Public Housing Sweden, smarter together with the new intranet

The old intranet was exactly that. Outdated. Many of the features of the solution didn't even work, such as the search engine. There was no owner or manager of the intranet, and it had become a low-priority site overall, with low levels of trust among staff. Finally, management put its foot down and announced that it was time for a rethink — a new intranet was needed.

In the pilot phase, a zero measurement was performed with an interesting result: Although confidence was very low — both in terms of technology and the reliability of the content — there was a lot of interest in making it work.

– We saw that a well-functioning intranet was long-awaited, and we felt that we were well placed to do something really great. "We really took this on board and shared our thinking and anchored our work as much as possible with our employees," says Jeanette Rådström, communications officer and project manager at Public Housing Sweden, who had previous experience of running both intranet and web projects.

"There are all kinds of opportunities for further development"

The preparatory work was carried out together with inUse, and they produced an impact map and targets that would be very useful later in the work. In addition to Jeanette, the project team consisted of a huan resources manager, an IT employee and a communications employee.

They had and wanted to continue to have an Office 365 solution and work in Teams. Creating an intranet that worked with Office 365 was therefore the starting point for the project. Soleil’s solution integrates selected elements from Office 365, such as email integrations, Teams, SharePoint and calendar. Employees can now more easily keep track of the groups they're in, have better document management and see what's on their own agenda and what's happening in the company.

– We just slightly tweaked the Sitevision, but otherwise we were very satisfied with the initial position. "There are all kinds of opportunities for further development, but we're starting with these functions and integrations, and we'll see if we want to add anything else later," says Jeanette Rådström.

Not all users use the computer to access the intranet, but the intranet is mobile-friendly for the mobile users, which has worked smoothly and effectively.

When it comes to the search function, the default solution is currently in place and not much time has been spent on this particular function as everyone is satisfied with how it works at present. The content work has been good at working to SEO standards and adding metadata, and so on. We've seen that users have really taken off compared to a few years ago.

– "I haven't received any indication that the search function isn't appreciated; on the contrary, I've heard happy employees say 'Now I get hits on what I'm looking for!'" As we see it, it works well without having to make much effort. "After all, you’re never finished with the search, so it’s absolutely something we’ll continue to work on," says Jeanette Rådström.

Solid groundwork laid the foundation

The main goal of the intranet was to become smarter together. The goal was divided into four sub-goals to make it easier to calibrate and measure. The sub-goals included increased collaboration, improved situational awareness, reduced vulnerability and increased efficiency. Making it easier to find things, advise and learn from each other was a goal throughout the project.

Since the initiative came directly from management, it was possible to focus immediately on doing proper preparatory work, which Jeanette strongly recommends:

– The most important success tip I can give is to spend most of the time on a good feasibility study. I’m really a proponent of impact mapping, as it gives you clear objectives that you can work on during the project and also check against when you’re finished. This takes away the guesswork and allows you to work in a goal-oriented way, based on needs and what supports them. "Throughout the entire process, we had no problem motivating management as to why we need to do this work, but if you don't have the management on board, this is a good tool for demonstrating the benefits," says Jeanette Rådström and continues:

– "It can feel like you’re spending so much time at first and people are wondering" 'What's going on, why isn't any of what you’ve done visible?'" "But you recognize it when you start clicking and coding, and – at the end it can go quite fast instead." "For us, there was very little we needed to rethink once we started to build the intranet!"

Scaling down and adapting to the organisation

At the beginning of the project, the team went around and made many study visits to some who had run very successful intranet projects. They were relatively familiar with the large systems available, but wanted to see how they had been applied and how they could work in their own organisation. As a slightly smaller player, they soon found out that it was important to have a stable and secure system that could meet their particular needs.

– I think it’s important to try to stay the course, to question all new functions: “Do we have support for this in our impact mapping?” You can do so much with your tool, so actually daring to adapt it to your company’s requirements and needs becomes particularly important. "Dare to deprioritise things!" says Jeanette Rådström.

Public Housing Sweden has a fairly decentralised way of thinking in that everyone is involved in creating news on the intranet, something that has exceeded expectations in the new intranet.

– "Having been involved in some major projects, I know that there’s always something that can go wrong or something, and this has go surprisingly well actually! "I've been asked at most one question about how to launch a new product, so even though you've not trained in Sitevision’s editorial mode, it's so user-friendly that you can understand it on your own. "I see this as an incredibly good result," says Jeanette Rådström.

“I’m happy to get this up and running every morning”

Today, users are satisfied and since the launch, work has gone smoothly. The brand has also strengthened internally.

– If you could see the old and the new intranet side by side, you would see two completely different worlds. We now have an appealing tool in design and layout – that feels like us. The old intranet had no colour, no pictures and little text. “I’m happy to get this up and running every morning,” many people say, "and it’s so important for the sense of who we are and what we stand for." "At the intranet release party, two employees ran from the party to be the first to post a news item!" says Jeanette Rådström.

Today you measure the inranet usage and can see greater use and engagement — before you couldn't really see the engagement on the intranet. With users being able to share, comment and like, there is a greater flow of information, which was one of the goals they wanted to achieve to become smarter together.

– "I’ve worked with most of the major tools, and Sitevision is so simple and user-friendly that I have nothing but good things to say about it – "I’ve fallen in love with the system. "It feels like you’ve thought it through and are constantly thinking about the next smart thing. "They have really succeeded in making it easy and fun for the editors. "I can recommend this with everything I have, and it’s very rare to say this in projects like this," says Jeanette Rådström.

In the future, Swedish Public Housing will conduct a follow-up on the zero measurement and also conduct slightly more qualitative monitoring with the organisation. Both elements are important to ensure that you end up in the right place and meet the requirements and expectations that exist internally.

– Naturally, I have a full backlog of things I want to develop, but we’ll let this one sit for a while, take another measurement and see what the next thing is to sink my teeth into. Going forward, for example, I would like to look more at automation for internal order flows and achieve an even higher quality of our documentation flow. "As I see it, it will be great to connect this to our new intranet," says Jeanette Rådström.