Private Equity Firm
Employee Engagement Platform Brings Global Offices Together
category
Design & UI
Digital Engineering
Research & Strategy
User Experience
capability
Drupal
Intranet
Mobile & Responsive
Technical Architecture
User Research
industry
Other
A premier private equity firm with multiple offices and hundreds of employees turns to a branded digital platform to enhance company culture and drive employee satisfaction. While the platform vision took shape before COVID-19, it became all the more important during the pandemic.
The Challenge
Execute on a digital platform strategy for a global private equity firm to create a centralized employee destination to support onboarding, create interpersonal connections between offices, and drive employee satisfaction.
The key components would be an employee directory complete with photos, bios, roles and organizational structure; News, events, and other communications made easily available and organized per location as well as across all locations; The firm’s investment portfolio shared through a dashboard view with all pertinent information including the team involved.
These components, and the expected tactical assets that an intranet provides, would help the firm deepen connections with and among employees at the firm, accelerate onboarding, and increase knowledge sharing.
The Approach
Supporting Multiple Intentions: Browsing vs. Working
An effective employee engagement platform, or intranet, needs to support two distinct modes — task mode and explore mode. In task mode, employees have access to intuitive navigation, quick page loading, and dynamic search or filtering while performing daily tasks. They get what they need fast and proceed with their day.
At the same time, a platform must also encourage and enable employees to explore company knowledge, receive company-wide communications, and connect with others. For this firm, the bulk of content available in explore mode revolves around the firm’s culture, with a special focus on philanthropic initiatives and recognition of key successes.
Both modes benefit from intuitive searching and filtering capabilities for team members, news, events, FAQs, and portfolio content. News and events can be browsed in a personalized way — what is happening at my location — or a global way — what is happening across the company. For every interaction within the platform, the mode was considered and influential of nearly all design decisions.
From a technical standpoint, the private equity firm needed to support security by hosting the intranet on their own network. This and the need to completely customize the experience for close alignment with their brand meant that no off-the-shelf pre-built intranet solution would work. We went with Drupal 8 to make this intranet scalable, secure, and tailor-made to an optimal employee experience.
The Results
The platform deployment came at a time when it was most needed, playing a crucial role for the firm during a global pandemic that kept employees at home. What was originally designed as a platform to deepen employee connections between offices quickly became the firm’s hub for connecting employees within an office. As many businesses are, the firm is actively re-evaluating its approach to the traditional office model, and the early success of the new platform indicates that it is likely to play an even larger role in the future.
