According to McKinsey, productivity levels increase by 20-25% when employees have access to social technologies like an intranet. However, the majority of companies are not making use of the full potential of these technologies.
We recently partnered with TDECU, a Texas-based credit union with 1,000+ employees, to launch a successful digital workplace designed for collaboration, communication and employee connection.
Read about our project below and learn how Unily’s intranet solution helped transform TDECU’s employee experience.
Maximize the value of your intranet
There is so much potential value that can come from having a successful intranet. Many enterprises are embarking on intranet modernization to transform the way their employees work together and help them succeed in a hybrid workplace. Gartner 2022 Predictions says, “digital workplace applications play a crucial role in enabling digital dexterity and shaping employee experience.” Productivity, efficiency and collaboration have been proven to increase when employees have access to a world-class intranet. However, building a successful intranet won’t just happen magically overnight. Planning, research, and teamwork need to go into making your platform the best it can be for your employees.
Knowing their old intranet was in desperate need of a refresh, TDECU came to Unily to transform it. It was outdated, not functional, and wasn’t providing the support its users really needed. Having just launched the updated platform, employees are infinitely happier.
Let’s take you on the Texas based credit union’s journey to building their new and improved intranet, in three steps:
#1. What do your employees need?
Before anything else, the first thing to do is figure out what you want to achieve with your intranet. It can serve many purposes, but to be truly successful in your own organization, it should cater specifically to your employees’ needs.
Create a roadmap from feedback
Collecting both qualitative and quantitative feedback from employees can help you discover what the main pain points are, which can provide the foundation for the design of the intranet. If you have an existing platform, looking at the engagement across the different areas on the platform can give you a good indication of how your employees are using it. If there are certain areas that aren’t receiving the traffic you want to see, this provides an opportunity for improvement. Exploring more than just metrics, Laura Whitley, VP of Communications at TDECU tells us about the start of their intranet refresh journey:
"We partnered with Cultivate to help us pin-point our major pain points and ensure we could solve them with a new digital workplace solution.”
Laura Whitley - VP of Communications at TDECU
After some digging, it became clear that one of the major problems the employees were faced with – particularly those that are member or customer facing – was not being able to access the documents and information that they needed. Being a credit union with various retail locations, many of the company’s employees deal directly with members and need to be able to bring up specific documents at the drop of a hat. They don’t have time to waste searching around to find what they need.
“We conducted employee listening sessions and shadowed our frontline teams to find out more about what they were using the intranet for, and what resources and access they needed."
Laura Whitley - VP of Communications at TDECU
Whitley explains how the previous platform wasn’t providing employees the access they needed: “It was impacting not only the employee experience, but it was also creating a poor member experience.” To better facilitate frontline employees to provide the best support and service for their customers, the intranet needed a facelift.
Encourage employee involvement from the start
Getting employee input early on is valuable for more than simply providing guidance and a jumping off point for an intranet transformation. Making them aware of the project and keeping them involved will create a sense of ownership and pique their interest before it’s even been launched. For TDECU, the comms team publicized the upcoming intranet through newsletters and updates on the old intranet as soon as they launched the project. They were also keen to get input from employees.
"We engaged early on with employees in terms of selection of the actual logo and name for the new intranet. We wanted to make it a fun, collaborative process where everyone could get involved."