The Problem: plenty of structure, little engagement
The existing intranet, however functional, lacked something capable of bringing people back to the platform for reasons other than routine operational browsing.
There were no tools designed to make employees, spread across a huge number of countries and cultures, feel like they belonged to a single organisation with shared values. The only attempts to gather feedback or opinions were generic forms, with no visual or strategic integration with the rest of the platform.
Adding to the picture, managing the entire intranet for a company with over 500 employees worldwide had to introduce changes that were not too drastic for end users, who were used to a certain visual and structural continuity.
A more technical challenge concerned the client’s wish to keep the same name that identified the old intranet on the new platform. An operation that proved more technically complex than expected, because SharePoint does not allow a site name already in use to be freed up immediately.
Home page of the intranet.ai SharePoint intranet
Our Solution: reinterpret, not just install
The project was built around the entire intranet.ai component catalogue, including intelligent search, one of the first add-ons activated, along with content analytics and read-acknowledgement tools.
But the real innovative value of the project lies in the creative reinterpretation of the various components to meet the client’s specific needs.
A telling example concerns the representation of the company’s international presence. The component normally used to show office locations, with precise address and geographic coordinates, was bent to tell the story of the company’s presence in dozens of different markets, some of which are not physical offices in the strict sense, but operational markets with local partnerships.
Using mainly the component’s description field, the team avoided building an endless page made of collapsible sections, the problem that afflicted the old intranet, delivering instead a clear, navigable map of markets, from Ghana to Pakistan, passing through numerous other African countries.
The intranet.ai Company Locations feature
A second example of reinterpretation concerned the presentation of the leadership team. Instead of the component designed specifically for this purpose, which offers little room for text, a component normally dedicated to company initiatives was used, precisely to let each member of the leadership team write a personal message, not just their name and role. A detail that turned a simple gallery of faces into a more human, constantly evolving space.
The most original part of the project, however, concerns the section dedicated to company values, elevated from the outset to the first level of the navigation menu, instead of being hidden as a secondary subpage. Within this space, three different components were reinterpreted:
The image slider was turned into a kind of flip-through book, with the pages of the official company-values document turned into scrollable images, far more engaging than simply downloading a PDF.
Mood was used to propose a different question each week about which company value employees felt closest to, gathering, already in the first week, participation equal to about half of the workforce.
The company bulletin board was reinterpreted as a peer-nomination system. Each employee could report a colleague considered particularly representative of one of the thirty company values defined by the organisation, with a scoring system that would reward those receiving the most nominations with recognition also visible on their personal profile.
One last distinctive element concerns the management of events on the home page, with two separate calendars: one dedicated to the more institutional company events (such as town halls), and a second dedicated specifically to the national holidays of the various countries where the company operates (complete with identifying flags for each nation). A choice driven by the strong cultural sensitivity required by an organisation with such a widespread geographic presence.
Calendar for company events on the intranet
Calendar for national holidays on the intranet
Regarding the wish to keep the platform name unchanged, the solution was found by migrating the old platform to a temporary site to free up the original name. The operation caused a brief instability of the platform, but it was resolved optimally within a few days.
The Results: real engagement, with a few bumps along the way
The adoption signals recorded in the first weeks after go-live are very encouraging.
The weekly tool dedicated to company values gathered, in its very first week of activation, participation equal to about 50% of the workforce, a remarkable result for a completely new tool, never tried before on this platform.
The client showed enthusiasm for the project from the very first days, collaborating actively and enabling the delivery of a new intranet that met all the needs and ideas discussed in the initial phase.
What’s Next?
Considering the complexity and scale of the project, our team is committed to ongoing support, even after the platform’s launch, which in the coming months will be enriched with other components already available in the intranet.ai catalogue.
The option also remains open to activate, in the future, a peer-nomination system tied to company values, as well as exploring even more advanced intelligent search solutions.
When a client already arrives with an established intranet, the real opportunity is finding the courage to reinterpret existing tools to tell something that previously had no voice.
Already have an intranet but feel it’s missing the engagement and creativity element? Book a demo and discover how intranet.ai can help you reinterpret the tools you already know.