1:15pm
Eva Collins is an HR Administrator at West Coast Savings Credit Union. Last week Eva met with Heather Jenkins, the HR Manager, to discuss setting up a Career, Health and Wellness area on The Buzz Intranet, with the goal of fostering a productive and rewarding work environment for all WCSCU employees.
Eva is tasked with building this new sub-site on the intranet. Referring to her meeting notes, Eva begins by entering The Buzz admin site and clicks to create a new Department Site, giving it the name of “Careers, Health and Wellness”. She secures it so that end users won’t be able to see it until Heather has signed-off on it.
Eva starts to build the sub-site by creating the navigation menu. Eva uses the navigation tool from the actions toolbar to add in applications that will become the site’s navigation. She does this with one click, which creates the applications in seconds.
Employee Services
This is a Documents application to store policies, procedures, and forms for the credit union’s medical, dental, 401K plans
Job Center
A dedicated Jobs application for HR to post new job opportunities within the organization and for employees to apply with their online resumes
Career Workshops
This Training and Registration system will allow employees to sign up for career development courses
Community Events
A Calendar tool showing upcoming community events, both internal and external
News & Views
A News application for announcements, bulletins and news pertaining to career development and health
Earthquake Safety
A Blog application focused on safety procedures and earthquake preparedness for all branches
Health & Wellness
A Knowledge Centre for FAQ and health and wellness tips
Healthy Recipes
An area for employees to share their healthy recipes with the rest of the organization
Once the tools have been added, Eva posts starter content in each area to give the end users and content managers an idea of the information that will be stored there. Eva designates open publishing for the following areas:
Community Events
News & Views
Health & Wellness
Healthy Recipes
Open publishing allows for all employees in the credit union to contribute content and help grow these areas. For Community Events and News, Eva sets up approval notification so that she can review posts and approve, or request changes, before the items are published.
Heather would like a mash-up of all the latest information from the navigation applications, pushed to the site’s home page, so Eva adds a “What’s New” widget. This will display advertised events, new workshops, tips from the knowledge center, blog posts from Earthquake Safety, the latest news and views, and advertised documents and forms from Employee Services. Eva calls the widget “Six Top Snippets” and sets the widget listing to show the top 6 advertised items from the various applications.
Heather had also requested that employees be able to see all the upcoming month’s events from the Careers, Health and Wellness home page. Eva pulls in a feed from the Community Events Calendar and chooses the mini-calendar format, placing the mini-calendar below the navigation menu. Employees can now see which days have events scheduled and hover for more information. The mini-calendar widget will rotate every month automatically, showing new events as they are added.
Happy with how the design of the home page is shaping up, Eva moves on to create more content feeds from the Employee Services Documents application, and creating a widget to always display the latest RSS feed from a leading industry blog, the Open Source CU Blog. Bringing in an external RSS feed will help to keep employees up to date with thought leaders in the credit union sector. Eva also builds a content box with links to other popular credit union blogs and resources.
Almost done with the first draft of this new site, Eva quickly adds a message box at the top of the home page to announce the goal of the Careers, Health and Wellness site, and another message box to display herself as the manager of the site in case employees want to contact her with questions or feedback. Eva adds her photo and contact details into the box, and links to her employee profile in case anyone wants to send her an instant message through the intranet chat feature.
“Not bad for one afternoon of work” thinks Eva as she uses chat to send Heather a link to the new Careers, Health and Wellness site she created for the Buzz. Heather chats back that she will take a look, and asks how difficult would it be to create another similar site for an upcoming HR initiative to be launched next quarter on the Buzz. Eva lets Heather know she can clone the existing Careers, Health & Wellness template and have an instant site to build off of. Heather is thrilled, and Eva closes up her office for the day feeling like a million bucks.
“A Day in the Life of an Intranet” is a blog post series by Rachel Lai of Intranet Connections that explores how employees at the fictional company West Coast Savings Credit Union interact with their intranet, The Buzz, during the course of a day at the office
