CorpComms Magazine

Once the dowdier poor relation of the external corporate website, early intranets were primitive. With limited functionality, the first generation of intranet sites largely amounted to bulletin boards and messenger functions. And all this hosted on a site that had the visual elegance of an early eighties version of Pac-Man.

But things are changing. Intranets are now viewed as an increasingly helpful internal communications tool as more companies find innovative ways to help bolster employee morale and troubleshoot peer to peer. Phil Morton, operations director at digital agency Freestyle Interactive, says companies are starting to view intranets more strategically but that developments still tend to lag the pace of the public site. 'Websites in general have moved away from being organisation-centric to being user centric but it is still the case that public websites tends to move with the users' needs quicker than intranets,' he says.

Global insurance group Aviva has already gone to ambitious lengths to serve its users. Among other features, its intranet houses an active employee forum where staff post and respond to queries. Group communications manager Adam Hibbert says getting the site off the ground was the hardest part. 'Establishing it in a culture that is not used to it was a bit hairy but it empowers employees and the company at the same time, by allowing us to exploit peer to peer communications,' he says.

The site allows internal communications to report to the executive committee on the hot topics of the week, like a kind of internal 'trending'. 'For us it's about cutting down the vertical distance in the company,' Hibbert explains. 'I think the distance between the executive world and the customer facing world is shrinking.'

But is there a danger of giving employees too much room to vent on an intranet? Everyone has seen herd mentality in action on Twitter. If a few mischievous users can badger a giant corporation like Gap into a meekly submissive U-turn on its corporate logo, is there not arguably a chance that a few well-placed employees could lead a mutinous campaign against a new corporate initiative? The widespread belief is no; a modern intranet fosters a forum mentality coupled with accountability. 'We moderate and have forum guidelines but people in the forums normally police them. We get involved every now and then; if people report then we will moderate but moderation doesn't take as much time as it used to,' says Hibbert.

Hibbert says he is not worried about internal revolts or leaks and points to some notable success stories where internal discussions helped reduce the likelihood of employees picking up the phone and sounding off to a journalist. When the insurer moved one of its departments from a final salary pension to a defined contribution pension last year, the discussions took place on the company's intranet. 'The conversations we had on that were very useful. There was a lot of wide ranging opinion and frustration but it helped create a healthier dialogue about where pensions were going,' he says.

'We also had an instance of an employee who had been involved in some redundancy issues. They were contacted by a journalist and asked if they wanted to speak and the employee said they didn't - everything that needed to be discussed had already been discussed internally - people have to have these conversations somewhere so it's good they are able to have them inside the company.'

Hibbert did concede that there have been some unforeseen outcomes to its intranet, not all of which had been entirely positive. 'We had a case recently where a customer wrote a negative blog post and one of our employees posted a link to the post on the internal forum. In that instance our own employees drove the customer's blog to the top of the search rankings because they wanted to know what the problem was.'

Aviva's lively intranet may cause the team the occasional headache but the team can console itself with the fact that at least people are using it. Fiona Joyce, a partner at Blue Rubicon, notes that a lack of engagement on issues internally is often the biggest stumbling block.

'A cutting edge intranet allows you to know who your most engaged and least engaged groups (as well as individuals) are in a company, which issues to engage different sorts of employees and the best way to execute internal communications campaigns (for example, time of day or format),' she explains. 'But the inevitable response of companies to measurement is shock at the low engagement rates. Digital hasn't created low engagement rates - it has just allowed us to appreciate more fully how complex and difficult internal communications can be.'

Joyce recommends a variety of channels to promote communications with staff including emails, executive blogs, comments and social networking features.

'It's well known that different individuals prefer different channels and some content suits certain channels better. For instance email tends to work for signposting timely information, video is much more expensive to do well, but is particularly important for communicating nuances. For instance, if a chief executive is communicating a sensitive issue such as corporate restructuring then a video will show that they care about the concerns and fears of their staff much better than other alternatives,' she says.

Allowing some kind of functionality that allows employees to be 'socialised' internally is also recommended. 'It means that employees can link to each other. Employees have their own existing internal channels for communicating, and strengthening these has a great potential to improve the effectiveness of organisations. This shouldn't just be communicating information, but also improving processes and innovation so that the business works more,' adds Joyce.

Companies can also make use of 'gamification'. For the uninitiated, gamification in a workplace environment is the trend for rewarding employees for participating in business initiatives through status systems such as points or badges. 'Rewarding employees for participation in initiatives, is extremely effective, even if the prizes are just psychological through recognition,' Joyce says.

Joyce thinks the best companies are using intranets in a very similar way to their customer relationship management systems. 'Starbucks and Dell use the Salesforce.com internal communications tools to encourage collaboration among large groups of employees and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office's purpose-built intranet for communicators working on the Olympics across three government departments - allows people to join up by interests and share experiences. As with many areas of communication if internal communications does not adopt social media techniques and develop internal systems that take advantage of these opportunities we will lose out on a powerful two way engagement tool with instant metrics,' she adds.

Management support

The difficulty for many companies comes in demonstrating the effectiveness of a project of this nature. 'Getting management support can be tough, you have to start off with an objective, whether it be targets, efficiencies or cost,' Morton concedes. 'Some people suggest engagement as a good metric for judging effectiveness but I'm not so sure. Is a system more valuable because more people are engaging? Efficiency is a better metric.'

Aviva's site certainly gets a respectable hit rate, with anything from 20,000 to 25,000 visitors per month but the team place a heavy emphasis on the troubleshooting functionality of the site when it comes to performance metrics. 'We have different metrics but one we are using at the moment involves taking a random set of queries and analysing the time it takes for someone to respond with a solution. The average response time is around 11 minutes,' Hibbert explains.

Collaboration is the buzzword at one of Freestyle's clients. It used its intranet to help reduce the number of full time photographers it employs from 14 to four by smarter deployment of the company's in house snappers. 'For example, If the photographer is in Brazil - someone internally can ask for a specific photograph of one of the company's operations or projects, the photographer then goes out and uploads the images onto the intranet allowing people to comment on the images or make suggestions. Demonstrating return on investment is easy in this instance because it's organisation driven, end user driven and also more efficient.'

While the majority of present day intranets leave a lot to desired, Morton thinks the intranet may be a redundant concept in the future. 'As an end user I don't think people will differentiate between intranets and extranets in years to come. Companies will need to make it easier for employees to find the information they need, whether it be from peers, external sites or the wherever.'

Having said that, intranets of some kind will always be required to provide a basic pragmatic human resources function, Morton concedes. 'I doubt I'll be booking my holiday request over Twitter any time soon.'

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