The Future of the Intranet at Sage
Sage
EMEA | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Sage recently launched a new SharePoint Online intranet to support over 11,000 colleagues across 20 countries. However, Tom McIlroy isn’t here to talk about how great their launch was or how shiny their new intranet is. He’s here to share how the team is already focusing on what’s next. This session will get you thinking as Tom will show you where they are now and where they want to be in the future. Tom will be sharing some insights into the big questions they are asking at Sage, including: What’s the purpose of the intranet? How will AI play a part in the future of the intranet? What role will colleague comms teams have? What can we learn from different areas of our business? How do we adapt to the changing channel landscape? This is a session you must not miss, giving you a chance to understand how a cutting-edge team is doing its cutting-edge thinking.
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I'm going to hand to someone who's going to bring what I would describe as a little bit of a more philosophical flavor to the to the session to the event today. And that person is Tom McIlroy from SAGE, who's going to talk about the future of the intranet at SAGE. So this is this is your kind of leader thinking ahead into the future of things.
So it's very much grounded in reality. Don't worry, it's not pie in the sky stuff. This is this is an interesting session where Tom will show you their thinking about the future of the intranet at SAGE.
And I I feel confident that you will get a lot of value from this. So this is the point where I shut myself up and I'll hand over to Tom. If you could come off mute and share your slides, please.
Fire away. Sure. Thanks, Pete.
And hi, everyone. Thanks for being here today. Hopefully you can see my slides.
OK, brilliant. It's part of the modern way of working these days, isn't it? We're not quite sure what we're sharing at any one time. So, yeah.
Hi, everyone. As mentioned, my name is Tom McIlroy and I'm the colleague comms exec for SAGE's global internal comms team. And I'm here today to give you a bit of insight into the future of the intranet for us here at SAGE.
Now, I'm going to kind of keep this to time if I can. But here's a brief outline of the things we'll cover over the course of the next 20 minutes, starting with a bit of context as to who SAGE is. We're known globally for offering integrated accounting, payroll, excuse me, and payment systems.
And we do that for millions of small and medium sized businesses across the world, predominantly in Europe, the UK and the United States. But I think what SAGE ultimately seeks to do is to take the burden of admin out of businesses. No one starts a business these days because they're excited about completing their payroll and tax returns.
And so SAGE is always looking at how we can help people to focus on the thing they wanted to create a business for while offering insights into how they can make it better. And like many companies right now, we're thinking about how generative AI can help with that. And that's led to our latest product offering SAGE Copilot, which you can see on the right there.
But for this presentation specifically, it's worth mentioning that internally, we have around 11,000 colleagues who work over about 20 countries. And like our customers, that stretches right across the world, but predominantly in those three regions I mentioned earlier. So because I work in colleague communications, helping our leaders to engage with those 11,000 colleagues, I wanted to show the main mix of internal channels we use.
We have our main intranet platform, which we call YourSAGE. And that is both our main news channel and the space where colleagues access the information and apps they need. And we'll cover it in more detail on the next slide.
We've also recently introduced podcasts, which give us a way to bring business conversations to life in a very unique way. It's a nascent channel right now and it's growing each month, but it's designed to supplement our other channels and give a bit of a different flavor to the content while allowing colleagues to listen on the go. Viva Engage is probably one very familiar to many of you.
It's our internal social media platform and it's where the more public conversations in our business largely take place. While Microsoft Teams is more focused around projects and tasks and the conversations around those, Viva Engage for us is more about themes and topics and it helps us to promote conversations and spark them around the content we're sharing, which is really important to us. We also have a wealth of digital signage ranging from lock screens to big multi-floor displays like this one in our Newcastle HQ.
It's very much a passive channel for us, but it's one we do like to invest in to help some of our key messages echo in a very visual way. And finally, there's email, which is very much the flex tape of internal comms. It can be used for everything and anything.
And what I think it's probably overused in many instances is familiar. People know how it works and that makes it kind of the default channel for many businesses. Now, all of these are designed to complement one another and offer something unique.
Podcasts bring human voices to those key messages. Viva Engage sparks conversation around them. And interestingly, where email pushes messages into a colleague's space, i.e. their inbox, intranets are largely designed to be explored.
They invite colleagues to discover content in more detail and that's often how intranets get positioned. It's a space for finding the information and news you either want or what's been flagged to you by leaders and comms people like me. But behind all of that, I want you to think about the concept of attention because that's what internal comms channels are ultimately fuelled by.
They're ways to direct attention to what leaders and the business as a whole think is important for colleagues. And I think how we talk about attention is fundamental to how all businesses will likely look at intranets going forward. But let's look at Sage's intranet more closely.
This is your Sage. As I mentioned, it is effectively a space built on SharePoint where all colleagues can get the information they need. This is the global homepage and at the top you can see the various zones where colleagues can access their benefits, pay slips, policies, expenses and so on.
The stuff that helps them do their job and get what they personally want from the business. But we also share a lot of information about our products and customers. You'll see at the top we have a brand new customer and product zone which explain the type of businesses we serve and which products help us to do that, effectively allowing colleagues to educate themselves and become great advocates for Sage.
And then there's our news. What's happening in the business and the various topics leaders want colleagues to know about. Here you can see our global stories but all of our regions also have their own regional comms teams and pages showing news for those regions.
So there's different layers to the stories we're sharing with colleagues too. One of the things we love most about the platform though is how adaptable we've been able to make it. Bringing the intranet over from Unilever to SharePoint has helped us to integrate a lot of our Microsoft tools together so we can blend our Viva Engage posts into our news stories for example and weave a mix of video content into our campaigns all while adopting new Microsoft tech as it evolves.
It's certainly not meant as an advertisement for Microsoft but simply to highlight that we've got a pretty comprehensive platform that we can do a lot of cool things with. Which then brings us to how colleagues are actually using it. Since we introduced our new intranet at the start of October last year we've seen a pretty steady stream of colleagues visiting on a daily basis, just over 2700 which is about a quarter of our global workforce.
And when we look at unique users over the span of a week we can see that each colleague is typically visiting YourSage about 2.7 times a week on average. And we can see that a lot of those views are going to sites like the colleague zone, our benefits and expense platforms and things like that. Now overall that's not a bad set of stats for us.
As I mentioned part of YourSage's function is to be there when colleagues need it and I think these metrics feel very much in the Goldilocks zone for us. Colleagues aren't relying on it too much and they're not ignoring it either. But the same can't be said for our news content.
Again we also rely on the intranet as our main channel for internal comms and so its ability to connect colleagues with that content is really important to us. But on the right of this slide you'll see a chart that compares those 2700 daily visitors, the bar in white, with the top 20 news stories by unique views in the first six months of YourSage's launch. Now I can tell you those top three green bars denote our Q1 financial results comms which talks about strategy, financial performance and bonuses.
As you can expect they get a huge amount of interest because they directly affect our colleagues. But you'll also see that very quickly the average views trend down into the very low hundreds and that's been consistent for some time now. More so these are stories that every colleague is seeing when they open their browser up.
It's the default homepage for all global colleagues and they're having to go past them to get to those various apps I mentioned earlier. And when we know that these stories may linger on the homepage for several days, i.e. seeing multiple cohorts of those 2700 unique users during that time, our conversion rate really drops into the single percentages. That in itself might feel like a cause for panic but it's actually something most businesses see and in any case we've actually found a way to kind of buck that trend by simply leveraging those daily visits over a longer span of time.
Back in February this year we held our Sage Transform conference in Las Vegas. This is a huge product event we hold for our North American customers and partners and it's where we show off our latest innovations including Sage Copilot. But it's also a big event from an internal perspective.
North America is a key market for us and the things we announce and talk about there have ramifications right across our global business. So it's something leaders want colleagues right across the world to learn about and be a part of. And so to try and buck that trend we're seeing with our other news content we brought all of the internal comms and content surrounding Transform together into a single hub where we could host the announcement articles, keynote videos, photos, beaver engage posts and so on.
And then we simply created a prominent banner that stayed on the global homepage for about four to five weeks after the event had finished. And the interesting thing was about 60% of our engagement happened in the four weeks following the event. In essence what made the campaign a big success for us was that we made the content discoverable and then we just let colleagues find it in their own time.
There were no all company emails, no big free merchandise giveaways. We just let it be and it works better than any campaign we had run before. And that brings us back to that idea of attention.
With the technologies we have and the demands of our roles, our attention has never been pulled in so many different directions inside and outside of work. After all, in colleague comms we're trying to cut through busy inboxes, online meetings, Teams messages and other distractions going on in the office and even at home. But that said, evergreen discoverable content is much more immune to those fast paced distractible environments.
And when you've got companies like Gartner and SWOOP telling you that colleagues are spending only an average of one minute reading news per day, you have to leverage that minute for as long as possible. But those trends we're seeing right across the intranet have ultimately got us to ask four big questions. The first three which you can see here.
Firstly, given our colleagues don't operate on the intranet, they're busy using Teams, the Office 365 suite or even specialised platforms, we need to ask ourselves how we meet them where they happen to be. Following COVID many of our colleagues aren't even in the office at the same time. So in many ways we're operating in 11,000 unique environments and that makes it very hard for any one solution or platform to engage them effectively.
One way to think about it is if our intranet is our internal storefront for our business, many of us are still grappling with the rise of internet shopping. It's a real paradigm shift we're experiencing. And just like the conversations around internet shopping, we're also asking ourselves what content resonates with colleagues.
The reason content on financial performance and bonuses is engaging is because colleagues innately see how it affects them. And that's not necessarily as obvious with other content. And so we're looking closer at the stories we're telling.
What's happening at SAGE? Why is that exciting and important for colleagues? And what can they do to help? Being clearer with that is helping us not to just engage colleagues, but engage them on a deeper level in the way a good film or book engages you and gets you thinking thanks to the way it tells its story. But with only a minute on average to play with, it's clearly about concise, informed moments of connection. How do you convey information to colleagues in a few short moments? That's going to be a really important one to think about as we'll come back to later.
And what metrics show us success? Often we talk about views and view time, but really at the end of the day, content is meant to make us feel and do things. And that's rarely measured inside businesses outside of quarterly pulse surveys. But getting that qualitative feedback, how colleagues feel about what you're telling them is ultimately what underpins the entire employee experience.
And that's going to be the holy grail of employee engagement in the years to come. But taking an even wider view, the biggest question we're asking is simply what is the intranet trying to be? Is it a space for colleagues to connect with apps and information they need when they need it? Or is it a space for broadcasting news? The topics we think are important to colleagues right now. In some ways, I don't think there's a right answer.
It can be either. But I also think our own experiences with technology suggest what type of intranet is destined to do better than others. I don't know about you, but I'm very careful with my phone's notification settings.
I turn practically all of them off because I feel notifications are a bit distracting. They nudge me out of my moments of focus and they often make me feel anxious because I'm reacting to my schedule rather than controlling it. You might be the same or you might thrive off of notifications.
But either way, I think we can all agree that much of our technology right now is intended to give us control of our focus and time. We have all of these platforms, apps and devices that allow us to shape almost every aspect of our day. And that expectation, that trained behavior then comes with us into work.
And those expectations are what I think we need to build our intranets around. Now, my team and I certainly don't have all the answers, but there are three key things we're paying close attention to as we move forward. Firstly, as millennials, Gen Z and soon Gen Alpha begin to dominate the workforce, we'll find that more and more of our colleagues may expect to consume content in 60 second TikTok and YouTube short clips.
That may sound a little bit cliche, but it's how I largely consume content and I'm 32. So there you go. Scroll culture is also a big trend right now, and it will put a lot of pressure on companies to present content concisely.
Swoot's benchmarking report has already shown that the optimal length for articles seems to be about 300 to 600 words. And I think we'll see that shrink more and more as time goes on. Similarly, our desire to Google things as we go through life is one of the biggest influences on our behaviors.
We find comfort in knowing that we're only a few seconds away from anything we need to know. Companies will likely need to reflect that and think less about comms plans and more about search engine optimization, because that will be the new comms plan for engaging colleagues to a large extent. And finally, as AI continues to evolve, it will reshape the relationship colleagues have with their work.
They'll soon be able to summarize newsletters and videos at the touch of a button, bringing it back to that point on conciseness that I mentioned earlier. And if Microsoft, sorry, and if the Microsoft showcase is anything to go by, we'll soon be using AI in the same way we use Google. A single space to interact with a ton of applications and content, but in a far more powerful way.
And in my view, that's why Intranet's filled with curatable information will be more important than ever. So I've deliberately kept this vision for the Intranet at SAGE somewhat broad because we're still asking the questions ourselves. But to leave you with two final thoughts, I think my recommendation for anyone thinking about the Intranet in their business is to step away from the tech and look at the people using it.
Just as no one starts a business to fill in paperwork. No one comes to work to read Intranet pages. It's only a tool.
And if it's not empowering those people in your business, then it's probably getting in the way. But similarly, to draw on a quote from a group that I follow called the Minimalists, if we don't control our screens, they inevitably control us. And I think that threat to our attention really is the danger of an Intranet that loses sight of its users.
Just as some of the best books you've ever read are sitting closed on a shelf right now. Some of the best Intranets are completely silent at this moment, too. And that's the real concept we're trying to grip and harness here at SAGE.
So that's everything for me. Thanks for listening. And I'm happy to answer any questions.
Tom, thank you so much. You're getting a lot of love, particularly for that last quote that you shared. And yeah, you and I are aligned on the Minimalist thing.
But yeah, scrolling is the new smoking definitely seems to have resonated with people. There's there's a few questions and we have a few minutes available. I just want to I just want to pull out a couple of the comments that you've sparked.
Actually, Cai SWOOP’s, I see you've commented it's just so easy to get distracted. Kai's turned off all alerts on his watch, which helped quite a lot. Would love to hear in the chat if anyone else is restricting themselves to only check email morning, afternoon, that sort of thing.
I know Melinda, one of our other speakers, if you email Melinda, you'll often get an auto reply saying, I only check my email at this specific point in the day. So there's lots of these tactical things we're starting to see infusing through. There are a couple of questions in the Q&A, but I can see Sonia has a hand up.
Is this an opportunity for me to say, Sonia Wandry, would you like to come off mute and ask a question of Tom or share a thought? Or was it an accidental clap reaction that turned into a hand up? No. OK, OK, cool. I had a couple of questions that I'm just I've got the mic, so I'm going to ask them.
The the shift that you mentioned around content on the Internet, what you've learned from that particular campaign, and I'm sure other case studies within within your organisation, that the shift in thinking about content on the Internet being about evergreen, discoverable content. Do you feel like comms teams are equipped to adapt to that shift straight away? Like or is the culture that seems to be across most organisations is here's a new story. Put it up now.
Anyone who's worked in internal comms is used to leaders coming to them and saying, I've drafted this, share it now. And it's all about news being in the moment. That's a solid message that seems to be drummed in a lot of the time for the Intranet.
Do you think that comms people need to shift the way they're thinking to adapt to that evergreen, discoverable profile that you're thinking of? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the elephants in the room is that a lot of internal comms content is is driven by leaders who are in a space in your business and they do something exciting. And to be blunt, they think it's the most incredible thing and they want to tell everyone about it.
But it's not necessarily helping going to help colleagues drive their, you know, get reach their goals or drive their OKRs. It may not necessarily have a direct impact on what they're supposed to be doing for the business. It's often I think sometimes there's a there's a vein of vanity sometimes to internal comms where people want to just market and promote what them and their teams are doing.
And that gets shown in the fact that, you know, a lot of stories that are really exciting don't always get the views that people think they're going to get. And I think comms colleagues are probably really receptive to less is more right now. And there's a huge amount of churn.
But the stats ultimately speak for themselves. You know, just I guess touching back on the slide we had earlier, you know, we're seeing a pretty consistent trend. You know, if it's not directed to bonuses or the financial performance of the business, which is another kind of proxy for bonuses in some ways, then colleagues kind of lean back and they'll discover it when they have time.
So I think I think there's a tension possibly there with a lot of people who are trying to communicate internally and the stakeholders who want to share all this information. But I think also I've heard the same leaders talk about focus and making sure we're not just, you know, in meetings for the sake of meetings and things like that. So, you know, by extension, you know, what is the content that colleagues actually need to know? What's actually going to help them perform better, achieve more, be prouder of the business they work for? I think once you start asking those questions rather directly, you kind of stumble onto the content that's most important.
But it's always going to be a challenge because often businesses, there's so much going on and managing that content flow and often saying no to people saying, actually, this isn't a new story. This is a Viva Engage post. That's where that's where the real work begins, I think.
Yeah, there seems to have been a bit of a subtle thread through a lot of the presentations around saying no to people, which I think comms, HR, culture, IT people are very much sort of culturally attuned to saying yes to people. You know, yes, I can fix that. Yes, I can do this thing.
But in this quest for clarity, it's really important to be saying no. Right. And I mean, you shared your channel landscape and you've got what looks on the surface of very clear.
Here's our core channels. And if someone comes to you and says, hey, I want to put this news story on that massive digital screen we've got in our Newcastle HQ. Of course, you're going to say no, that is not intent.
A seven story high digital screen is not there for a 300 word news story about a new policy. So what I mean, we should feel confident saying the same around the Internet. Right.
Like, no, Internet news story isn't the appropriate place for this. The appropriate place is this. So I think that saying no is a skill that everybody's got to learn a little more as as we adapt to the future.
Right. Yeah, I think so. I mean, one of the interesting tactics I use with stakeholders is I often, you know, they'll come in and they'll they'll want the new story.
The Beaver Engage post announcement, the banners and the block screens and just ask them, you know, what's the last lock screen you looked at? What was the message? What was the last Beaver Engage post you had to start a conversation on or applied to? Often, you know, people are shoveling the content out, but they're not engaging with themselves. And when you kind of put it back into their own experience, you know, are you doing these things? Are you taking time to explore your site or your Internet? A lot of them say I've got time. And, you know, if you haven't got the time, why would our eleven thousand colleagues have the time as well? And I think that's that's the kind of, you know, reverse card, if you want to call it that, that I tend to use.
And it's but at the same time, it brings it down to technology. You know, there's that paradigm shift of AI. And I know I kind of is kind of an all got everything moment.
It feels like it's going to achieve everything and it will kind of start to narrow down as some things don't work. But undoubtedly, you know, the ability of stage colleagues to soon be able to summarise 20 minute videos with CodePilot. You know, that's you could argue that's going to kill that content and mechanism, because why are people going to record 20 minute videos when colleagues can just click buttons and summarise them in 10 seconds and get the action points and the key points? So I guess, you know, there's a question there of making sure we don't race to the bottom with AI and the content we share on intranet and things like that.
But there is a kind of huge empowerment of colleagues to kind of control how they gather information. And I saw a comment a moment ago about how maybe cons people should be called like colleague insights or data managers and things like that. And I information managers.
And I think that is probably true to a large extent. It will be the information the business has internally and how you get its colleagues when they need it. And the people in between, you know, that may be cons people who transition or something else.
I'm not sure, but it's it's going to change a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
And there's a few comments on that theme of what should cons managers be called. I like the cons teams sometimes feel like common sense. Yeah.
What you've described there is like just applying common sense. So someone comes to you requesting something and you're the common sense check for that. I think is is a really nice way to think about it.
I like that. There was a comment further back that I wanted to call out from Anna who mentioned to do. Where is it gone now? So I saw a comment I wanted to call out.
This was it. So Anna said, Tom is touching on something that I think is really interesting. Do we really need to get eyeballs on the content to drive page views? Or is the Internet about giving people the safety of knowing that they will always be able to find the information and answers they need when they need it? I just wanted to call that out because it speaks to that thing of touches on metrics as well and purpose around.
Do we really need to get eyeballs on the content or are we trying to get the right eyeballs on the content? Just love to get your thoughts on that, Tom. Yeah, I think I think that the idea of views and click throughs to a large extent is part of the legacy metrics we've got. You know, as new tech steps in, excuse me, we'll be able to potentially just measure what's actually important.
And, you know, for example, if there might be a comms on our Internet about Glassdoor reviews, we want colleagues to share what it's like to work at Sage so that people who are joining us know what's going on. You know, does the comms really matter? Does it really matter if people see the message or does it matter that they're going on to Glassdoor and posting it? And if they're not doing that, is there a reason why they're not doing it? Maybe they don't feel comfortable. You know, they might feel that they can't be honest or something like that.
And so really, the comms is kind of a false lead in terms of the success we're going for. It really does come, I think, down to how colleagues feel. Think, feel, do.
That's always the kind of three of comms. You know, what do people feel about this? What do you want them to do about it or to think about it? And that the way to measure that is there isn't a lot of tech that allows us to do that or that's easily implementable. If Microsoft, you know, my recommend, I know Microsoft coming on later.
My one recommendation, Microsoft, is find a way to get sentiment. You know, if you go on to SharePoint, I'd love it if it asked you how you were feeling, what you were interested in, what questions you have and the eyes and things like that kind of built your Internet in front of you with all the information you needed. But I think that's that sentiment is the real thing, because how your colleagues feel and what they think about your business is what we ultimately try and shape.
We want them to feel that they can be their best and achieve more. And they're excited about where the company's going. The comms are just the kind of dartboard, I think, in many ways.
You know, we're just trying to figure out what triggers those behaviours. And it's a bit hit and miss, but I think we're getting closer. It's just we spend a lot of time measuring the activity rather than the result.
A lot of the time. And but that's not to say that measuring the activity isn't important because it's often all we've got. But at the same time, I think I think we all think about our own experiences.
You know, when we get company email, not company emails, marketing emails from people or, you know, just the communications in our personal lives. We're often thinking about how we feel and what those things make us want to do. That's kind of the measure of success.
And I just think we need to probably bring that into corporate life a little bit more. Yeah, nice, nice, nice note to end on there, because time is ticking. Thank you, Tom, for such a such a thought starting presentation.
You've had loads of reactions. I hope you've seen all of that and felt the love from the crowd and loads of comments and a bunch of questions. So, yeah, really good.
And I really appreciate you and all of our speakers, of course, putting the time and effort into collating your thoughts together and sharing such a fantastic presentation. Thank you very much indeed.
Meet the speaker:
Tom McIlroy
Colleague Communications Executive
Sage
