Driving employee engagement to deliver client success: 6 challenges DWF addressed with their intranet

After multiple acquisitions, leading UK law firm DWF doubled in size, spread across 12 offices in the UK and Ireland, and found themselves with multiple intranets. They needed to integrate disparate teams and infrastructure, unlock valuable knowledge from across the organisation and help teams deliver the best, most timely legal advice to clients.

So what was the answer?

A single, intuitive intranet platform that could bring everyone together and address the following challenges:

1) Single access to knowledge

With employees across multiple locations, accessing knowledge and expertise to deliver legal advice for clients quickly and accurately was a challenge. DWF needed one place their employees could access the skills, knowledge and information they needed from across the business.

Having previously struggled to find what they needed on old platforms, it was essential their new intranet included search functionality that searched all content, from documents to the staff directory, calendars to attachments, to find the most relevant answer. Having this instantly helped DWF bring together legal specialists across all of its six practice groups.

Lawrence Spence, Portfolio Manager, explains; “Previously, it was difficult to find the right people, skills and information needed to deliver client engagement in the best and most efficient way. Now, the process is much faster for our legal specialists, saving them time and increasing their focus on core, client-facing tasks.”

2) Promoting collaboration

Having a single platform to share knowledge and best practice, provide an awareness of who’s who across the business, and access to social tools, including blogging and discussion forums, has been essential for DWF to foster collaboration.

Ryan Kaye, Project Manager, says; “Blogging is a critical tool for us in terms of driving collaboration. Our CEO Andrew Leaitherland blogs very regularly and that’s been fantastic for engaging staff across all our practice groups. We use discussion forums regularly now when we launch new products and services, and we get ideas and suggestions on how we can improve them.”

3) Easy access to critical news and information

Communicating important messages and making sure the most up-to-date and relevant information is being used across a dispersed workforce is always a challenge.

DWF use their homepage to give employees fast, easy access to a range of critical news, information and resources in one place. It provides all the tools and resources users need, including links to legal knowledge banks for different practices, online legal and IT training, blogs and discussion forums and HR and expenses.

This helps to effectively communicate the firm’s mission, values and brand to all employees, as well as giving them fast access to the tools and resources they need.

4) Improving content management

Previously, adding new content was complex and time consuming, putting pressure on content administrators and the IT team. Now, through their intranet, the process is much faster and simpler, delivering significant time and cost savings.

Ian Bennett, Content Administrator, is delighted with the results; “Interact has made it very easy for me to add new content areas and to add information to those areas. The whole process is now very quick and simple, which means I can focus on more strategic tasks such as driving adoption and supporting users more effectively.”

5) Maintaining brand identity

Maintaining a strong brand identity is always a challenge post-acquisition. By standardising page templates, corporate brand guidelines and introducing a set of engaging brand characters called the ‘o-men’ through their intranet, DWF has managed to achieve this.

Lawrence explains; “The o-men represent the values of the company and provide valuable information about new initiatives, people investment activities, company leadership, reward and recognition and driving employee engagement.”

6) Reducing pressure on time and resource

The objectives were clear but given the previous situation it seemed like a daunting task that would only put pressure on people’s time and available resource. They needed an easy-to-use, out-of-the-box solution, and Interact was just that allowing them to deploy in just 11 weeks.

Creating DWF-branded pages was fast and simple, requiring no specialist knowledge. Lawrence says; “The rich branding capabilities of Interact have enabled us to communicate DWF’s mission and brand values to all employees, helping us to create a more cohesive, successful firm.”

The results speak for themselves

Following a live launch at the DWF partner conference and a successful campaign, nearly all of DWF’s 2,500 staff now access the intranet on a regular basis. Blogging and forums are used frequently by teams to collaborate and share best practices.

And the site is growing at an impressive rate. When DWF launched their Interact intranet just over a year ago, the site contained 568 pages. It now has more than 1,400 pages and is growing by an average of 11 pages a day.