Merck KGaA delivers this message to Merck employees with its internal social network: “Let’s explore this wonderful, huge, mysterious business house we live in—to get new ideas about everything we do.”   

The visitor to Merck KGaA’s intranet, EVA, almost immediately notices that the usual social element often found on intranets takes a decided back seat to the business element. No company eBay or craigslist is found on the internal social network within EVA, nor much deliberate provision made for workplace sociability, small talk, and “fun.” But this emphasis on business is what earned Merck victory in the “Best Internal Social Networking” category of Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards. 

EVA focuses on helping employees do many things: Make contact with far-away colleagues; following those colleagues easily on teams, initiative, and projects; conveniently ask questions to a selected group or to everybody at Merck; become immersed in the work lives of fellow workers in an employee’s “activity stream”—and much more.

Some of the advantages of the EVA internal social network:

• Rich user profiles make finding the right expert on your subject easier and faster.
• EVA’s social network fosters agility and innovation by allowing employees to communicate easily across functional, organizational, and geographical boundaries.
• All social functions are wholly integrated into every bit of managed content on the intranet.
• The intranet’s extreme ease of use offers a seamless user experience incorporating simple, elegant visual design.
• A short—almost instant, in many cases—response time to questions in the microblog.
• All activities for each employee post on one central page, called “activities in my network,” which allows employees to stay up to date on everything they’re interested in.

This internal social network seems to beckon the viewer to explore every activity of this gigantic, 40,000-person organization in 65 countries. It stirs the imagination and the viewer’s sense of adventure. 

Congratulations to Merck KGaA head of digital media Frank Sielaff, to Merck KGaA managers of digital media Rudolf Froese, Stefanie Babka, and Karen Bradbury, and to Publicis Pixelpark senior consultant Marian Moehren!

Alaska Airlines communicator Nancy Trott and AS webmaster David Henrich saw immense potential in the “employee comment” tool they built to engage employees. The result: Henrich created a new tool that allowed employees to vote up or down on questions asked at the airline’s town-hall style employee meetings, with the five questions getting the most “up” votes asked first. The achievement earned Alaska Airlines first place for “Best Online Discussion” in Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

The partners used Henrich’s comment tool three times before each employee town hall. Employees sent in a total of 222 questions that received 27,612 votes from just 14,000 employees. In Trott’s words, the solution was “an overwhelming success.” 

There were several surprising benefits and side benefits:

• The tool ensured that the questions most vital to all employees got asked at each meeting.
• It gave leaders insight into what employees were thinking.
• Asking for questions in advance gave leaders time to prepare thoughtful answers.
• Trott received “tremendously positive” feedback from workers who attended the town halls.
• Officers requested that Trott and Henrich use the tool in other ways.

Trott and Henrich used the tool before an announcement of new AS destinations to give employees a chance to be an “airline network planner for a day” and suggest new routes. Trott says, “Amazingly, three of the highest [employee-] ranked destinations were the very same destinations we were about to announce.” Trott adds, “That process helped instill pride of ownership among our employees, who really do know this business well.”

Congratulations to Nancy Trott, David Henrich, and Alaska Airlines!  

The intranet homepage for Merck KGaA, called “EVA,” is so obviously functional that at first a viewer might think, “There’s nothing special here.” But after a second look—and a third—the user will quickly see that this intranet has that rarest of online qualities: a quiet, understated beauty. That’s why Merck KGaA is the clear winner of the “Best Intranet Design” category of Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards.

The homepage immediately offers the viewer six clear color-coded navigation destinations in nine compact squares: [Business] Unit: light gray-blue; Topic: dark gray-green; Project: dull brick-red; Apps/Services: light green; Location: deep sky-blue; Process: light gray. These six colors mesh astonishingly well, and make clicking on the correct destination automatic and concentrating on the chosen task simple.

The type on this homepage is 10- and 12-point sans serif. No boldface type is used (not even for headlines)—except for the names of employees that appear in the 3½-inch white square titled “LATEST ACTIVITIES.” Every word, every letter is perfectly legible, even the reversed type in the colored boxes described above.

Exactly three news stories appear in the 3½-inch white newsfeed square titled, “MY NEWS.” No headlines, just simple teasers describe the story’s content. Very effective.

The headlines are unobtrusive: all business, all interesting. The caption headline beneath the small top photo of a huge glass-box office building reads, “ONE Global Headquarters.” The teaser below that headline says, “Check out how more room for innovation is created.“

This intranet was created for power, speed, search, and efficiency. It is the Ferrari of employee digital workplaces. It is all business, and it is extremely pleasing to look at.

Kudos to Merck KGaA digital media execs Frank Sielaff, Rudolf Froese, Stefanie Babka, and Karen Bradbury, and to Marian Moehren and Peter Kohlberger of Publicis Pixelpark.

Benefits enrollment is usually a fairly cut-and-dried activity. Even the best enrollment communications are characterized by plan comparisons and materials designed to make completing the process as quick and painless as possible. Genentech had a different challenge. Its success in rising to meet it has earned it first place in the “Benefits Communication” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

As recently as 2013, 71 percent of Genentech employees were enrolled in a high-premium/low-deductible plan. Despite paying the higher premiums, employees often weren’t getting any added benefit and were paying more in total than they would if they were enrolled in another plan. The high premium / low deductible plan design also discouraged employees from taking an active role in their health and healthcare. For example, many employees enrolled in the plan would use a specialist as a default even when a general practitioner was all that was needed.  

The tactics Genentech employed to encourage employees to change plans and take greater ownership in their health and healthcare included the usual suspects: traditional mailers, posters and the like; emails and blog posts; videos and calculators. Recognizing that leaders model behavior, though, the team also introduced executive stories—along with those of frontline employees—about managing one’s health and taking ownership of one’s own health care. 

Then CEO Ian Clark was among those who sent emails to employees providing an overview of the U.S. health care landscape and discussing the importance of employees taking ownership of their health care. Communication also included photos of real employees and their families engaged in healthful activities. 

Infographics also supported the campaign, and the head of HR shared stories about her own diagnosis and cancer treatment to reinforce the importance of taking responsibility for health care. Videos and articles showcased other employees who dealt with health issues from multiple sclerosis to heart transplant surgery. 

The multimedia, multifaceted campaign was remarkably effective, with enrollment in the high-premium/low-deductible plan plummeting to 24 percent. 

For a comprehensive approach to addressing a significant issue in what is traditionally a dull topic, kudos to Craig Sullivan and Julie Tuggle.

The “Grand Prize: Best Overall Intranet” award in Ragan’s 2015 Intranet Awards goes to … Yahoo. For many solid reasons, including: 

• The best, wittiest employee news show (“Hoo News”) our judges have seen. 
• The best use of a celebrity-expert (David Pogue) to publicize the company’s products. 
• The best intranet infographics about company services and products. 
• The best re-do of the old intranet: from busy, cluttered darkness to sweet, simple light.
• The best new hybrid story, an infographic/feature article about an employee.  
• The best company news about its new ventures.

The tone of Hoo News is hip, knowing, sarcastic, and more than slightly self-mocking. Take, for instance, David Pogue going off on an extended metaphysical tangent about the expression “dogfooding” as a tech metaphor. This sequence, like all the Hoo News clips entered, remains interesting and funny even after three or four viewings. And it’s effortlessly informative about the Yahoo products it pushes. In addition, Sarah and Dave, the woman and man who co-anchor the Hoo News “newscast team,” are skilled comedians who play off one another with perfect comic timing, like Jon Stewart and John Oliver. 

The list of “bests” and impressive stats goes on:

• The best retention and recruitment intranet feature we’ve seen (“Why Yahoo?”).
• The best and widest variety of features on Hoo News.
• 85 percent of Yahoo employees visit Backyard daily; this number increases steadily.
• 91 percent of employees say that Backyard is a source of truth for them.
• 81 percent think that the stories on Backyard reflect the culture of innovation at Yahoo.
• Hoo News is “incredibly popular,” ranking in the top three stories by page views the week it airs.

Congratulations to Yahoo communicators Sarah Tompkins, Nicole Baudouin, Caitlin Millar, and Carolyn Clark!

The Northwell Health Total Rewards Blog only launched in September, but a quick tour of the blog reveals that people are paying attention. A very recent post on effective meetings, for example, not only inspired readers to comment, but the writer responded—a hallmark of true blog engagement. Its success has led to the Total Rewards Blog winning first place in the “Blog” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The Total Rewards Blog is just one component of a comprehensive plan to see Northwell Health recognized as a “Best Place to Work” by 2020. The actual benefits themselves play a huge role: Northwell is bending over backwards to make sure the package appeals to prospective employees and inspires existing employees to stay. 

The communications strategy includes enlisting executives, HR representatives and frontline managers as cheerleaders and advocates; distributing e-newsletters; and issuing benefits updates. The blog was launched as a one-stop shop for everything that makes working for Northwell appealing, with categories carefully chosen to reflect the broad range of perks of working there: benefits, rewards and recognition, employee wellness, need-to-know announcements and work-life programs. 

The blog is publicly accessible, making it available to people considering working for Northwell, and is configured to look great on a desktop or laptop computer as well as on mobile devices. The writing is sprightly and informal (not to mention short, avoiding the “too-long-didn’t-read” syndrome), the design appealing (including big, colorful images), and the topics interesting. 

For her outstanding work, congratulations to Northwell’s Sally Ann Lake. 

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives work best when they’re connected to what an organization does. Spirits company Bacardi Limited has tied sustainability efforts to the resources required to make its products, including water, and has earned first place in the “Corporate Social Responsibility” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications as a result.

A bottle of premium spirit takes 10 liters of water to produce. What’s more, alcohol beverages are frequently served with plastic straws or stirrers, many of which are not biodegradable and wind up in oceans in addition to landfill. In fact, they are among the top 10 most common debris recovered from oceans, which could contain more plastic than fish by 2050. 

To help protect water sources, Bacardi corporate communicators recruited employees in the effort by simply asking them to add “No straws, please” to their cocktail orders. They were also asked to do away with plastic straws and stirrers from in-house corporate events. 

So Bacardi employees could see how their peers were engaging in the effort, they were invited to enter a contest through which they shared their commitments. It became the most popular content on the company’s global intranet. Within two weeks of introducing the campaign, every major office, brand home and visitor center declared its intent to stop using plastic straws.  

Employees also advocated for the action externally—through the #NoStraws hashtag and encouraging bartenders to join the cause—contributing to the overall success of the effort. The global corporate communications team followed up with a thank-you campaign celebrating employees’ contribution to cleaning up the ocean. Ultimately, Bacardi estimates 1 million straws and stirrers will stay out of the water each year as a result of the effort.

Congratulations on an outstanding effort to Jessica Merz and Amy Federman.  

Getting employees engaged in a health-and-wellness effort is no easy task. At Molina Healthcare, the internal communications team found a way to make participation easier for employees whether they were office workers or remote staff. Their success has earned first place in the “Health and Fitness Program” Category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The program, #WorkoutWednesday, established a pattern of behavior and promoted simple activities employees could incorporate into their workday routines. Delivered entirely over MySite, the Molina intranet, the campaign wound up not only encouraging employees to participate, but driving additional traffic to the intranet. 

Among the content created were workout tips like “Park your car in the furthest spot from the door,” and “Move meetings outside.” The campaign was not a one-way effort; employees were encouraged to contribute their own tips and asked to nominate a #WorkoutWarrior who inspired them over the course of the seven-week campaign. They could download and print posters from the intranet to hang at local facilities; incentives were offered, including Nike gift cards and organizational logo items. 

A wrap-up video summarized the program and recognized the top #WorkoutWarriors. Not only did the campaign produce more than 500 comments on the weekly intranet articles and more than 12,000 views of those articles, employee comments about the campaign externally reached 2.3 million people and made 16.4 million social media impressions. 

Congratulations to the communications team of Christina Fumia, Robert Drum and Bianca Portillo. 

As IBM undergoes a transition from a hardware and software services organization to a cognitive solutions and cloud platform organization, it has invested heavily in its Think Academy, an open online course designed to educate IBMers on various lines of business based on the belief to make them better advocates for its products and services. When Think Academy became the home of an introduction to Cognitive, IBM needed a way to get its workforce engaged in its strategy. The result has won IBM first place in the “Advocacy” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The idea was for employees to form agile teams and describe a low-fidelity prototype. Then using internal crowdfunding resources, each employee received $2,000 in “ifundIT dollars” to fund the best prototypes. The top 50 teams advanced to the Outthink Challenge in Austin, TX, where 100 IBMers from around the globe pitched their prototypes to IBM leaders and clients; smaller events were held in 22 other global locations. 

IBM has close to 400,000 employees, and an amazing 72 percent participated, with many of the projects undergoing additional development as they were adopted by the organization. More than 8,000 teams were formed, testifying to the effectiveness of communication that involved hyper-targeted, personalized email, site posters and guerrilla marketing tactics, in-person experiences, executive endorsements, blog posts, banners, videos, news stories, and a variety of other tactics.  

Congratulations to the team of Nancy Pearson, Rebecca Reyes, Heidi Litner and Ann Rubin for a campaign that was a model of employee engagement and one of the most innovative employee-focused concepts seen in a long time.

IBM’s Think Academy is a multi-faceted program through which the organization’s 370,000-plus employees can learn about the company’s strategic imperatives and develop the skills required to succeed in them. Its effectiveness has earned IBM first place in the “Employee Education” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

Employees use Learning Maps to move step by step through various personalized training programs to acquire the knowledge they need based on their roles. Think Academy also uses contests in which IBMers share photos, videos, and personal narratives. Internal marketing drives ongoing awareness of the program and alerts employees to new modules available to them. 

Ninety-six percent of all IBM employees have availed themselves of Think Academy’s 32 courses, available in 11 languages in 97 countries. That includes 10.2 million video views and 80,000 mobile app downloads. 

Ann Rubin, Amy Loomis, Jennifer Vickery, Tiffany Lawton and Christopher Luongo are to be commended for their amazing work. 

At San Antonio-based financial services company USAA, several departments that had operated independently were merged to create a Chief Risk Office (CRO), centralizing Risk Management across the company. The successful transformation that unified these independent areas was so impressive that it led to USAA taking first place in the “Employee Engagement” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The new organization needed to find the right balance between meeting regulatory expectations and creating a compelling vision for the future. USAA uses the Gallup survey to measure employee engagement levels and this was a key tool in the success story. Management invited employees to contribute their time and ideas to bring the vision to life, with nearly 65 percent of CRO employees stepping up to participate. These employees took assignments on teams that overhauled many of the employee related pieces of the department, including training, development program and recognition as well as putting new technologies in place to open communication, and involving employees in the process of formulating the vision for their future.

Information sharing was elevated through a new intranet platform and more face-to-face interactions between teams. Employees also staffed a CRO booth at internal expos to educate their colleagues about the vision and how CRO operate within the company. With the vision always top-of-mind, employees remained focused. United behind a common purpose, employees became the best advocates for the CRO Vision and with employees driving solutions to create the “CRO of the future,” they literally engaged themselves.

USAA’s formal engagement feedback channels have recorded steadily increasing engagement among employees, with the Gallup survey showing a 45 percent increase in actively engaged employees. Congratulations to the leadership and employees of USAA’s Chief Risk Office for this accomplishment.
 

CHI Health CEO Dr. Cliff Robertson tasked the organization’s Corporate Communications department with helping him communicate more effectively with the CHI leadership group, which includes 1,200 employees from the supervisor level on up. The department took the job on, and in the process won first place in the “Executive Communications” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employees Communications Awards.

To get a handle on what the leadership group would consider effective communication, the team launched a survey that revealed no shortage of opportunity. Among the issues: Leaders didn’t get information they needed to communicate with their own employees; employees often received news and information before leaders did, limiting their ability to answer questions that arose; the information leaders did get was often overwhelming; they didn’t have the tools they needed to communicate with their staffs; and more. 

Leaders also ranked the kind of information they wanted, leading Corporate Communications to develop a clear set of goals: reducing leaders’ email overload, sharing information with leaders before all-employee distribution, providing clear direction on messages, including talking points and Q&As with messages that needed to be communicated, and increasing leaders’ sense of transparency. 

Delivering on those goals meant establishing an intranet site where leaders could quickly find all the information they needed, along with a weekly email newsletter, the CrossRoads Leader Update. Follow-up research revealed that nearly every recipient of the email newsletter was satisfied with it and found the content relevant, while the leader homepage drew 93 percent overall satisfaction and 99 percent content relevancy scores. 

Congratulations to Craig Samuelson, Cathy Brockmeier, Kelly Grinnell, Lisa Bowen, Vonda Hartsell, Anna Fryda, and Aria Ford. 

When eight health care organizations combined to create Envolve, communicators were tasked with reaching 1,500 multishift employees in 60 locations, along with 1,000 telecommuters. The success of their effort has earned them first place in the “Rebranding Campaign” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The level of dispersion among employees who had previously identified with a smaller employer led to a strategy that was grounded in two teleconference meetings (to make sure staff on all shifts could participate) led by the CEO. An impressive 89 percent of the multishift employees participated. The teleconferences were followed with Q&A sessions at local facilities, aided by employee FAQs and manager kits that included talking points. 

The teleconference, which featured a brand message video, kicked off a weeklong celebration designed to convey the new “Better Together” theme. Daily activities engaged employees through themes. Fitness and Technology was Monday’s theme, for example, with employees winning Fitbits for registering on the new intranet. 

Communicators also employed brand ambassadors from among the employee population to distribute posters and promotional items. The week after the rollout, a “Better Together” quiz engaged employees further, drawing participation from more than half of the total staff. Nearly 30 percent of the staff contributed photos for a selfie contest and almost 70 percent cast votes for the best selfies. 

Congratulations to the communicators at Envolve! 

The employer branding effort at Cisco Systems took off when a new team came on board and, with support from leadership, set out to establish a clear voice in social media channels. It succeeded—and earned first place in the “Social Media” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The team found employees who were already conveying their pride in working at Cisco via social media and asked for their stories. With the photos these employees shared, the team posted their tales on the Life at Cisco blog. 

A breakthrough came when the #WeAreCisco hashtag debuted on the renamed @WeAreCisco Twitter account, which exploded from 2,000 followers to 20,000 in one year. The team also established an Instagram account of the same name, which grew from zero to 10,000 followers in the same timeframe. 

The real genius, though, was the nature of the new Snapchat account, which after only four months achieved 2 million minutes watched with a 60-70 percent completion rate. Although the executive chairman and the CEO both appear in the Snapchat account, followers have come to expect the daily employee takeover, in which employees share images and videos (with filters and other Snapchat features included) that convey what a day in the life of a Cisco employee is like from the employee perspective. 

Across all of Cisco’s accounts, engagement is routinely two to three times the industry standard. 

For all these accomplishments, congratulations to Macy Andrews, Carmen Shirkey Collins and Casie Shimansky. 

The very notion of an intranet is evolving as the world becomes more mobile and communication occurs more naturally in channels outside the traditional news hole on a home page. T-Mobile’s newly redesigned intranet reflects these trends (which you might expect from a mobility company), and has embraced them wholeheartedly in its design. The result: T-Mobile is the winner in the “Intranet Design” category of Ragan’s 2016 Employee Communications Awards.

The intranet’s name changed from OneVoice to T-Nation. Gone is the one-way, top-down broadcast of messages. Instead, the intranet strives to engage employees and inspire enthusiasm. Articles of interest or importance to employees are still there, but so are Twitter and Instagram feeds from senior leaders, an Instagram-like feed populated with photos shared by employees (including a “Photo of the Day”), unfiltered industry news gathered from third-party publications, and the organization’s internal social network. 

Employees can tailor what they see to their interests. Given that most of the employees work in retail locations, T-Nation is also designed to be accessible on mobile devices. Integration with tools employees use to get their work done has been well thought out. 

Equal care was given to the rollout of the new design, which was accomplished in phases with early adopters getting a first look. T-Nation’s introduction was treated like a marketing campaign and included special communication to facility managers so they could promote it with their staffs. If any proof is needed of the intranet’s success, consider that 35,000 employees per month used to visit the old intranet. The same number visits now . . . per week. 

Congratulations to the communications team at T-Mobile for creating an innovative and informative intranet.