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.

One view IC reporting = Actionable insights, learn how to better measure your IC channels, audience and content performance.

With the internal communicators channel toolkit ever expanding this interactive session will look at the tools currently available to internal communicators and address the challenge of how to gain maximum insight from a multi-channel communication approach.

This workshop continues the “designing for engagement” theme of the morning’s presentation.

We’ll begin by expanding on one of the examples we saw in the morning covering the entire process from research, workshops, prioritisation, sketching, wire-framing, prototyping through to configuration and build.

Armed with a better understanding of the full process you’ll now be ready to tackle your own intranet challenges. However this is a workshop so we should do some work right? Let’s leverage the collective expertise of the workshop attendees to refresh your intranet. We will apply one of the techniques described – sketching – to one or more attendees’ intranet challenges.

For a community to really thrive it should be open and accessible to every user. How does your site stack up?

Have you been tasked with increasing the accessibility of your digital workplace? Do you feel overwhelmed by the range of tools available? Do you want to make your intranet more inclusive?

Whatever your platform, Billy and Andrew show you how to take some steps to assess the state of your intranet site using free tools available, and what to do next when you have that information. They’ll also be sharing some key learnings of some of the mistakes we made, so you don’t have to, and how to help you prioritise making your intranet accessible to everyone.

Join us for a live problem solving exercise – bring your problems and we’ll pick one (or two) to solve during the session.

Intranet managers can struggle to justify their budgets beyond launch day. We’ll look at how to put problems and their resolution central to your ROI thinking. How to combine multiple problems to make the case for a rebuild project, or strategies to get a rolling budget for evolving changes that can be easier to manage and give you the benefit of keeping your functionality fresh.

Sarah will start off by examining the problem and the ways that you could measure the success of solving it. As a group we’ll look at the business benefit that solving would bring.

We’ll walk you through the steps to success including the technology aspects; the people or business change process and crucially the communications to make this happen.

Finally, take a crash course in success measurements – how to make your results feed into the next part of your cycle.

Without proper requirements gathering, intranets become bloated with unnecessary features and too complex to use the tools that users really need.

Join Twine’s Julian Morency in a hands-on session to help you get to grips with requirements gathering and rapid prototyping. With the requirements gathered in the workshop, Julian and the team will be spending the remainder of the day creating an interactive prototype.

One of the biggest challenges with developing or procuring an intranet is knowing what it actually needs to do. Good requirements gathering is the first step to creating an intranet that is simple, whilst remaining useful.

With 10 years of experience planning web projects, Julian will show you his favourite techniques. Carrying out an interactive requirements gathering exercise, together you’ll design an elegant and intelligent intranet for the Intranet Now conference.

We won’t be throwing these post-it notes in the bin. After the session, you can join the Twine team in developing these ideas into an interactive prototype that will be viewable online as it progresses.

Very few intranet managers choose SharePoint for their intranet. Most of them inherit it. Seen by many as a ‘black box’, it takes a lot to get your head around it and it’s never clear what you can and can’t do with it.

This opaqueness is compounded by the often disjointed user interface and the simple fact that SharePoint is not itself an intranet. However, it’s important to recognise that SharePoint is an immensely powerful platform with lots of building blocks from which you can craft some very clever functionalities, time-saving tools, and elegant user experiences. As it integrates ever more closely with the Office 365 suite of tools, the possibilities are expanding further still.

In this workshop we’ll focus on things that can be done fairly simply and without breaking the bank. We’ll show you concepts that will help you generate practical ideas for your own intranet.

We will  also discuss some of the new possibilities with SharePoint – like how you can integrate Office Graph, Skype for Business, and Yammer into your SharePoint intranet.

We’ll be on hand to answer your “how to” and “Can Sharepoint do this” questions.

No bad omens here, but our intranet strategy workshop is all set for June, yet the early-bird ticket offer ends this Friday.

The workshop, led by Chris Tubb and Steve Bynghall, will take you through five steps to formulate a working intranet strategy. The full-day workshop is an opportunity to work alongside other practitioners and literally craft or polish your intranet strategy in a structured manner.

Whenever I’ve asked conference audiences or organisations about their intranet strategy, responses have been muted – to say the least. Many people are so busy getting through the day-to-day tasks and the constant ‘user requests’ that it’s easy to neglect the overarching purposes of the intranet and the business objectives that are supposed to shape it.

A great deal can be done each day, but what progress is made over the quarter?

A well-communicated and implemented strategy hones your work and the way the intranet supports people’s needs.

Chris and Steve’s framework gives you an approach to building a strategy that fits your organisation’s needs and culture – rather than ‘copy n pasting’ from an ill-fitting template.

A day away from the office to delve deeply into the pressures you and your intranet face allows for clear thinking and long-term goal setting. The day is, frankly, even more valuable if you bring a colleague – the best insights can happen during conversation. This is why we have a Team Rate ticke.

I appreciate that managing an intranet is no easy matter, but in order to lead the intranet and its use it is necessary to have a strategic view, and a written and communicated strategy will engage your stakeholders and hopefully gain their commitment.

Don’t be without a decent strategy any longer – get your best-priced ticket before the stroke of midnight on Friday the 13th and avoid the horror of an undervalued intranet.