Apologies if you have heard the Machiavelli quote before but no apologies for its timeless truth. It seems especially true if you’re trying to change your intranet or digital workplace to be more efficient and effective for employees, perhaps using techniques like the Task Performance Indicator developed by Gerry McGovern and his Customer Carewords partnership.

A major theme of this year’s Customer Carewords partner gathering in Lisbon was how to move beyond just measuring or reporting on poor employee experience, to projects which resulted in real organisational change. Needless to say there were more questions than answers but here are three insights that emerged over the course of our 24 hour get together.

Connect with existing current measures of organisation performance

Usability and employees experience professionals who want to support change must connect their studies with organisation KPIs; so far so obvious. But with a focus on measuring ‘task completion’ and ‘employees time taken’, Task Performance Indicator projects can lose or understate the connection with employee behaviours that drive revenue or reduce costs.

To create lasting change, projects must draw an explicit link between leading indicators like task completion and increased employee performance, in areas like sales or service delivery – in other words more revenue or reduced costs.

Hypothesising explicit links between employees’ experience and organisation performance

Every usability project, like a Task Performance Indicator project, should hypothesise 3 to 5 links between the measures they are making and positive changes in employees performance.

An example hypotheses might be – “If employees find it easier to contact service engineers and make changes to service call schedules then customer complaints for this product area will fall”.

The project measures the tasks; contacting service engineers and changing service call schedules but links these explicitly to changes in the lagging indicator (customer complaints). Ideally, measures are published side by side in a dashboard showing success rates for the employees tasks alongside the rate of customer complaints.

Getting the right internal customers for you project

The continuation of Machiavelli’s quote is rather depressing if you are attempting to change things, but the germ of success is contained within it. It’s those “defenders” who you really need no matter how ‘lukewarm’ Niccolo found them. You’re looking for people who care about the lagging indicators, like customer complaints in our example, and who buy into the connection you have made between them and the tasks you are measuring. Not got any of those? Time to think again because without a motivated sponsor or ‘customer’ for your results then there won’t be any change.

I’ve been working with Gerry McGovern for 14 years, and he’s got a knack for highlighting organisational failure to change, and bringing the necessary tools to bear. Hear Gerry talk about how top organisations drive change in the digital workspace and how you can build task based intranets that delight employees and management. Full day workshop, London.

“Intranet Now should be the place where intranet and comms people start to solve breakdowns between technology and the things people actually need to do at work.”

That’s what I wrote before the first Intranet Now conference back in 2014, and this year it really felt like we were delivering on this pragmatic vision.

Previous conference themes have sporadically caught the mood of the room but this year’s theme ‘What works now’ was really reflected in the presentations and conversations during the day. People were hungry for tried and tested ideas and they got plenty of them! Rita Zonius walked us through a textbook implementation of enterprise social media; Natalie Smithson’s talk on content showed how best practice in content management could be applied to an intranet, and Amanda Broomhall gave us an antipodean take on task focused user research.

We did have talks about leading (but not quite bleeding) edge practice but these were grounded with actual examples. Chris McGrath had a live demo of how chatbots might help us with internal communications, featuring our own conference chatbot. Not mainstream yet but certainly working now.  

Emma Peagam and Anwen Gardner’s story about Barnardo’s intranet featured both Workplace (Facebook for work) and an intranet platform, and a stated ambition for intranet content to be public by default.

Intranet practitioners, the backbone of our conference, came up with the goods with really useful, honest and wise presentations but it is always good to have someone from outside our community on the programme, and Scott McArthur was the perfect choice adding a different angle for us after lunch.

We had very high quality help from our volunteers, many returning for the third or fourth time, so they know what to do and they did it very well. Registration was super smooth and everybody got a warm welcome, the ushering of speakers to the stage was very efficient.

The venue was a definite upgrade to deluxe as we gave everyone a better screen, better sound, and better lighting. They locked us into a party on the mezzanine but we struggled through it with the help of stupid quantities of champagne (again thrust upon us by the hotels pricing structure).

I failed to check the spelling of Dana Leeson’s name (previous Diamond Award winner) and Jenni Field’s name (panel member) on a slide so I’m sorry about that and I am also responsible for Prawngate and Aussiegate.

Mostly it did not even feel like work but a friendly meet-up with intranet friends, which is exactly how we wanted it to be from the start so that’s a result!

Blogs and reviews

Wedge’s wrap-up — What really happened at Intranet Now.

Martin White was the first to blog about our conference.

Ellen van Aken wrote about her Diamond Award win, and you can watch her video acceptance on our announcement.

Jenni Field wrote about our themes and takeaways.

Steve ‘star material’ Bynghall’s five takeaways.

Ross Tarbard’s insights and review (speaker, from the University of Leicester).

Sulaiman Durrani of EasySharePoint blogged about the experience.

Connor Ward’s highlights.

Lauren Taylor’s review.

Allan Tanner’s review (speaker, from Standard Life Aberdeen).

Power to the (intranet) people – Lisa Riemer’s review (speaker and sketchnoter).

Sarah Blackburn’s take aways (speaker from EasySharePoint)

Intranetizen podcast – The Intranetizens talk to Wedge about the conference. Listen now.

We’re pleased to have Gerry McGovern writing a guest post on the the need for diversity and collaboration in coding and design. This year we have worked hard to get more women on stage at Intranet Now and after we announce final speakers this week will will have more women on the agenda than men for the first time.

I saw my first intranet in 1997. It was not a pretty sight. I will never forget its “Feedback” icon. It was in the shape of a letterbox, from which suddenly a grabbing hand burst forth.

Being allowed to view the intranets and internal systems felt like being an investigator on Silence of the Lambs. ‘Ah, so this is where he tortures his victims.’ Because that’s what intranets and internal systems were, rubbish dumps and torture chambers. Many still are.

For years, I wondered why there was such a yawning divide between software designed for employees (enterprise software) and software designed for consumers. Why was so much enterprise software so utterly unusable, so incredibly badly designed?

A lack of commitment to delivering a quality employee experience by senior management is certainly the most important factor.

However, over the years, I noticed a pattern in the intranets that were striving to improve. There was nearly always a woman driving the change. Most often, this woman came from the Communications Department. She was tech-savvy and worked hard to build relationships with the IT Department.

Whenever I saw intranets that were delivering business value they were always collaborative efforts. It was IT working closely with Communications and HR and Support and Marketing and Sales. Working across divisions and boundaries and silos.

Traditional internal IT departments have been almost exclusively male dominated. Not simply male, but a very particular type of male. These hermetically sealed monocultures were like they were some sort of monastery where men could code in solitude, while sharing the occasional in-joke with their brothers. These monasteries of code delivered some of the worst software I have ever come across.

It is not wishful thinking but rather my constant experience that diverse teams deliver better software, deliver better customer and employee experiences. It is thus important to see the debate in Silicon Valley about the need for diversity as a critical one. The release of an internal document from a Google engineer challenging approaches to diversity within Google allows us to continue that debate.

The author of the Google piece makes the groundbreaking statement that there are undeniable differences between men and women. It is the differences we should celebrate, integrate and learn from. If we want software to work for the widest possible groups we must involve the widest possible groups in software development. A team with different genders, cultures and backgrounds delivers more usable, useful software.

One thing I noticed about the female champions of the employee experience is that they were often seen as troublemakers. Their desire to build bridges, encourage collaboration, put the employee first and help develop enterprise systems that actually worked, did not sit well with macho senior management culture. Men don’t like their monasteries being disturbed.

The old male world was: Listen to this leadership insight explaining how wonderful it is to work for us and how much we’d like your feedback telling us how great it is to work for us. And, by the way, we’ve just bought and installed a new sales management system. Pease learn how to use it by Monday latest.

Exclusive: Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google

http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320

Originally published 13th August 2017 on gerrymcgovern.com

Join us and celebrate Intranet Diversity at Intranet Now 5th October.  

Kurt Kragh Sørensen,  intranet/digital workplace consultant and owner of IntraTeam will talk at IntranetNow on October 5, 2017 about “What’s working – Results and insights from benchmarking 186 intranets  using IntraTeam’s digital workplace survey, showing how to get more value from your intranet and tools”.

IntraTeam has done surveys about intranets since 2001 and benchmarked intranet/digital workplaces since 2005. Now they have combined it all in an Intranet/Digital Workplace Self-Assessment Benchmark that has 299 questions divided into 19 categories:

• Strategy
• Communication
• Internal Social Media
• Integrations
• Governance
• Management Engagement & Support
• Mobile
• Apps
• Search
• Staff Directory

• Usability
• Navigation
• Analytics
• Language
• Content
• Collaboration
• HR
• Homepage
• ROI.

All participants get an overall score and a ‘spiderweb’ that compares each participant’s score in each category with the best in each category.

Highlights from the survey

193 mostly Danish organizations participated in the benchmark survey to date; 55 participants come from 9 other countries. The average organization have almost 12,000 employees. Some of the key findings are very revealing:

• The overall average benchmark score out of 100% was 21%
• The best scores were 55-60%
• Only 4% have a detailed intranet strategy (nearly 50% have no strategy at all)
• More than half resources (funding) for the intranet will remain unchanged this year; about 30% say they will see an increase in resources

• On average, the organizations have 1.1 full-time employees working in the intranet/digital workplace team per thousand.
• Almost half of the respondents use internal social media internally but only one in five of these say that it works well and one in seven say it doesn’t work at all.
• Nearly 50% have a mobile or responsive intranet (or app). One in five say these work well and one in seven say it doesn’t work at all. 93% of these have mobile access to internal news
• One third use microblogging e.g. Yammer and 69% of these use Yammer; 10% use Slack
• One in six have have an app for collaboration e.g. Yammer and one third of these say it works well. Almost nobody says it doesn’t work (3%)

• 63% use SharePoint or Office 365 in some shape or form
• 46% of the respondents say that their users see the intranet as their primary source for news and information
• 56% allow user commenting in news stories and four out of 10 of these say that it works well. Only 7% say it doesn’t work.
• Seven out of 10 claim to have intranets that deliver information that can be personalized by business unit, department and/or location. Three out of 10 of these say it works well.

105 of the 193 have had their intranet/digital workplace benchmarked in the self-assessment tool. “With a few exceptions, most have enjoyed answering the process answering the additional 200 questions” says Kurt Kragh Sørensen.

“The IntraTeam Self-Assessment Benchmark has a lot of very valuable and detailed questions. The assessment result gives you an insight into how your organization exploits the potential of a Digital Workplace,” says Thomas Maeder, Senior Digital Experience Manager, Swisscom.

The intranet/digital workplace survey/benchmark is available to organizations across the planet. If you wish to participate in the survey (the first part requires 10-20 minutes) then you will receive the survey results for free. If you participate in the full benchmark study (which requires 30-40 minutes), you get an overall score and the spider web graph (like the one below) showing how good you are in the 19 categories compared to the best in each category. Kurt recommends that you answer the benchmark with the whole team but then should be prepared to use more time depending on the time used for fruitful discussions. Two hours is a good estimate.

Example of the spiderweb that compares each participant’s score in each of the 19 categories.

More advanced reports and segmenting can be done by industry and organization size, for a fee. If you’d like to benchmark your intranet versus these organizations and all other participants  you can meet Kurt after his talk  at our World Cafe or write to Info@IntraTeam.dk or for visit the IntraTeam website.

Kurt will talk about the results and their meaning to digital teams at our conference in London, on the 5th of October.

During the breaks, not only will the exhibitors’ foyer be packed with intranet vendors, agencies, and experts, but you will also be able to peruse loads of intranet home pages. After a successful expo last year, Intra2 return with a brand new selection of intranets to show.

The Intra2 home page expo shows how other organisations lay out their intranet home pages, and you’ll see the functional priorities because Caroline and Mads of Intra2 have analysed each home page across four categories.

• Library: To get information
• News: To be updated
• Collaboration: To interact with colleagues
• Tools: To get things done.

Not only can you see other peoples hompages at the expo but you can participate by sharing your own home page. In return for sharing you receive a free analysis of your content and access to 6000+ screenshots of intranets and digital workplaces via Intra2. Contact Mads Richard on mads@intra2.com asap.

• Terms and conditions for contributing to the intranet expo
• Read more about home page analysis / benchmarking.

After a couple of years of the ‘intranets are dead’ refrain, there’s now a renaissance, as intranet managers either become part of new digital teams or work closely with digital workplace leaders.

The digital workplace is an important concept, and the intranet’s place within it is still emerging for many organisations. Those intranet and comms people who only consider the intranet to be a broadcast channel will find their budgets and headcounts cut, while those that embrace digital and consider the intranet to be a collaboration and productivity platform will see themselves elevated.

This journey, this digital transformation, is not easy for the organisation or the comms and intranet people who find their roles must change.

We are looking for people who share their journey. We want to recognise them and award one person the Intranet Now Diamond for their remarkable contribution to the intranet community.

Who has influenced your approach? Whose blog do you read? Who do you listen to on Twitter? Who makes the most sense on LinkedIn? Who do you love to see at events?

Our past winners include Martin White, Sam Marshall, James Robertson, and the Intranetizen crew (Dana Leeson, Luke Mepham, Jonathan Phillips, and Sharon O’Dea). They won because of their commitment to sharing their experiences with others. Their presence online helps shape our community, and supports the work people are doing in-house.

Who will you nominate? Does your intranet or digital person blog externally?

Simply tweet me on @BLamb or email me on Brian@intranetnow.co.uk – let me know your nomination reason and the online details of the person.

The award is mine and Wedge’s to give, but we take advice from our past winners – the Diamond alumni.

The winner will be announced on stage at the Intranet Now conference in London, 5^th October 2017.

EasySharePoint returns to sponsor our Intranet Now conference, and so we can look forward to hearing about their latest intranet deployments and client successes. It’s great to announce our first partner for 2017.

EasySharePoint is an award winning, market leading digital workspace for Office 365 and SharePoint. EasySharePoint intranets deliver exceptional communication functionality by including social features into the mobile ready platform, and make collaboration easy and effective.

We’ll put EasySharePoint on stage for just 9 minutes – that’s right, the majority of speakers present a fast-paced lightning talk. The challenge is to deliver insights in a way that audience members can take them back to the office to discuss and implement.

If something in their talk piques your interest, be sure to visit the EasySharePoint stand in the exhibition foyer, but don’t forget you’ll be able to connect during the afternoon’s World Café – structured small group discussions at your tables.

We can trust EasySharePoint to share their experience and expertise, just like everyone on stage – the agenda is coming together nicely, with something like 25 speakers, and it will be a great day of insight and conversation.

Remember we’ve got a brand new, massive venue this year. We can expect well over 200 participants!

Discounted early-bird tickets will be released in June via the Intranet Now newsletter. If you’d like to get the best-value ticket, please subscribe now.

I work online in a small city in Ireland, nowhere near my customers; I place incredible value on face-to-face meetings because I know that face-to-face builds relationship and relationship builds business. In this online, digital, social networked world, we need real-world shared experiences. Intranet Now from the start has been a conference about making connections and building relationships.

Partners make it all happen

We think we have the recipe about right for this and we need companies that want to build relationships with intranet, comms, collaboration, and IT people to sponsor our conference. We offer genuine engagement opportunities with our savvy crowd who want to hear from intelligent vendors and agencies that can avoid the sales pitch and showcase good, solid work. Last year, Intranet Now attendees voted for sponsor-speakers as their first and second favourite speakers — proving that our sponsors are respected and heard.

In-house speakers – get on stage

Martin White kicks off this anthology of intranet wisdom for managers with a short history of intranets. He reminds us that the term ‘intranet’ was coined by Steve Tallen from Amdahl back in the early ‘90s and many of the issues that emerged then are still relevant today.

Sharing information over networked computers was a core theme of Tom Peters’ book, Liberation Management, published in 1992 and intranet teams are still trying to foster knowledge sharing and collaboration. Oscar Berg’s chapter “Collaboration and the Intranet” brings us bang up to date as he describes the creation of social intranets and why they are of fundamental importance to the development of intranets.

These two chapters form a fine bridge to the rest of the collection as intranet managers and thinkers tackle all manner of practical topics.

Marcus Österberg provides a starter guide to using analytics to help manage your intranet; “The time when major design decisions were made based on subjective measures, like  someone’s personal taste, is behind us” and although intranet teams might have a different current experience everyone needs guidance on analytics as the flow of available data to intranet managers increases. Marcus points out it’s easy to get lost in the data without asking ‘what is all this for?’. Fredrik Wacka and my chapters attempt to show just how much practical use facts and data can be in constructing and improving your intranet.

More approaches to design follow. Want to design to maximise your intranet’s impact on the business? Ingrid Domingue’s gives teams a way to design their intranet considering impact rather than the possibilities and limitations of current technology. Maciej Plonka looks at UX techniques applied to intranets including guerilla research techniques that are accessible for teams of even one or two persons.  

Without content there would be nothing to analyse, measure, or improve. Joop Van Loon and Christian Lustig guide us through the different types before providing a practical model for managing the how, what, and why of intranet content. Everyone wants their content to be engaging and two chapters deal with this topic; a real practitioner’s perspective from Nils-Erik Gustafsson with lots of everyday useful ideas and a holistic theoretical approach to engagement from Dan Jones and Kevin Cody. Every so often managers are confronted with the prospect of moving content to a new platform. David Hobbs describes the dangers of seeing this as a purely mechanical IT process at the end of a project, and provides concrete methods for planning and managing content migration. Good content is no use if you can’t find it and Kristian Norling poses the question – “Is good intranet search actually possible?” at the start of his chapter. He comes to a positive conclusion but adds that it takes a lot of hard work and determination. Provided you have both, then his chapter takes you through the necessary techniques and steps to having a good search function.

Modern intranets have a diverse bunch of publishers and contributors – How do you keep control whilst fostering collaboration and innovation? Mark Morell provides a reasoned case for good governance and explains how to make that case to management. Intranets often begin as ‘projects’ with multiple functions involved and lots of historically unsolved problems like gaps in directory services. Stephan Schillerwein outlines a specific project approach that tackles these issues. Stakeholder management is often quoted as a skill intranet managers should have; Sara Redin takes a deeper dive into this topic in her chapter with specific tools and best practices for identifying and managing stakeholders.

Martin White closes his chapter saying “The core good practice principles (for intranets) were well established by the end of the 1990s”. This book comes as a timely summary of much good work that has been done putting those principles into practice.

Book details

Intranets – handbook for Intranet managers

Kristian Norling Publisher and Editor

Brian Lamb Editor

Chapter Authors

Martin White

Mark Morrell

Sara Redin

Ingrid Domingues

Fredrik Wackå

Stephan Schillerwein

Maciej Płonka

Kevin Cody & Dan Jones

Nils-Erik Gustafsson

Oscar Berg

Joep van Loon & Christiaan Lustig

David Hobbs

Sam Marshall

Marcus Österberg

License

Photo credit Some rights reserved by Image Catalog

Thoughts and conclusions from observing Google and website search across similar tasks

Over the last three months I have been testing the website of a very large multinational organisation. The test procedure was simple; starting on the organisation’s home page, people were given a task such as “Find the report on Acme services for 2016” and I then observed as they tried to solve ten such tasks. The testing used the Customer Carewords Task Performance Indicator methodology.  

For a variety of reasons, search was the dominant tactic for solving the tasks. In fact over 80% of people chose to start to solve each task using search. This meant that I ended up watching 835 individual searches during the testing.

Each test started on the website home page of the organisation and 70% of the searches I watched  were executed using website search, that is, the search engine provided by the organisation for searching their site. However, in the introduction to the testing participants were told that they could use external search engines to solve their tasks if they wanted to. Many people chose to do this and about 30% of the searches used Google (two participants used Bing to search; no other external engines were used). This made it possible to compare search behaviour between website search and Google.

People who used Google were much more likely to solve the tasks. The 30% of Google searchers accounted for 45% of task success, meaning you were about twice as likely to get the right answer if you relied on Google.

So much so obvious. With R&D spending of $8 billion in 2013, Google is pretty serious about delivering better search results. I won’t discuss the reasons why Google search is better (there are plenty of articles on that), instead I’m more concerned with the user experience of search and drawing some conclusions about how intranet search teams can improve user experience.

The first thing I observed was that user journeys using Google and website search followed the same basic pattern (with different outcomes of course).

Observing this pattern again and again, I drew one major, obvious conclusion, two connected conclusions and made one conceptual leap.

Major conclusion: Google has moulded search behaviour. People act like website search is the same as Google.

I observed no measurable differences in the way that people used Google versus their use of website search.  Of course I could not tell what they were thinking as they searched, and there was no opportunity to follow up participants with questions about any decisions they were making, but what I observed was a homogeneous user journey (above) and a very low level of use of any advanced search features presented by website search. It seems reasonable to push this thinking a little further and add two further conclusions.

Two connected conclusions

1 People expect relevance

In the tests people expected relevant results to appear at the very top of the search results. People searched a lot; they persisted with search, changing terms, adding words, to try to get results that would help them solve the task. On average, people executed more than twenty searches during each test session over an  hour. They did not (with very few exceptions) go beyond the first page of results. Google of course uses PageRank to count the number and quality of links to a page and determine a rough estimate of how relevant a page is to a search term. Using the power of the whole web PageRank means relevant results are pushed to the top. Website search (and enterprise search) are bounded by the organisation and do not have tools of similar effectiveness to PageRank to increase relevancy. In the testing, people needed to tune their own results using ‘advanced search’ or filters to increase relevancy. But people fully expected website search to deliver the same level of relevancy as Google – and filters, which would have helped, were used only a handful of times.

2 People expected precision from the first search

People commented a lot about the search results during testing

“Using the (website) search is impossible because the results often do not match what you want.”

“I used a lot of words in the search box – but only found an answer infrequently – could be better.”

Website search results brought the whole set of documents and pages with words from the search query. Results were comprehensive but lacking a meaningful hierarchy of relevance (in search literature this is called being good at recall and poor at precision and it’s a ubiquitous problem in enterprise search). Google, on the other hand, is dedicated to increasing search precision using at least 26 separate algorithms to provide accurate results. People expected website search to be like Google.

The conceptual leap

Employees using internal intranet search behave the same way as people using website search.

Improving intranet search user experience

Armed with this knowledge, what can be done to improve user experience of intranet search? An arms race with Google to engineer better relevance and precision seems like a lost cause; instead, teams should consider a number of ways that the search experience can be improved by leveraging the fact that users behave like their search is Google.

1 Present filters like Google  

Presenting filters and advanced search features straight away at the side of the search results page might seem like an obvious good practice, but most people ignored the filters presented on the right hand side of the results page of website search in my study. Better to obey users expectation that filters are presented like Google, immediately below the search box, not in the left column or, even worse, the right column.

You can bet that this design is the result of research on the use of filters and it’s reasonable to assume that this way of filtering will be the way users expect to do it.

2 Present suggestions and best bets like Google

If you spell something wrong in Google you are presented with a spelling suggestion.

Experiment with presenting explicit messages in this way (exactly this way) on the second and successive attempts at search.  This messaging feature could also be used for ‘best bets’ and suggestions based on easily available research on search logs.

3 Start with fewer results

Although strongly counterintuitive to many teams, this technique can drastically improve relevance. Instead of starting with search results that index everything on the site, remove some results from the initial results page.

This is the reverse of the usual process of enabling the user to turn on filters to restrict results (in my testing very few people used this feature), instead it starts by excluding whole sets of results (PDF, Excel or other document types). Crucially, you must allow users to add these  back in if they want (again use Google’s message format on successive pages to do this).

Here we are, copying Google (at least in intention if not method) and their Penguin algorithm to exclude results that do not meet their standards

4 Improve titles

Of course, improving actual content is fraught with difficulty as it involves changing the practices of everyone who writes anything that is indexed by the search engine. Google, of course, has the market to do this for them (if you don’t follow the published guidelines on title and title meta tag then don’t expect to get found); a little SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) knowledge is necessary to get anywhere on the web.  Achieving this kind of wholesale bottom-up change is very difficult, but by focussing purely on title and first lines of content you could get plenty of bangs for your bucks in improving both precision and relevance.

One thing is certain for intranet search; you will not out-perform Google, so if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.

This article was originally published on Linkedin Pulse.

Photo credit: Alan Stanton