The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) is Canada's most research-intensive hospital and the largest centre dedicated to improving children's health in the country. They employ over 13,000 people, including hospital, research and learning staff, as well as students, trainees and volunteers.
The employee experience at SickKids relies on uniting the physical and digital worlds so staff across all roles and locations have a seamless experience. In a communications survey with almost 900 responses, they learned that accessing the intranet was a huge barrier to staff productivity and a major pain point. At the time, there was no mobile access for frontline staff, who didn't have regular access to a computer during work hours, and those working offsite or from home, who needed a VPN to connect to the site.
This access issue was exacerbated with the onset of the pandemic and staff working from home. With their legacy SharePoint intranet, the organization wasn't able to quickly pivot to a new way of working remotely, and as a result, site visits declined by 40% within a few years. Many people shared that logging in to a VPN to check news and other information on the intranet was a burden and they avoided it unless absolutely necessary. Without a solution that incorporated mobile and single sign-on, SickKids risked increasing disengagement among many staff groups.
Their previous SharePoint intranet was nearing end of life and would no longer be supported by Microsoft. They needed a new intranet to give people easy and secure access to essential tools and documents, support internal communication and strengthen employees’ connection to the SickKids community and overall corporate culture.
The benefit of a managed intranet solution
When choosing an intranet product, the Communications & Public Affairs (CPA) and Information Management Technology (IMT) teams at SickKids saw the value of a managed intranet solution that would leverage their existing investment in Microsoft 365.
They wanted to work with a vendor who could manage the design, implementation and site configuration, as well as provide ongoing support and managed product updates to keep the intranet looking fresh and aligned with changes in technology.
This would allow the CPA and IMT teams to focus their time instead on communication, adoption, education, optimization and engagement with the intranet to ensure it remains a useful digital platform.
Unifying a hybrid workforce
SickKids’ new intranet prioritizes ease of access for groups who have historically been difficult to reach – for example, front line clinical staff, research institute staff, students and trainees – ensuring they can get information and regular and reliable communications wherever they’re working. While their old intranet wasn’t mobile compatible, the new site has seen 5,838 mobile users one year since launching.
“We’re able to drive people to the intranet in different ways now,” says Caitlin Johannesson, Manager of Digital Media and Creative Services at SickKids. “We have LED screens throughout the hospital with QR codes that link to mySickKids, so people can access the intranet from their mobile phones.”
It’s also improved access for SickKids’ affiliates and partners, such as SickKids Foundation, and other organizations they work with closely.
Creating a digital front door for staff
The intranet contributes to staff and patient safety and compliance by connecting staff to hospital-wide policies. It’s also the entry point to other important HR and finance applications and a central point for sharing in-house knowledge and experience.
To ensure their new intranet would fulfill its role as a truly valuable portal, the research and design process put employees at the centre, uncovering and solving for their needs.
Several features within their new intranet helped support this approach and make it a success:
Springboard
Located in the sidebar of every page of the intranet, the Springboard gives employees priority access to the tools they need every day.
With just one click, SickKids staff can access their apps or favourite links, view the latest announcements, or check on the status of their IT support tickets. They can also adjust their preferences to customize the content they see on the homepage. In the site’s first year, staff clicked on the sidebar over 1.2 million times.
Previously, staff were navigating deep within a specific site to find an application, like the HR portal. Now, all the apps are aggregated into one easily accessible location.
Enhanced search
On their old intranet, search was unreliable and often surfaced outdated documents and links. When employees use the search function on the new site, they see type-ahead suggestions, along with different filters for sites, file types, and more. Results can be configured to draw from across the intranet, collaboration sites, OneDrive for Business and external repositories. Their new intranet also leverages the security protection that is part of their Microsoft 365 environment, including but not limited to multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure that only authorized users can access sensitive information.
Resource and service library
It’s essential that staff have easy access to the latest employee forms, information and resources. The Resource and Service Library allows employees to view new and recently updated documents, resource pages and forms, or pin their most-used documents for quick access. Within the first year, employees downloaded 94,165 documents from the new intranet.
Supporting internal communications
Another goal of the new intranet was to provide staff with better access to internal communications and help them feel part of the SickKids story. The organization wanted to move employees away from their reliance on email communication, which didn’t allow for two-way communication or connections between teams.
Their new intranet leverages features of the platform to provide compelling, personalized communications to all employees:
- News – News highlights feature articles and provides a streamlined feed that can be targeted to employees based on category, topic and department. Employees can set their preferences to customize the news they’re interested in seeing.
- Announcements – Announcements are short, text-only updates that appear on the homepage and in the intranet’s Springboard; when something new is published, a red bubble with the message count lets employees know there are unread announcements. This ensures people can stay on top of important updates with minimal effort.
- Events – Employees can browse upcoming events or explore the full archive to revisit past events, including recordings. Since its launch, the site has featured over 450 events, which were accessed by over 33,000 sessions. The Upcoming Events page alone received over 19,000 views.
- Alerts – These short snippets communicate important messaging at the top of every page within the intranet. Alerts can be customized based on priority level (head’s up, warning or critical), scheduled for a specific date range and include a link to more information.
Using these features, the CPA team has been able to streamline their messaging. Each feature has a unique job to do and they all work together to provide a cohesive experience for employees.
The delineation between news, announcements and events has helped the team to use the featured news for true feature stories. In their old intranet, they only had six news slots on the homepage, so regardless of the content – whether it was a message from the CEO, IT notice or a warning about an icy sidewalk – it had to be in one of the site's top news spots. Now, they can publish the right message to the most appropriate channel.
They’re also able to measure engagement and effectiveness of their communications efforts. The intranet’s analytics provide insight into site-wide user behaviour. Helm Insights, included with their intranet, delivers in-depth analytics specifically related to SharePoint news, including stats for a specific news post or performance for all news over time.
The main analytics dashboard shows social engagement across news posts along with a monthly breakdown and the option to download a PDF report.
Analytics for individual news posts includes:
- Performance metrics based on reach, social engagement, reactions, responses and response sentiment
- Text analysis based on reading level, word count, number of acronyms, questions, images and video
- Social engagement and reach timeline that shows how a post performs over time
- Page and response sentiment
- Breakdown of engagement by audience
- Raw metrics like views, unique visitors, call-to-action clicks, likes, comments and time on page
So far, the results are impressive. In the first year after launch, employee engagement for news has increased by 73%, with likes on posts up by 146% and comments by 78%.
Fostering community and increasing engagement
With the new intranet, SickKids saw the opportunity to engage new staff, students and trainees, so they feel part of the SickKids family. Employees are empowered to participate in fostering organizational culture by demonstrating SickKids values and celebrating their teams and the work they do.
The intranet has enabled employee engagement and recognition, not only through the recognition feature or the photo gallery, but also due to the visual nature of the site itself; staff can see themselves in the intranet so much more than they could before.
The user-submitted photo gallery, called “Our Culture in Pictures,” helps connect employees across SickKids. Employees can upload and share their own photos, which appear in a lightbox view with the option to comment. So far, employees have submitted over 300 photos, which have received more than 100,000 clicks.
For the SickKids’ communications team, the gallery offers another way they can tell the SickKids story. It empowers staff to share photos and see themselves and their teams on the intranet.
With a prominent position on the homepage, the recognition feature also helps increase employee engagement and fosters a sense of belonging. Employees can use the feature to show appreciation for the work of their peers. This feature spotlights both the person giving the recognition and the person (or people) receiving them. In addition to sharing their personal comments, employees can select from a list of qualities that incorporate SickKids’ values. Recognition can be sent privately or posted publicly according to the sender’s preference, and the recipient has the option to print a paper certificate if desired.
Empowering authors to create great content
Content for mySickKids is managed by a distributed team of over 120 employees from different departments. With its limited design options and finicky functionality, the previous platform was challenging to use. It wasn’t easy for authors to create great-looking pages; they often needed to reach out to the CPA or IMT teams to fix issues, add features or make simple changes. And CPA or IMT didn’t have many options to improve the look and feel without further development work.
Their new site empowers the team and content authors to create well-designed pages without external support.
To easily create new content, authors can use the Quick Content Creation Panel, available in the Springboard. They just have to click the “Add content” button, choose the type of content they want to create and then select from a list of page templates relevant to the section of the intranet they’re in. Page templates serve as a starting point – authors know that anything that appears on a template should stay and not be deleted. They can then add other web parts to the page based on the nature of the content. In-context tool tips and design suggestions throughout the page help them make informed decisions about styles and web parts.
To ensure content is updated regularly, authors can use content lifecycle management to schedule and track reviews. When this web part is added to a page, its details are pulled into a central dashboard that records page edits and other details. Every month, content owners receive email notifications for pages that are due to be reviewed.
All this means that content authors and owners can be active participants in making (and maintaining) a great intranet. Staff can post news and events on their own sites, and the CPA team chooses what to pull into the homepage.
“For the site launch, we reviewed all the content, edited it and did the first build for them. Then we handed over the keys to our content authors,” says Caitlin. “We're still there to consult and provide support, but now they have what they need to run with it.”
