BOSTON–A credit union that dumped its old employee intranet in favor of a completely new internal communications resource said they payoff is clear to see.
Speaking to CUNA’s America’s Credit Union Conference here, Kimberly La Liberte, marketing manager with the $1-billion Horizon CU, Spokane, Wash., said the investment HCU made in what it calls the “Hub” has driven results in employee communication, satisfaction and engagement.
One key lesson, she said: get a governance process in place early on.
Horizon CU, which has 240 employees, used Toronto-based Bonzai in building a new intranet. It won a Diamond Award from the CUNA Marketing & Business Development Council earlier this year for the Hub.
La Liberte and Michal Pisarek of Bonzai discussed the new intranet in a Q&A. Here is some of what was discussed:
Pisarek: What led to looking for an Intranet?
La Liberte: We had one, but it was only OK. There was no search, and we had maybe five people out of our 240 who could publish to the intranet. Just two could update the home page, and information just didn’t get to the Intranet as quickly as it needed to. What we had was a communication tool that impeded our communications.
Pisarek: When you were looking for a new platform, what were some of your main drivers?
La Liberte: We wanted something that worked with Sharepoint. We wanted more people to be able to publish to get information out faster. But having more people being able to publish, we also knew we needed some control over documents and we needed records management.
We were pushing content out, but people really wanted to be able to comment to one another and see what coworkers were saying. We also wanted a really good employee directory. And we had refreshed our brand, and we wanted the Intranet to be consistent with that.
Pisarek: The dirty little secret of an intranet is we can give you a great piece of technology, but without good management it won’t work. What were you looking for in a partner?
La Liberte: We wanted someone who could help us with this whole project. It is about more than just handing off the software and saying here you go. It was important to be intuitive and not just be our best guess. We wanted the end-process for the end-user to be super simple, and we wanted it to look awesome.
The engagement is one of the pieces that gets them there. That was big in our discussions. Of course, they need the forms and need to know the procedures. But they also come to see what’s for sale in the marketplace, or who is celebrating 30 years with the credit union, and then we get them the other information.
Pisarek: What were the four things you found really, really critical?
La Liberte: You need a really good team. We had several teams. We started with a small team that did some research. From there we expanded the team, which I think is important. Sometimes Intranets get launched and it’s just the people who selected the internet and who are in web development who are involved. We had involved HR, marketing, the IT team and branch operations, who I think are really, really important.
The next step in the process was the content audit. Everyone on the teams was asked to fill out a content audit, and it was really hard. If you take what you had on the old intranet—and we had old pages with dozens of links—and just transfer that to your new intranet, you’re going to have what you had before. We looked at what do we have now and do we want to keep it? We asked what can we delete? Once we figured out what we can do, our content list (really grew) and we had to implement two phases.
Implementing a governance process. We didn’t have that. We have guidelines around what should be published to the Hub and what shouldn’t, and we have a steering committee to deal with the major decisions. We have guidelines for branding so it looks better and catches the employee’s eye. And we have ongoing meetings once a month.
Pisarek: What were some of the benefits and what were you trying to benchmark?
La Liberte: We really wanted more content out faster. We wanted the Hub to be a place people wanted to go to and could rely on. Previously, the Hub could go weeks without being updated. Our previous intranet had no reporting. Employees love to comment, can reply to comments, can like articles. That’s employees engaging with employees, which is the great part because that’s creating a community. Our branches are in three states and can be 450 miles apart. Sometimes those employees can feel distant, and we wanted to reduce the distance.
Probably the biggest complaint I got from employees was they get too many emails, and we put some guidelines in place about whether an email should be sent to everyone or better posted to the Hub. We have probably reduced emails by 80% to 90%.
Pisarek: So what happened?
La Liberte: It really is a trusted place now. People ask, ‘Did you put that on the Hub, or did you see that on the Hub?’ The marketplace was the one area that employees figured out right away and they love it. It’s where they can put things up for sale. We wanted the interaction, and it’s being used all the time. We wanted it to be a central place for employees to go, whether it’s finding out what people’s dogs look like or finding out more about branch operations.
La Liberte said a survey found 85% of employees are satisfied or very satisfied with the new Internet; 86% said they visit multiple times per day (85% use it as their home page); and 75% of employees feel it has increased communications.
The top two reasons employees say they use the Hub is to find forms and to see what’s new at the credit union, according to La Liberte.
La Liberte said new employee onboarding has also improved, with one page on the intranet dedicated just to them, with common questions for those who have just joined the organizations.
“Websites shouldn’t be designed for people who design them. They need to be designed for people who use them, and those perspectives can be very, very different,” said La Liberte.
Overall, said La Liberte, the lessons she and Horizon Credit Union have taken away from the process are these:
- Assemble the right team and encourage continuous feedback
- Spend time choosing the right platform and partner
- Prioritize governance to provide a sustainable, diligent intranet platform
- Empower content authors by supporting them to develop outstanding content
- Embrace the full relationship of communicating information through the intranet