Client
Engender Equality is a Tasmanian based non-profit organisation that works with and on behalf of individuals, families and communities affected by family and domestic violence for over 30 years.
Challenge
Engender Equality has a dispersed team of counsellors across Tasmania that work remotely.
There was no single platform where staff members could stay informed on what’s happening across the organisation, easily find information they are looking for and knowledge share.
In addition, there was no single source of truth for organisational policies and procedures as multiple versions of the same documents were stored in OneDrive in different sub-folders.
Course of Action
CloudJoy has been engaged by Engender Equality to review the existing set up on Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint. After completing a detailed analysis of the current set up, understanding the use of OneDrive and SharePoint and undertaking consultation sessions with different stakeholders, we made the recommendation to create an intranet.
We recommended creating a SharePoint Online intranet as a repository for storing and sharing organisational news, CEO updates, organisational events, corporate documents (policies, procedures, forms, guides, etc) and a front door for accessing organisational tools and applications.
Solution Architecture
We have built a modern SharePoint Online Intranet which is seamlessly integrated with Microsoft Teams. The integration allows staff to quickly access organisational news, CEO updates and events, policies and procedures as well as other tools across the organisation.
The Intranet homepage delivers critical organisational content to keep users engaged and informed. At the glance the intranet homepage has the following components:
- Mega Menu – allows quick access to different areas on the intranet such as information about the organisations, policies and procedures, contact information, etc.
- News and CEO Updates – employees are kept in loop about the latest news and CEO updates. Employees can view and like articles and leave comments which encourages two way communication.
- Quick Links – includes links to the most accessed and used tools and applications across the organisation.
- What’s On – a snippet of upcoming events relevant to all employees such as training, conferences, team members, public holidays, etc. These events create awareness and engage employees through events and topics that are upcoming.
- Facebook feed – Engender Equality has a very active social media presence. Therefore, surfacing the latest Facebook post on the homepage helps employees stay up to date with the social activities rather than having to access the platform directly.
- Footer – is consistent across the intranet and allows easy access to Engender Equality website and social media accounts.
Impact and Benefits
Staff members are now kept up to date with the latest news, CEO updates and events happening across the organisation. Additionally, they can quickly find information they are looking for such as different policies and procedures as well as forms to submit their timesheets and leave requests.
The management team no longer needs to use email to send organisational news and updates and are comfortable that all policies and procedures and other information on the intranet is up to date and contained in a single and secure location.
The intranet is managed by two team members who are responsible for creating and maintaining content and making updates as requested by business stakeholders.
What’s Next
The next step is taking Engender Equality’s intranet to the next level by making the homepage personalised and more user centric.
Some of the improvements that are in the pipeline include targeting mega menu links and homepage events based on the employee’s role and physical location.
As the team at Engender Equality is starting to use Microsoft Planner more, the plan is to surface upcoming tasks on the intranet homepage as a reminder to employees to complete them.
