Employee Onboarding Portal for a Global Pharmaceutical Group
A listed Italian pharmaceutical group with offices across multiple countries built a global intranet from scratch — including an employee onboarding portal active from day one — in 4 to 5 months: 759 unique users on the mood tracker and over 700 views per quarterly magazine issue.
3 key project figures
- 759 unique users interacted with the mood tracking tool on the homepage
- Over 700 views per issue of the quarterly internal digital magazine
- 4–5 months to deliver the entire platform, including custom graphic content
Introduction
Some companies come to intranet.ai with an intranet that needs refreshing. Others come with nothing at all. That was the case for a listed Italian pharmaceutical group with offices in several countries, which partnered with us in 2023 without a single platform worth the name — or with something so outdated it had to be rebuilt entirely from scratch. The contact came through an internal referral from someone at the company who had already heard about our work, and from there grew a project that continues to expand to this day.
What makes this case particularly interesting is not just the scale of the operation — an international group with a global site managed in English and a growing network of local sites in each country’s language — but a small detail that turned out to be one of the most appreciated features of the entire project: a dedicated onboarding portal, designed to welcome every new hire from their very first day, before they have a chance to get lost in a flood of questions to colleagues.
What the team worked on
- Global and local architecture — group site in English, flanked by local sites progressively activated country by country
- New Hire onboarding portal — a structured space active from day one, with a dedicated path and a manager-only section
- Manager-only section — content with dynamic targeting based on the user’s role
- Custom graphic content — headers, icons, and editorial guidelines created by the intranet.ai team
The problem: communicating as one group, without losing local identities
The group faced a challenge that goes beyond the simple absence of a digital tool: the need to communicate as a single entity, despite being made up of many different national realities, each with its own language and operational specifics. Leadership had a clear vision from the start: “we need to communicate as a group — we don’t want to be fragmented.” This meant avoiding the approach, common in many multinationals, of completely separate local intranets, while still giving each country its own space, in its own language, managed by local editors.
A second challenge concerned corporate culture. This is a listed organization with a highly formal communication profile: introducing even a simple emoji reaction system on the homepage was perceived internally as a small act of revolution. This meant designing a tool that could be modern and effective without feeling out of place for the organization’s identity.
Finally, a more technical challenge: despite having access to a broad catalogue of premium components, the internal communications team’s adoption of these tools has remained partial — partly because of a strong internal aesthetic sensibility that in some cases led to preferring custom solutions over the standard components proposed by the intranet.ai team.
Our solution: a clear architecture and a portal that welcomes from day one
The architecture chosen reflects the group’s communication philosophy exactly: a main group site, managed in English as the common language, flanked by a side panel that shows — based on the user account’s country — the content from their local site. An Italian employee sees content managed by the Italian editorial team in their own language; a colleague in another country sees theirs. Local sites are activated progressively, as each country becomes ready to run its own editorial team.
The most significant project delivered in this context is the New Hire onboarding portal. From day one, every person joining the company receives a welcome email with a direct link to this space, which opens with a short welcome video and a guided path explaining what onboarding truly means for the organization. The message the company wanted to convey was simple: before asking questions left and right, check here first.
Moving through the portal, new hires find information on benefits and local agreements, the ability to book spaces and meeting rooms, and the learning opportunities available for those who want to start growing from day one. A section reserved exclusively for managers activates automatically based on the user’s role through a dynamic content targeting system, so that even those joining with people management responsibilities find the right tools from the start.
On the engagement side, the team had to adapt every proposal to the client’s extremely formal culture. An ambitious project tied to the company’s centennial — involving a scavenger hunt and the sharing of personal photos of meaningful moments at the company — was shelved due to legal and compliance complexities around sharing images globally. What remained active was a simple daily mood tracking tool on the homepage, a sober emoji-based voting system that was nonetheless revolutionary by the company’s internal standards, alongside a quarterly digital magazine published via Microsoft Sway with a carefully crafted, almost journalistic layout.
The platform’s entire graphic identity — from headers to icons — was custom-built by the intranet.ai team, starting from stock images recolored to match the brand palette, accompanied by editorial guidelines covering color use, bold text, capitalization, and icons. This remains a living reference that the client uses to maintain visual consistency across content published by different teams in different countries.
Results: a tool that carved out space in a formal culture
The project took between four and five months — longer than average precisely because of the intensity of the graphic support provided and because of specific customizations developed on request. Among these: the “Welcome box” component, born as a dedicated development for this project and later adopted as a standard feature offered to all intranet.ai clients, and a widget showing the group’s live stock price.
The numbers tell a story of solid adoption for the tools that were actually activated:
- The daily mood tracking tool reached 759 unique users — a significant number given it is the only genuinely informal engagement tool available to employees
- The quarterly digital magazine, published with a magazine-style layout, exceeded 700 views per issue
- The onboarding portal, while lacking dedicated quantitative metrics collected to date, is the qualitatively strongest result of the project: it accompanies every new person from their very first contact with the company, reducing the informal question load on colleagues and immediately establishing the intranet as the reference point for working life at the organization
The people directory and intelligent intranet search complete an information ecosystem that grows with the organization — more active countries, more languages, more content to find quickly.
Next steps
The group is continuing to expand its network of local sites, with new countries being activated as their respective organizations become ready to manage a dedicated editorial team. A diversity and inclusion section is also in advanced design, including a self-assessment path and a candidacy form with status tracking — an engagement initiative designed to respect the organization’s formal culture without sacrificing active involvement.
The intelligent intranet search remains an open priority — currently under internal evaluation as a potential next investment — to make information access even faster within an architecture that, growing across countries and languages, increasingly needs tools that can quickly orient users.
Even in a highly formal organization, a well-designed tool — like an onboarding portal active from day one — can become the quiet reference point that guides every person through their journey at the company.
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