When do you need a new #intranet? And how do you make a business case that addresses the upsides and downsides of change? An insightful post from Jason Anthoine
Executive Courage and Counsel | Culture Change and Clarity | Employee Experience and Insights
I used to run comms at a big ol’ global company. Employees told us over and over they hated our intranet and the usage numbers proved it. I casually shared this and what we could do about it with my CEO during a hallway chat and he said, “If they aren’t using our current intranet, why would we buy a new one?” Challenge accepted. So my team and I did some focus groups. And by focus groups, I mean we both called and sat with dozens of actual employees to literally hear and see what their issues were. Every single one of them said search was their biggest problem. Sure, there was other stuff but all that was just mildly annoying compared to the real pain of search. We asked IT and found that each search was taking about 15 minutes to finally get folks what they were looking for. And we asked HR for some salary info. Then we did some math: * Average hourly pay rate for every employee, both hourly and salaried * Divided by 4 to understand how much each 15 min search session cost * Multiplied by the number of searches per day, week, month, quarter and year As you can imagine, these were huge lost productivity numbers across a company with 30,000 employees! Then we did the same math but used 10, 5 and 2 mins for the average search times to show what good could look like. I went back to the CEO and said, “Here’s why we need a new intranet.” I showed him an annual cost in lost productivity solely due to a crappy intranet search function, a number that was higher than even his lofty annual comp. Then I showed him the cost of a new intranet with advanced search that cut that search cost by 85%. I didn’t even show him all the other good stuff we’d get along with that. He looked at the numbers, looked at me, looked at the numbers again and said, “Go do it.” No executive cares about an intranet, a new product or even a crisis until you make them care. And you make them care by focusing on the three things they care about the most: Revenue. Cost. Risk. That’s it. All their decisions come down to these three things. Figure out how what you’re proposing addresses one, two or all three of these things and you’ll be speaking their language instead of yours. H/T to Sonia Fiorenza, Jo McRell and Mike Klein FIIC, FCSCE, SCMP for inspiring this post.