Emma Morrison: It’s essential to involve your staff in your intranet redesign at each step of the way, and keep them posted as you make progress.

In the following speakers' interview we are happy to present the answers of Emma Morrison - an innovative, results-driven, strategic digital communications and social media manager at The Hyde Group. Emma is passionate about digital transformation, user-centred design, digital employee experience and creating engaging content that inspires and influences others. She manages a team of six experienced staff to deliver best practice digital solutions and integrated marketing campaigns across all internal, external and social channels. On the 17th September at IOM SUMMIT she will be holding in our practice panel a case study on "Redesigning the Internal Communications at The Hyde Group". In our interview she outlines some of her learnings.

(1) Emma - you will join the discussion at IOM SUMMIT as a speaker. What are the three keywords that we can mark your talk with?

Engage, Collaborate, Connect

(2) What has been the background to your project and what have been the challenges to tackle at The Hyde Group?

The Hyde Group  had a fragmented and old fashioned intranet with multiple sites, and different unresponsive designs. In addition, it was one-way broadcast with no platform for interaction. Thirdly we had no content hierarchy, so staff complained of information overload, irrelevant information and missing what is really important. The whole set-up was completely unfit for the workforce of the future who expect timely, open, transparent, two-way conversations.

(3) Talking about the employee engagement issues - what are the key elements of a digital workplace / intranet approach that can help to work on this?

Our new intranet,  Hyve,  is modern, flexible and interactive. Staff can easily stay up to date with key business priorities, and our new integrated social platform Workplace by Facebook means that everyone has an equal voice, and a place  to share their news and views or give feedback.

(4) So - it’s not the way the digital workplace is designed but the way of designing the digital workplace in common with the employees?

Collaboration between Communications, HR and IT has been at the heart of our project, with input from our staff at every step of the way. Before we kicked off the redesign we held workshops around the business where staff could share their wants, needs and frustrations with us, and we kept staff in the loop as we progressed. We have also acted on staff feedback since launch, and continue to make small changes to the navigation and layout to improve the employee experience. We also recruited and launched a network of brilliant Digital Ambassadors who have been our eyes, ears and advocates and helped us raise awareness and give early warning of any issues.

(5) What is the key learning from conducting this re-designing process in a participatory manner?

It’s essential to involve your staff in your intranet redesign at each step of the way, and keep them posted as you make progress. Of course you will never meet the needs of every single person, but you’ll do a much better job if you take the time to find out how different teams across the business work, and what their daily frustrations are. We worked hard to develop a clear purpose for each area of our intranet to ensure staff can find what they need easily and intuitively and to reduce information overload. Our new intranet fostered a sea change in terms of  collaboration, communication and engagement across the business, and it continues to develop and grow as we respond to business feedback and identify improvements. Setting up a network of Digital Ambassadors has been very positive and has increased the reach and influence of our small team.

(6) What are your expectation for coming to the IOM SUMMIT - and what are the topics that attendees can approach you?

I’m excited to hear more about what other are doing to engage and connect their employees via the digital workplace.