Support to be able to do the job well;
Stimulate a sense of togetherness;
Stimulating professional collaboration;
Learning from each other(s) experience.
Tasks and activities on or with the intranet
The results of the focus group with employees and the strategy workshop clarified a number of things:
Employees want to change their working methods, collaborate more and share information;
There are multiple usage scenarios among employees: youth protection workers/guardians who are on the road a lot versus support workers/staff members in the office.
With the results of the research we also mapped out mobile tasks of the employees. There are several methods to get these (top) tasks above the table, for example through the top task research of Gerry McGovern , but in this project we went deeper into tasks in the focus group.
The youth protection officers of Nidos and the so-called owg employees (reception and living in a family context) are the most important groups for intranet when it comes to mobile use. They are on the road a lot and work in a different context than their colleagues of regional managers, administration, HR or finance, who primarily have an office function. Logically, they have other information requests and (therefore) tasks:
Find contact details of colleagues;
Directly consult laws and regulations;
Filling out forms/reports on the go.
Why a responsive intranet?
The choice for a responsive approach for this project has several sides. We present a few of them.
A large part of the employees of Nidos, the youth protection officers/guardians, are often on the road. For example, they make home visits to young people or host families, consult with colleagues in offices throughout the Netherlands or directly receive young people, for example at Schiphol. This results in numerous different situations in which information questions arise and employees need to have quick access to the most up-to-date information or need to quickly get in touch with other employees. While up until now they did not have access to the (now old) intranet. This meant that the choice to make internal information accessible on mobile devices was quickly made.
Solutions that immediately come to mind are an app, a switzerland mobile phone number data mobile intranet or a responsive intranet. All solutions that allow you to serve employees who are on the road well or better. In this way, content is always accessible. Think of images that are loaded: the higher the bandwidth, the better the quality. And images are scaled to the dimensions of the device. Text is immediately easy to read and navigation is simple.
Costs
We then opted for responsive with a view to the future use of tablets, in addition to smartphones. But cost efficiency also played a role here. Because a separate mobile intranet entails additional development costs, while opting for (native) apps would mean additional development and management costs. In addition, a separate mobile version of the intranet, in addition to a desktop version, requires a separate management plan and employees may have to maintain information in two places.
Managing, sharing, organizing and distributing documents at one central point was another important argument. We wanted to develop and strengthen a structured and efficient workflow.
Last year, Jakob Nielsen published a number of articles ( Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift , Mobile Site vs. Full Site , and Repurposing vs. Optimized Design ) that were not entirely without criticism. However, we would like to highlight one quote from Nielsen that certainly holds water: