How to create a thriving culture in a digital workplace

As we speed toward 2022, many companies are still grappling with how to create a close-knit workplace environment that helps employees thrive.

Maintaining a strong culture is no easy task amid ongoing pandemic uncertainty, but creating a sleek, employee-centric intranet is a great place to start.

A recent Ragan webinar, “Learnings from 2021: Building Culture in the New Digital Workplace,”offers essential tips for building digital connection. Featuring expertise from Workiva’s Lauren Frandsen, senior manager of internal communications, and Chris Worrick, corporate communications manager, the session offers practical takeaways for creating an intranet that employees love.

Frandsen and Worrick share how they’ve partnered with Simpplr to create a seamless, collaborative digital workplace ecosystem that’s reshaped Workiva’s employee communication experience. To start, they established key objectives they wanted their intranet to achieve:

• Goal 1: Drive employee engagement.
• Goal 2: Optimize content organization.
• Goal 3: Support cross-channel sync and integrations (to seamlessly integrate Slack and other tech).
• Goal 4: Improve search functionality, which was biggest complaint on its old intranet.
• Goal 5: Offer mobile-friendly design and use.
• Goal 6: Deliver meaningful analytics to prove ROI and employee adoption.

Workiva settled on Simpplr because:

So far, the new intranet’s been a smashing success. Workiva’s comms pros share that it took just four months to launch its new hub, which ended up coinciding with the start of the pandemic. Workiva shares these outcomes:

The benefits of robust collaboration—and appreciation

For Workiva, an intranet is all about creating a “single source of truth” for its workers. That means crafting and curating content that resonates with individual employees who are based all around the world. Workiva cites Simpplr’s employee segmentation/localization tools and employee recognition functionalities as particularly useful in personalizing employees’ experience on its intranet.

As for ongoing engagement efforts, Workiva closely monitors its seven employee resource groups and gathers feedback from employees on what sorts of content they prefer. So far, the intranet’s “Share to Slack” feature has proved quite popular, as has the company’s MVP (“mission, values, principles”) program—a peer-to-peer online recognition program that lauds co-workers who exhibit a company core value. Content series are also a staple for Workiva. “Micro Lesson Mondays,” which offers quick tips on personal development, training and growth, have been a hit, though not to be outdone by “Well-being Wednesdays.”

Simpplr’s software makes it easy to track metrics that matter—including the percentage of employees who are logging on and how many pieces of content they’re consuming per session. Simpplr also has tools to help you benchmark data against industry averages. But for Workiva, it’s all about proving to execs that employees are making good use of the investment and using the intranet in meaningful ways.

Here’s the “suite of features” Workiva is harnessing to keep this momentum going:

Finding success in 2022—and beyond

What are you doing to prepare for the engagement challenges of 2022? You can start by listening to this webinar in its entirety. If you do, you’ll also learn about:

• The role of technology in delivering a modern digital employee experience
• The importance of an employee-centric digital strategy
• How to transition to a new intranet for a hybrid work environment and meet people wherever they are
• How you can make the business case for a modern intranet to improve employee communication

Click here to listen to the free webinar from Ragan and Simpplr.