Tips for reinventing the intranet from Uber

Tips and tricks from our upcoming Employee Experience Conference.

When used correctly, an employee intranet should be a vibrant source of employee-centric information and a platform that reflects an organization’s culture. However, far too often, intranets serve as little more than a repository for employee holiday calendars.

But according to Kristin Komar, senior manager of global communications at Uber, it doesn’t need to be this way.

“We realized that an intranet shouldn’t be just a document storage tool,” she said. “It should be a daily touchpoint that shapes how employees experience the workplace or find what they are looking for.”

Komar will present a case study of her experience reworking the intranet platform at Uber during this year’s Ragan Employee Experience Conference, August 5-7 at Disneyland in Anaheim, California. To learn more and register for the conference, click here.

Identifying and solving problems

Komar told Ragan that her team conducted an audit of the intranet to determine what needed to change to enhance engagement and ease of use.

“One of the biggest pain points we identified was our search function,” she said. “After consolidating content from multiple legacy platforms into UberHub, employees still struggled to find what they needed unless they knew the exact category or location of the resource.”

Komar and her team enlisted the help of AI.

“We integrated an AI-powered keyword search, which replaced the category-based navigation,” Komar shared. “This allowed employees to search for what they needed more naturally. They got more accurate, relevant results — just like they were Googling something.”

Komar said that the success of the revamp was simple — people need to know where your content for them lives.

“Findability is part of the communication strategy,” she said. “If people can’t find what you publish, the message gets lost. AI doesn’t just make content more accessible, but it makes communication more effective.”

Intranet and the employee journey

If a company wants an impactful intranet, it needs to be more than just a series of pages with rote information. An effective intranet should serve as a map that helps guide people to where they need to go in the most frictionless way possible.

Komar said that during Uber’s intranet redesign, her team tried to place themselves in the minds of their colleagues by trying to figure out what they’d look for on the platform.

“From a real estate perspective, our focus was to map out the employee journey and understand what they may be searching for,” she said. ”This led us to create Building User Guides as the single source of truth for each Uber office no matter where they’re physically located.”

Komar added that a major line of thinking in the redesign centered on optimizing the platform for self-service. “To achieve that, communicators need to anticipate the big questions and build systems that empower employees to solve them independently,” she said.

Komar shared a few details from the platform rebuild that other comms pros can apply to their own intranet redesigns, including:

• Use plain language and make navigation intuitive. “This was especially important for the Places section of the platform,” Komar said. “Previously, our Building User Guides were attachments that didn’t show up in search. We had to pull key terms out of those documents and build searchable knowledge pages within UberHub so the content could be found.”
• Bring fragmented resources together. Ease of access helps reduce confusion and can lead to increased usage. “Work to create a single source of truth on your platform,” Komar said.
• Bring ticketing systems under one umbrella. “Instead of sending employees to multiple systems, UberHub became an employee’s central access point,” Komar said. “The result was less back-and-forth, consolidated feedback and a more streamlined employee experience. That’s a big benefit for comms.”

Komar also provided a word of advice for communicators looking to overhaul their intranets.

“Engage your cross-functional partners early,” she said. “You’ll design something more holistic, more effective and more lasting.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.

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