After research revealed that nearly half of its employees felt “frustrated” or “ineffective” on the job, Visa redesigned its intranet with the goal of delivering an “employee-first” experience that would reduce frustration, improve productivity and become Visa’s “cultural heart.” The results have earned Visa first place in the “Design” category of Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards.

The intranet’s problems included poor organization that did not reflect the real-world tasks employees needed to complete every day, along with unnecessary complexity and a tired design. Visa surveyed employees to identify their most common tasks, using the information to create numerous iterations to test with workers. An inventory of content led to a culling of unnecessary material while recrafting content essential to employees. 

Mobility was top of mind, too, with a mobile-ready intranet a key consideration from the start (another feature employees said was important to them). Visa’s use of branded icons emphasizes the tools employees use most frequently—visual cues are highly important, especially on screens intended to be seen on smartphones. 

Personalization was another factor, with the homepage serving as a dashboard that collects and prioritizes each employee’s most important tasks along with the more common elements of an intranet homepage. 

We congratulate team members Christen Kelly, Shiv Singh, Alison Rezai and Visa’s agency partner, Critical Mass. 

Not enough Hulu employees—known as Hulugans—were satisfied with the organization’s employee recognition efforts, according to the annual engagement survey. That led the Internal Communications team to introduce Hudos, a peer-to-peer recognition program designed to bridge the gap between what the organization offered and what would more engage Hulugans. The program was so successful that it’s taken first place in the “Engagement” category of Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards.

Among the issues Hulu identified were a fragmented recognition infrastructure, a perceived inability to recognize individuals (team recognition was favored) and a disconnect between recognition and the organization’s values. The Hudos program provides employees with points they can give to their peers for appreciation, thanks or congratulations. Hudos recipients can redeem the points for gift cards, donate them to charities or regift them to other Hulugans. 

Unlike many recognition programs launched and then left to languish, Hulu keeps Hudos front and center by dedicating part of the intranet homepage to it, adding a “Give Hudos” button to each employee profile and distributing “Hudos Highlights” every other week through the organizational newsletter. Hulu also emails to employees who have yet to participate (and whose points are set to expire), as well as including it in new-hire orientation and ensuring leaders and managers talk about it. 

So far, 96 percent of the Hulu employee population has participated, and the Hudos page is the intranet’s most visited (about 5,000 views per month). It’s also the most searched term on the intranet. 

For building an online program that elevates engagement and satisfies employees’ intrinsic desire for recognition, congratulations to Scott Kaminsky, Mike Rocco, Julie Steele, Sandra Nguyen, Jared Cohen-Richards and Jackie Bartoletti. 

Among the goals for QuintilesIMS’s reboot of its intranet, iQ, were a mobile-first design and greater real-time collaboration. QuintilesIMS’s success in meeting those goals has won the organization first place in the “Social Network” category of Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards

Getting employees to use the new system involved finding one that was more user-friendly, so the organization dropped the built-in SharePoint network in favor of Yammer (a Microsoft-owned tool). The intranet team used Yammer themselves as the collaboration tool during the development of the revamped site. 

Eschewing an “If we build it they will come” mentality, QuintilesIMS produced a variety of resources to help employees figure out how to use the social network, including videos, quick reference cards and user manuals. Yammer activity appears on the home page, keeping collaboration front and center for employees. 

So do employee blogs, which combine with the internal social network to create a genuine social and collaborative experience for employees. Making the intranet mobile-friendly helps drive collaboration because employees are able to engage spontaneously rather than waiting to return to their desks.

Within 36 hours of iQ’s launch, 16,000 employees had activated Yammer; that rose to 34,000 over the first three months of availability. Those users created 450 active groups. In a single month, employees shared nearly 870 posts, each of which (on average) earns nearly seven interactions. 

Kudos to QuintilesIMS’s nine-person global and cross-functional iQ team.
 

Global consulting firm Deloitte offers a wide range of benefit plans and employee programs while enforcing a multitude of policies. Talent On Demand—Deloitte’s one-stop dashboard for employees—is not only a marvel of design, it’s a masterpiece of systems integration. And it’s now the winner in the “Use for Human Resources” category of Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards.

If you’ve seen HR sites on intranets of other organizations, you can easily imagine the nightmare Deloitte’s employees might encounter while trying to navigate their benefits options. By identifying the most common and repetitive interactions performed by Deloitte employees and supporting a new shared-services operating model, the team behind Talent On Demand was able to provide one-click access to more than 40 activities, most of which previously required an HR staff member’s assistance. 

The intranet site even boasts a chat function—similar to those found on customer service-oriented websites—along with one-click calling if additional help is required. Pulling this off required integration with an HR system, SharePoint, a staffing system, the company’s 401(k) vendor, training resources, a recognition system, a talent acquisition system, a compliance system, a time and expense system and more. 

Team members Karleen Westermeyer, Kunda Jadhav and Yvette Honaker are truly worthy of congratulations for their excellent work. 

Organizations employ all kinds of techniques to drive employee engagement, but surprisingly few tap employees’ emotions. PPD, a contract healthcare research organization, did just that as part of its “Be with PPD” campaign—and its efforts have won it first place in the “Video” category of Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards.

Designed to employ storytelling to encourage employees to be more engaged with the organization’s purpose, mission and strategy, the kickoff video wove the stories of two employees who shared their experiences—both that led them to the organization and those they have had while working there. The employees are emotionally invested in the organization, and they explain why. 

Deftly edited from superior footage of both interviews and candid scenes of the featured employees on the job and at home, the video captures the essence of why these two people are engaged in their jobs. The video wraps up with a map-driven animation showcasing a variety of other employees briefly sharing why they too are engaged. 

Presented on the PPD intranet, the video has been viewed more than 20,000 times (in an organization of 17,000 employees). It also inspired employees to submit their own stories far beyond the expectations of the team that created the video. 

These results from a highly watchable video earn kudos to PPD’s Elizabeth Kuronen, Bert Kittner, Wendy Woodall, Randy Buckwalter and Mary Morgan. 

Dutch organization Huis Vanboeijen supports 700 independently living children, youth, adults, and elders with intellectual and/or physical disabilities, along with several hundred living at home. Thus, the organization’s intranet has to be usable not only for its 1,600-member workforce, but also for its clients, their families and caregivers, many of whom may have cognitive challenges when undertaking intranet tasks that most users would find routine. Its determination to create an intranet that anyone can use has won Huis Vanboeijen and its partner triptic first place in the “Usability” category of Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards.

Working with the design agency triptic, the organization undertook “Design Thinking” sessions with users to assess the different ways they think about and use information. As the organization notes, ‘Simply asking, ‘What do you need?’ does not work!” The results of these sessions led to a prototype that asked clients to perform tasks like updating their timelines with a photo. 

The designers sought to tune the intranet fully to the perceptions of clients, realizing that what made sense to some users wouldn’t make sense to others. The results included the robust use of visual icons, functionality across a variety of types of tablets and other considerations. 

The organization has reported greater satisfaction among clients, nearly all of who have signed in and are sharing photos, updates and other content on a daily basis. The screenshots from the intranet reflect the thinking—along with user engagement throughout the process—that went into making an intranet usable by those seeking to be part of society while living with challenges that make that goal difficult. 

We are especially proud to honor Vanboeijen and triptic for their success. 

Pharmaceutical company Astellas used the upgrade of its intranet, InSite, to take the site to new heights. Its successful effort has won Astellas first place for “Best Launch or Relaunch” in Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards.

While most relaunches aim to improve the look and feel of an intranet, enhance search functionality and reorganize content, Astellas had loftier goals. Key among them: Enable employees to access the intranet via their smartphones and deliver content to 1,200 field employees who had been isolated from the old intranet. 

Other goals focused on driving higher levels of employee engagement through improved two-way communication, and introducing internal social media to the company—notoriously difficult in the pharmaceutical field and other highly regulated industries. 

To achieve these goals with more than mere guesswork, the communicators conducted stakeholder interviews, usability tests and other research methodologies. Many of these techniques were repeated as the revamped intranet took shape. 

In addition to nuts-and-bolts improvements in speed and other elements, InSite now boasts interactive feedback capabilities, personalization, subscription options and integration of the company’s various social media activities. 

Post-launch research found employees are now visiting the intranet daily and responding enthusiastically to the update. 

For a strategic approach that resonated with stakeholders, congrats to Jennifer Saputo and Trent Richardson of Astellas. 

It’s no surprise that QuintilesIMS’s intranet, iQ, is the winner of the Best Overall Intranet prize in Ragan’s 2016 Intranet Awards program. After all, iQ was also the winner in two other categories: blogs and internal social networks. 

The latest version of iQ (its third iteration) was undertaken for infrastructure reasons: the transition from an on-site-hosted intranet to the cloud-based SharePoint 365 and Office 365. The transition offered an opportunity to look beyond communications and engagement and develop an intranet that would also affect productivity and affinity. 

iQ was re-envisioned as a mobile-first entity. Personalization was also built into it, permitting employees to configure the home page to more effectively meet their day-to-day work and information needs. Access to resources was simplified, information streamlined, and usability improved. 

Search—a problem area on most intranets—was also revamped, allowing employees to search the entire intranet as well as team sites, with results filtered and easy to access via smartphone. 

Most impressive, however, is the integration of collaboration and internal social media tools. Employee blogs and Yammer are not merely options employees can access by clicking a link—they are featured content on the home page. Employees have embraced both Yammer (34,000 Yammer accounts have been activated and 450 accounts started) and blogging. 

Congratulations go to all nine members of the global, cross-functional team that made iQ version 3.0 happen. 

Alaska Airlines writer Cole Cosgrove’s account of 2,000 American tourists brought back to the U.S. from Los Cabos after Hurricane Odile roared through the tip of the Baja Peninsula in 2014 is an engrossing and terrifying read—qualities that earned him and Alaska Airlines first place in the “Best Article” category of Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

Cosgrove begins his masterly report with a comment from a traveler Alaska Airlines brought back to the States: “You have no idea what we went through—it was terrifying. Your staff was amazing—hugging us, comforting us, humoring us, delighting us with supreme service. It wasn’t just one person. It was the whole staff.”

Amid total devastation, 25 AS workers living in Los Cabos “put aside their own adversity and worked at the airport for three days to help people fly back to the U. S.,” Cosgrove writes. Those 25 employees worked in dangerous conditions, enduring water shortages and the threats of dehydration, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke.  Cosgrove justifiably calls them “heroes,” and remarks, “They showed the world what it means to say, ‘I am Alaska.’”

Alaska Airlines employees in the American Northwest helped too; they raised $72,000 to assist their colleagues in Los Cabos rebuild their lives.

AS’s communications and social media staffs made sure all 14,000 AS employees and the public knew what the Los Cabos ground crew and the Alaskan relief-flight crews had done:

• Intranet stories about the self-sacrifice of those two groups “were the most-read articles of the year,” garnering 13,000 page views by 14,000 employees.
• The AS public blog about Odile set a record as the busiest traffic week of the year—more than 40.000 views and 7,000 social shares.
• The video in Cosgrove’s story was the emotional high point of the annual employee meeting.
• The AS communicators say, without exaggeration, that their crisis reporting sparked “an amazing level of [pride] and engagement.”

Congratulations especially to Cole Cosgrove, and to his fellow AS communicators Bryan Zidar, Nancy Trott, Dianne McGinness, Christy True, Marianne Lindsey, and David Henrich! 

In 2013, Spectrum Health’s three intranets divided 23,000 employees rather than connected them. Clinicians, mainly the doctors and nurses who made up 80 percent of Spectrum Health’s employees, used one intranet. Administrators and medical insurance workers, the other 20 percent, each maintained their own intranets.

That setup changed in March 2015, when Spectrum Health introduced its new, unified intranet, InSite. InSite was built on four “pillars”: connection, communication (content), collaboration, and “Work Out Loud.” The new site has won Spectrum Health first place in the “Best Launch or Re-Launch” category of Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

Unlike many new intranets, which launch on a slipway of good intentions and fine phrases, InSite delivered measurable results:

• Connection: InSite helps employees get in touch with co-workers in other teams easier than ever before. Rich profiles and a powerful search tool turns colleagues/strangers into allies. 
• Collaboration: InSite exposes email chains as inefficient in getting consensus, feedback, and dialogue. It offers a single source for discussions and easy access to previous discussions, which streamlines decision-making. InSite now holds more than 2,200 collaborative pages, and employees add more than 200 new pages every month.
• Communication: InSite gives employees several tools to direct messages to specific audiences and many places to post information to unit colleagues or the whole hospital. InSite has 1,300 consistent content creators—and 3,000 participating users.
• Work Out Loud: InSite pushes a cultural shift to transparency and collaboration. It has opened up content creation: Everyone can create news, blogs, project sites, and workgroup pages. Employees create or upload more than 300 documents every day. More important, InSite records 1,100 revisions to documents daily.

One can easily believe the communicators at Spectrum Health who say, “The real results aren’t all in the numbers—they’re in the stories, the comments, the collaboration and the engagement across departments, job types and responsibilities … the new InSite has opened eyes and doors around our organization.”

Congratulations to Spectrum Health staffers Ian Botbyl, Josh Bundy, Kristen O’Hare, Don Shell, Sarah Brodhead, Ron Bussa, Nick Lemmon, Pete Rigney, Tim Mayo, Mike Meyers, Michele Bitoun, Carrie Manders, Nancy Tait, Nicole McConnell, Crystal January-Craft, Krischa Winright. Patrick O’Hare, Roger Jansen, Mike Kramer, and Reagan Marketing! 
 

Viral events happen by luck as much as by design. If your audience is 13,000 busy health care employees and nearly 4,000 overwhelmed health sciences students, you need lots of both. Thomas Jefferson University and Hospitals’ campaign to stimulate innovation in health care ended up getting a very substantial number of its employees and students to submit their ideas and innovations and vote for their favorite ones during their “JAZ Tank Startup Challenge.” That’s why Thomas Jefferson University and Hospitals won first place the “Best Viral Campaign” category in Ragan’s 2015 Ragan Intranet Awards. 

Hosted by a newly created innovation center, the Jefferson Acceleration Zone (JAZ), the Jefferson JAZ Tank Startup Challenge was an enterprise-wide contest for employees and students created in the spring of 2015 to tap into the innovative thinking of the entire organization. Its goals were to help Jefferson entrepreneurs incubate, accelerate, and cultivate ideas and possibly create startup companies focused on health innovation.

In early March, the Jefferson JAZ Tank Startup Challenge competition invited students and employees to compete in offering their ideas. The invitation generated 54 entry submissions in less than one month, to be voted on by employees and students. The campaign drew more than 900 votes in one 24-hour period. Twelve finalists were chosen, and ultimately three winners were awarded $60,000 in prizes supporting winning conceptions or devices—with the possibility of some or all of them being brought to market with Jefferson’s assistance.

Among the JAZ Tank Startup Challenge communicators’ other results:

• Got significant local media coverage for TJUH and the JAZ Tank Startup Challenge. 
• Built new and strengthened relationships with venture capitalists and business leaders.
• Stimulated campus excitement and interest in the next JAZ Tank Challenge.

Kudos to staffers in TJUH ‘s Communications, Creative Services, Web Department, Innovation Office, and Student Activities Office for getting the two busiest populations in any organization, health sciences students and health care workers, to care enough to submit their innovations, read the entries and take time to vote!

MasterCard has been experimenting in employee communications for at least the last half-decade, trying to make unpromising story material interesting and readable through photos, infographics, and a hybrid form that combines graphics and text in an infographic-like style. The approach succeeded so well in these departures from intranet routine that it’s won MasterCard the “Best Use of Visuals” category in Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards. 

Let’s look at these departures one by one:

• Photos: MC’s decision to commit to a 50-50 balance between visuals and text is nowhere better illustrated than in a blog by an MC exec who attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Almost every paragraph is accompanied by an uncaptioned thumbnail photo of famous and not-so-famous conference attendees talking at parties or outside in front of the Alps. The lack of captions doesn’t frustrate or irritate the reader; on the contrary, it draws him or her into the blog text.
• Infographics: We’ve all yawned our way through articles like “Four big sales wins for Wee Widgets in last six months.” How do you deal with the boredom inherent in such stories? Make infographics like the ones MasterCard has designed. One example is titled “Loyalty Solutions AP 1st Anniversary: 12 Great Things We Achieved in the Last 12 Months.” Every element in this infographic is interesting and memorable. A map of Australasia anchors the infographic and supplies proof that MC is an important global innovator.
• Text-Infographic Hybrid: Here’s how to make a humdrum “How to set up the mobile browser app of our intranet on your smartphone” story pleasant, fast, and profitable to read: Combine arresting, bold graphic elements with text cut to the bone in a box. This hybrid form increased readership of the text article, “MC Central Is Mobile,” and the subsequent downloads of the AIRWATCH browser. “MC Central Is Mobile” got 2,200 page views, 144 percent more than the 900 average page views for news articles.

Congratulations are in order for MasterCard staffers Elyse Cuttler, Susan Warner, Mary Lester, Valerie Gross-Manca, Ryan Erenhouse, and Arsalan Danish! 

Of all the routine stories that run in the newsletter, magazine, or intranet, one of the most tedious to write—and to read—is the article warning employees they’ve broken (or are breaking) the rules. First you tell employees what they’re doing wrong. Then you say, “Don’t do this again,” and finally you re-iterate the penalties offenders will face. 

Alaska Airlines found a way around all this. Communicators turned the dreary “rules” story into one of the most-read articles of the year on AS’s intranet, “Alaska’s World.” For that feat, Alaska has won the “Best Use of HR” category of Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

Internal comms worked with HR to co-produce an easy-to-read intranet story spiced with social media bits, photos, and humorous animated gifs. One example of how Alaska’s editors breathed new life into a conventional story: For the rule, “DO: Follow the dress code as outlined on the Travel Guidelines subsite,” the editors displayed a photo of an employee wearing bunny slippers and pajamas (decorated with sunglasses and twinkling stars) to illustrate unacceptable dress while flying on the organization’s dime.

In 2013, Alaska ran a traditional story in its employee magazine about the problem—with the usual uninspiring results. Here’s what happened in 2014:

• Internal comms turned the conventional “rules” story into a funny intranet multi-media list piece titled “The dos and don’ts of nonrev travel.”
• The story was the third-most-read story of the year, getting 7,436 page views (53 percent of Alaska’s 14,000 employees!).
• The story got 38 employee comments praising the story and supplying more “DON’Ts.”
• HR loved the story so much that it included the piece as part of new-employee orientation.

Congratulations to Diane McGinness in Alaska Airlines’ Internal Communications department! 

The fight over bigotry and discrimination against LGBT people may be far from finished, but a moving four-minute video from Cardinal Health, a leading health care services company, shows that change is gathering strength, and it’s coming faster than many believed possible. The video, titled “Be an Ally,” is an inspiring call to practical action on behalf of LGBT workers among Cardinal Health’s 34,000 employees. It has also made Cardinal Health the winner of the “Best Use of Video” category in Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

Cardinal Health’s top leaders had the courage to recognize that this video was necessary for their organization. They showed their courage by spelling out their LGBT policies uncompromisingly:

• “Every person has value and can contribute to a successful organization.”
• “We don’t care about your color, your weight, or who you love. Talented? Cardinal wants you!”
• “An ally accepts the LGBT person and advocates for equal rights and fair treatment.”
• “Allies help others see the importance of equality, fairness, acceptance and mutual respect.”
• “Homophobic comments and jokes are hateful. Let everyone know you find them offensive.”

“Be an Ally” received 337 views and 104 likes on Cardinal Health’s internal social network, and 612 YouTube views. Cardinal Health shared social posts linked to a video on LinkedIn that got 39,000 impressions, 79 clicks, and 49 interactions. Since the video went live, 737 Cardinal Health employees have signed the “Be an Ally” pledge.

Congratulations to Cardinal Health staffers Lachandra Baker, Eileen Lehmann, Gregg McConnell, Charlotte Click, Jennifer Jimenez-Miller and to two top executives at Cardinal Health: Carole Watkins, CHRO, and Steve Falk, EVP, general counsel and equality network executive sponsor. Cardinal Health would like to extend a special thanks to Mills James Productions for their assistance with the video production. 

How often do you find an intranet blog alive with strong opinions about such diverse topics as literary style, the pervasive corporate culture of consensus, and a militant argument that “Generational differences enrich the workplace”? If you’d answer, “Never!” you’d probably agree that the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s “Live Wire” blog is a deserving winner of the “Best Blog” category in Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

The “LiveWire” blog can be, and often is, about workplace issues and problems, but just as often it’s about an attitude or an idea the writer wants to get off his or her chest. And the open atmosphere the Bank’s leaders encourage sparks the rank and file to have their say.

The Chicago Fed’s Internal Communications department policy of allowing anonymous comments draws uninhibited—but civilized—commentary from big numbers of employees. Many reply in thoughtful mini-essays of 100-200 words. The 109 employee comments on the Oxford comma represent more than seven percent of the Chicago Fed’s 1,500 workers.

The most remarkable display of arguments and philosophies on “LiveWire” concerned the sore subject of endless unnecessary meetings. The blog, titled “Breaking the Bank’s Meeting Habit—Can It Be Done?” called forth 30 comments full of passionate, even acrid observations, e.g., “There are no such things as five-minute meetings at the Fed!” 

Since its inception in 2008, the blog, published on Fridays, has attracted nearly 7,000 comments, about a thousand each year.

Congratulations to the Chicago Fed’s leaders for their support of such candor and honesty and to the Chicago Fed’s internal communications team members: Jocelyn Sims, Michele Murphy, Rebecca Shaffer, Greg Morton, and Tyler Landry!