Blog | 25 January 2021
"Coffee machine talk has been replaced by news and commentary"
The train company Green Cargo has employees spread across the country. In 2019, they launched a new intranet to meet their needs. Perhaps that made them extra prepared for today's remote working. We had a chat with Veronica Svahlin, internal communicator and intranet manager at Green Cargo.
How was your internal communication affected by the pandemic?
As a train company, we already have employees spread all over the country – in yards, in workshops, train drivers and administrative staff – and now everyone who can is working from home. So the intranet has become an important hub.
One of the first things we did was to create a Q&A page on how the pandemic is affecting our company. For example, we need to be clear about what guidelines we have for physical training that is business-critical, what applies to our train drivers during their passport journeys, when they should get to their work shifts so that they can travel as safely as possible, but also keep track of rules in Denmark and Norway for our cross-border traffic. As soon as the page is updated, statistics show that it is well visited.
How has the transition from physical to digital meetings gone?
Everyone has been creative and adapted quickly. In our yards, where we have daily reconciliation meetings and gather in slightly larger groups, we have solved this by holding the meeting outdoors as much as possible, using larger rooms so that we can spread out and using Teams as a video meeting, which is also recorded. The annual training that our instructors in production must undergo to maintain their qualifications was hastily changed and conducted as a live webcast instead, something we have not done before, but which was appreciated by the participants. And our physical managerial dialogues, where managers from across the company gather, were replaced with Team Meetings. Here, the interactive parts, where we bring up topics for joint discussion in smaller groups, which we call chipboards, have worked well in digital format, which is great fun.
Veronica Svahlin, Intranätsansvarig på Green Cargo
Working from home can be good at times and tough at others. What do you do to stay motivated?
I would say that within the organisation, we have more regular meetings such as morning meetings and review meetings. New forums have also emerged that we didn't have before, such as cross-functional meetings where we can quickly reconcile what's happening internally, make quick decisions and then communicate them out.
Many departments and functions have also introduced digital fika, where people talk about anything and everything. You can share thoughts and ideas about work tasks or talk about the weather and the weekend. And let's not forget the video camera. Many people have become much better at using video cameras in their meetings, precisely to get a more IRL feel.
How do you maintain job satisfaction?
In my role as internal communicator and intranet manager, I try to focus on making the work of our employees visible. To give a picture of what their everyday life looks like, success stories, to "connect" us when we do not see each other physically as often. It could be an article about the challenges, but also great efforts made during the snowstorm in the north in January, or a text about how we work together with our customers to improve our booking process. It creates a lot of interaction like likes and comments. The chatter at the coffee machines has been replaced by news and comments on the intranet.
Great to see more engagement on the intranet. Tell us more!
We didn't have social features at all on our previous intranet, but now we really notice that the habit of liking, commenting and sharing has set in. We have a lot of social groups that are used on a daily basis, such as the group where we post the daily status report in production, which affects many of our employees. We also have personalised department inputs on the intranet that are linked to the department you belong to.
It becomes very concrete and close, which means that many people, especially in our production, use the social department flow a lot to give "heads-up" and push for different things. And I think that's great, partly because that's where we have the largest proportion of our employees, but also because everyone now has access to our intranet around the clock, no matter where they are, both via your computer, mobile or tablet. The intranet has become a valued and trusted channel.
What do you think the workplace of the future will look like?
I think it will become more personalised. Some people miss the workplace a lot and want to keep the private sphere and the work sphere separate, while others think that working from home suits them well for various reasons. It will probably be a combination of physical and digital meetings. Now we have tested it and know that it works.
