Tag: homepage

Socially redundant

 

 

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I’ve been following with interest the situation with HMV and the job losses announced live on Twitter.  It highlights some of the issues companies and employees face when becoming more of an open, transparent or social organisation.

The press is filled with stories of industrial relation being conducted via social media channels. As organisations begin to ask more of employees to collaborate, share knowledge and generally become a louder voice within the workplace it also requires the organisation to accept that the channels used for collaboration and knowledge sharing can also be used for employees to discuss the decisions and actions that effect their family and livelihood.

How companies, or maybe that should be individuals within companies, handle the situation reflects a great deal on how much they understand or fear the power of technology that enables employees becoming more engaged or vocal within open, transparent and social businesses. In some ways it shows how far an organisation has come in bridging the digital divide that exists within many companies.

A few years ago I worked for an organisation that trumpeted to clients the value and expertise of its staff. We had developed an active knowledge and collaboration programme, based around communities and the value of collectively working towards solutions for our clients. Our intranet platform was full of articles of people related initiatives involving collective innovation. The firm then announced there were to be redundancies. It happens and this article is not discussing the merits or dilemma of redundancies but how digital savvy companies deal with it. Rather than continue the open, community based approached being developed the response from leadership was to remove ‘people related’ and ‘success’ stories from the intranet and close down any form of online discussion around the events. I appreciate there are certain legal requirements and obligations that need to be met but to completely ignore this channel was paramount to dismissing this as an essential source of news and discussion.  So we had the situation where staff could read about events on external news and social sites but could find nothing within the intranet environment.  For a channel that was being promoted as a source for company news, collaboration and knowledge sharing the effect was dramatic. Over the next few months we saw contributions and engagement on our communities drop dramatically. I fear it will be many years before this organisation understands the possibility that these types of collaborative workplace technologies can provide in changing the way people work.

Moving this on a few years I had the fortune to work for a global organisation that is really trying to change the way they work. They had suffered from poor industrial relations but are determine to build relationships, engagement and communities within their workforce by using collaborative technologies, realising that embracing the open nature that technologies provide is one of the ways to prosper in the changing work of work. Rather than bury their head in the sand they are actively building and supporting internal communities, putting in place appropriate stewardship, governance, advocates and nurturing collateral to make sure this works. It won’t happen overnight and there will be hurdles along the way. But being open and transparent will ensure they have a greater chance of bridging the digital divide.

All organisations will go through good and bad times. But the consistency of relationships with their employees will ensure the continued development of collaboration and knowledge sharing. This is a significant step in creating a more open and democratic working organisation that the digital age is delivering.

 

 

When two become one

Got a baby sitter on Saturday so my wife and I went to see ‘Up in the clouds’ – good film but that’s not the point of my post. In one scene  ‘preppy’ rookie employee was giving presentation that focused on the merger of the words ‘global’ and ‘local’ to form Glocal!! Stealing my thunder I think. For a while I’ve garnered a sense that we are looking back towards local solutions to combat the rise of ‘global this and that’. The same applies in the world of intranets. Some of our most popular communities are based around strong local connectors, doing local things that matter to the members. Regardles of the ‘global’ solutions offered (or forced upon them) from new technology, fancy new branding,  etc. The communities work because they know and understand what’s required. A know all usability people will say that any site should do the user research etc prior to launch but sometimes you can’t please everyone and comprises to fit within the company guidelines. Our local community sites have purposely kept themselvs under the radar to avoid having to conform to global requirements and have remain far healthier than gloabl communities that have grown big and perished.

Troops on the ground with passion

On 1st October my firm completed a rebranding programme. The visible effects on the intranet were colour scheme and the switch from illustrations to photo imagery. A number of weeks prior to the switch we looked at the most efficient way this could be done. Schemes were devised and then dropped (i.e. an agent to find/replace jpegs, gifs etc – not all image files could be dropped such as photos of events and individuals). Eventually we fell back on the fail-safe position of manual updates. Leading up to the brand change we spent many nights removing illustrations. On the night of the rebrand we then loaded photos to a number of key pages. We’ve learnt some lessons, particularly becoming stricter on who, how and where photos can be used. A number of intranet stakeholders worked with great passion to ensure their areas complied to the new branding.

 

It did get me thinking, even after all these years of improved content management systems, some tasks still need the troops on the ground deleting, copying, replacing and uploading. Just confirms to me that one of the main mantras for running an intranet is that its ‘run by people, for people, who need connecting to people’. Technology is useful but passion is key

The decreasing value of a homepage

One of the trends for 2009 has been the decreasing value of the homepage on websites. When I started in the world of the browser the homepage was the ‘be all and end all’ of the site. You had to get coverage on the homepage for your content to be viewed. Times have changed. With differing adoption approaches directing users to sites (email alerts, notifications, alias urls, rss feeds, bookmarking) the savvy online user now knows how to get direct to what they need rather than go through a busy, distracting homepage that disrupts, interrupts and annoys. Common website homepages now find ways to grab us by the arm and shout in our ears about how wonderful they are and how much we need their products and services.

On my intranet I see a similar pattern. The number of visitors accessing content via the homepage has decreased since our 2007 comparison (see statistics below).

Visits via homepage

  • June 2009 – 35,669
  • June 2008 – No statistics available*
  • June 2007 – 66,961
  • June 2006 – 66,690
  • June 2005 – 64,450
  • June 2004 – 60,202
  • June 2003 – 48, 324
  • June 2002 – 34,897
    *No site usage software was available in 2008.

    The overall number of visitors to the intranet and the page views garnered from these visits have remained consistent throughout 2004 – 2009, yet access via the homepage is dropping. Why?

    One of the key factors within our new intranet template design was the ability to create alias urls (the ability to give a content page its unique name in the form of a url – i.e. audit.insite/pages/CCH. This has allowed users direct access to the task they need to complete without a detour through the homepage.

    In June 2009 1,232, pages were used to access content on the intranet. Of the traffic to our main knowledge community sites in June 45% went directly into their sites without using the homepage navigation.

    The user now has far greater knowledge how to navigate online. With knowledge comes control. A user can control their journey to a key tasks far easier than ever before. This presents a greater challenge for a Content Manager tasked with getting content in front of a user. It requires greater focus on search, the words used, key navigation and your adoption approach rather than just publishing on your homepage. That approach won’t work. At best they’ll just ignore the content and at worst they’ll think the homepage is a waste of space.