Evolving Employee Communications: Our Intranet transformation journey
TD Bank
AMER | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2024
How TD Bank transformed its dated legacy Intranet into a modern colleague digital workplace
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Our next speaker is Abby Webster from TD Bank. So Abby is going to share with us how she evolved employee communications and their intranet transformation journey at TD Bank. I'm excited to listen to this one as well.
So Abbey, are you available to start sharing your screen? I sure am. Can you hear me OK? We can hear you, yes. Oh, perfect.
OK, I'm just going to share. Let me know when you can see it. We can.
Thanks, Abbey. Awesome. I live in the middle of nowhere, so I'm reliant on Elon Musk for my internet.
OK, so thank you. Thank you for the intro. Hi, everyone.
It's really great to be here. My name is Abby Webster. I'm a white woman with brown hair and I'm wearing a green top and a black jacket.
I'm excited to be here and sharing details on a couple of intranet features that we've recently found transformational from an employee communications perspective. I'm a senior product group manager in employee enablement at TD Bank, and one of my product groups is intranet. And it's probably the one that I have the biggest soft spot for, as I've worked in this field for a very long time, as Kai and I were talking about in the prep for this session.
Here at TD, we have over 27 and a half million customers worldwide, with our largest presences being in Canada and the USA. We have more than 2000 retail locations across North America. We are 95000 permanent employees strong.
And as of July 2023, we have over 1.9 trillion Canadian dollars in assets. Our intranet ecosystem is very much a multifunction system. It's used very heavily by our customer facing colleagues when interacting with customers.
It's also our primary internal communication channel. It houses reference content such as our employee handbook, and it's our social collaboration and engagement platform as well. We have about 40 different sites and a high proportion of these are bilingual with English and French.
About 100,000 pages and documents are actively managed on the ecosystem. So I'm showing you some high level usage stats. And as you can see, the intranet is fairly busy.
We see about 400 million visits per year. This year, we're trending for about 440 or so, and it's gradually increasing year over year. During April, we saw 24% product usage for Viva Engage and our engagement score on our all company feed added up to 29%.
And this engagement score is based on the entire population of TD because anyone can go in and read and interact with each post. We're currently in the midst of the final stages of replatforming the entire ecosystem from a collection of apps that served us well over the years. But they now look very dated.
They're really clunky to use and manage, and not to mention expensive. So this explains the relatively low penetration of Viva Engage usage so far. We quietly launched it in September of 2023.
And as yet, we don't have the mobile app, which will be a key enabler for us. And that's coming really soon. We built our business case on IT currency.
And it was really quite an easy sell for us to spend some money now, essentially by diverting currency project spend and recoup it fairly quickly with savings from license spend and operating costs, as well as avoidance of currency projects for our old on-premise infrastructure and apps. Our main driver to simplify and improve the colleague experience was well understood, and everyone agreed we needed to do it. For example, we needed to reduce the amount of context switching our colleagues do, as this just causes confusion and leads to a sense of learned helplessness.
We did call out some business impact risks, such as disruption to business teams during transition, a heightened change management requirement and the inevitable extra resources that are always needed before and during a content migration exercise. But the risk of staying on the old platform was so much greater that it didn't impact any appetite to proceed. Our new platform, TD Central, is built on SharePoint, SharePoint Online.
We're using fresh intranet from Advania and Viva Engage for social collaboration. So quick shout out to the Advania team, David Bowman, if you're here today, hi from me. There are two particular areas that I would like to go on to talk about today in line with our topic of evolving employee communications on our intranet transformation journey.
One is our release calendar. I thought it might be great for you to see behind the curtain of how we communicate about our release train. And the other is news targeting, which is part of the push-pull personalization mechanism that we're building with TD Central.
It might be a good time to tell you that I can't see the chat or the Q&A due to TD's security settings. As I always say to everyone, we are a bank, so we are really careful about all these things. So I just wanted to pause for a second to see if there are any questions and I'll do this a couple of more times as well as we go through.
So is there any questions so far? No. OK. So, yeah, I think they are, but I think just not to to break your flow.
I think it's because sometimes we also see there's a certain, you know, there's like a trend in some of the questions that are coming up. So, yeah, just keep going, keep going ahead. Absolutely.
OK, so let's quickly talk about our release calendar, which is one of our tools for managing expectations with any of our audiences, whether it's my own leaders or our business partners or stakeholders or our end users who we refer to them as our colleagues. It's the reliable source of truth for finding out what is being released with TD Central and when. So here it is on the slide, a screenshot of it.
We've built it using a very simple page with high level content and have embedded a SharePoint list containing the release items. We've got a note on there about how to contact us on the top right and then a legend which explains what our labelling system means. For example, if something is already released or if it's under evaluation or if we've declined it.
And the main portion of the page is the roadmap itself. And we have the list set in reverse chronological order with the most recent at the top. And we're using this really convenient card view.
Each item has a very brief summary. The objective is so that colleagues can understand what is coming and when. And we found that we only need to provide a very tiny amount of detail here for this tool to be effective.
So for example, People Directory MVP2 is under evaluation, which means it's working its way through our co-creation process. And it's expected to be delivered in Q4 of 2024, which for us is before the end of October. Brand updates to news items has already been released and you can see that it's labelled as such there.
The three main benefits of this, of transparently publishing our roadmap this way, are one, it's openly published and available. So when we receive requests either directly or through our ideation platform that have already been evaluated or in our backlog, we can very quickly advise whether this work is in the pipeline already. Two, it helps us to educate our audience on the way that we run the portfolio and lets them see that we're continually releasing enhancements.
And three, it helps us to reinforce our strategy of keeping customisation to a minimum. We'll list ideas here that we've received, evaluated and declined and we'll explain why. As you can see, this release roadmap is a very lightweight tool, but we found it makes it very quick to keep people updated and excited about what's coming.
It's significantly reduced the amount of questions we need to answer and we don't need to get into explanations of individual items as much now as we did before we had it. Another thing that it's done for us is it's reinforced to our audiences how accurate we are with our projected timing. More often than not, people expect projects to be delayed, but they can see from this that we truly are a release train, launching improvements throughout the year, which is very important when business readiness for launches or for content migration, for example, is so crucial.
Again, I'll take a quick pause and see if we've got any questions about the release roadmap before getting into talking about news targeting. Just looking at the Q&A, we do have some questions, but again, are you OK if we interrupt your flow, Abi? Yeah, yeah, because if it's related to the release calendar, I can answer that and then move on. OK, so quick question from EJ.
So with your release roadmap gallery, do you get many user comments that are full view of the list item when users can click on the cards? Yeah, we don't actually. So we have other mechanisms how people can contact us. We specifically put an email link on the page because a lot of the times people will think that they've got a really great suggestion.
They may not see it in there and they'll want to submit that to us. But we have other mechanisms as well. So no, we haven't really noticed people commenting on the actual cards themselves.
That being said, we do keep our eye on them. So if anything was to come up, then we would reach out to that person individually and have a conversation with them and let them know. And if applicable, we can reply to the comment as well.
I think having that roadmap's amazing. I think it's a really good way just to let people, your colleagues know what's coming. And another question quickly, what are the cards that you're using for your roadmap? So I'll just go back there for a second.
So this is just a SharePoint list in the card view. And we've put some labels in there just as columns in the list. So status, for example, Epic is one of them as well.
So our Epic ties into our JIRA board. And that's really just for us. It's not really relevant to the end user who's having a look at it.
But it's relevant to us and our stakeholders. And they can kind of tie it into our JIRA and the work that's being done there. So hopefully that answered the question about the list.
But also, I'm happy to follow up with a bit more detail after if that's helpful, if it wasn't answering properly. I think that'd be good. So if you carry on, Abby, because there are tons of questions.
So I think anyway, you can go into the Q&A as well. Thank you. No worries.
OK, so let's get into talking about our news targeting function, which is part of our push-pull personalization mechanism on TD Central. And when I say push-pull, I'm referring to a combination of targeting that is pushing content to people. And subscription, which is the user pulling content that they're interested in.
So either favoriting it or following it. So this is our most important release of the last quarter. It's literally hot off the press and just gone live.
It's our key enabler for moving all sites onto TD Central. Because with personalization, everyone can land on the same page, but see news and information that is relevant to them. And in our old world, we had to maintain different browser landing pages for different audiences to achieve a similar effect.
But they were nowhere near as granular as we'll be able to achieve on TD Central. Our guiding principle when developing news targeting was that we needed to ensure there was minimal admin overhead. And what I mean by that is that we really didn't want to have a complex system of manually maintained access groups that the whole process hinges on.
Because this doesn't work for our business. We've tried it before. People move around so much that there's just too much admin.
So figuring out how this mechanism could work properly was a challenge. Because we are a large matrixed organization with colleagues often having cross-border reporting lines where they may be paid by one legal entity but roll up to someone who is in a different legal entity. For example, I'm located in Canada.
My boss is in the USA. We get paid by different parts of TD Bank Group, but I report to him. So it's complex in that way.
We wanted it to be powered by automatically updated employee attributes that are changed as and when people move around through the normal admin processes. We didn't want to add any additional admin steps at all. So the mechanism works through a simple to understand tagging system.
And we're starting really lightweight with location that is country level and department down to two levels from the top. So how does this targeting mechanism work? Well, it's a three-step process. The first step is that attributes are fed into our people directory.
Essentially tagging our people. I'll show you the fields on our people directory profile page in a moment. In the second step, new stories are tagged with the corresponding attributes during publishing.
For example, Canada, United States, UK, and then the relevant line of business tag for the story. And in the third step, the magic happens when our fresh homepage web parts do a kind of matching exercise and show the relevant stories to the colleague based on these two sets of information. To tag our people, we figured out which fields in our identity access management system were automatically updated as people move around.
That also made sense to use the target for location and department. In essence, these are fields from the HR system or people book of record. So you don't necessarily need an identity access management system to achieve this.
We just happen to have it. So that's where we get our feed from. So here you can see we have company, which controls location and department fields.
There's one there at the top. There's some more on the org chart page. And as I mentioned, this goes down to two levels from the top.
So we use legal entity for location. Handily, you need a legal entity in every jurisdiction in which you operate. So for this highest level of granularity on location, this worked really well for us.
So on company there, where you see the Toronto Dominion Bank Canada, that is the legal entity that pays me my wages. And then for department or line of business targeting, we used an attribute called supervisory organization, which is essentially our functional hierarchy, which is the chain to the top or your reporting line. And we took the top two layers.
So if we assume the senior executive team, which is our board a level zero, then we have the layer below that as level one. So all the department heads are level one. And then the layer below that is level two, which in many cases is SVP level.
And then we have them all marked up with the leader name as well as the team name because leader name is much easier to understand from a news perspective when you're trying to publish to so-and-so's world. And here you can see how they show on the profile. And this is the way that colleagues can understand what they'll be shown with news that is pushed to them.
To tag our content, we introduced some corresponding tagging fields. So the news stories that are being published can be labeled with the relevant audience, location and department. Each news item will need to be tagged with up to three things.
The location that the story is relevant to. And we do have an option for everyone, which is NA. So not applicable.
So essentially not targeted goes to everyone. The level one tag for supervisory organization and level two. And they're only needed when you need a certain level of granularity.
A common question that I do get on this mechanism is whether the leader names get updated automatically. The answer is yes, they do. In the case that a role has been vacated and the new exec is not yet in seat, it will show us the leader above, but there'll be an additional label to denote the difference in level in effect that they're kind of standing in for that person.
The final part of the mechanism is the web parts on the homepage. Because we're building on SharePoint online, we're always signed into the system. Very handy.
And when a colleague lands onto the homepage, the stories that are shown to them are in three different areas. So we've got the first area, which is the banner carousel. This is a curated list of stories controlled by our internal communication teams.
They choose which stories to feature here. And our very first step on the ladder is to get everyone comfortable by only targeting the banner carousel by location. And we're doing this gradually to help with change management for the comms teams.
We want to ensure they stay comfortable and ensure that what we're doing is working for colleagues. So we're really taking baby steps. And ultimately, the direction is for the carousel to also be targeted by department.
And we'll get there at a comfortable pace. We're not in a rush to do that. And this has only just gone live.
The second is our news web part, which shows all news stories, whether they're featured on the banner carousel or not. So all stories will show here. Effectively, it's the archive of everything.
And as mentioned, the colleague, when they hit the page, will see stories relevant to their location, to their level one supervisory org, and to their level two supervisory org as well. And then the third one is TD stories, which is a curated list of media pieces that are featured on our external TD stories website. Here are two views side by side, where the left side is the view of a colleague in Canada in platforms and technology, which is essentially our IT department and infrastructure technology solutions.
And on the right is the view of a colleague from the USA who is in our consumer bank in residential lending. So we're achieving this with the fresh web, fresh, sorry, fresh page card web part. It's a bit of a tongue twister for me, that one, which has a built-in query builder that allows us to apply certain rules to pull targeted content.
If either colleague wishes to see all the news, whether targeted to them or not, they can click the link to the top right, view all news, and they will go into the news centre where they can see and filter all stories. So far, the news targeting mechanism has been very well received by both comms teams and colleagues. As I mentioned earlier, this is a key function for us being able to consolidate our separate intranet landing pages onto the one page.
And so this is our current state for news targeting, but what about the future? Well, we've received asks for more granular location targeting for particular business units. For example, some departments are organised into regions and they would like to see this option available for them to do location targeting. If we choose to go down this path, we will need to find another automatically updated field that denotes region.
In addition, some of the larger business units have a more complex structure due to their size and they might like to get down to a finer level of detail on the department front. We know we can use supervisory org for this as well, but ensuring it doesn't get unwieldy as we go down levels will be a challenge that we'll need to overcome. So that about wraps up my summary of news targeting as well now on TV Central.
Thank you so much for being on this journey with me, discussing our business case, release calendar, news targeting. Again, if there's time and you've got questions, I'm happy to answer anything. And I can't see the Q&A by the way, or the chat, just a reminder.
That's fine, I can ask some of the questions. So we do have lots of questions. And the same as Chris, if you wouldn't mind going in and answering some of them, Abby.
So I'll cover a couple now. So I think somebody said about the following news. So how are you finding it for asking people to subscribe or follow news? Is that, does that work well for you? We haven't asked them yet because this is really the push part of our mechanism.
So we've not done that yet. We're really taking baby steps as we do this and people are not necessarily using, they're not necessarily landing on the site yet because we're still in transition. So some of them are still landing on the old site.
So we've not really gone down that route yet. But one thing that we have done, which is kind of similar, is we have a tool selector on the page and we have got a favorites area on the tool selector. And we've noticed that people are just loving that.
They can just go in and say which tools they want. I'll just scroll back up to the screenshot. So it's this top part here and it's kind of like an app store, which is a bit of a carousel.
And we've got a my favorites section there. So you can just easily click in and then favorite, just start the ones you want to appear. And people really love it.
These are curated lists, but they also really love the favorites. So we feel like it will be well-received, but we've not really gone into that yet. That's cool.
Thank you. Someone asked as well about, are you embedding Viva Engage? So I know you're on your, I'm just looking through the chat. There's lots there.
Sorry, I'm going to need you to just go through. But I did see a question. I think it was from Bridget was asking about Viva Engage.
And do you actually embed Viva Engage yet into your intranet? But I know you said you're very early on on adoption for Viva Engage. So you don't have the app. We do embed it.
Yeah. So what we did, we did used to have an old social media platform, which we had for about 10 or 12 years called Connections, which was from IBM and they sold it off to HDL. We've shut that down.
And as we did that, what we did was we created a community, like a TD custom community template. And it's got a SharePoint side to it and the Viva Engage side to it. So we've linked those together by surfacing the Viva Engage web parts in the community.
And then people can just go in the community if they want and use it in there. And generally they'll be looking at reference content that's been published for them. They can also interact on the social or they can just go straight into Viva Engage, whichever they prefer and do it that way.
So yeah, we are embedding that and we have got like a cross function. And the way we explain this to everyone is that it is an ecosystem just like the old one. It's just, it's much more intuitive to use and get around.
So yeah, we definitely needed to do that and we've been seeing success with that for our communities. Oh, that's brilliant, Abby. So we are at time.
Thank you. Thanks, again. Are you open as Chris was to LinkedIn, people connecting with you? Because as I said, tons of questions, if you wouldn't mind having a look.
Meet the speaker:
Abby Webster
Senior Product Group Manager, Employee Enablement
TD Bank
