People gathered in a workspace with a whiteboard and spherical light fixtures

Innovating the Digital Workplace: Transforming an Already Award-winning Intranet

Private Communications Company

As the largest private broadband provider in the US, this family-owned company creates smart homes and smart cities all across the country. They partnered with Rightpoint to create a powerful digital workspace by evolving their already award-winning intranet. The result: an improved and innovative platform that equips and empowers their employees to share and access information, experiences, and insights so they can deliver distinctive value to their clients and drive profitability for their organization.

Services

Technology, Entertainment & Communications

Employee Experience

Starting with a Strategy

The company’s intranet was already a big success. It had won multiple awards and was a primary communications channel within the organization. However, it was built on an aging platform. The company chose to take advantage of the opportunity to rethink the digital workplace for their hybrid work environment. The goal was to deliver a modern, mobile-first experience that would empower employees to discover and take action.

The first phase of the partnership with Rightpoint was a six-week discovery process to align on goals, success metrics, business requirements, and project risks. This phase represented a deep dive into workspace vision and business goals, including the operational and cultural nuances that would influence adoption across the organization. Simultaneously, the team tackled content management assessment and strategy as well as an in-depth assessment of technology capabilities.

To create a clear vision and lay a strong foundation for the project, the team executed several types of research:

An initial workshop with the primary project stakeholders in Communications, HR, and Technology served to define success criteria and the project vision (including framing strategic drivers, business insights, revelations, potential risks and mitigation strategies).
This was complemented by user research sessions with key stakeholders, and interviews with a variety of employees from across the organization.

This intense discovery exercise provided the team with the key insights and revelations they needed to shape their vision for a complete reimagining that would result in a brand-new intranet.

The team removed constraints that would have limited their imagination by focusing on the “Why” and the “What” rather than getting stuck in conversations about how something would be accomplished. This approach gave them the freedom to imagine the best possible scenario.

They were able to take this approach because everyone involved in the project trusted that the combined team had the experience and expertise to bring the vision to life.

Two people smiling while looking at a laptop screen

Work

From the start, the team agreed that long-term success would require a design and implementation that paired innovation with proven, existing capabilities. They needed to marry experience and technology enhancements with the existing foundation of what was already working to create a wholly new solution.

As the team transitioned from strategy to the design and build phase, they did so having defined a set of core capabilities that would allow them to completely reimagine the digital workspace and create a new central hub for communication, collaboration, and work.

The following features would be central elements of the new experience:

Primary engagement channel for the employees
Personalized user experience, tailored to the employee’s location and interests
Improved search across all sites
Seamless collaboration for the entire organization

Keeping these elements in mind, the team incorporated many new and improved features into the new intranet.

A Fully Branded and Customized Aesthetic

While the intranet is built on Microsoft’s SharePoint Modern platform, the look and feel is entirely unique and reflects the company’s brand through and through. The attention to detail in the updated design makes the site feel like a seamless part of the employee experience.

A Strategically Personalized Experience

The team paid special attention to how personalization could help create a better user experience while also improving efficiency and productivity. Some of the personalization updates include:

Tailored navigation driven by personalization rules such as a My Region drop-down menu which highlights a user’s local content, My HR seen by employees only, and a Leaders Hub navigation drop-down menu just for people managers.
"Need To Know” module on the homepage gives visibility into specific to-dos and tasks that require timely attention, a great reminder when news rotates out of the featured area.
Customizable “My Resources” to maximize access to frequently used applications within the organization — employees bookmark their apps of choice for easy access.
A custom search overlay experience from the navigation provides quick access to bookmarked Resources, people directory and recently visited links.

An Enhanced Leaders Hub Section

The Leaders Hub section of the site provides curated and personalized information for senior leaders of the company, assisting them with their people management responsibilities and providing access to productivity tools and specific learning modules for leaders.

A key priority in the new intranet was to provide the company leaders with even faster and easier access to the tools and information they need. The company’s team elevated access to this critical section of the site with a targeted link for leaders in the main navigation — a change that tripled leader engagement.

A Full Range of Integrations

The new intranet includes time-saving integrations to key applications and analytics. These integrations offer quick access that reduces clicks and eliminates the need to re-authenticate in separate applications. For example:

Viva Engage integration fosters discussion and collaboration within the company.
My HR section integrates Workday data so hourly employees can quickly see available vacation time.
Company rewards and recognition platform highlights the latest accomplishments, rewards points balance, and provides easy access to the platform.
The company’s learning platform brings relevant learning and training videos into various areas of the site.
Several analytics platforms – Adobe Analytics, Microsoft Clarity, and New Relic – track usage patterns, engagement trends, heat maps, and overall site performance.

Greatly Improved IA and UX

Building this new site allowed the team to rearchitect how content was delivered across the site, moving from 100+ sub-sites within the Classic architecture to 30 streamlined Modern site collections that provide easier, more intuitive access to deep-dive content from the main navigation.

Two men looking and pointing at a laptop screen

"For a project of this scope and scale, everyone has to bring their A-team, and that’s just what Rightpoint did. Everyone worked together to expand the vision of what was possible. We were able to think big because we trusted that the team had the experience and expertise to deliver — and they did. As a bonus, the people on the team were not only some of the best in their field, they were a pleasure to work with."

Director, Digital Communications

Outcomes

Just one month after launch, positive feedback from employees was overwhelming. The new intranet provides employees with a convenient front door to their digital workspace, which gives them easy access to all the tools they need to increase productivity.

Launching the new intranet on SharePoint Modern is a step forward in the broader digital ecosystem for all of the companies. It allows better alignment with the other companies that are also using SharePoint Modern for their intranets. Being on the same platform will allow future integrations across companies to provide more efficient ways of sharing information across the enterprise.

Other companies are recognizing the increase in employee engagement that is happening at this large private communications company and are looking to replicate the intranet practices across their divisions as well. We are expanding these capabilities to other company divisions.

Impact

Increase in mobile engagement

300%

Increase in engagement on the Leaders Hub

20%

Of all HR issues resolved via a chatbot from the intranet

Our Contributions

Insights