Hi, good morning everyone. I hope everyone is having
an enjoyable day and learning some great new things.
My name's Brad Rooke and I'm the Senior Solutions
Consultant with Customer Success at Igloo Software.
I have the pleasure of helping people be
really wildly successful with their digital
workplaces. So it's a passion of
mine and I'm really pleased to be here with you today.
Through today's session, I really
want to look at the Intranet
and its' evolution from
something of a standalone entity, something
of a top down entity, to that
digital destination that it needs
to be. Digital transformation
that it needs to be as we move forward into
this brave new world of work.
And that's really what I'd like to explore
with you today, especially as we move into
this future and know that things are changing
and will continue to change as we move forward.
So the impact of the pandemic for
me was really clear. We had a lot of
Intranets, a lot of digital workplaces,
that were very top down communication.
We started looking at the idea of
knowledge being distilled down to a group of users
who were consuming that. But at the same
time when that knowledge wasn't
necessarily being distilled down, or in the gaps
between those knowledge distillations, if you will,
we didn't necessarily have
a reason for employees to go into the
digital workplace or the Intranet. It was
very much a lack of targeting,
if you will. There just wasn't a whole lot
of reason for folks to go in. And
you might have said that digital workplaces were
mission essential, but not
mission critical. And mission critical
is what we want, that's what we need moving forward,
and that's where we're going with this.
So if you flash forward,
or flashback, if you will, to
the sudden announcement of work from home, suddenly
we take everybody—or the
vast majority of people—and we
send them working from home. They are now working
from home. We've got this massive transformational
shift and just like that the Intranet
has become that critical tool for communications
both ways. We need to distill
that information down to employees, but we
also need those employees able to find
resources and able to communicate with each
other, to communicate with the
larger organization moving forward.
And we know that that is here to stay.
We know that remote work is here to stay.
84% of organizations expect broader
remote work, hybridized work, whatever
the case may be. But 85%
of organizations say that keeping employees engaged
as harder. So we have to give them those tools
that draw them in and allow
them to consume that information and
be as informed and as engaged
with the corporation and with each other as possible.
51% of employees are feeling overwhelmed.
Whether it's simply from the idea of this
paradigm shift of work, whether it's
from maybe a couple of false starts of
maybe going back to the office and well,
we're not doing that just yet. Whatever the
case may be, we're definitely looking
at maybe, maybe it's just employees that
are stressed out at home because they are now
taking the entirety of their work day
and
bundling that in with pets and kids and
all that fun stuff in the background. And maybe that's
that source of stress. So we see that happening.
And then finally, employees
are choosing their own tools, so that's
something of a challenge, both inconsistency
and security. If we have
people that are choosing their own tools,
security wise, that can be a little bit of a
problem, because we're not always vetting those tools
and we might be exposing corporate information
inadvertently on some of those tools.
And then consistency wise, we
also see that employees are
not necessarily always pointed
to the same place and that's what we want, ideally
we want them to have a consistent digital
destination where they can find the information
they need, collaborate with their fellows, communicate
as needed, and and simply
have that as their target. That
that digital front door, if you will.
So looking at our first kind of quote
slide here... "Empire Wire became
our most critical tool during Covid."
That's from the CTO of Caesar's.
And basically that's a real encapsulation
of what the world went through. We
had an organization that suddenly
had to communicate to their employees,
65,000 or so employees, that...
we've got furloughs, we've got
returned to work actions, things like that. So we've
got that communication driving
down to employees. But at the same time—
not necessarily with Caesar's, this is just more of
a general commentary—but at the same time, what's
keeping those employees in the digital workplace?
They're going there to consume news, but what's keeping
them there? What's what's creating that stickiness
if you will, that staying power?
That keeps people coming back
to their digital workplaces. I really like to quote
in the middle here, "we're replicating
the culture we had in the office
in a work from home atmosphere and really
that's comforting to people..." It's something that we
really need to consider as we're moving forward,
that culture of who we are as an organization,
that culture of who we are to each other as
coworkers is something that needs to
happen. It's not just enough
to have people consuming news. We
want them to come back and participate in discussions,
we want them to come back and
exemplify a little bit of that organizational
culture. "It is," on the bottom
line here, "a digital reflection of our physical
workspace. It's not just about the
news, it's about creating a
digital destination." Pardon
me. So how do we get there? How do we get there?
And how do we keep them coming back to
these destinations?
So if we look at a digital maturity
model here just really quickly, an
Intratnet is obviously a very, very
important part of digital maturity models
for communications, for collaborations, that
sort of thing. And it's
extremely important for those things, as we
can see on this chart, those in the high maturity
model, they're not just distilling
information down. We can see in low maturity,
we've got information
being shared on emails, not always the Intranet,
that sort of thing. As we move into those higher maturity
levels, we see improved effectiveness
of internal communications, it's
really about interaction and getting
people into, as I mentioned earlier, that
digital front door. It's not simply
sending news downwards to people, that top
down communication.
If we look at the digital workplace maturity model
and we look under innovators, that modern Intranet,
we start to see those with full digital workplaces
are transforming their remote work efficiency
and go just beyond beyond,
just, pardon me, posting the news. They
have users interact and engage with each other
and it becomes about the people, not
just the news that's within the digital
workplace. I'd be really curious
to know where a lot of folks in attendance
will feel they would have landed on on this
model that we see in front of us. Are you looking for feedback?
collaboration? participation? Is it
just distillation downwards of
the news? Or are we looking
really at more creating that digital entity,
that digital life form that
provides more than just information to our employees
and, again that digital
destination that will keep
people coming back.
So a few quotes up here that really
kind of drive the point home. The first one being the
digital workplace is all about the employee's ability
to do their job by communicating, collaborating
and connecting with others. And that's it in a
nutshell right there. It's not just
absorption of corporate communications.
They have to communicate, collaborate, and
connect with others... with the other people that they're
working with. And if we look at the the diagram
on the left, we are connecting
in a digital workplace, people to processes,
people to information, and people to people.
It's about the people, processes, and
information and the connections between
all of those things. Not simply
just knowledge and
news bulletins.
So who did really well in 2020?
That's one of the things we want to look at today. How do
we make that shift from essential Intranet
to that mission critical digital workplace?
Really it was all about culture.
It really was. And creating great
destinations where employees want to go.
I want to walk you through a couple of really great designs
here that really
drive engagement, if you will, beyond the news.
So the first one really puts
people at the centre. And before we get
to this one, I just want to fire some digital workplace
names by you and just
kind of drive home a point here. So,
digital workplace names, we've got The Cube, we've got
The Source, we've got Empire Wire,
we've got Iris, we've got ITI
We've got Blink. We've got all sorts of really
cool
digital workplace names. And you'll note
that from any of these, it's really
hard to determine
what the name of the company is. And,
really,
that's by design. This isn't your external
facing website. This is something that faces
your employees internally. So the name is
not necessarily the name of the company, it's
the name of something that's characteristic
of the company, or maybe a corporate value, that
sort of thing. It's not about the product or
the service that the company is selling, it's
about the employees, it's about taking
that physical office space and
that physical office culture and transforming
it into that digital format or culture.
And with a lot of those great names, what
we see is great mission
statements. And they all focus around the
idea of connections, communications,
collaboration, that sort of thing.
So as I said, I do want to give you a couple of examples
here of customers who've done this really,
really well.
And the first one
we see the digital workplace name is Iris.
And again, selected by their employees.
The company name, or the company ethos,
if you will, is in there somewhere
but this isn't just all about the company,
this is about the employees who work there
and who they are to each other and who they are
to the company.
They named their digital workplace Iris.
And within this homepage it's basically
a one stop shop for a huge number of
employees
to get the resources they need to do
their day to day jobs. It's their digital destination,
it's the first place they go when they start their day.
But what drives employees
across the base wanting to come
here and to return here isn't
just that information that they need. We start
getting into some of these social or cultural
aspects. And one of the things that they have
in the lower right corner of this particular
screenshot is Community Groups.
And this is a
really cool thing that these folks have done.
They've set up these community groups, and we can
see the graphic on the left, and
they're not just set up willy-nilly. There's a
process that really goes into this to ensure
that the group is needed, the group has
backing, and the group has
some sort of shelf life so it's
moving forward. It's not just setting up a space because
someone says they want a darts league, it's,
it's creating champions and incentivizing
people to ensure that that happens
moving forward. So if we look at this, we
see board games, we see common good, we see
financial wellness and we see pets, we see
pets everywhere. There's
a lot of community
engagement here. But
it is this culture part, this is a representation
of the organization's culture that's
driving people back. So they're coming in
here for the knowledge and they're staying a while or
they're returning at another point in their day for
those culture aspects. Everything that we
get our paycheck from, the news, the
documentation that we need, all that
fun stuff we need to do our jobs is here.
But what keeps them coming back
is going to be the culture.
And they've taken it one step further. This is
a really cool initiative... and this graphic, it's just
in the lower middle here. It's called "I Am."
And we'll just highlight it there for you.
"I Am" is something these folks have done as well. So
so what is it? Well 'I am' is
the ability to take a
person... And what we're doing is
we're allowing them to tell one piece as
it says here of a more powerful story. So we're taking
any employee, all our employees, and
we're allowing them to upload a photo and a few
statements about themselves that really give them
a sense of personality within the digital workplace.
It goes beyond their bio
or their profile and really gets into who
they are as a person. So what
happens is, within the 'I am' board,
an employee shares their photo
and they submit up to three I am statements
and what we start to get is a real
mosaic of the cultural
aspects of who these people
are within the organization.
They get a photo and three tidbits and they can
really describe themselves and have a little fun
with this.
So if we look at Gabe here in the, in the lower quadrant
of the slide, Gabe has a photo,
he's got his his job title, but he's also
way into the Beatles. He really
enjoys morning walks and he's the father of
a couple of young
boys. This really
gives a sense of personality
and, dare I say, humanization
to this individual beyond, as I say, the
aspects of the profile within the
digital workplace. So if
you stop and think about that for a second, where
are you, what are you doing? That
is going to drive people into your digital workplace
in a similar fashion.
I did have another one for you. And this one
is really cool. I find this one really,
really interesting. These folks kind of,
well, created a map on culture
as the slide says.
So what we've got here is we've got a
construction company and they've got a
digital workplace that they call the Kraus Haus.
And it's again, another one that's
named by the employees. It's reflective of the organization,
but not necessarily just the organization's
name up there in high letters.
It's created for the people and by
the people are Intranet's being about us.
So it's about the great things that we do
and the fact that the users that name this is
really powerful.
The cultural element though, that they've got here
is called the Club Haus. And I'd really like
to take a closer look at that with you.
So, first off in the Club Haus,
it is about social and there's this great
little map and we'll get to this in just a second. But
what I want to focus on is in the upper
left of the map. We see work
from home community and this is really
powerful. This speaks to what we need to do
moving forward with the digital workplace.
So if you look on the left hand side
here, we see a lot of covid information
and absolutely, that's what needed to happen.
This was spun up in response to the fact that
people started working from home. They
had to simply because of covid
and we had to convey this information.
But what we found over time and what these folks
found is that that covid information actually
started to push people away from
the digital workplace. It was something that was already
a known quantity. Let's face it, it was probably
a little bit depressing from time to time and
people started avoiding it. So what these folks
started doing, which was really cool is
they started providing areas for people
to have work from home discussions to see resources,
anti-stress tips, all that
stuff. And I see this evolving a lot
in our customers digital workplaces. There's a
ton of our customers that are doing this.
They're pushing that covid stuff to the side, it's
still there,
but they're enabling their employees and really
allowing them to embrace
the idea of work from home hybridized
work, whatever their own personal
future of work looks like. And they're providing
them the resources to get these sorts
of things done within the digital workplace.
That's evolution as far as
things go.
So moving back into the map,
the map, I love the map simply because, again,
it's a construction company, so we've got a blueprint
and every room in this house is
representative of a different interest. And
again, because it gets a
place on the map, there's a little thought that has to go
into this. So we're not looking purely at the idea
that, okay, well I just want to dart's league,
as I said before, this is something
where it's vetted. We
get champions for this and
then we start inviting people in and we
start monitoring the analytics
of how these rooms are performing.
So we don't have any stale content as
far as things go, it's a little bit of a distraction
from the day to day.
But bottom line here, whether I want to see how the
business is doing in Kraus Haus, if
I want to see work from home updates, or
I want to see the bio of someone, how someone's
cat is doing in the pet room. I'm all
good here. It's a really nice representation
of evolution.
So we see fun little graphics like this. We've got
our fitness room, all this fun stuff
and then lastly, and
something that's really been top of mind very
much lately, culture is more than
just those social aspects. So we talked about some
social aspects, but it's more than that
culture is who your members are, where they come
from and what they believe. Bottom line, more than
ever, employees are demanding a voice for these important
initiatives and they're seeking out
employers whose values mirror their
own as far as things go here. So
diversity, equity, and inclusion is
more than just lip service to a particular event
or cause it's celebrated more than one day a
year or more than one month a year.
It has to be a continuous conversation
that goes throughout the employer and employee
lifecycle. Digital workplaces really
do provide an optimal area to convey
this information. And this is something else
we're starting to see is that a lot
of organizations are setting up these spaces,
to embrace diversity within their
corporate culture and really celebrate
that and really give people safe spaces
to collaborate and communicate around
these very, very important and
timely subjects. So
it's a great vehicle for displaying
this information moving forward.
So
those are some of the things that I want you
to see a couple of really cool examples as far as
things go. But if I've
still back to the point, what did we really learn from the
pandemic about, you
know, measuring that success and what we've learned
about the evolution of the digital workplace? It really,
for me, can be boiled down into three things.
And the first thing is we have
to make it a destination. We have
to create reason for people
to come back just beyond the news.
And I don't mean to belabour the news, the news is
obviously very important, but we have
to create
reasons for people to come back.
Destinations or places that people want
to go back to. Think of a vacation down south,
you come home, it was a great time, you really think
fondly of that and want to go back again.
So certainly we start looking
at the idea of creating some of these little
pockets of culture that are going to drive
people back. It has to be something that's a little bit
fun. It doesn't, it's not a mindless
distraction from work, but it has
to be a little bit fun. And,
and we create that traffic
and creating that traffic and creating
that consumption of information, that collaboration,
that culture really
is what drives this from being something that's mission
essential more to mission
critical. It becomes that trusted source
of where we want to be. I love the quote
in the middle. The newsroom is the most popular
page, but culture, culture
is what keeps them wanting to come back and that's
super important when it comes down to digital
workplaces.
We want to connect people to people,
making it
a digital destination. We have
to connect people to people. The digital workplace needs
to be that digital representation of
our corporate culture. So if
we look at the, the quote on the right hand
side here, it's about connecting people to people
in a meet everyone on screen kind of world.
And that's not to say that we're work from home
forever. Some organizations will be, some organizations
will go back to the office. Most organizations
will look at a hybridized model, but regardless
of where we're at, we have to put the
information in the hands of the people who need
it when they need it. And certainly
that's never been more true than
it is now. And we have to create
that digital destination, that's ultimately
that source of that information.
And we're connecting people to people to create
those value drivers that keep people coming back
for more if you will.

Lastly,
if we look at that, think back to that maturity
model, depending where you are on the maturity
model, it's proven that people
are more advanced people
more advanced on that digital maturity model
model. They drive culture
the more advanced customers, they
put energy into this for for a number
of years and they've really driven that.
So They had a little bit more of a seamless
transition when it came down to migrating
to that work from home. And we're seeing these
are the people who are leading the charge when we see things
like those COVID-19 spaces
shifting to work from home support spaces,
shifting to hybridized office spaces,
things like that, we see that happening.
So customers more advanced on the
maturity scale are driving corporate culture
in the digital work from home world. They have improved
effectiveness of internal communication because
people are continually going back into
the digital workplace and they have enhanced
knowledge management. So it couldn't
be more important. And again, just repeating this graphic
here, we're connecting people to processes,
people to information, and people to people
and now that's really very important.
So, those are three important aspects
that we want to consider going through 2021, depending
on where you are or were in
2020, I think we all
know kind of where we are and where we need to go. And
obviously we can
leverage certain aspects of analytics to
help us measure where we are. But certainly
the most important thing that can tell you where you are
and maybe where you need to go is your users
feedback from them, talk to your
users, find out what they need, what they want
to see within the digital workplace. You can't
necessarily incorporate everything going
back to the example of of of cross house and
and and
you know, I can't necessarily have a
darts league just because I play darts, there have
to be other people interested, but certainly
look at that maturity model, talk
to your people and consider where you want to go.
And most importantly, consider making culture
part of your digital workplace. It
has to be some place your users want to
go. It has to be some place they start,
the day, has to be some place where I'm kind of scratching
my head and going, where do I find? Oh yeah, I find
that in [insert name of digital
workplace here], that's what has to happen. People
go here because they want to consume information,
but they also go here because
they want to collaborate, communicate and engage
with their fellows and with
the organization as a whole.
So
that's really what we do at Igloo Software,
it's why we're here, we're absolutely
passionate about employee engagement and
culture. We create digital destinations
every day. There's tons of tools
out there, but ultimately you're building your own house.
And it's something that has
to be reflective of your culture.
And as we talked about a digital representation
of your culture and your office space,
I could have easily given you,
you know, I give you two examples. I could have given you 20,
I could have given you 200. If
you want to connect with us and and hear more about that,
please feel free to do so, the information
is on the screen, but otherwise thanks
very much for allowing me to chat
with you today, and definitely
open to questions now.
Thank you.