A Pretty, New Intranet Will Fix All Your Communication Issues (Not!)

Is a solid enterprise communications strategy a pretty new intranet site?  Would our employees feel the love if we sent out a monthly newsletter?  If the CEO tweeted, would everyone completely understand the vision?  These seem like silly questions but I hear people offer them up as solutions all the time. So how do you build a solid communications program?

My last organization had serious communication issues (just like nearly every other org out there).  Our department had over 600 people – not too large but not too small either. We had many different divisions that were very siloed in everything that we did. We used SharePoint as our intranet site to share documents, news and policy info.  We didn’t have a dedicated person assigned to manage the intranet.  And if you asked our employees what they thought of leadership’s ability to communicate they would have laughed!  Let’s face it, communication just wasn’t a priority and our intranet was faded and ugly!

Through some employee feedback it was determined that we needed to redo our intranet.  The employees wanted a site that was much more like a blog or a cool website.  I was the CIO and so the request ended up coming to my group.  I told them that we can definitely build a cool new intranet site but first I needed to see the plan that would keep the site fresh, add content regularly and get feedback from our users to ensure that we were heading in the right direction.  I told them that a new intranet site won’t do those things by itself and before I pull resources to build this site, we needed to have a good plan. (By the way, this response didn’t go over well and I ended up having to put the program together myself.)

How do you build a sustainable and innovative communication program?  How do you consistently communicate relevant, fresh, interesting, educational and concise content? How do you impact your organization, increase alignment and accelerate transformation with better communication?  How do you encourage employees to participate, increase collaboration, expand thought leadership and be more engaged and innovative?

Too good to be true?  That’s a lot to accomplish.  I’m not saying this program was perfect but it was pretty awesome!

To detail this all out, I plan to write multiple articles.  The topics will include: Keys to Success, Program Governance, Measuring Objectives, Content Creation and Executing the Plan.

I’m passionate about strong program management, organizational alignment, communications, content development, technology platforms and accelerating transformation.  This should be a great series of articles!  Please comment and share your great (or bad) experiences with internal communication programs.  Let me know your horror stories and killer solutions.  I will incorporate your ideas and questions in my future articles.

(*note: I’m brand new to this blogging thing and am following the Blogging 101: Zero to Hero approach from WordPress. This is my fourth article, part of Day Nine: Inspire Yourself.)