SharePoint Intranet Improvement to Boost User Engagement

Customer

The Customer is a company that cultivates medicinal plants for phytotherapy. It’s based in North America and has several offices across the globe.

Challenge

The Customer had an intranet based on SharePoint Online. The intranet’s user adoption was low as the solution was non-engaging and inconvenient to use. So, the Customer wanted to encourage wider use of the company’s intranet by making it more useful and appealing for employees. The Customer also wanted to use the intranet for nurturing employee loyalty and promoting collaboration among their offices.

Solution

The Customer turned to ScienceSoft as an experienced SharePoint intranet developer for assistance in upgrading their intranet.

ScienceSoft’s team started with increasing the intranet’s convenience of use. They created a quick links web part that enabled easy access to the most popular resources like documents, careers, employee directory, employee benefits, and more.

To make the intranet more engaging, ScienceSoft’s team introduced web parts that displayed industry and company news, company events, employee birthdays and work anniversaries, and more. To increase employee motivation and support loyalty, our team developed a recognition system that allowed award various types of badges (e.g., Student, Champion) to employees. Also, ScienceSoft’s team helped the Customer track and showcase to employees mentioning the company’s name on the web with the help of Google Alerts. Our team configured the tool to send notifications triggered by new mentions directly to the intranet’s RSS feed.

To facilitate collaboration between employees from distant offices, our team built a custom web part that showed time zones of all company’s offices and combined it with a weather web part. Thus, users could see time and weather for all the company’s offices at the same time and be on the same foot while working on questions related to the cultivation of medicinal plants.

Results

The Customer received a dynamic, engaging and easy-to-use intranet, which encouraged more employees to turn to it on a daily basis and nurtured employee loyalty. From the intranet, they could learn about the latest company and industry news and events. The gamification features helped increase employee motivation. The intranet’s addressing the different time zones and weather helped improve collaboration between the employees working from different locations.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint Online, Visual Studio Code, Google Alerts.