The Employee Portal is Dead: Welcome to the Social Intranet. A New Platform for Increased Employee Engagement

Transcription

1 The Employee Portal is Dead: Welcome to the Social Intranet A New Platform for Increased Employee Engagement

2 Introduction Some habits, like eating right and exercising, are good for us. Some habits, like monitoring metrics and collaborating with colleagues, are great for business. Yet few companies have a single, effective information-sharing resource that employees want to visit again and again. Companies have a variety of reasons for their decisions about their company portal. Most businesses are reluctant to invest more time or more money on their legacy intranets. The intranet becomes the remains of a oncepainstaking effort by HR to improve service delivery. These first-generation intranets didn t fail because they were a bad idea, though. They were originally envisioned as a single, online destination to share workforce information. These intranets failed because HR and IT didn t create a compelling and valuable user experience. HR and IT used the portal to solve own needs. They made work easier for HR content providers, not the consumers of content. They created a site to manage information, content, and access to tools with the hope that employees and executives would visit and consume all that HR had created (or linked to). Then they hoped the consumers of information would regularly return for more. But during this Few companies have a single, effective information-sharing resource that employees want to visit again and again. time, HR and IT failed to anticipate how quickly information would become stale, links would become outdated, and processes would change. Growing dissatisfaction with corporate intranets led some businesses to go back to the process of employees directly contacting HR representatives. This change perpetuates HR s administrator role and limits their strategic role. Other companies still maintain their intranets to access certain talent management functions or static workplace information (e.g., opening a job requisition, accessing a performance review system or looking up benefit plan details). Yet, first-generation sites are doing little to decrease HR burdens and even less to increase the agility of the business. 2

3 The Workforce Transformation The year 2011 marked the first time more smartphones than PCs were sold. At the same time, individuals continue to embrace tablet computers and social media. These trends leave legacy intranets looking even more stale. Employees bring expectations of mobile and consumer websites and into the workplace. Along with this societal trend, HR and IT are being asked to do more than ever before to drive value. HR responsibilities have grown from process support of key areas such as recruiting, performance management, compensation management, succession planning and learning to process support, plus functional/technology support and organizational/business support. This requires HR and IT to work harder, smarter, and better to address and lead the transformation to greater business agility. process support RECRUITING PERFORMANCE MGMT COMPENSATION MGMT SUCCESSION PLANNING LEARNING informal learning improve time-toproductivity Apps & Widgets blogs social networks employee engagement collaboration Tools RECRUITING PERFORMANCE MGMT COMPENSATION MGMT SUCCESSION PLANNING LEARNING RSS Syndicator customer engagement wikis multimedia Groups & Forums The Expanding Influence of HR and IT social network analysis speed time-tomarketing 3

4 From Static Intranet to Personalized Employee Experience Today s cloud, mobile, and social technologies offer ways to expand the delivery of HR information to employees using a set of robust tools. These tools provide anytime, anywhere access to organizational information, knowledge, and expertise. All this is done with employee engagement in mind. This critical shift in focusing on end-user experience is allowing portals to have a dramatic impact on productivity, efficiency, and employee engagement. While a compelling employee experience is required, a social intranet doesn t have to be a multimedia extravaganza. It simply needs to serve each individual in a personalized and relevant way. This requires some built-in intelligence. That s exactly what Virgin America found out when it set its sights on providing a new employee experience for its more than 2,500 on-the-go pilots, flight attendants and team members. Case Study: How Virgin America Increased Collaboration through Improved Access Virgin America replaced its outdated, unsupported legacy intranet with a new mobile, social intranet. This new intranet provides a user experience consistent with the company s cutting-edge, friendly brand. Developed in just 6 weeks, the easy-to-use VX Connect website: Promotes cross-company collaboration through embedded Salesforce Chatter and Content Provides anytime, anywhere user access through responsive design. This enables web pages to recognize a user s device whether it s a PC, tablet or smartphone and adjust to the format. 4

5 Keeps sensitive information private while simplifying log-in processes with single sign-on (SSO). The intranet uses the company s existing SecureAuth SSO system The new Virgin America social intranet has increased an average site visit from 45 seconds to 6 minutes. The portal has also seen more than 50 percent user adoption even before completing formal user training. Today VX Connect helps more than 2,500 Virgin America employees stay connected with each other and the company as they travel. Within your organization, HR and IT can team to build a next-generation portal to deliver relevant content to specific users and user types. Within your organization, HR and IT can team to build a next-generation portal to deliver relevant content to specific users and user types. Your social intranet can contain integrated search functionality, providing instant access to relevant transactional data from across HR and business applications all with security and role-based permission managed through SSO. That way, when employees, managers or executives log in, the portal recognizes who they are, their role, location and function, which enables each employee to receive a highly personalized, consumergrade experience much like he or she is accustomed to when accessing a personal portal like a retirement planning website or an insurance provider s policy management page. 5

6 Why Personalize Your Social Intranet? For HR, personalization translates into fewer phone calls and s from employees and faster answers to questions. HR also gains the ability to make information more relevant. A more engaging social intranet reduces the cost of HR service delivery while improving service levels and employee satisfaction. In addition, today s social intranet technologies ease the burden of content management. They allow HR and other departments to create and curate content with easy-touse publishing tools. This process reduces the reliance on IT or outside vendors, which can slow updates and delay access to new applications, functionality and modules. Better content that is easier to access is what a global imaging solution manufacturer discovered after transforming its outdated intranet. 6

7 Making the Transition: One Size Does Not Fit All By following a few simple design principles, an organization can begin to effectively transform an existing, often stale, company intranet into a social intranet that employees make a habit of visiting: 1. Focus on people, not documents People work with people. The driver for their interaction may be to complete a document (for example), but documents should not be a primary design focus. Connect teams, identify experts and enable employees to easily share their interests. People will self-select into relevant teams. 2. Go to where people are Identify existing behaviors and create workflows around them. For example, if employees use the existing intranet to place food orders every day, create access points around that behavior to engage in others. Provide critical, but easy-to-use tools for collaboration. traditionally or through new gamification programs to reward the participation you want. 4. Make it a compelling experience Think about how your social intranet can make an employee s job easier. Make the site both easy to access and use. Help people quickly get to what they need to solve a problem. Provide advocacy and actively promote engagement using the power of crowds to own areas and regularly create new content. 5. Adapt and evolve Choose technologies that will evolve with your changing business needs. Treat the go-live date of your social intranet as the start of greater business efficiency, not the end of a project. Because your company is unique, your social intranet design should be, too. Yet your portal should maintain a clear purpose, have clear ownership, deliver clear value, and reflect continued collaboration between HR and IT. 3. Engage and reward Employees may feel they need permission to post content online in a public workspace. Seed behaviors by engaging employee experts. Use these advocates to post acceptable and useful content online, demonstrating productive decision making. Highlight successes and build on those behaviors. Offer incentives 7

8 Change Behaviors and Drive Agility Today s social intranets are quickly becoming more than simply efficient repositories of content. They are the nerve center of the employee experience. The social intranet is the jumping off point for everything from requesting personal time off to starting a performance review to finding an internal expert. They are also the place business leaders can access business and talent metrics to support better decision making. When properly designed and executed, a social intranet enables HR and IT to be more strategic, improve productivity and increase employee satisfaction. And with the right solution, your company can outmaneuver the competition. Using a cloud, social, and mobile platform allows employees to better share knowledge and drive agility. 8

9 About Appirio Appirio is a global services company that helps customers innovate and win in the new cloud economy. As the leader in enterprise crowdsourcing, we deliver unmatched customer value by combining the world s top talent with a unique cloud services platform. Our platform harnesses the power of one of the world s largest crowdsourcing communities, thousands of ready to deploy assets, and leading cloud, industry and technical experts, to help our customers drive competitive advantage. Appirio is a trusted partner to some of the world s largest brands, including Cardinal Health, Coca-Cola, ebay, Facebook, Georgia-Pacific, Home Depot, Moen, and Sony PlayStation. 9