planning and business information

The portal provided a regular stream of information that employees could opt into whenever they needed information. A monthly message to employees from the CEO, prominently positioned on the portal’s home page, conveyed his views on current topics and company strategy.

Implementation

The portal was built with broad a team representing all segments of the company.  This team provided content ideas and served as advocates for the portal within their business units.  A small core team developed the portal’s look and feel, managed editorial content and web publishing.

Global Navigation

The portal itself featured a home page with access to news and popular applications, along with prominent sections for the top business segments and Human Resources.  Global navigation provided two-click access to commonly needed tools and content.

Online Learning

Since the portal represented a radically different way of doing business, and included online team collaboration tools (document sharing, online project plans, etc.) which were a new innovation at that time, a “Help Center” offered extensive documentation for on-demand learning.  Monthly online training classes, led by a live instructor, were also offered to help employees take full advantage of the portal’s capabilities.

Communities

Functional teams and business units found communities, another innovation delivered by the portal, to be useful for sharing specialized information.  Extended team members, especially those outside the U.S., could then download it as needed.  The HR team used these features extensively to share process documents with its members.  When documents required editing by multiple team members, collaborative project tools allowed teams to share drafts and efficiently manage revisions without version control snafus.

Employee Communications

All company-wide messaging appeared on the portal.  This built an expectation among employees that they’d be informed whenever something important happened.  Very few mass emails were sent to employees.  Emails were typically reserved for legally mandated benefits communications or information relating to the portal itself.  Organization announcements were emailed to affected groups as headlines and a brief description and a link to the full announcement on a portal page.

Content and Promotion

New content areas were added periodically to meet evolving business needs.  As new content, feature upgrades and user experience enhancements were implemented, communication campaigns marketed the enhancements as upgrades to the portal and stressed messaging describing how employees could do more in less time by using the portal.

Feedback

Focus groups and regular feedback (invited through a prominent button on the portal’s home page) demonstrated that the intranet contributed greatly to developing a “one company” spirit among employees.  It was a crucial platform for the successful product ambassador programs.  The findings from usage tracking, focus group results and user testing also contributed to the periodic portal updates/upgrades.

Result

The portal, dubbed “My Standard,” launched first to U.S. employees.  The launch faced a hard deadline necessary to support the annual benefits enrollment period.  A global launch came three months later.

Intranet Usage

The portal immediately received 10 timesthe usage of the old corporate intranet.  Usage was tracked on a monthly basis across a range of metrics.  Usage grew steadily until 86 percent of employees accessed the portal regularly for company news, business applications and team collaboration.

CEO Leadership

Monthly corporate CEO messages were among the most-read features on the intranet.  Together with CEO town halls at various locations, they established a perception among employees that he was a dynamic leader whose strategies affected their work – and that their efforts were crucial to the success of those strategies.

Additional:

About Multilingual Content

For the global launch, a process was implemented to regularly provide a limited set of content in five additional languages – French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese (Simplified).  These languages were selected based on an analysis of the most frequently spoken languages within the company. Ongoing translated content included press releases, organization announcements and news releases. “Sub-sites” were launched as needed to focus on specialized content.

Sub-sites included Environmental Sustainability, Workplace Safety, Wellness, U.S. Benefits Enrollment, Six Sigma, Company Values and Employee Recognition (which featured a tool for identifying appropriate recognition options, including an online certificate).  A sub-site supporting the company’s global program to provide college scholarships for the children of employees appeared in 22 languages.

 

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