Interview with Silpion IT-Solutions: how to proceed after launching a social intranet

Nicole Pingel, senior consultant at Silpion Consulting, supports clients in launching social intranet and digital workplace platforms. Her experience shows that the key to success lies after the rollout.

You’ve been helping your clients launch social intranet platforms for over seven years. What happens at companies after the platform goes live?

Launch day is always very exciting – you’ve been working towards it for months and now the day has finally come. The weight falls from the project managers’ shoulders, the corks are popping, and a pleasant feeling of “mission accomplished” spreads through the office. We learned early on that long-term user acceptance depends on what happens after this point. If the social intranet project is considered finished at this point, it isn’t uncommon for employees to fall back into old patterns after their initial curiosity has waned – e-mail celebrates its comeback as the number one means of communication and the only time employees look at the social intranet is to check the cafeteria menu. Our experience shows that the company needs to take measures during implementation to counteract this.

What do you recommend?

First of all, it’s important to approach the project from an agile perspective. In this context, the main idea is that “there’s no such thing as finished.” If the social intranet is going to become the company’s hub for interaction and collaboration, it will need to be continuously enhanced and advanced. Even if the launch project has to be wrapped up upon launching the platform for organizational reasons, the company still needs to develop a strategy for managing the platform after the rollout.

What should this strategy look like?

Above all else, the company needs to ensure that it defines various roles and provides them with sufficient time resources. It is especially important to have one individual who is responsible for the ongoing development and maintenance of the platform – a product owner for the social intranet – in order to remain agile. A concept for measuring success and collecting feedback is usually developed during the initial launch project. This can include, for example, using analytics tools to obtain quantitative data on the use of the platform. In addition, surveys or focus groups can be used to obtain qualitative user feedback. These analyses provide information on which aspects of the social intranet are already very popular. At the same time, however, they also show what’s not yet working well or what users lack. This is where the product owner can start to optimize existing features and gradually roll out new ones. This ensures that the platform will always meet the latest standards in the future and will be able to adapt to changing requirements over time. Sometimes a fresh look from the outside also helps, which is why we offer our clients reviews of their existing social intranets in order to gain new inspiration and ideas for ways to optimize their platform with the help of our many years of experience.

So are companies on the safe side with a strategy for continuous improvement?

It’s certainly a good start. However, active community management is also essential, especially in larger companies. A community manager does a lot more than just ensure compliance with the community guidelines. At best, they are the human face of the social intranet and are there to help and advise their coworkers – both online and offline. This assistance is especially relevant after the launch, particularly when onboarding new employees. In addition, the community manager can offer smaller workshops for teams to explore how the new social intranet can best support their work processes.

We also can’t forget the managers and key communicators. Their support is one of the most important success factors when launching a social intranet. But it’s also important to remain in close contact with these key individuals later on. A great way is to offer them coaching to help them use the platform and understand the changes it will bring. This is because role models can also model the wrong behavior – if these opinion leaders fall back into their old habits, other employees will do the same.