Content strategy exclusive: Let your employees do the talking

As a financial cooperative, Dupaco’s mission is to improve our members’ financial position and build valued relationships by delivering personalized financial advice, products, and service.

Our design for our intranet, The Burst, is representative of how we brand our company to our members. We intentionally kept the design aspect of our new intranet simple and low-key, as we wanted to highlight the content and functionality. Many times fashion overpowers function and in this case, the function and content were the stars. We also wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to find what they were looking for and didn’t want the design to intrude upon that.

Our engagement challenge

Our biggest challenge was finding a way to incorporate a large amount of working content and resources for employees, while also highlighting our culture and encouraging employee engagement. We have 350 employees among 19 locations and a majority of our employees use information or resources available through the intranet to work with members and do their jobs. We also wanted to find a way to encourage employees to share their stories and news through the intranet.

Our approach

In addition to incorporating our brand into the intranet, our three main objectives were to:

1) Enhance functionality: Make it easy for employees to find the information they are seeking

2) Reduce unnecessary email: Better intranet structure that will create a library of current content and reduce email

3) Encourage employee engagement: Create a living, changing content environment by encouraging employee generated content

It’s all about the content

We kept the design and structure of The Burst very clean and simple as we wanted the content to be the focus. We switched from a mostly department-based structure to a simple, task-based structure to help make it easier to find information. We also incorporated our logo, name, and brand colors and elements throughout the intranet. Our main sections are:

Member area

• The Member Hub includes information related to working with a member
• It contains the ‘how to’ information that used to be mostly sent via email

Employee area

• The Employee Hub contains information purely related to the employee
• It means the universally used resources can sit in one area rather than scattered in several areas of the old intranet, such as new career opportunities and new employees to the company

Staff development

• This area includes information related to training, development and sales, including calendars so employees can easily see what is available when and quick links to the training team who interact with a large majority of our employees
• It contains the resources which used to be in multiple areas on the old intranet

Company area

• Named Dupaco, this area includes information related to general business or company news and announcements, security, etc.

Teams area

• This area is purely for project and department based teams

Employee only space

• This was created to allow employees to quickly and easily share their stories and news, as well as buy/sell/trade with other employees

People directory

• An area to include all employee information, including interests, expertise, favorites, etc.

Encouraging employee generated content

Our homepage design is focussed on employee generated content rather than company related content. We wanted to both highlight and encourage employees and the connections they make with our members.

Here’s how we structure our homepage, which is almost completely employee generated content:

Top banner

• This contains a variety of graphics, from highlighting events and general items
• We have seen an increase in employee contributed photos seeking to be in the ‘top spot’

Small right banner

• A dedicated area to make it easy for employees to submit their own stories

Fraud Squad Alerts

• As a financial institution, it is important that employees are aware of fraud and security issues so all updates from the Fraud team are made visible on the homepage

Milestones

• A social element to recognize employee birthdays and anniversaries

Who’s blogging?

• In addition to core communicators, we have key employee ‘Brand Activists’ sharing their experiences with their colleagues
• Blogs range from more industry or company related news to general personal interests

What’s happening?

• A mix of employee submitted stories and company generated news

Campaign graphics

• This particular campaign is GreenBack Impact 2.0. It allows employees to add their impact stories and other campaign related information in our annual member campaign section

Impact stories

• This widget pulls through the employee generated posts about their connections with members and the impact it has

Flair Awards

• Employees can recognize other employees for great service, etc.

The results

We launched our intranet on March 4, 2015. At the end of this year, we average 90% of active users and over the first ten months we have had 274,059 visits.

We have seen a steady increase month by month in collaboration. Our first month showed 69 contributors (20% of users), five months in we had 146 contributors (40% of users) and now we are seeing 200 contributors (52% of users).