Supercharging your intranet content with a decentralised publishing model that really works
Syngenta
EMEA | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
Melinda from Syngenta will share how they have introduced a decentralised publishing model that empowers people to create targeted, relevant and timely communications and content on their intranet. Hear how Syngenta has waved goodbye to long approval processes and laborious centralised control by implementing a model incorporating a fully automated system which makes it easy for people across the organisation to deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
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Melinda's smiling face up on screen, because I'm going to just share this slide and then hand straight over to Melinda from Syngenta. And Melinda is going to be talking about how they, we use the word supercharged, supercharging your intranet content. Melinda oversees a decentralised publishing model that really works, and that's enough from me on this.
Melinda, I will invite you to come off mute, and then you can share your slides and share your story. Great. Thank you so much, Pete.
Thank you for having me here today, and hello, everybody. As Pete said today, I'm going to take you through our decentralised publishing system. So let me just quickly get the right screen, here we go.
So my name is Melinda, as Pete said. In the project that I'm about to present, I actually had a different title to what you see on screen. I was the SharePoint product lead, and therefore for the intranet as well as some other digital comms tools before coming into this new role a couple of months ago.
So I am double hatting, and that's why you probably see on LinkedIn, there's a slightly different job title, but still very much involved in our intranet space. So quick word about Syngenta before I get started today. We are a global ag tech company with headquarters in Switzerland.
I'm based in Basel. We're around 50,000 employees now in more than 90 countries, and our mission is to work to transform how crops are grown and protected. So basically we like to describe ourselves as an innovation company, and everything we do internally must also reflect that, and it very much starts with internal collaboration.
Here's a little bit about our journey so far. I have to go back a little bit to explain how we got to where we did with our decentralised publishing system. The reason for the drawing board is that we went back to a drawing board a couple of times to get to where we are today, but if we go back to 2019, that was when we were decommissioning our old intranet, which was based on SharePoint 2010, and it was a heavily customised system.
It was completely built from the ground up. It was on premise. It was unreliable, and it was going out of support from Microsoft.
So we had to do something, and at the time it was decided that we would completely migrate everything over to SharePoint Online as a base platform and put a third-party wrapper product on top of that. We launched it about a year and a half later, and it simply didn't work. It never worked the way that we intended.
The reason was it was probably just too complicated. It was very, very customised. It was very hard for people to contribute to it because it was unreliable.
It was also unreliable for the people that were trying to consume it. The service behind it was based in a different country and a different time zone, so it was very, very hard for us to get any help, and there was simply expertise that we couldn't get internally because it was part of this company's IP. So we were really reliant on somebody else to fix issues in a different time zone from what we were working, and this was really one of the main reasons we decided we have to do something else because we need to have a reliable intranet.
So in 2002, when the contract was coming up for this product, we decided we wanted to bring back that expertise in-house, and we had a team of SharePoint professionals at the time that knew everything there was to know about SharePoint at that time and were willing to learn more. Obviously, it changes every single month, sometimes every single week. So we really wanted to leverage that.
Bring it in-house, and what we proposed was a SharePoint out-of-the-box intranet that was completely no customisations, a completely simple system, using SharePoint as the platform, not the base platform for something else. So that's basically what we did, and we launched that about 18 months ago, and we're still using that today. So what's our model for this SharePoint out-of-the-box product, and how do we get people to contribute to it? Well, we have an editors community, and our editors aren't just people that are in internal comms.
There are a lot of people that take up that role within various departments around the company because not everyone has a comms business partner, and our internal comms department just isn't big enough to cover everybody. So we have this community of people that contribute to the company, and we have a content, and it's based on teams, and they can go there, and they can get training, they can keep in touch with us, they can raise any issues, ask questions, access tips and tricks as well, and people often in the community answer the questions that other people are asking, so it's not always that there has to be a technical team or a support team behind it. The community kind of runs itself as a community, and this works really, really well.
In the beginning, we did have regular check-ins where we had a monthly update where we would just give tips and tricks. We would let people know of any updates that were coming or of any changes, but eventually this faded away because we switched to a more asynchronous collaboration style. It worked a lot better for the number of editors that we have, and also because of the global spread that we had as well.
When you're an editor, you do have special access to what we call an editor's workbench, so that's this blue bar that you see in the screen. Not everyone sees that. That is only for people that have these editor's rights, and there's an additional right that you can also have to feature your content, which goes in those top three boxes that you can see in the top right.
This is reserved really for the people that are contributing the most content in their regions because some of those boxes are dedicated to regional content, so to be able to get those boxes, you need the special permissions, but you also need to be a communicator in that region. Here's a little bit more about how it works. Basically, an editor would go to the homepage.
They would click on the editor's workbench. From there, they would select a business area. This is a news delivery site where they would then put their news, so they're already choosing their first targeting.
Actually, there's a little video that will play on loop here while I explain that. They choose their business area. That's already the first part of targeting that they have to do.
When they put their content in global news, for example, that is targeted to everyone that is global. They could choose something like IT where everyone in IT would then get that news. Then they create their content, and as you can see, the template is a completely blank template.
We did play around in the beginning with having some preset templates, but it was actually more work for editors because they had to go in there and delete all the lorem ipsum holding text that was in there or replace images or whatever it might be. We have it completely flexible that people can come up with their own design. Everybody has their different pieces of content that they like to add into their story to build that context out.
Some have more than others, so we keep it completely flexible. It also means that if you're quickly posting news on the go, you can quickly do so without having to do too much else. You can always go back in and then add more later.
After you've added all the content, all they have to do is click on the publishing detail for which we have a few areas set up where they have to add some additional pieces of information. One is an expiry date so that we make sure that the content doesn't stay on the homepage too long and become outdated. The second is to add a topic to it, and we align these with our company values so that we can go back through the content and say, okay, we had so many pieces that were all about our long view value, for example, and these were ones that were based around customers, and then we can divide that up at the end of the year and have a look to see what works best.
Then they, of course, have to put another targeting field in there, and that targeting field is usually based on a geography. It could be global or it could be Switzerland, it could be Basel site, it could be an entire region. That's the second piece of targeting information.
Then if they wish to feature the content after that is pushed to the homepage, they can go in to the feature request section, which we have actually built an app for. So when they launch into that, they will see all the content that is available to be featured, they click what they want to be featured and how long for, and then that gets pushed to those feature boxes. So it's all completely automated after all of those details are filled in, that content gets automatically pushed around the page, depending on how much other content is there and depending whether or not it is featured, and then the audience will only see what has been targeted to them.
So the front page is different for everyone. Let me just stop that video, sorry. So you might be wondering why we take this approach, it comes with a lot of questions.
I think trust is a big one, and quality as well, which was discussed in the previous talk. But the reason we chose this really is in these four boxes. So for resilience and availability, as I explained at the beginning, our previous systems didn't have the availability and the reliability that an intranet should have.
And at the end of the day, isn't this the overall purpose of having an intranet, to give people the right information at the right time and in a reliable way? If someone's going there to read something, they need to read it or find something straightaway. A great tip I actually got from Pete when I was struggling to get this project past my stakeholders at the time when I said to them to do SharePoint online out of the box, no wrappers, no customisation, no bells and whistles, it was very tricky to convince them. And Pete basically said, why don't you enroll people in the main purpose of the project and the intranet, rather than focusing on the vision? And the project team at the time had spent months trying to come up with this fancy vision.
And it just wasn't enrolling anybody the same way that a purpose did. Everybody could really gather around the same purpose and they couldn't argue with that. And that's really how we got the go ahead to take this approach.
We also took this approach because of the ease of use. News is only new when it's really happening now or it's just happened. So if it's really hard for content creators to come and contribute their content in a reliable and available way, then by the time it is posted, it's not really going to be news anymore.
And then it's not keeping employees informed. So therefore not fulfilling the purpose. Trust and transparency was also a huge focus from us.
Our previous intranets were really about command and control. It was very, very locked down. Not many people could contribute to it.
This definitely did have its merits. But we have a more open and trustworthy culture here at Syngenta. And so what we decided to do was trust people that were contributing the content.
We train them, of course, and we give them all the resources they need to get help. And we trust that they're going to do the right thing. I mean, at the end of the day, we have guidelines and governance.
We have policies that they have to adhere to as well. And so we trust that they follow those. And actually in the past 18 months, not once have we ever had any issues with that.
We also give them lots of resources in terms of the training, the tips and tricks, how-to guides, best practice guides, and look books as well that they can refer to. So there's plenty out there to help keep them on track. We try not to have any complications whatsoever.
And therefore we don't have any customisations on our intranet. What we focus on is integrations. And that's integrations with other tools that are available in that Office 365 suite.
By doing that, we're guaranteeing that the security is built in. We're not sending any of our data or information to a third party or over a third party. And this is really helpful for us too in the kind of nature of business that we have.
So that also helps it to become more reliable, because when you have things like customisations, there's a lot more that can go wrong, especially every time Microsoft pushes an update to you. A lot of the coding can fall out, which we had experienced in the past. So that was a key reason for not doing that.
Also, this enables that everybody has access and it's completely inclusive. So you don't have to be in communications to be a contributor, like I said before. They're not the exclusive owners of the news in our organization.
The people that are on the ground quite often are, as well as the communicators, of course. Global access is guaranteed because this is an Office 365 tool for which everybody has a license. There's no additional fee or there's no additional thing that you have to sign up.
This is already included in the license cost that you have if you have those licenses from Microsoft. So, you know, why wouldn't you use it? This is globally available. We can also access it via Teams now, and it's completely mobile responsive.
So it can be accessed on an iPad and it can also be accessed on a phone very, very easily. So as I said, no command and control. And one of the other reasons for this, apart from those kind of trust points that I made, was that we did have a real lack of resources when we were in this project.
The company was going through a bit of a reorganisation at the time, and part of that was that a lot of the internal comms departments were also going through that reorg. There weren't as many resources on the ground anymore that could simply spend their day managing an intranet. There used to be a whole editorial team for our intranet.
It was about three to four people that worked full time on placing articles on the page, on writing articles, finding pictures, et cetera. That no longer needs to be the case because the system is so easy to contribute to and so reliable, and it takes no technical expertise to be able to contribute to it as well. So what we found is we didn't need to replace those resources anymore.
We could completely automate the system, as I showed before, so that someone doesn't need to be monitoring it 24-7. So what we have done is build in automations that do those kind of tasks, such as language translation. This is something we used to do by hand, but now with the integration of AI tools and some of the other language translation tools out there, coupled with things like Power Automate, we can do an auto-translate just with a click of a button onto our intranet.
This is an integration, not a customisation. We can place the content on the page through automation. We can expire the content.
So when you select a date that you no longer want it to appear, the content will be taken away. It's still searchable, but it won't be there in the news river anymore because it would likely be out of date. We feature content via automation.
As I said, we created an app which basically runs on your browser. So it doesn't even look like an app and doesn't navigate you away from that main page. The automation can also show people what they need to see and when they need to see it.
So that's via our targeting that we set up. That's all done by Office 365 groups. And this means that we can also have a 24-hour publishing cycle.
Previous editorial team worked nine to five and not in public holidays and not on weekdays. And not every country in the world has a public holiday on the same day. But Power Automate never takes a break and neither does the news.
So one reason why we have actually been so successful with this approach is it's been 18 months since we launched it. And it still is quite successful in the fact that we haven't really had to change it the way that we thought we did. We wanted to launch it and then maybe do another iteration after we did a launch and learn phase.
And we thought we'd probably have to build in some customisations or people would find things that were missing. But actually it worked so well that we found that we didn't really have to do anything. So then we really started looking at our analytics.
And around the same time, luckily, SWOOP launched SWOOP for SharePoint, which we implemented immediately, so that we could back up a lot of our thinking and a lot of our successes with proper data and analytics. And this was really how we proved to our stakeholders that this was the right direction and that we didn't need to go into another project to keep building on top of something that was already working and that was already well-received. So we coupled the SWOOP analytics as well with other bits of feedback such as surveys and feedback forums to get a robust look at what works, what people are enjoying, what doesn't work, what could we do better, and most importantly, what should we stop doing? So what's not working anymore? So things like long-form articles or even really short articles that could perhaps work better as a Yammer post, we're able to have a look at those and discuss those and then create a robust editorial calendar around that to make sure that everything that is going on there is of quality, number one, and number two, is actually of use and people are using it and accessing it.
There's always going to be things on the internet such as policies that need to be there, need to exist, but with SWOOP, we're able to find the content that isn't working and that can be removed because it's outdated and it's no longer relevant. And this really helps us keep an eye on the environment and the kind of limitations that we have in terms of how much content can be stored before the internet becomes too cluttered. So here's a couple of screenshots on this slide of just some of the analytics that we find really useful on SWOOP.
One of those is, of course, just tracking the most read news articles. You can then click into those and then see why are they successful? What's the quality rating? How long are those? How complicated are those? You can also click into the article and see what other content is featured in there. So it really helps if someone is coming in and saying, well, why is that article working and not mine? They can go into SWOOP and easily do a comparison and look at some of those statistics and then maybe change a little bit what they're doing based on that.
So it does all sound pretty easy, but not everything is perfect and there is still work for us to do. Having a good editorial strategy and alignment across all our editors and content creators is definitely a focus for us this year. Now that we have a new communications team in place, but we have a great analytics system to be able to start that conversation from a really good place.
We also have a system that's working and so that's going to make everything a lot easy. So we know we can do a lot better across regional collaboration as well to avoid duplication because when it is too easy to publish, sometimes you do have people publishing similar content particularly around celebration days. For example, we have pride month coming up where we know that we will have some localised content, but we need to align sort of as a global company on what's going to be the global message, what are going to be those regional messages and how are we going to target those down so that we're not flooding people with the same messages.
So there's still a lot of that alignment that needs to go on and it does, and it does successfully. As I said, we don't really meet about it. We have a Teams chat group with the kind of heads of communications where we'll simply say, what are you doing? This is what we're doing.
This is the time we're publishing and we basically align that way. So it's very, very easy to do and we really have established a lot of trust in the team that we can all work together in that way successfully. We do also need to continue to drive engagement.
I think a lot of people have this issue with intranets because there's a lot of competing priorities. There's also a lot of competing tools. A lot of people are spending their day in Teams and maybe they don't go to the intranet or they might not go to Yammer or they prefer Yammer or VivaEngage over the intranet.
So there's got to be a way to bring these tools together to not disperse the audience across those but sort of point them to all of those things in different ways. Also, one key thing that we need to do is get people to the bottom of the page. That's something we do use SWOOP for.
We can go back and say to somebody, your article's not successful because it's really too long. No one's liking it because they simply don't get to the bottom of the page. And at the bottom of the page is where the comment box is and where the like button is and where the share button is.
So you need to do things smartly with your content to get people to the bottom of the page. And then you also need to let them know that you want them to engage with that content. You want them to share it.
You want them to like it and you want them to comment on it. And sometimes it's as simple as giving people that permission. When you're in a global company that the size of ours, sometimes people hold back from commenting because they're worried it might be seen that they're not actually working.
But we always try to encourage that in a positive light and really highlight people for doing that. Another way that we do it as well is to use all those channels together. So things like Teams, things like Viva Engage, things like SharePoint.
We also even take it offline and if there's an important message to get across, we create a post and we put it on our lists and our notice boards and put a QR code in there that will point people back to that original article on SharePoint where they will have all the information. And sometimes it is in long form. So things like breaking up that content by using collapsible sections or adding a Viva Engage feed in there.
I've got an example on the screen here of something where we've also used videos and related links and bringing out points into different columns. So this is a long form article, but it's easily broken up by all these different parts of content that are bringing context to the article. And if people won't necessarily read all of that on the internet, then we're pointing them to it in other ways using Viva Engage and also these lift posters.
So I'm surprised you haven't told me I'm almost out of time, Pete. Hopefully I was not finishing too early. Well, no, spot on.
You just beat me to it. I was going, I think there's one slide left and it's questions. So it's perfect timing, Melinda.
Thank you so much. Again, lots of chat, lots of questions. We've got about five minutes before we head to a break.
So let's take a look at a couple of questions. There was one that I spotted earlier that I'm going to be selfish and jump to first because it struck me if I can just find it. One sec, Jason.
Jason asked the question to all presenters generally and I replied in the Q&A saying he should definitely talk to you. But I think a lot of people on the call value your response to this. Jason Cochran asked, you're using SharePoint online.
Where are the non-SharePoint products considered? And if so, why were they discounted? Why were they opted out of? The key thing I want to ask, you did mention a little bit in your presentation. What advantages did SharePoint bring and what disadvantages are there? So just a little bit on that would be great. The advantages that it brought definitely was that we had the expertise in-house already.
And I think we did look at other products quite extensively. And the reason we discounted them was that we didn't have internal expertise about how to run those products should we run into issues and we had a negative experience before. Those products also come with customisations and bells and whistles and bolt-ons and then it becomes too complicated to manage.
SharePoint, we think that we can have a really good view on it because we have the internal team. We have a technical team there. We also have a line of communication open to Microsoft, which is obviously the owner of SharePoint, for which we have a really good connection with our CSM.
And anytime we have any issues, we're able to go and raise a ticket or speak to a CSM. We worked a bit with the SharePoint engineer when we were building this as well. And all these things were included in what we already paid for from Microsoft.
So in considering what would be some of the advantages of SharePoint over another product is like, well, we're already paying for SharePoint. We have the expertise. We can get more expertise that technically we're already paying for as well.
And then when you started to add it up like that, you thought, well, why wouldn't you try it? And so when we launched it, we thought we'll launch and learn because we were missing some bells and whistles and this was one of the disadvantages. In the beginning, you can't get it necessary to look the way that you can some of these other products because it's kind of a base product when you take it out of the box. You can put your branding in there.
You can play around with images and column sizes, but there's always gonna be something that you can't do unless you go into customisation mode. Like on our homepage, there's two white columns that are down the side, which you just can't change. You can't change it.
You can't change the spacing between things very, very easily. So there's little things like that that are disadvantages, but actually when we put that question to our users, when we first launched it, not one person said that the look and feel was something that bothered them or something that they thought was important. The focus was really on, this is so much easier to get the information that I need.
Wow, it really works was one of the top comments that we got. So the disadvantage was letting go of some of those bells and whistles, but actually we found out that that was an advantage because then there was less things to maintain and go wrong. We did manage to build some of these bells and whistles that these other products sell to you as well.
Things like having your own quick links in there, which you can build using a SharePoint list and some automation behind it. The auto-translation, like I told you, this is something those products sometimes really sell on and they do have good other products behind it, some professional translation services. But if you're okay with a kind of 80-20 rule, you can build those yourself with automation.
So that's another one of the advantages. You can keep building on top of it without doing the customisations that these other products would require. And I know from our conversations and previous talks that you've done with SWOOP and other talks I've seen, you really focus on that user feedback, right? And one of the big benefits that you've spoken about with me before is with SharePoint out of the box, you can try something and then talk to the users and see, is that working? And if it's yes, carry on.
If it's no, okay, easy to change it. Yeah, exactly. What we usually do now is we put something out there and then we test it and get the feedback rather than doing it the other way where you kind of test it and go to a focus group and go to a feedback group.
We can put something out there that sometimes people won't notice for a while. And then we'll say, okay, is this working? No one's noticed it. You know, maybe it wasn't needed or maybe it works so well that no one has just raised any concerns about it.
So it's very, very flexible in that sense. You don't have to go into a big build phase or, you know, go through any massive approvals to make these what seem like big changes, which are really only very, very small. With our previous system, if someone wanted to add something to the navigation, so they launch a new campaign or a new page that they want to draw attention to, to get that into the navigation would probably take a couple of weeks.
And that was just because of the kind of service that we had behind it. Now it probably takes me about three seconds to do something like that. Yeah, nice.
One final question I'm going to call out and then I'll do the same with you as I did with Hannah and Ewan. I invite you to jump into the Q&A, Melinda, and give some responses. There's a whole bunch of questions, but there's a few questions around branding.
Claire has asked, if you don't have a template for your pages, how do you ensure that items posted meet your brand guidelines? That's a good question. And it goes back to the point I raised around trust. We trust that our editors are actually going to adhere to those brand guidelines that we have out there.
While we don't have any templates, we do have loaded in the system all our brand colours. So there's only a couple of colour schemes that they can choose from. So everything is on brand because it's always in our colour scheme.
In terms of other kind of guidelines we have around branding, I mean, there's not really much that I've seen go wrong. Maybe somebody crops the logo a little bit too much or something like that. But everyone is very, very well versed on how to apply the brand, what is on brand and what isn't.
I don't think I've ever seen an instance where somebody has taken a template and done something that was so off track it wasn't right. Like I said, we have a lot of look books as well. There's a lot of examples out there and people just tend to do the right thing and they know what to do from looking around other examples across the internet.
Well, I'll finish by saying aren't you lucky to work in a place where people tend to do the right thing? So far, so good. We've all got a few little horror stories but I think the thing is we often blow them out of proportion and we think, oh, if one person does one thing wrong let's design the whole system around controlling that risk. And very often if you actually open up the floodgates it's only a tiny little drop that comes through.
So props to you for being so open and putting so much trust in your content editors. Thank you very much for sharing your talk and the lessons you've learned along the way today. Really appreciate it, Melinda.
Thank you so much.
Meet the speaker:
Melinda Schaller
Capabilities, Culture & Strategic Communications Lead - IT & Digital
Syngenta
