Powering digital employee experience with a new Microsoft 365 intranet

Entain

Delivering a modern digital workplace hub in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams for a vibrant new brand

Entain is one of the world’s leading sports betting and gaming groups and owns several prominent retail and online brands. Headquartered in the UK, the FTSE 100 company employees 24,000 staff spread across 20 global offices around the world, including 15,000 retail employees based in the UK.

A digital employee experience fit for a vibrant brand

On the back of an exciting rebrand, Entain was keen to establish a new intranet and digital workplace that would celebrate its vibrant new identity and give momentum to ambitions to be the world-leader in sports betting and gaming entertainment.

Entain wished to introduce a new LiveTiles intranet that would combine with SharePoint Online to create a world-class channel for global digital communications, while also launching and integrating Yammer to underpin community and collaboration. Entain also wished to retire an existing Jive intranet.

Working as one team

Recognizing Content Formula’s wealth of experience and specialist expertise in LiveTiles and Microsoft 365, we were engaged as Entain’s implementation partner for the new digital workplace.

Working closely with stakeholders in HR, Internal Communications and IT, we held workshops and conducted a user survey, producing a detailed discovery report with recommendations for the new intranet and a suggested information architecture. We also produced wireframes.

Following agreement on the scope, we set about developing and implementing the new intranet, working closely with the client as one project team across several different streams covering technical advice, Yammer, integrations, content and retiring Jive.

Entain.me – a gateway to the digital workplace

A brand-new SharePoint and LiveTiles intranet called Entain.Me acts as an attractive and compelling gateway to the new digital workplace, providing personalized access to inspiring communications, operational content and critical apps from right across the Group. Using the LiveTiles Noticeboard feature, it brings updates into view from all around the world, reflecting the everyday activity of a busy and diverse workforce.

Yammer drives global conversations and connection

Working closely with internal communications, we provided ongoing strategic advice and on-the-ground support to launch a series of Yammer group pilots, leading to a global roll-out of Yammer to all 24,000 employees.

Adoption is growing daily with social collaboration heavily integrated into the Entain.me experience through multiple embedded Yammer feeds supporting conversations and connections. This complements the use of Microsoft Teams for closed project and working group-based collaboration.

The video

The result

Support for content owners

Entain.me features over 100 sites, supporting locations, groups and functions from across the world. To ensure high quality content, we provided support for a network of content owners through training and weekly drop-in clinics, helping them to migrate their existing sites from the legacy Jive intranet and creating new Entain.me sites that are both engaging and useful.

A true digital workplace

To ensure Entain.me is a true digital workplace, the LiveTiles Everywhere persistent toolbar has been deployed with the Entain.me ecosystem, connecting employees to information from different systems and helping busy employees keep on top of their to do lists.

We delivered initial integrations with ServiceNow and Oracle HR, with further integrations planned in one of the most popular features in the new digital workplace.

Communication in the flow of work

With Microsoft Teams adoption on the rise, we also ensured Entain.me can be accessed within the Teams app, from desktop and mobile. This ensures that the new intranet is available on all devices and by all staff including those working in retail, bringing communication and messaging directly into the flow of work.

A vastly improved digital employee experience with strong adoption

The combination of Entain.me, Yammer and the Microsoft Teams app has resulted in a vastly improved digital employee experience, bringing the new brand to life, and helping staff get things done.

Early feedback from staff and senior stakeholders has been overwhelmingly positive, and initial adoption is exceeding expectations. We are continuing to work with Entain to evolve an even more exciting digital workplace.

Mobile intranet app case study

Yorkshire Tea

A mobile intranet app for front line workers with a focus on communications, ease-of-use and engagement.

Employees: 1,500
Industry: Food and beverage
Location: Europe

The challenge

While elegant Yorkshire Tea shops and quality products remind us of the simple pleasures in life, they needed to be able to communicate effectively with all employees, whether at headquarters, on a factory floor in India or a retail outlet in Leeds. Added to the challenge was the fact that many of the frontline employees had no digital identity within the Yorkshire Tea corporate ecosystem.

Our approach

It was clear that Yorkshire Tea needed a simple, portable means of reaching staff. The LiveTiles employee communications solution ‘Reach’ was the perfect match. ‘Reach’ is a mobile-first internal comms solution delivering targeted content through dedicated channels, and multilingual capability.

The result

More engaged and connected staff and a more inclusive communications culture. Hundreds of workers are now using Reach daily from wherever they are based, connecting, posting, and engaging via mobile or desktop.

Yorkshire Tea – a tradition of valuing people evolves into the digital age Is there anything better than settling down with a comforting cup of tea?

In the business world, excellent staff engagement and internal communication comes close...especially for tea merchants who embraced employee communications app ‘LiveTiles Reach.’

Yorkshire Tea are one of the biggest tea manufacturers in Europe with a reputation for creating a truly excellent product with a focus on craft, quality and valuing their people. The company has a network of production plants in both the UK and India and their tea’s reputation is among the best in the world. Yorkshire Tea also have spin-off businesses in the retail market, including bakehouses and coffee shops.

The client’s primary means of communicating with their staff was via email and a couple of employee newsletters. One of their key pain points was the wasting of people’s time and resources, not knowing if these outdated forms of communication were getting through to the diverse groups of employees and the feeling that important cohorts of colleagues were not being reached or included in the workplace comms and culture.

How to improve food and beverage employee engagement while retaining the brand

While elegant Yorkshire Tea shops and quality products remind us of the simple pleasures in life, they needed to be able to communicate effectively with all employees, whether at headquarters, on a factory floor in India or a retail outlet in Leeds. Added to the challenge was the fact that many of the frontline employees had no digital identity within the Yorkshire Tea corporate ecosystem.

With so many different touch points to consider, Yorkshire Tea needed a solution to easily communicate with their staff, no matter their role, location or device. To achieve this, they set out to embrace innovative and easy-to-use internal communications technology.

Yorkshire Tea also recognized that spending so much time in email systems meant their communications were very one-way. They were very keen to move onto a much more advanced solution, something that was mobile-first, so they could move away from their dependence on email and create a two-way dialogue with their staff.

Finding the perfect solution with LiveTiles Reach

It was clear that Yorkshire Tea needed a simple, portable means of reaching staff. The LiveTiles employee communications solution ‘Reach’ was the perfect match. ‘Reach’ is a mobile-first internal comms solution delivering targeted content through dedicated channels, and multilingual capability.

What’s more, ‘Reach’ seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Teams and Office 365 or it can also be standalone. This is ideal for including all the frontline colleagues who may not have M365 licences assigned to them. Reach’s simplicity and ability to unite the workforce is its unique selling point.

The Result: Engaged, connected staff with LiveTiles Reach

More engaged and connected staff and a more inclusive communications culture. Hundreds of workers are now using Reach daily from wherever they are based, connecting, posting, and engaging via mobile or desktop.

Staff are innovating, creating events, participating in polls, an employee of the week page, and their own buy and sell. They also have their own ideas for innovative additions to Reach. The employee voice at Yorkshire Tea has never been more included or amplified. This massive increase in digital workplace participation has also positively impacted the evolution of company culture as Yorkshire Tea continue to accelerate their digital transformation journey.

After six months of using Reach the Yorkshire Tea comms team is hugely satisfied with the solution and how it’s benefiting the business. An off-shoot of the project was a digital paper being published monthly for and by employees, driving more effective corporate and bottom-up content and conversations. A survey was carried out with staff and leadership teams, asking for their thoughts on how the new Reach solution was benefiting the organization. Unanimously, the responses were incredibly positive.

Their "Employee of the Week" page, and a buy and sell trading page have become extremely popular. Polls and events have also really taken off and brought greater connectivity to the company culture and corporate communications.

Yorkshire Tea goal was to get around 1500 staff actively using Reach daily. Currently, around 900 staff are using Reach, and user numbers are rising steadily every day.

The Comms team at Yorkshire Tea has gathered plenty of ideas for new additions to ‘Reach’ that could be implemented going forward, such as a livestream function, a live Q and A function, and the ability to attach photos to news posts.

Employee engagement on SharePoint intranet

Internal communications and employee engagement on SharePoint

Award winning engagement campaigns with measurable results

The brief

As SharePoint consultants we are often asked, how can SharePoint be used to drive employee engagement? We've used SharePoint to deliver really creative engagement and internal communications campaigns – quite a few of which have won awards. Based on our learnings throughout the years we have developed a 7-pronged framework for employee engagement in the digital workplace. We call it Seven Secrets. At the heart of it lies social interaction, something that SharePoint – if used properly – can do very well.

Our approach

Here are 3 examples of our best employee engagement campaigns:

Example 1: We mobilized over 6000 Johnson & Johnson employees (50% of the workforce) to take part in fundraising activities across AsiaPacific. Making Smiles won us a gold award at the prestigious Step Two Intranet Innovation Awards in 2014 and was a finalist in Melcrum’s Awards for internal communication.

Example 2: We used SharePoint to drive awareness and understanding of Ethicon’s corporate values across EMEA. We did this by creating a fun online awards campaign. The campaign reached 100% of the target audience and 431 nominations were made across 900 employees.

Example 3: The Better World Walk intranet was pivotal in raising $250,000 for Operation Smile by encouraging employees to do a virtual sponsored walk across the EMEA region. The highly social campaign used SharePoint to drive fun photo sharing all the while promoting health and fitness. Better World Walk was a finalist in the Communiqué Awards in 2014.

The result

SharePoint doesn’t have to mean dry, sometimes boring intranets. Our SharePoint consultancy know how to make SharePoint look good and work really hard to deliver impressive and hard results when it comes to employee engagement.

Client testimonial:
"I had the pleasure of working with Content Formula on our internal campaign. They are the business partners that every client hopes to have but not always finds: dependable, extremely meticulous, friendly and never skip a beat. They have been instrumental to the success of our campaigns."

SharePoint intranet consolidation

SharePoint intranet consolidation

Harmonising a business by consolidating 22 intranets onto one platform

The brief

Consolidate 22 standalone operating company intranets into one regional EMEA intranet to create a single destination and maximise best practice sharing and collaboration for comms and HR.

  • Our client, a leading medical devices manufacturer, wanted to unite employees by having one regional platform for the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.
  • One company portal would reinforce the business message of “One EMEA, One business.”
  • We needed to centralise company news flow and employee communications while ensuring local teams still had the right tools to work effectively.
  • Harmonise branding across the countries.

Our approach

A thorough user and stakeholder discovery phase shaped the right SharePoint intranet to suit employees across the region:

  • User interviews with end users and close meetings with stakeholders throughout the information architecture and user experience phase.
  • Our SharePoint consultancy developed a central site and a toolkit of designs, templates and web-parts to provide flexibility for countries to tailor their channels whilst also ensuring consistency and harmonisation
  • We built “killer apps” to maximise communications – including People on the Move, to communicate people moves and promotions and a chat facility to allow dialogue between leaders and employees

The result

Project rolled out over 12 months leading to increased engagement and collaboration between employees and operating companies:

  • A 300% increase to the number of unique visitors to the site every month.
  • Time on site increase by 250%.
  • Improved top-down communications facilitated new EMEA initiatives.
  • £100k savings on licences and human resources per annum.

"Content Formula worked closely with the management team on a new Intranet strategy that would lead to stronger employee engagement and business alignment. This work required technical expertise, strong account management and cultural understanding given the scope and breadth of the project, which included the integration of 20+ portals to a new platform. Content Formula provided strong partnership on this complex and highly visible internal initiative for our company. The project was completed with strong reviews and support."

Vice President EMEA of Strategic Affairs and Communications, a global medical device company

SharePoint experts deliver gamification, user experience and design

Using SharePoint to share digital marketing best practice across Pfizer EMEA

Our SharePoint experts deliver sexy SharePoint design, gamification and elegant user experience

The brief

Pfizer’s requirement was to replace two SharePoint intranet sites with one solution that would enable digital marketing managers to find and share digital marketing channel information and best practice.

  • The site needed to look engaging and “cool” whilst remaining within brand guidelines
  • Be simple to administer
  • Intuitive navigation and elegant user experience
  • Drive the digital mindset within Pfizer

Our approach

Our SharePoint consultancy worked closely with stakeholders and users at Pfizer to define requirements and understand business objectives

  • A full content audit of both sites was undertaken to ensure that good content was migrated and new content requirements were identified
  • Our SharePoint consultants used an agile approach to development, working in sprints and testing and bug fixing as we progressed
  • We introduced elements of gamification to encourage interaction, awarding badges for posted questions that received a lot of interaction.
  • We created an identity for the Digihub that was differentiated from other Pfizer SharePoints but remained within Pfizer’s brand guidelines

The result

  • We designed and delivered a hub for Pfizers digital marketing community which enabled speedy access to key information with the desired engaging look and feel.
  • Gamification has helped drive contributions and build community across a geographically dispersed region.

SharePoint intranet designs to drive collaboration and sharing in FMCG company

Global collaboration and information sharing in SharePoint 2010

Multi-brand SharePoint intranet for food industry client

The brief

Mars wanted to overcome a tendency for brand marketing teams to collaborate locally by enabling the brand teams to collaborate and share best practice globally via SharePoint.

  • Mars wanted the ability to easily roll the site out to multiple brands
  • It was important that the community was engaged from launch
  • Findability of content and assets was a key objective

Our approach

Our SharePoint and intranet consultants worked closely with the stakeholders and end users at Mars to design a site that:

  • Used gamification and collaboration to engage employees
  • Was intuitive to users and aided speedy access to key assets and libraries
  • Was templated to enable staged roll outs to multiple brands with minimal cost
  • Utilized user centered design to create an environment that engaged a brand obsessed user base
  • Integrated with Mars chosen ESN

The result

Brand portals have now been rolled out across major FMCG food brands: Mars, M&M’s, Snickers, Twix, Dove/ Galaxy and Maltesers

Global internal news site on SharePoint | Content Formula

Global internal news site on SharePoint

Social news and content delivery for 30,000 employees

The brief

Jaguar Land Rover wanted to move their staff magazine online and introduce social interactions. They wanted employees to engage with and impact the news agenda whilst accessing the site from desktop, tablet and smartphone.

The team at Jaguar Land Rover were focused on the creation of a site that delivered an intuitive user experience (UX) regardless of device, with an engaging design that appropriately showcased their luxury brands.

Our approach

Our SharePoint consultants worked closely with the Internal Communications team at JLR to create a user-centered solution that met the businesses objectives.

  • Our user experience designers created a home page with three news columns, which enabled employees to influence the news agenda via a “trending” column. This column displays content in order of popularity, based on the number of likes, shares and comments the content has generated over the previous few days.
  • We also enabled the Comms team to pin news to the right hand side of the page.
  • We utilized defined content tags that enabled users to customize their view and allowed the site to push related twitter and instagram content based on the tags attributed to news articles.
  • In designing the mobile and tablet view, we ensured a consistent navigation whilst introducing the mobile gestures that JLR’s employees would expect.
  • Our graphic designers worked with JLR’s brand guidelines to create an engaging design that enhanced the visual nature of JLR’s premium video and imagery.

The result

Content Formula designed and developed a high-end SharePoint with social interaction integrated with premium content. The user experience was rich, engaging and optimized for multiple devices.

Responsive intranet on SharePoint 2013 for railway industry client

Personalised and responsive SharePoint 2013 intranet

How we created an engaging platform for the Office of Rail Regulation

The brief

The Office of Rail Regulation (ORR) wanted to re-develop their intranet on SharePoint 2013 to better serve the needs of their staff across 6 UK locations. They wanted their new SharePoint intranet to be a more modern representation of their organisation and achieve the following objectives:

  • Create a SharePoint 2013 platform where consistent messages and information can be shared
  • Reinforce a positive company culture and facilitate employee engagement and the internal communication strategy
  • Allow office and non-office based staff to access relevant information whether on the move or at their desk.
  • Drive collaboration between offices.

Our approach

We needed to ensure the mobile context was built into the user experience from the outset. We consulted heavily with stakeholders and end users to ensure the information architecture was well structured and ran several workshops to understand the types of user journeys that would be required in a mobile context.

Through our early discovery work, our SharePoint consultants learned that the intranet should not be perceived as London-centric. They had conducted some insightful user research that pointed towards the intranet needing elements of personalisation based on job role and office location.

As with all of our SharePoint projects, our SharePoint experts start from the position of utilising mainly out-of-the-box components. However, we needed to create certain bespoke components for things like navigation and personalisation and were able to do this via front-end code, not impacting the SharePoint core.

The result

The site was delivered and launched in a 3-month timeframe. Our SharePoint consultancy worked hand-in-hand with the ORR intranet team and acted as a bridge between them and their outsourced IS provider.

End users are feeding back that they really like the new intranet and early data shows signs of much-increased engagement with corporate news and other content areas.

SharePoint intranet rebuild boosts user adoption and collaboration

SharePoint rebuild boosts adoption and collaboration

Intranet revamp and governance strategy boosts knowledge sharing by 375%

The brief

Janssen is a leading pharmaceutical company. The EMEA Medical Affairs function in Janssen provides scientific support to both internal teams and external customers. They collaborate extensively on writing scientific knowledge documents. To help them with this they put in place a SharePoint collaboration and knowledge portal.

After 3 years the SharePoint site had only enjoyed modest success with key areas unpopulated and unused. Following a referral by EMEA IT we were asked by the site sponsor to provide consultancy on reversing the poor levels of adoption of their intranet.

Our approach

Whilst many people had their own ideas as to why the intranet was struggling, we approached the project with fresh and open minds. One of our top SharePoint consultants designed a research project that included a deep dive into the analytics, a content audit, a stakeholder workshop and 25 one-on-one interviews with content owners and end users from across the EMEA region.

Our research uncovered a number of problems – many of which the team had not considered. These included usability issues, technical issues, content issues, inadequate training, and almost non-existent governance. Together these issues had led to a huge lack of trust in the content held on the site.

We put in place a three-pronged plan to address the issues: first, rebuilding the core knowledge and collaboration section of the site to make the user experience more intuitive; second, putting in place a robust SharePoint governance framework aimed at driving up adoption and sustaining high levels of usage; and third, carrying out a SharePoint rebrand to send a strong signal that the site had changed.

The result

With a limited budget and a tight timeline we relaunched the site after two months. As set out in our governance plan we worked closely with the network of 25 content owners. We briefed, motivated and supported them to get their latest and greatest content onto the site. We’ve stayed in touch with the site owner and have delivered ongoing analytics post launch. We have found that:

  • The amount of scientific documents on the site doubled in one month after launch.
  • 9 months later the site has seen the number of documents shared increase to 1762 – an increase of 375% since the launch date.
  • Year-on-year the site has enjoyed a 20% increase in users and a 30% increase in user sessions.
  • With such a pronounced and sustained increase in usage and adoption we have been invited to build a similar site on Office365 for Janssen Asia Pacific.

New 2013 Sharepoint Intranet for healthcare industry

Social intranet on SharePoint Online for Office 365

Using social techniques and Office 365 to help drive a massive culture change

The brief

Nuffield Health wanted our help to launch a truly social and open intranet on Office 365 that would help drive a massive culture change in the organisation:

  • The sponsor and other board members were clear what their objectives were but needed them to be translated and articulated into an intranet vision and strategy.
  • They were also clear that they wanted a social intranet: they wanted to promote trust, respect for expertise, openness and passion for healthcare.
  • Following our recommendation, the client wanted to involve stakeholders and users in the envisioning and design process: first they wanted an engaging vision document followed up with detailed requirements, wireframes and designs to socialise with the company.

Our approach

Our SharePoint consultancy took a top down and bottom up approach to the project, listening carefully to what senior managers were looking for but also reaching out to employees across the many gyms and hospitals in the UK:

  • To set the vision we interviewed each member of the management board and tested some of their ideas with staff across the business.
  • Our SharePoint consultants developed polished concept designs to illustrate the vision and in particular show how staff contributions and networking were a key feature of the intranet.
  • Once signed-off the vision was communicated broadly across Nuffield Health to help drive enthusiasm for the project

The result

Our SharePoint consultancy delivered comprehensive, detailed wireframes and written requirements and a modern vibrant design template to apply onto SharePoint Online:

  • We came up with some innovative features including a co-creation tool, a fun recognition tool and an algorithm to encourage contributions through social reputation..
  • Because we had to target social tools to a broad audience with varying levels of PC literacy and limited PC access time it was important for us to keep ease-of-use top of mind. We stripped back SharePoint functionality to provide elegant and simple interfaces that even our grandmothers could use..
  • We really stretched SharePoint - building in lots of easy-to-use functionality that could be developed natively and without complex code.

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