Lisa and I had hoped to do something this year, but even if distancing restrictions lift, we recognise that people will make their own decisions about where they feel comfortable going. As Intranet Now is managed by just the two of us (with support from partners and the venue of course), we don’t feel confident enough this year, considering the workload, financing, and indoor distancing rules at the venue.

I mean, Lisa’s working long hours in her day job, while I never leave the house and am supporting some large projects in my job. We want to have the confidence and zeal needed to put on the near-first-class event you expect.

Real life and virtual

I launched Intranet Now back in 2015 to bring digital comms and intranet managers together in discussion; not something easily done via webinar or virtual event. So Intranet Now, itself, must be a real-life event, even if Lisa and I do some kind of online event to facilitate sharing and learning in the meantime.

There’s some appetite to do Intranet Now in the spring of 2021, but having a fallow year and trusting our usual autumn spot feels better.

Now and next year

We’ll confirm the 2021 date in a few months. It will either be the 1st or 8th of October 2021, and for some reason, we can’t decide which. Maybe our platinum partner will help us plump for a date!

Please sign up for our newsletter and join our LinkedIn Group so we can let you know about the date and theme – we’ll start looking for in-house practitioner speakers around March or April I imagine.

We’ll also invite you to any webinars or half-day virtual events we might produce! We’ve had interest for such from intranet platform vendors and comms agencies, so we’ll have a think.

Lisa and I are too busy to be sad just yet, but as the summer cools into autumn, I know we’re going to pine for the frenetic excitement and miss our partners, volunteers, and the community terribly. I know I shall frequently wake with the urge to buy nice shirts and critique PowerPoints.

We are really sorry to miss you this year, and we hope you’ll help us create the best experience next year when Intranet Now returns to London.

Yep yep, Lisa and I are (still) keen to do another conference, providing we can keep the ticket prices down by engaging sponsor-partners and can attract top speakers to the stage. Shouldn’t be a problem!

It’s too early to ask, but keep in mind that we love inviting in-house practioners to talk about their work – around all the topics that touch on comms, engagement, adoption, and the digital workplace.

Make sure you’re signed up to our mailing list to keep up-to-date with our ‘call for speakers’ and our ticket sales next year.

See all the photos from autumn 2019 – and the presentations; we had a busy, day of talks and discussions.

New urgent things have to be done on a daily basis. You respond to emails quickly because you don’t want to hold up anybody else’s work.

You know your employee communication channels are creaking, but you don’t have the time to revamp or replace them as that would become a whole project-thing.

You’d love to say ‘no’ to ‘please send this’ requests, but showing them how to publish things themselves would take longer than just doing it. So ‘just do it’ becomes your mantra as you eat lunch at your desk, because having a meeting about processes and quality would overwhelm your team — now’s not a good time, what with all the change already going on.

You can’t remember when you weren’t firefighting.

Is there a strategy?

Is there a comms strategy? Is there an intranet strategy (that isn’t four years old and doesn’t start with ‘launch new intranet’)? 

Being strategically minded is valued by most colleagues, but you have to get things done. The trick is to get the things that matter done, and have licence to avoid and delay the things that don’t truly makes things better.

But how do you, how does anyone, decide what matters? 

Personally, I struggle with judgement calls about other people’s priority tasks, and I can be swayed to deprioritise my own in order to be helpful. After all, this thing is important to them, and they’ve come to me for help. Are we not all about collaboration and meaningful progress…? But stop all that!

Everything that we do should move us, the project, or the organisation closer to defined goals. Goals that are genuinely shared and clearly communicated (for the most part), and part of the specific or overall strategy. Elsewise, what are you doing? Who are you working for?

You’re definitely an expert adviser, but are you strategically minded?

There’s a cost involved to setting strategy; best to be up-front about the time needed to develop and explain a strategic direction for your team, department, overall function, or main communication platforms. Good strategy is costly because it’s valuable. 

But who has time for the dull documents, the drawn-out approval processes, and the many, many meetings needed to set, agree, and understand ‘the strategy’?

Understandably this means that some would rather invest cold hard cash into strategy than time, because time and energy are so obviously undervalued and in such short supply. But a solid strategy – that’s a touchstone, that’s shared, understood, and oft discussed – directs our most valuable work. Solid strategy ensures we know what is in scope, what to delegate, what to say ‘no’ to.

Strategy is important to senior managers

The value of our comms and engagement work isn’t always immediately evident to stakeholders. They see ‘stuff happening’, hits, views, engagement scores et cetera, but they don’t directly link all that employee stuff to revenue, to costs, to new customer acquisition. Harsh, I know. 

We want leaders to be involved, and we expect them to have a wide view of the organisation, but if our digital and people work is to be valued we have to be able to express that value – the outcomes – clearly enough so they get discussed in the board room.

Align your tactics to your strategy

To create value for stakeholders, audiences, customers, users, and our colleagues, we need to align our tactics to the stated strategy.

Don’t let anyone call their action plan a ‘strategy’, and never let anyone dismiss your tactics as being low value. We need high-quality tactics to achieve our strategic goals.

All of this and more is going to be discussed at our Intranet Now conference on the 4^th of October, in London. You should come along – not only do we have some amazingly experienced tacticians and strategists from the Wellcome Trust, the AA, Willmott Dixon, Scottish Natural Heritage, the NHS, Standard Life Aberdeen, and Affinity Water, but we also build time into the day for your contributions and conversations.

Take a look at the agenda, the lovely venue, and get a high-value low-cost ticket.

Our Diamond award is for an individual who contributes to the intranet community – the community that’s a big Venn or Euler diagram that includes in-house practitioners, consultants, and vendors across internal communications, change, collaboration, information technology, design, and the whole digital workplace environment.

Everybody on the short and long lists works to improve things for others – we highly recommend that you connect with every one of the following stars on Linkedin and Twitter.

Short list

First name links to Linkedin, second name links to Twitter.

Andrew Wright — runs Worldwide Intranet Challenge as a free benchmarking service, and curates the two biggest LinkedIn groups in our area (Intranet and DW Professionals, and Digital Workplace and Intranet Employee Benchmarking).

Elisabeth Marsh — for her thought leadership within DWG, and recently her superb work on digital literacy. Long career in research and academia, adding to the formal knowledge we have.

Kurt Sorensen — has tirelessly run an intranet community in Denmark, with a genuine passion for the space, and conferences (with wide influence), intranet awards, and posting collections of articles.

Lau Andreason — for connecting people and ideas around intranets for more than a decade.

Paul Miller — a long history, but also books and a current podcast and expansion into America.

Richard Hare — someone who’s been bringing intranetters together for years and is generous with his time and knowledge.

Steve Bynghall and Chris Tubb — for thoughtful blogging and ideas which improve the professional standards of intranet managers.

We will announce the winner a few minutes before 5pm on the 4th of October at our Intranet Now conference.

Long list

While not up for the Diamond Award this year, each of the following people work to contribute to the community and are well worth connecting with and following.

First name links to Linkedin, second name links to Twitter.

Hanna Karppi — for her practical but creative approach to helping people get work done.

James Dellow — who blogs, presents and joins in the global community from Australia.

Jed Cawthorne — for his generosity with his time and knowledge and willingness to help. Has also acted on the CMSWire reader advisory board, judged digital workplace leaders awards.

Jesper Bylund — sharing his journey to create a good council intranet [and creating the intranet governance card game].

Larraine Solomon of Monster — for inspiring conversations on all aspects of internal communication, intranets, and employee engagement.

Mark Morrell — a role-model for the intranet community for his work at BT and his earlier blogging.

Matt Jukes — for considered counsel in this space but also for curating his digital jobs list.

Nigel Williams — his insight has helped many companies achieve intranet success.

Rita Zonius — for ESN Chat, blogging, conference work.

Suzie Robinson — started blogging as an intranet manager and has now become an intranet platform expert at ClearBox.

Tom Chippendale — a digital manager who shares company insights on his blog, which is a big deal.

Tony Stewart — for his thought leadership on how to link intranets with bots. He understands the challenges companies face when migrating from static intranets to ESNs on to cognitive bots.

Before you start @ing me, remember that Martin White, Sam Marshall, James Robertson, the Intranetizens, Brian Lamb, and Ellen van Aken have already won the Diamond award! And of course, the dozens of nominations that come in for me on a monthly basis are simply deleted.

We will announce the winner a few minutes before 5pm on the 4th of October at our Intranet Now conference. You should come!

Topics

Check out the agenda and see how we’re tackling the right problems. Topics include employee engagement, user-journeys, on-boarding, content targeting, governance, Yammer and other platforms – the whole gamut of digital workplace concerns really.

Experts

Everyone is an expert by experience of course, but we’ve got senior communicators from Kellogg and Monster showcasing their strategic and tactical work. Not to mention the odd infamous consultant, and digital-types from South Wales Police, Halfords, Standard Life, Scottish Government, and the FSB. All showing their real work. Intranet Now always champions practitioners, and always focuses on what works now.

Tech

While we’re sure Office 365 will be mentioned, Intranet Now is not all about Microsoft! There’s a real mix of tech solutions and platforms, and so you’ll get to steal ideas that you can implement your way within your digital workplace, regardless of your intranet platform.

Mixed learning

Intranet Now is built around lots of 9-minute lightning talks, but we break up the day to provide a different pace of learning and involvement.

The workshop will enable you to get deep into a topic of your choice, and the table talks let you share your concerns and experience with peers in an informal setting.

Plus nobody is an ‘attendee’, everyone is a participant! We invite you to share your ‘hot take’ during one of the SNAQ sessions.

The afternoon debate will help you reconsider the age-old question of just how to create a new intranet. From scratch? With a ready-to-go product?

Easy networking

Our conference, hand-crafted as it is by Lisa and me, is a particularly friendly affair. The table talks, roving mic, and the whole format of the day are designed to make it easier to have a chat with strangers, or acquaintances you’ve seen at previous events or online. There’s also space to step away to reflect if you need to!

And we’re providing stickers to help you break the ice – so don’t forget to choose your sticker (choice of five) when you arrive.

Semi-structured structure

We’ve built the day to faciliate conversation and reflection. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to contribute, challenge, and (re)consider. Take a look at our step-by-step guide to the day (great photos).

Tickets

Before you leap, take a look at the Team Rate tickets and think about bringing a colleague. Need your manager to be more onboard with your digital thinking? Immerse them at Intranet Now.

To make it easier to say ‘hello’ to someone, we encourage delegates to pop a sticker of their choice onto their fine selves.

I might suggest that the elemental nature of the stickers could mean that Air people (classic communicators!) could look out for fellow Airs, but I could just as easily suggest that Airs should seek out Earth people (classic builders!).

But it’s all just a bit of fun, and if you’re not sure if you’re an Air, Fire, Water, or Earth type, then you can plump for a Star.

Star — the combining force of all elements!

Air — pure thought, communication, and ideals.

Fire — action, creation, and momentum.

Water — empathic, in the flow, dedication.

Earth — stable, growth, calm.

All good qualities for anyone working with people and systems, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Check our agenda, filled with in-house comms and intranet practitioners, infamous digital workplace consultants, and expert technologists — and then grab your tickets.

There’s not long to go, and Lisa and I would love to welcome you (regardless of your sticker choice).