Aggreko – How to target the intranet to your audience

Sometimes a “one size fits all” approach fails to fit anyone.

When it comes to company intranets, the “one size fits all” approach could result in alienating many employees.

For example, how is news about a new key card entry to head office in London relevant to field workers in South America? Or a US leave application form relevant to an office worker in Malaysia?

At Aggreko, the global leader in providing energy solutions, the intranet is targeted to each and every audience. Aggreko does so by using SharePoint Online’s out of the box functionality for audience targeting. By enabling audience targeting, specific content is prioritised to specific audiences through SharePoint web parts, page libraries, and navigational links.

If you’re in the Asia, Middle East and Africa (AMEA) region, your intranet home page would be targeted to the region, with relevant links to tools associated with your job role, like Salesforce.

A screenshot of Aggreko’s intranet homepage for AMEA colleagues with audience specific content tiles and the Viva Engage All Company feed, renamed Aggreko News, on the right-hand side.

Paul Brereton, Head of Digital Communications at Aggreko, said targeting audiences on the SharePoint intranet homepage has been a huge game changer in getting employees more engaged on the intranet.

“It’s given the home page a really personal feel whereas before it was a one size fits all that didn’t fit all, particularly when 80% of our audience are technicians/operations and they have a very different need of an intranet than someone in a support function in head office,” Paul said.

“We wanted to give them a flavour of the home page to give them links to the tools they use the most. It’s not rocket science, but it’s made a real difference.”

Replacing the intranet news feed with the All Company Viva Engage community

Another way Aggreko has personalised the intranet is by replacing the intranet news feed with the All Company community on Viva Engage. The end result is that people are talking about what interests them, and every employee has the ability to add to the company news, or share their thoughts and perspectives on each and every topic.

Paul Brereton, Head of Digital Communications, Aggreko.

The All Company Viva Engage feed was renamed “Aggreko News” when it was added to the intranet news feed, and all 5,500 employees now have editorial access to share their news with everyone in the business – on Viva Engage and via the intranet homepage.

Paul said the decision to scrap the traditional approach of sharing corporate news front and centre on the intranet homepage and replace it with Viva Engage community was made so every employee could be involved with sharing news.

“The problem we found was everything (on the intranet) was posted by internal comms so no one else was able to share news,” he said.

“So we moved it to (Viva) Engage in the hope that everyone would share news because there’s lots of great news stories happening across Aggreko.

“If we kept the news on the intranet, it meant that unless we opened up editorial permissions to everybody in the organisation, it was limited to just corporate stories. We wanted to devolve editorial ownership back to the business.

“Now we’ve got 5,500 news editors because everyone is able to post in Aggreko News on Engage.”

This approach to sharing news on Viva Engage helped Aggreko take out top honours for medium-size organisations in the EMEA region in SWOOP Analytics’ 2023/24 Viva Engage benchmarking analysis. 

Every time someone logs onto the Aggreko intranet homepage, they will see the latest posts on the All Company Viva Engage community, and can navigate directly to Viva Engage to join in the conversation.

“We wanted everyone to be empowered to share their own news whether that be a leadership update, or really great customer stories, or just something cool going on in the business,” Paul said.

Not once has Paul had to remove or edit a post on the Viva Engage feed, and sharing news this way has uncovered so many otherwise unheard stories.

“Since we’ve done it, I’ve not had to take down or suggest an edit to a single post. It’s really lifted the lid on the business,” Paul said.

“We knew there was lots of great things going on but it never really made it anywhere because there was nowhere to post it.

“We only had corporate news on the home page. Now we’ve empowered everybody and people are sharing more and more things and I would say 99.9% of it is business related.”

An example of a post in the Aggreko News Viva Engage community, which is also shared on the intranet homepage.

Paul said there is an occasional social post; “but even then there’s a hook back to Aggreko in some way or other”.

Aggreko has continually been amongst the top performers in SWOOP Analytics’ annual Viva Engage (formerly Yammer) benchmarking and has a healthy culture of sharing and conversing on the platform. The old intranet didn’t allow for two-way conversations, hence the deliberate move to substitute news on the intranet for the Viva Engage All Company community.

“We wanted it to be two-way and we wanted people to interact and react to the news but also we were just bored of putting the same old corporate messages up on the home page,” Paul said.

“It’s dull. Whereas we knew by going out and speaking to the business there’s some fantastic stuff going on across the Aggreko world so we wanted to put the spotlight on it and what better way than to make news social.”

The combination of audience targeting and replacing the news feed with Viva Engage on the intranet has resulted in increased engagement across the intranet and Viva Engage at Aggreko, which is measured with SWOOP Analytics for SharePoint intranet and SWOOP Analytics for Viva Engage.

“Now we’ve moved news (news feed) off the home page, we’ve made the home page much more audience focussed,” Paul said.

“Now everything is audience targeted and it’s made a difference.”

In SWOOP Analytics’ latest Viva Engage benchmarking, the Aggreko News community ranked amongst the top 5% of the almost 5,000 active communities (those with significant activity over a three-month period) analysed. It was the top ranked community at Aggreko based on SWOOP Analytics’ in-depth measures.