An international digital finance company turned its existing SharePoint intranet into an active employee engagement intranet using intranet.ai — achieving 50% employee participation in the company-values tool within the very first week of launch.
3 key project figures
- 500+ employees across the Middle East, Africa, and beyond
- 50% participation in the weekly company-values tool during its first week
- 1 person manages the entire platform globally
Introduction
It is uncommon to work with a client that already has a functioning intranet — established content, organized tags, and a mature communication structure already in place. That was precisely the situation with an international company operating in digital finance, headquartered in Athens, with a direct operational presence across numerous countries in the Middle East and Africa — from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to Bahrain and several African nations, plus more remote locations such as Indonesia and Uzbekistan.
When this company reached out to intranet.ai, they were not starting from scratch. They had a working SharePoint platform with their own news, tags, and pages. What they were looking for was a revamp: an initiative that could bring new visual energy to the platform and — most importantly — introduce something that had been entirely absent until then: employee engagement.
The only previous attempt in this direction had been a few Google Forms scattered across pages: understandable, but far from a real engagement strategy.
The problem: plenty of structure, no spark
The existing intranet, however functional, lacked something that would bring employees back to the platform for reasons beyond routine operational lookups. There were no tools designed to give employees — spread across dozens of countries and cultures — a sense of belonging to a single organization with shared values.
Adding to the challenge: the entire intranet for a company of 500+ global employees was managed by a single person. An enormous responsibility, which made every design decision consequential. On one side, the project lead brought tremendous enthusiasm and her own ideas; on the other, she had to manage pressure from her managers and the concern of introducing changes too disruptive for end users accustomed to a certain visual and structural continuity.
The solution: reinterpret, don’t just install
The project was built on intranet.ai’s Diamond plan, which provides access to the full component library — including intelligent intranet search, one of the first add-ons activated, as well as analytics and content acknowledgement tools.
The real value, however, was not in installing standard components but in creatively reinterpreting them to meet the client’s specific needs.
International presence on a navigable map
The component normally used to display office locations was repurposed to communicate the company’s presence across dozens of markets — some of which are not physical offices in the traditional sense, but operational markets with local partnerships. By leveraging primarily the component’s description field, the team produced a clean, navigable market map spanning from Ghana to Pakistan, eliminating the endless accordion-section page that had plagued the old intranet.
A leadership team with a human voice
Instead of the standard leadership team component — which offers limited space for text — the team used a component normally dedicated to key company initiatives. This allowed each member of the leadership team to write a personal message, not just a name and title. A face gallery transformed into a living, human space.
Company values as an interactive experience
The most original element of the project is the company-values section, elevated to the top level of the navigation menu rather than buried as a secondary subpage. Three separate components were reinterpreted within it:
- An image slider turned into a page-by-page flipbook, with the official company-values document transformed into scrollable images — far more engaging than a downloadable PDF.
- A daily mood tool repurposed to pose a different question each week about which company value employees felt most connected to. Result: 50% of the workforce participated in the very first week.
- A bulletin board reimagined as a peer-nomination system: employees could nominate colleagues who best embodied one of the organization’s thirty defined values, with a scoring system that displayed recognition on the nominee’s profile. The feature was fully configured but temporarily placed on hold pending a management review.
A dual multicultural calendar
The homepage events section was structured into two separate calendars: one for institutional events (town halls, etc.) and one dedicated specifically to national holidays for each country where the company operates, with country flags as visual identifiers. A deliberate choice, driven by the deep cultural sensitivity required by an organization with such broad geographic reach.
Results
Early adoption signals, measured one week after launch, are encouraging:
- The weekly company-values tool achieved approximately 50% employee participation in its very first week — a remarkable result for a tool that had never existed on this platform before.
- The people directory and department areas are live and natively accessible from the platform.
The journey was not without friction. The project lead had expected the intelligent search to behave like a conversational assistant capable of answering free-form questions, while the tool is designed to query static content in documents, texts, and pages. A misalignment that, rather than being a problem, surfaced a concrete future development opportunity. On the technical side, retaining the original intranet’s name required a SharePoint migration managed internally by the client’s IT team, causing a brief instability resolved within a few days.
Next steps
- Ongoing support contract (identified as an immediate priority) for a platform managed by a single administrator
- Activation of additional Diamond components not yet included in the initial project scope
- Reassessment of the peer-nomination system tied to company values, once the management review is complete
- Advanced intelligent search, responding to the conversational expectations that emerged during early use
When a client already has an established intranet, the real opportunity is not to start over — it’s finding the confidence to reinterpret existing tools to give voice to something that wasn’t being said before.
Already have an intranet but feel it’s missing the engagement layer? Book a demo and discover how intranet.ai can help you reimagine the tools you already know.