In the first two blogs of this series, we looked at how intranets have changed over the years, how the concept of the digital workplace has evolved (with the intranet at its heart) and what you need to take into consideration to successfully deploy an intranet to enable your digital workplace.
In this, our final blog of the series, we’ll help you understand how ready your organisation is to go ahead and deploy your intranet or digital workplace.
The size, shape and scope of your digital workplace team
Understanding where you are on your intranet and digital workplace journey means asking lots of questions about your organisation, your strategy and your current position.
One of the first things our clients ask at the very beginning of their journey is what will they need to make their intranet a success. For example:
- What tech?
- Which people?
- What resources?
- What else?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. There’s no one team size or profile needed to successfully deploy and maintain an intranet; there’s no single approach or methodology, nor one set of criteria.
There’s a spectrum of answers we could give to these questions. It really does depend on what you need, what you want, how much time you have, and how many people are involved or available.
Take the example on the right. This outlines a basic outline for how an intranet platform might be used.
The uses are fairly simple and it’s likely that the burden of the platform will fall on one person’s shoulders, or that the actions supporting the platform – such as content creation/curation or tech support – will be folded into people’s existing responsibilities.
At the other end of the complexity scale, you could have an all-encompassing digital workplace that might extend into the office, devices and room management or online meetings. This may require a dedicated team in place, which is likely to be in the region of three to ten people. It will scale, depending on the size of organisation. For organisations with maybe 1,000 people, the team’s going to be at the smaller end; for 100,000 people, across multiple office locations, there’s likely to be many people needed.
There may be some sort of virtual team as well, extending out into the organisation. This may include digital champions that are going to be able to provide the organisational context, and help you overcome the problem of distributed groups and functions across the business.
As covered in my previous blog, we’re going to need people that can manage and govern this platform, and make sure that the experience our employees have is engaging and exciting, with the right content accessible in the right places.
There may also be some more advanced responsibilities, such as analysing usage, acting on those insights, and scheduling content. A trend that we’ve seen become quite popular at organisations using Microsoft 365 is the role of product owner. This is somebody tasked with ensuring that all of these components of technology are coming together to create a cohesive employee experience.
The team is going to need a great leader, driving from the top down. The most successful customer implementations we’ve seen, where usage is high and the platform is rich with content, have a very strong employee-orientated intranet manager.
Starting your digital workplace conversation
Now we’re going to look at about how we turn this into something useful to help you on your journey to a successful and smooth-running intranet or digital workplace.
A series of conversations or workshops with your key stakeholders is a great place to start. Our hierarchy of intranet needs gives you a good visual representation of the building blocks that an organisation is going to need to consider in these conversations.
At the beginning of an engagement with a client, we tend to be facilitating discussions on some of these topics. We have found that a really useful way to facilitate these discussions is to go through this pyramid as an exercise. This might be in a single set of discussions or over a period of time.
What we’re aiming to deliver with this is an assessment of where your organisation is currently at and where you need to get to:
- What do you want to launch with?
- What does Day 1 looked like in your new platform?
- What does the future look like?
In these discussions, with you and your stakeholders around the table, we’ll ask you to consider these topics and set a score, between one and five, for your level of readiness in each.
A good example of this could be the Microsoft 365 platform. A score of one here could mean that Microsoft 365 licenses are available to most or some employees. A score of five could indicate that Microsoft 365 is a fundamental part of the organisational strategy, and that the services are being actively used by all employees.
This process helps organisations understand where they are today, what they want to launch with and what the scenario is going to look like tomorrow. It’s then much simpler to see the work that your organisation is going to do over a period of time to get to where you need to be, and to come back to these descriptions over time to track your progress.
Let the Fresh team help you begin your intranet journey
Hopefully we’ve given you a idea of how we take the considerations from our hierarchy of needs and turn them into actionable priorities for organisations.
Over the course of this series of blogs, I hope you’ve found some inspiration or reassurance as you begin your journey towards your digital workplace.
If you’d like us to help you kickstart your digital workplace strategy, you can sign up to a personal workshop to identify your organisation’s current state and plan the path you’ll take to deploy a successful intranet.