Case Studies—Impact of Intranets
By Raha Naddaf, Staff Writer
eCentral
Campaign, Lockwood Greene
In 2003, Lockwood Greene was faced with a simple rollout of
a new and beneficial employee database that created a challenge—not
in implementing technology—but in overcoming attitudes
and changing behaviors. For over a year, Lockwood Greene’s
Corporate Information Technology department (CIT) had been
working on a new centralized employee information database
called “eCentral”—short for “Employee
Central.” The purpose of eCentral was to give their
globally dispersed workforce a single, easy-to-use way to
find and contact other employees. With the addition of resumes
and credentials, employees could more easily find talent across
the enterprise and quickly assemble teams for projects. The
objective in developing and launching this online system was
to save employees time, effort and cost accomplishing the
basic tasks needed to do their work. After the launch of the
first e-mail, CIT did in fact receive negative feedback: Some
employees thought that the message looked like a sophisticated
advertisement for software and wondered why CIT was “spamming”
the workforce with a solicitation. At the four-week point,
over 1,000 employees had entered the eCentral site and made
some change in the database—exceeding the 33 percent
goal set in the objectives and marking the campaign as a success.
Redesign
of The Highway, Progressive’s Intranet, Progressive
Insurance Corp.
The Highway, Progressive’s intranet, is the company’s
primary source for news and information—connecting over
20,000 employees and providing equal access to information
to over 350 offices across the country. The intranet team
initiated a redesign of The Highway in July 2002 to freshen
the look, improve functionality and provide a better online
experience for users. The redesign was intended to improve
and enhance the overall navigation and functionality of the
site as well as freshen the look and feel while moving towards
a strategic vision: a portal concept that makes all enterprise
resources (information, applications and processes) accessible
and personalized through the web. Since the redesign, reports
indicate that visits have increased, reaching their first
million visits per month ever. Employee feedback has been
positive and the team received more comments than to any prior
redesign.
Aon
Flex and Aon HRCafé Launch, Aon Canada Inc.
Aon Canada Inc. is 10 ‘siloed’ organizations that
merged in 1997 with 2,268 employees. In 1997, a traditional
employee benefit program was available—offering health,
dental, life insurance, pension and stock purchase plans,
but with little choice. Employee feedback supported the move
to a flexible benefits program that offered more choice, flexibility
and tax-effectiveness. Going from a traditional program requiring
little employee involvement with virtually no choice, to a
program that required significant understanding and participation
would be a monumental change. How best to facilitate this
degree of change? Aon Canada Inc. implemented a self-service
intranet site and a flexible benefits plan in the fall of
2001. Aon HR Café was a personalized transactional
intranet site that gave employees the opportunity to model
different types of benefit programs and understand the dollar
value of the total program along with associated tax savings.
World
News Network, Nortel Networks
In 2001, Nortel Networks, one of the world’s largest
telecommunications and networking companies, faced an unprecedented
situation: a dramatic downturn in the global market that necessitated
a 50 percent reduction in employees and a dramatic restructuring
of the corporation. In this environment, speculation became
the staple of the news media. Internet chat rooms swirled
with the latest rumors, and anxiety and uncertainty threatened
to frustrate management's efforts to right the ship. To be
successful, the employee communication team would have to
compete successfully against both internal and external news
sources vying for employee attention. Internally, other divisional
news pages threatened to diminish the audience for World News
Network, thus making it more difficult for management to be
sure its message would reach all employees.
The collection of all case studies from the 2004 Gold
Quill Awards program, titled, "Best Practices in Communication
Planning and Implementation, Volume 19," is scheduled
for release soon. The new softcover book will feature more
than 100 case studies of what's working in communication right
now. Online preordering is now available at www.iabc.com/knowledge.
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