Sveriges Allmännytta smarter together with the new intranet

The old intranet was just that. Outdated. Many of the features of the solution did not even work, such as the search. There was no owner or manager for the intranet, and it had become a place that was poorly prioritised overall and trusted by employees. Eventually, it was management who put their foot down and announced that it was time for a change – a new intranet was needed.

In the pre-study phase, a baseline survey was conducted with an interesting result: although trust was very low – both in terms of the technology and the reliability of the content – there was a great deal of interest in making it work.

– We could see that a well-functioning intranet was long overdue, and we felt we had a good chance of doing something really good. We really took that on board and we shared our thinking and anchored our work as much as possible with the employees, says Jeanette Rådström, communicator and project manager at Sveriges Allmännytta, who had previous experience of running both intranet and web projects.

"There is every opportunity to develop further"

The preparatory work was done together with InUse and they produced an impact map and goals that would be very useful later in the work. In addition to Jeanette, the project team consisted of the HR manager, an IT employee and a communications employee.

They had and wanted to continue to have an Office 365 solution and work in Teams. Getting an intranet that worked with Office 365 was therefore the starting point for the project. The solution from Soleil integrates selected parts of Office 365, such as email integrations, Teams, Sharepoint and calendar. Now employees can more easily keep track of which groups they are in, have better document management and can see what is on their own agenda and what is happening in the company.

– We've only tweaked the Sitevision platform a little, otherwise we were very happy with the starting point. There are all kinds of opportunities to develop further, but we're starting with these functions and integrations, and we'll see if we want to add anything else later, says Jeanette Rådström.

Not all users use a computer to access the intranet, but the intranet is adapted for mobile users, which has worked smoothly and well.

As regards the search function, the standard solution is currently in place and not much time has been spent on this particular function, as we are satisfied with how it works at present. In the content work, they have been good at working based on SEO standards and adding metadata and so on. It has been noticed that users have improved considerably compared to how it looked a few years ago.

– I have not received any indications that people do not appreciate the search, on the contrary, I have heard happy employees say "Now I get hits on what I'm looking for!". As we see it, it works well without much effort. Then you never finish the search, so it's definitely something we will continue to work on, says Jeanette Rådström.

Thorough preparatory work laid the foundation

The main goal of the intranet was to become smarter together. The goal was divided into four sub-goals to make it easier to reconcile and measure. The sub-goals were increased collaboration, better control of the situation, reduced vulnerability and increased efficiency. Finding things more easily and sharing tips and learning from each other was a goal throughout the project.

Since the initiative came directly from the management, they could immediately focus on doing proper preparatory work, which Jeanette highly recommends:

– The most important success tip I can give is to spend most of the time on a good feasibility study. I'm a big advocate of impact mapping, as it gives you clear goals that you can work with during the project and also check against when you're done. Then you don't have to guess and can instead work goal-oriented and based on needs and what supports them. Throughout the process, we had no problem having to justify to management why we need to do this work, but if you don't have management with you, this is a good tool to be able to show the benefits, says Jeanette Rådström and continues:

– It can feel like you spend an incredible amount of time at the beginning and that people wonder "What's going on, why can't you see anything you've done?". But you get over it when you start tapping and coding – at the end it can go pretty fast instead. For us, there was very little we needed to rethink once we started building the intranet!

Stripped down and adapted to the organisation

At the beginning of the project, we traveled around and made many study visits to some who had had very successful intranet projects. They were relatively familiar with the major systems available, but wanted to see how they had been applied and how they could work in their own organisation. As a slightly smaller player, they soon realised that it was important to have a stable and secure system that could meet their specific needs.

– I think it's important to try to stay the course, to ask all new functions the question "Do we have support for this in our impact mapping?". You can do so much in your tool, so actually daring to adapt it to your company's conditions and what you need becomes extra important then. Dare to prioritise things! says Jeanette Rådström.

Sveriges Allmännytta has a fairly decentralised approach in that everyone is involved in creating news on the intranet, something that has worked beyond expectations in the new intranet.

– As someone who has been involved in a number of large projects, I know that there is always something that can bug or so, and this has gone surprisingly well actually! I have received a maximum of one question about how to launch a news, so despite not being trained in SiteVision's editor mode, it is so user-friendly that you understand on your own. I see that as an incredibly good grade, says Jeanette Rådström.

"I'm happy to get this up every morning"

Today, users are happy and since the launch, work has been running smoothly. They have also noticed that the internal brand has been strengthened.

– If you could see the old and new intranets side by side, you would see two completely different worlds. Now we have an appealing tool in design and layout – it feels like us. The old intranet had no color, no pictures and little text. "I'm happy to get this up every morning," many people say, and it's so important for the sense of who we are and what we stand for. At the intranet release party, two employees ran away from the party to be the first to post a news item! says Jeanette Rådström.

Today, they measure the use of the intranet and can see greater use and engagement - before, you couldn't really see the engagement in the intranet. With users being able to share, comment and like, there is a greater flow of information, which was one of the goals to become smarter together.

– I've worked in most of the big tools, and Sitevision is so simple and user-friendly that I have nothing but good things to say about it - I've fallen a little in love with the system. It feels like you've thought about it and are constantly thinking about the next smart thing. They've really managed to make it easy and fun for the editors. I can recommend this with everything I have, and it's very rare to say that in projects like this," says Jeanette Rådström.

In the future, Sveriges Allmännytta will follow up on the zero measurement and also do some more qualitative reconciliations with the organisation. It is seen that both parts are important to see that you end up in the right place and meet the requirements and expectations that exist internally.

– Of course, I have a full backlog of things I want to develop, but we have to let this live a little, do a new measurement and then we'll see what will be the next thing to get our teeth into. In the future, for example, I want to look more at automation for internal order flows and achieve even higher quality in our documentation flow. As I see it, it will be great to connect this to our new intranet, says Jeanette Rådström.