Digital Workplace and Intranet Employee Benchmarking: WIC Updates

16 posts categorized "WIC Updates"

April 27, 2015

The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2014

The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC)* results for 2014 have been tabulated and we can announce that from the 51 organisations who participated last year, the WIC’s top 3 intranets of 2014 - according to feedback from their own intranet end users - are:

Esurance (USA),
IAG (Australia) and
The Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre (Australia).

* The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) is a free web based survey that allows organisations to obtain feedback about their intranets from the people that matter the most - their intranet end users. The WIC team then benchmarks the feedback from all participating organisations, enabling a comparative score and rank for each survey question to be given. If you want to participate in this year's WIC, all you need to do is register for the Worldwide Intranet Challenge. You could have a benchmark report on your desk in 2 weeks,

Details of the highly rated intranets are below.

1. Esurance

Esurance provides auto, homeowners, motorcycle, and renters insurance direct to consumers online, over the phone, and through select agents, including sister company, Answer Financial.

WIC Question Rankings
#1 Complete common work tasks, #1 Access to business applications, #2 Understanding values and culture, #2 Menus, #2 Repository of re-usable documents, #2 Customer information, #2 Reports or dashboards, #2 Training material, #2 Access to external websites, #2 Information for new starters, #2 Page loading speed, #3 Home page, #3 Policies & procedures).

Quotes from Esurance intranet users

“I love it! It keeps me informed!"

"The Intranet has been critical in helping me find, understand and utilize the applications used here. It has also been a great source of information regarding benefits."

"I like the articles - they provide a little fun in a hectic day. If I have a minute or 2 I might go in just to see if there is anything new that day. A good way to take a little break w/out leaving your desk. Keep up the good work!"

Esurance intranet home page

2. IAG

Insurance Australia Group Limited (IAG) is the parent company of a general insurance group with controlled operations in Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and Vietnam, employing around 13,500 people.

WIC Question Rankings
#2 Templates, #2 Access to business applications, #3 Menus, #3 Staff details, #3 Information about products/services, #3 Access to external web sites

3. Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre

MCEC is the place to connect people and ideas. The multi-functional Plenary, 52 meeting rooms and 30,000 square metres of pillar-less exhibition space are just the beginning.

WIC Question Rankings
#1 Home Page, #1 Finding information, #1 intranet menus, #1 Provide feedback or comments about intranet content, #1 News, #1 Online forms, #1 Re-usable documents, #1 Policies and procedures, #1 Information about products and services, #1 Information for new starters, #1 Intranet maintenance, #1 page loading speed, #1 Overall value, #2 Upload or download documents, #2 Calendars, #3 Online forms, #3 Mobile access

To read more about the MCEC intranet, see MCEC's employee intranet ranked seventh in the world.

Overall value of the intranet

The following three intranets rated most highly for the question about overall intranet value. WIC research has shown that increased use of the intranet has a relatively strong correlation with overall intranet value. For more information, see Intranet user adoption: why it's confusing.

The value of the intranet can also be increased in the intranet supports one or more of the 3 compelling reasons for having an intranet.

Highly rated organizations by category

Interactivity/content contribution

This category looks at how interactive the intranet is. This includes questions about publishing content to the intranet, online discussions, uploading documents and providing feedback about intranet content.

Making your intranet more interactive and getting employees to contribute content is one of the keys to providing a more valuable intranet. For supporting research, see If employees spend more time on the intranet, does this mean it's more valuable?. For information about how to get employees to contribute more content, see 10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia.

#1 Publish content, #1 Discuss work topics

#1 Upload or download documents, #2 Publish content

#2 Upload or download documents, #3 Publish content

#2 Intranet feedback

#3 Upload/download documents

#3 Discuss work topics

Finding information

This category covers how easy it is to find information on the intranet using either search or menus.

#1 Find information, #1 Intranet menus

#2 Finding information, #3 Search

#1 Intranet hierarchy

#2 Search, #3 Finding information

#1 Search

#2 Intranet menus, #2 Intranet hierarchy

Task completion

This section looks at how the intranet helps employees complete work tasks. It includes questions about completing tasks online and the use of online forms.

#1 Instructions for completing work tasks, #2 Online forms

#1 Online forms

#1 Complete work tasks

#2 Complete work tasks

#2 Instructions for completing work tasks

#3 Complete work tasks

#3 Online forms

#3 Instructions for completing work tasks

Content

This category reviews the quality of intranet content. This includes questions about staff details, news, templates, policies and procedures, re-usable documents, customer and product information, training, access to internal applications and websites.

#1 Access to business applications,
#2 Understanding values and culture, #2 Repository of re-usable documents, #2 Customer information, #2 Reports or dashboards, #2 Training material, #2 Access to external websites, #2 Information for new starters, #3 Policies & procedures).

#1 News, #1 Re-usable documents, #1 Policies and procedures, #1 Information about products and services, #1 Information for new starters, #2 Calendars, #3 Understand values and culture

#2 Templates, #2 Access to business applications, #3 Staff details, #3 Information about products/services, #3 Access to external web sites

#2 Policies and procedures, #2 Product and service information, #3 Forms, #3 Calendars, #3 New starter information

#1 Staff details, #1 Calendar, #3 News, #3 Reports, #3 Access to business applications

#1 Information about our customers, #1 Reports or dashboards, #2 Forms, #3 Training

#1 Templates

#1 Understanding values & culture, #2 Staff details, #3 Repository of re-usable documents

#2 News

#3 Templates

#3 Customer information

Collaboration

This category looks at how employees use the intranet to collaborate. As the amount of online collaboration increases, it becomes important to be able to convert this informal and unstructured content into useful and findable information. See Intranets: the signal and the noise and the need for a 'content miner'.

#1 Collaborate with other staff

#2 Collaborate with other staff

#3 Collaborate with other staff

Mobile and off-site access

This category looks at mobile and off-site access to the intranet.

#1 Mobile access, #2 Off-site access

#2 Mobile access

#3 Off-site access

# 1 Offsite access

#3 Mobile access

Personalisation

This category looks at the ability of employees to personalise the intranet.

#1 I can personalise the intranet

#2 I can personalise the intranet

#3 I can personalise the intranet

Intranet maintenance

This category is about how well the intranet is maintained, whether it is being improved, how effectively staff are aware of new content and changes to the intranet, and whether training about the intranet has been provided.

#1 Content accuracy, #1 Content up-to-date, #1 Intranet being improved, #1 Can see what's new or changed

#1 Receive alerts, emails or RSS feeds when content on the intranet changes, #2 Intranet training

#2 Content accuracy

#2 Content up-to-date

#1 I have received training on using the intranet

#2 Can see what’s new or changed

#3 Change notifications

#3 Content accuracy

Performance

This category reviews the availability and speed of the intranet.

#1 Availability

#2 Availability, #3 Page load speed

#3 Availability

#1 Page load speed

#2 Page load speed

Look and feel/visual design

This category is about how the intranet looks. It includes questions about the home page, the overall look and feel and labeling of content.

#1 Home Page, #1 Intranet look & feel, #1 Consistent page layout

#2 Homepage, #2 Intranet look & feel, #2 Information on the intranet is easy to read , #1 Content is labelled with an owner

#3 Homepage, #3 Intranet look & feel

#1 Information on the intranet is easy to read, #2 Consistent page layout,

Demographics of the 51 participating organizations

Locations

10 from Asia/Pacific
10 from the USA & Canada
5 from the UK
26 from continental Europe

Size (employees)

101 - 1000 = 19
1001 - 10,000 = 26
10,001 - 50,000 = 6

Apr 27, 2015 9:54:48 PM | Competitions, Intranet Measurement, WIC Updates

September 04, 2014

Intranet Benchlearning with Peers

by Mads Richard Møller and Caroline Simony

Danish local municipalities have a lot in common, this includes how intranet and digital workplaces can support the daily work and internal communication.

This is why sixteen local Danish municipalities recently participated in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC). There are two major benefits of the common approach:

The results are very easy to compare. As one of the participants explains: “It is very effective to show our management that our results are poor compared to other municipalities. It really calls for reflection. And for action”.
It’s easy to take the benchmark results one important step further - towards 'bench learning'. You can make a better intranet and improve your results by learning from peers, because it is simple and rewarding to translate and use their results and real practice in your own organization.

The first step in the ‘bench learning with peers’ for Danish local municipalities was a whole day workshop in April 2014.

Participants from 18 Danish local municipalities met and discussed intranet best practice on the basis of the results from the WIC benchmark. The presentation of results was supplemented by sharing intranet screen shots between the participants.

Highly relevant and usable best practices

The main outcome of the workshop was a range of convincing and useful ‘best practices’ evaluated by intranet users similar to each other and presented by and confirmed in discussion with peers.

Key learnings were closely related to the special conditions for municipalities: being organizational and geographical diversified and embracing very different types of employees and tasks. This pointed to:

The importance of local management support, and
Segmentation as a central way to create easy access to relevant content for different users.

The conclusions were not surprising or 'never-heard-before' conclusions, but they provided the participants with extremely relevant learnings and points to note for their further intranet development.

Important to challenge the ‘blindness of peers’

Even though the peer-to-peer sessions are extremely effective and useful, it is still important to challenge and supplement these learnings. This may require a diplomatic and professional analysis to inspire local municipalities with best practices (e.g. Coca Cola or LEGO) and can be a very important eye opener for using the intranet in brand new ways, unleashing even more of the digital potential.

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About the Danish ‘benchlearning with peers’ concept

The WIC benchmark and workshop for Danish municipalities was arranged in collaboration with the Danish community for intranet and digital workplaces Intra2.dk. The next step – besides benchmarking and learning from more local municipalities – is ‘data mining’, e.g. looking at differences between different user groups. Another “benchlearning with peers” activity in the pipeline is planned for SharePoint intranets.

About the authors

Mads Richard is the Danish partner in Worldwide Intranet Challenge. He is also the founder of Intra2.dk, where more than 250 Danish companies share knowledge about intranet and digital workplaces, and works as a consultant in his firm Intracom Consult. Caroline Simony is facilitator of Intra2.dk.

Sep 4, 2014 2:12:48 PM | Intranet Events, WIC Updates

February 05, 2014

The WIC's most valuable intranets of 2013 (based on end user feedback)

by Andrew Wright

The Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) is a free web based survey that allows organisations to obtain feedback about their intranets from the people that matter the most - their intranet end users. The WIC team then benchmarks the feedback from all participating organisations, enabling a comparative score and rank for each survey question to be given.

In 2013, 61 organisations from 9 different countries participated in the WIC, bringing the total number of organisations who have participated to 179.

Note: Total surveys completed = 193. Some organisations have completed the WIC twice.

This article lists those organisations from 2013 who received the highest rankings in a range of categories, based on feedback from their own staff (you may also wish to view 2012's top ranked intranets).

2013 top ranked intranet - Milan Chamber of Commerce (Italy)

For 2013, the overall top ranked intranet was from the Milan Chamber of Commerce (Italy). The Chamber of Commerce supports and promotes the general interests of local businesses and markets through in-house functions or others delegated to it by the national or regional governments or deriving from international conventions.

The Milan Chamber of Commerce also ranked #1 in many of the survey questions including: Value, Look and feel, Home Page, Understanding culture and values, Finding information, Search, Managing documents, Re-usable documents, Policies and procedures, and Reports and/or dashboards.

See the case study - Leading intranets - Milan Chamber of Commerce.

Milan Chamber of Commerce Home page

2nd ranked intranet - QIC (Australia)

The second ranked intranet was from QIC. Established in 1991 by the Queensland Government to manage its long-term investments, QIC has grown to be one of the largest institutional investment managers in Australia, with more than 90 local and international clients and $70.1 billion in funds under management as at 30 June 2013.

QIC rated well in the following questions: #1 in Australia, #2 home page, information easy to read, publishing content, managing documents, policies and procedures, content, reports and/or dashboards, and #3 value of the intranet, look and feel. access to business applications,

Sample comments from staff about the intranet:

We have seen dramatic improvements in the intranet over the last year - the intranet is much more user friendly. I see benefit in the continued development of this channel as a place for employee interaction, toolkit for resources, information and how to guidance and to promote 'connective' stories that promote QIC values and culture.

Being a new starter to the business, I have found the intranet to be great in helping me with every-day tasks. It is very easy to find your way around and provides me with the information required.

Keep up the good work. A huge improvement. Everything should always be a work in progress, most things can always be improved upon.

QIC Intranet Home Page

3rd ranked intranet - Prophet (USA)

Prophet is the third ranked intranet for 2013. Prophet is a strategic brand and marketing consultancy with offices around the globe. Clients include BMW, Cisco, GE, Johnson and Johnson, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s, The Cosmopolitan, Visa, and Zurich Financial.

Prophet rated well in the following questions: #1 online discussions, staff details, access to business applications, #1 in the United States, #2 value of the intranet, look and feel, re-usable documents, providing feedback, notification of changes to intranet content, #3 finding information, publishing content, provision of intranet training.

Prophet home page

Sample comments from staff:

I think the team has done an awesome job with the redesign -- the broader thing to tackle is our culture of sharing knowledge - really getting people to dig in with this -- we are all responsible for this -- but in the end the team has done an outstanding job of giving us an environment to do this well

The recent changes to our intranet, especially the elements of gamification, make engagement with the company, content and culture almost second-nature. The photos and personal profiles add an excellent element of social media.

I LOVE THE INTRANET. It's super collaborative, and I really like the ability to talk to colleagues across different offices. The visibility on the pipeline is brilliant, as are the staff profiles.

Prophet was also a gold winner in the 2009 intranet innovation awards.

Other highly ranked organisations

The following organisations also ranked in the top 3 (top 5%) in one or more of the survey questions or categories:

AmBank Group (M) Bhd (Malaysia), #2 for completing work tasks
Beaver Street Fisheries (United States), #2 for online forms
British Gas, (UK) #1 UK intranet, #1 10,000+ employees, #3 online discussions
Socialministeriet (Denmark), #1 for completing work tasks
Department of Transport (Australia), #3 information for new starters
Endress+Hauser (Switzerland), #2 information about products/services, #2 search
ERM (UK), #1 off-site access, #3 personalisation
Home Assistance UK Ltd (UK), #3 intranet availability
JT International (Switzerland), #3 understanding values & culture
Køge Kommune (Denmark), #3 ease of reading information
Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre (Australia), #2 new starter information, #2 content accuracy, #2 understand culture and values, #2 finding information, #3 home page, #3 news, #3 policies and procedures, #3 product/service information, #3 feedback about intranet, #3 mobile access
Nestlé (Switzerland), #2 collaboration
NNE Pharmaplan (Denmark), #2 personalisation, #1 1000 - 10,000 employees
PinnacleHealth System (USA), #2 complete work tasks
Queensland Country Credit Union (Australia), #1 online forms, #3 managing documents, #2 intranet training
State of Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles (USA), #2 work instructions
Simpson Grierson (New Zealand), #3 content, #3 change notification, #2 intranet availability, #3 staff details, #2 news
SNL Financial (USA), #3 collaboration, #3 reports & dashboards
St Barbara (Australia), #3 search, #3 re-usable documents
Swisscom AG (Switzerland), #1 collaboration, #1 mobile access, #1 content easy to read, #3 content accuracy, #3 off-site access
Tiscali Spa (Italy), #3 work instructions

Characteristics of highly ranked intranets

The following characteristics were common among the leading WIC intranets.

Staff spend more time using them

Staff from the top 6 most valuable intranets (ie. the top 10%) spent an average of 43.1 minutes each day on the intranet. While staff from the bottom 6 organisations spent on average just 18.1 minutes - less than half.

This is consistent with WIC research from last year which shows that the more time staff spend using the intranet, the more valuable they perceive it to be.

The challenge for intranet professionals then is to deliver content and services that will keep staff coming back.

They are more interactive

While intranets in the top 10% out-scored those in the bottom 10% in all survey questions, for some questions there was a larger discrepancy than others. This would suggest that, as the highest priority, the biggest opportunity for improving intranets lies in these areas.

The biggest discrepancies were in the four questions (from a total of 50) shown in the chart below.

These questions all relate to making the intranet more interactive and convincing staff to contribute content. For more information about this, see 10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia.

They support clear business objectives

There are many articles about intranet strategy that discuss the importance of aligning the intranet with business objectives. After speaking with many of the managers of the leading WIC intranets listed in this article, it appears that most of the business objectives supported by their intranets can generally be placed into three broad categories:

Innovation and continuous improvement: This includes the ability of intranets to identify and support new ideas, forums for discussing new ideas and for looking at ways to improve things, project & team sites for implementing these ideas, serendipitous connections for fostering innovative & collaborative work environments, and communications to inform people about process changes resulting from the implementation of new ideas
Operations: This includes the ability of intranets to support call centres and front line staff, to improve customer satisfaction by delivering products and services more quickly, effectively and efficiently, to ensure processes and tasks are completed consistently throughout the organisation and to automate manual processes where possible.
Employee engagement: This includes the ability of the intranet to provide staff with access to the information and tools they need to their jobs from anywhere at anytime on any device, allowing them greater freedom and flexibility to control their own work more effectively.

For more information about these objectives, including additional examples of how intranets can help, see 3 compelling business reasons for having an intranet.

They ‘mine’ their social content

While enterprise social networks (or social intranets, social software, enterprise 2.0) have been getting a lot of attention lately (partly because of the difficulty in gaining traction), research from Deloitte and McKinsey suggests that this attention is warranted and that those organisations that ‘get it right’ will gain a significant advantage over the competition.

Leading WIC intranets have recognised that greater staff participation and interactivity with the intranet is not only inevitable but is critical to raising the value of the intranet. However with this greater level of input from staff comes a greater need to recognise the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise’. So just as big data has created the need for a data miner, increased online social interactions has created the need for a ‘content miner’ - someone to analyse and identify key nuggets of information and include them in a formal organisational wide information repository.

For more about this topic, see Intranets: the signal and the noise and the need for a 'content miner'

Participate in the WIC in 2014

If you would like to participate in the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) this year you just need to complete the WIC registration page (or if you are from Denmark, view the Danish WIC site). It takes just a couple of minutes and you could have the benchmark results on your desk within two weeks, for free.

While it can be a little daunting and takes a lot of courage to ask for feedback from your end users, deep down you probably know that it's the first step you need to take to provide a better intranet experience. Without this concrete feedback, you are relying largely on intuition and guesswork to identify improvement activities. In addition to this, past experience has shown that benchmarking your intranet will help improve it.

Nearly 200 organisations from around the world have already benefited from participation and many have provided recommendations for the WIC.

The survey is currently available in 13 languages with others being added as requested. The WIC is also supported by a network of partners from around the world.

Key facts

The intranet is built with Liferay technology
There are 1153 end users
The intranet was developed from May 2012 (beta) and finally launched in September 2012. An external makeover is planned for 2014.
The 3 most visited areas are:

Home page: news and information people need can be found here immediately.
Directory and profiles
The communications section and provisions (containing detailed information to colleagues)

In a year and a half over 700 items were created for the “fixed part” of the homepage and more than 300 other content items were generated by editors of the various internal sections.
The average duration of a visit is about 6 and a half minutes,
On average 40,000 pages per month are displayed with clear peaks in the most intense periods of work (up to 43,000 in May 2013-37000 in July 2013)

Screenshots

Below is the Milan Chamber of Commerce home page (the full background image can be changed according to the season, event or simply for aesthetic purposes.)

Widget page

Each user can create their own widget page. Below is an example page showing possible widgets that staff can choose. From this page it’s possible to move, open or close widgets as required.

HR Page

This page is an example of complex internal section containing links to content and documents.

September 04, 2013

10 lessons intranets can learn from Wikipedia

by Andrew Wright

Convincing employees to use the intranet is one of the biggest challenges intranet managers face. One of the main reasons is the difficulty in persuading employees to contribute good content that other employees will find useful.

Just how difficult this task can be is highlighted by feedback from the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC) online benchmark survey (the survey has been completed by over 45,000 intranet end users from more than 160 organisations).

The chart below shows the breakdown of responses to the 4 questions that ask employees how often they contribute content to the intranet.

As you can see, on average more than 90% of staff are not frequent contributors (content contribution methods include discussion forums, commenting, team sites, messaging, blogging, micro-blogging, as well as publishing traditional intranet content).

That’s a huge amount of handy hints, tips, information, business intelligence, insights, best practices, ideas, innovations, solutions, answers, knowledge and good advice that is not being properly shared or managed by organisations.

This lack of involvement represents a virtual gold mine of untapped knowledge lying dormant within many organisations.

How can organisations mine this gold?

Wikipedia began in 2001 and has since grown to become the 6th most popular internet site in the world (according to the Alexa website rankings). The Wikipedia statistics for June show that there were 11,071,642 pageviews per hour for the English Wikipedia. In anyone’s language, Wikipedia is a runaway success. And all the content is provided by volunteers!

How did this happen? Why do people contribute content? And can these same lessons be applied within an organisation?

The article, Why did Wikipedia succeed while other encyclopedias failed, explains that there were seven collaborative encyclopedias that aspired to Wikipedia-like dimensions before Wikipedia itself came along.

So why did Wikipedia succeed?

Focus on content - not the technology

Wikipedia focused on content development instead of technology. Its competitors, on the other hand, saw themselves more as technologists than as content providers. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the two Wikipedia founders, played the role of content evangelists, seeding Wikipedia with content they solicited from contributors — which, in turn, led to more content, and more contributors.

Lower barriers to participation

Wikipedia also lowered the barriers to participation. Editing Wikipedia is easy, instant, and virtually commitment-free. It’s possible to come along and do an anonymous edit and never make a contribution again. Over time, a sentence here and a paragraph there, turned into articles, which then turned into an encyclopedia. Without this relatively low barrier to entry, the community would be difficult to sustain.

In addition, there are no professional editors that review material before it is published. Instead, it’s the people who visit the pages who are the reviewers.

Why do people contribute content?

The article Online Motivational Factors: Incentives for Participation and Contribution in Wikipedia also examines why people are motivated to contribute to Wikipedia. There are many research based references and it’s well worth reading. Some of the key findings include:

Users will contribute more to a community if they:
- Believe that their contributions are important to the group’s performance,
- Believe that their contributions will be identifiable, and
- Like the group they are working with.

Three conditions need to exist for this kind of peer work to perform well:
- Cost for the contributors is low - needs to be easy to do
- Tasks are ‘chunked into bite-size pieces’ - minor editing is available and boosts participation because the threshold for initial participation is low
- Low cost of quality control

The article also notes that research has shown that a high level of both two-way and large scale community interactivity is a strong inducement to participate. There is a strong correlation between interactivity and motivation in online communities.

10 lessons that can be applied to intranets

Become ‘content evangelists’ - obtain ‘seed’ content from contributors
Provide a platform that is quick and easy to use - lower barriers to contribution
Make it possible for people to do edits on the run - chunking of tasks
Consider the content review process - is it unwieldy and a barrier to contribution?
Don’t get caught up in the technology - focus on helping users understand what you want from them rather than on dazzling them
Provide tools to enable contributors to interact with each other
Organise content community events and gatherings
Explain how content contribution is important to the organisation’s future
Use gamification with incentives to reward certain user behaviors
Make sure your platform ‘invites’ rather than ‘challenges’

Interested in learning more about the WIC research?

I am giving three presentations in September where I'll be talking about some of the more interesting findings from the WIC data. I'll also be showing case studies of intranets that have succeeded in satisfying their most important stakeholder, the end user.

Sep 4, 2013 2:09:51 AM | Intranet Analysis, Intranet Leading Practices, WIC Updates

Andrew Wright

Director of CIBA Solutions, who manage the worldwide intranet challenge (WIC).

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Digital Workplace and Intranet Employee Benchmarking

Intranet end user benchmarking, sharepoint, internal communication, digital workplace