Takeaways from DEX2018 in Sydney – Part 1 – Australia Post and UNICEF

I was so lucky to speak at Step Two’s very well organized conference #DEX2018 in Sydney and here are my notes.

All international speakers were invited to lunch the day before the conference and got to meet Step Two’s members.

There were three short presentations from Neil Barnett, Heathrow Airport, Ernst Decsey, UNICEF and Elena Bogdanova, Rivelty.intranet.

• Neil is one of the few that uses analytics every week to improve and increase adoption for their new Office 365 intranet. He uses Office 365 Stats and Analytics and the analytics in Poppulo. They do not use SMS-service but uses Office 365 notification instead.
• Elena told us that ROI is very important in Russia and showed us some of it.
• Ernst had success showing a picture of a family with two teenage children in their living room Dad was reading the newspaper and the kids were on their laptops. It also made an impression on the top management how many different UNICEF groups there were on Linkedin, Facebook etc. They realized that they were not present there – as they probably were reading the newspaper! Ernst also showed us how they have Yammer integrated in their intranet. A very important function according to our survey.

Australia post

Frankie Raymond, HR, Australia Post was the opening keynote and a seldom experience to see HR so actively involved in the intranet. But then every traditional post organization is really disupted and transformation is necessary.

Australia Post had 66 HR systems, 42 it-platforms and 70% of the workforce with no access to any of the systems. They got it wrong from the beginning as they were thinking functional and not user centered. They managed to change the mindset and started to talk to the employees about their needs. That helped ?

They made their own framework and categorized all the needs from the employees.

They had a two speed approach where they delivered specific stuff while working on the big things.

They balanced what was prioritized by the employees, what was feasible and financial viable.

She concluded:

• It is very important to have a vision and understand your starting point.
• Shift from functional focus to user focus took a new level of collaboration
• You can’t change everything at once, and you can’t solve things separately
• Think about what you can deliver to demonstrate change along the way

UNICEF

An old friend Ernst Decsey then took the stage and with the help from two other friends: Elena Bogdanova and Scott Fulton he explained how they had had a dialogue with the employees about their needs using LEGO blocks in five colors. Each of the colors represented:

• Contact
• News and Events
• Collaboration
• Social
• Activity

Ernst used a storytelling approach to gather needs and inspired the colleagues with Step Two’s 7 days in the digital workplace.

This was very powerful for the management.

They also realized that the colleagues came more for the tools than the news.

UNICEF has meta tagged all content and there is a contact person on each page and a feedback button. It raises the trust in the content.

They also added a cart for downloading documents.

But that’s not the end it’s just the start of a journey!

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