Is your intranet just a link farm nobody actually goes to for news? One that makes searching for information all but impossible?
If you’re looking for a better approach, listen to Kristin Hayek. Hayek manages internal communications for DaVita, a 65,000-teammate health care organization in Denver.
In this Ragan Training video, “Transform your site into a place where employees want to get companynews,” Hayek outlines how her organization transformed an internal “link farm” into a useful information portal that better informs employees.
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She also tells how DaVita communicated the changes in its intranet, The VillageWeb, to employees.
“We really wanted people to understand how different this was,” Hayek says.
Here are a few lessons DaVita shares:
1. Individualize the home page
DaVita needed a central repository for its information, but its old intranet had too many options that didn’t necessarily reflect employee use, Hayek says.
Worse yet, some departments had set up their own internal sites—among them clinical enterprises, human resources (known as people services), hospital services, and policies and procedures.
The new front page sought to amplify, not duplicate, information that’s available elsewhere. Tabs allow quick access to applications and personal links. The apps section caters to individuals’ work needs whether the employee is a patient-care technician or a social worker.
“It automatically loads the applications you go to the most,” Hayek says. “So, if you are a nurse, your nursing apps are going to be on the front page. If you are a teammate in an office, your office apps are going to be on the front page.”
Under “My Links,” employees can add and change the order of links. There is a list of “Daily News” headlines on the left, and information “you can use today” on the right.
At the top is a carousel that advertises such features as a compliance hotline, a video for low-cost marketing training and a DaVita cookbook (juices, smoothies and more). There’s even a link that reads, “Share your favorite joke in the Spirit of Our Core Value of FUN.”
2. Teach and promote with video
DaVita produced a short video that explained the new layout to employees, from the improved search engine to the personalized apps tab.
“It doesn’t have to be the most high-, wonderfully produced video you’ve ever seen,” Hayek says. “We just want to get the message out there in a simple and easy way so that your teammates and employees can get the information they need to do their job.”
Another video uses humor to promote the changes, with a special emphasis on improving the search function. In the video, a Siri-like voice continues to misunderstand an employee’s search commands, so the employee vows to create a new intranet with better search capabilities.
“It will make sense,” he says. “It will be intuitive.”
The video ends with the message, “The VillageWeb is getting an upgrade.
3. Design for mobile
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: If your employees spend half their lives on their smartphones, why not make your intranet mobile-friendly?
That’s what DaVita did. “You can access it anywhere on your phone,” Hayek says.
(This doesn’t include any apps with patient information, which is highly sensitive.)
4. Establish a governance committee
Are you overwhelmed with people demanding that you feature their pet project on the home page? Try forming a governance committee with representatives from communications, compliance, HR and other relevant departments, Hayek says.
That way you won’t have to fight alone when somebody gets the bright idea of linking to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s external website. (Weather, you see.) You can explain to your eager co-worker that the committee makes the rules.
“When you want to embed an outside website onto ours, I don’t even have to say no,” Hayek says, “because our governance committee will.”
There’s lots more to this session. Subscribe to Ragan Training.
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