We went through a rigorous process for the project, and we undertook a series of interviews with employees to better understand the key information they were looking to access to do their job.
We felt Elcom understood what we were trying to achieve and could deliver it best from a cost and capability perspective completely out-of-the-box. The Elcom Digital Experience Platform was also user-friendly and quite intuitive compared to some of the other systems we had seen.
The Elcom team were amazing and responsive. Everyone was easy to work with and really accommodating in helping us make our intranet as successful as possible. We were provided with a dedicated project manager who was available all the time and kept a register of actions that had to be done to make sure everything was running smoothly. The training provided was also great. We have a content team who went through the publisher training and now manage their own areas or sections.
We're proud that our new intranet has since won an award at the Step Two Intranet & Digital Workplace Awards in the Intranet Essentials Category.
We named the intranet Ask George, after our Founder and Director. It is the central digital destination for GJK employees, providing them with a single source of truth for our staff directory and organisation chart, key documents, knowledge hubs, online forms, general information and news, as well as a launchpad to external systems via single sign-on. They can access information in the office (laptops) and out in the field (mobile devices), where it is easy for people to navigate and find what they need to do their jobs.
We rolled out the full intranet experience to our salaried employees. We plan to use security permissions to deliver an alternative version to our field employees (our cleaners) later in the year. It will surface relevant content to them in a way that is optimised to their needs. For example, they will have a different homepage with prominent buttons that quickly direct them to key information they would be looking for such as Payroll and Safety, and content such as function specific team pages will be hidden.
For most of our cleaners English is their second language. We have a Translator built into our site so they will be able to change the content into their native language. We are also using the Acknowledgement functionality. This will let us notify people when we have important information we need them to read and acknowledge whilst enabling us to have a record of it stored. Employees can use the Translator tool to read the content. This way we know people are aware of changes, what they mean and how it might affect their roles.
We have an alert feature on the homepage to bring to attention important information that people need to be aware of. There is also an accessibility component across the site to quickly change font sizes and make the site black and white to assist people with visual impairments, which we felt was important from an accessibility perspective.
Forms and workflows meet our needs really well. We moved a lot of our finance, payroll and HR forms to online forms, which trigger email notifications for approval authorisation. Some forms then go to an external party once approved such as our travel agency with all the information submitted.