Municipality & Public centre for social welfare
Houthalen-Helchteren local authority, located in the beautiful province of Limburg in Belgium, has around 320 employees including 110 colleagues of technical and cleaning staff.
A year ago, the local authority of Houthalen-Helchteren contacted Involv with the ambition to strengthen interaction between departments and teams with a new, user-friendly intranet.
<300
Belgium
Local government
Challenges
The organization’s previous intranet was built on WordPress. Despite functioning well for a period of time, the need for a new and more advanced intranet grew. One of the biggest limitations of the old intranet was the lack of a “Single Sign-on” functionality. This meant that employees often had to log in again. There were often issues with logging in, such as employees forgetting their login credentials and having to request or change them again. This required extra time and effort and made the intranet inconvenient, discouraging its use.
The motivation to search for a new intranet was reinforced by the fact that the current system, developed in WordPress, did not comply with privacy laws and GDPR regulations. The intranet was found to be insufficiently reliable in terms of protecting employee privacy.
The previous intranet mainly involved one-sided communication. Although interaction was possible, there were no standard tools available to promote efficient collaboration and quick feedback. These different factors led Jimmy Vanderheyden, internal communications manager, to search for a new intranet that meets his requirements for usability, interaction, and privacy protection.
“When researching various intranet options, Involv immediately caught my attention. The excellent reviews and various awards that the platform received played an important role. In addition, the integration with Microsoft 365 offered a significant advantage for us as employees were already familiar with working in these programs such as Microsoft Teams, particularly due to Covid.”
Solutions
With the implementation of the Involv intranet, the employees of Houthalen Helchteren now have a wide range of interaction tools that enable them to work and communicate more efficiently. Thanks to the integration of various tools such as Teams, Microsoft Forms and the “Who is Who” function, it is now much easier to connect with colleagues, gather opinions, perform searches, and many other tasks.
With the Involv intranet, “Single Sign-On” is possible, avoiding frustrations caused by regular login, forgotten passwords, and so on. In addition, the organization has chosen to open the intranet directly at startup. This automatically ensures a more intensive user experience of the intranet.
Because Involv is built within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, it immediately meets the strict requirements for privacy and security. The intranet and all content are always optimally secured by the strictest security measures.
The new intranet has also resulted in significant time savings for Jimmy. Previously, it was necessary to use external tools such as Mailchimp to create newsletters, which was a time-consuming and cumbersome process. With the new intranet, everything can be handled in one system. This saves Jimmy a lot of time and enables him to work more efficiently.
Launch
The choice for the launch date of the intranet on December 6th was no coincidence. The local government, located in the NAC (New Administrative Center), had previously held a contest to come up with a new name for the newsletter. The name “Nic Nac” – where NIC stands for news in close-up – was chosen as the winner. In honor of this, the Involv intranet was launched on December 6th, on Sinterklaas.
Current Situation
After the successful launch of the intranet, a survey was conducted among the employees to gauge their opinion of the system. The reactions were generally very positive. The intranet was well-received.
The implementation of the mobile Involv app is also on the agenda. This will enable technical personnel to consult the Involv intranet from anywhere, regardless of their location.
“I am pleasantly surprised by the interaction capabilities and the ‘Who’s who’ component of the intranet. The likes are starting to come in and the integration of polls is a nice and functional addition”
Jimmy, internal communications officer