Thanks so much for having me.
My name's Sian.
I am the Internal Communications Manager
at Essential Energy,
and I'm gonna talk about some learnings and improvements
that we've made to our intranet,
which is called EssentialNet.
Here's just kind of an overview slide about us,
but I think for me, the key takeaway from this slide
is about how dispersed our organisation is,
like in geographical terms, also in terms of age,
and then in terms of technology as well.
So we really do have to be mobile first
with all of our solutions
and just make things as easy as possible
because our people don't have a lot of time.
We are also an exceptionally teeny tiny team.
So there's only three of us doing internal comms
and only one person in my team, Michelle,
who's on the call as well,
is solely focused on the intranet.
So we really have a lot of work to do
with not a lot of people and not a lot of budget.
So basically our vision for our intranet
is that it's a healthy single source of truth
filled with relevant up-to-date content,
good metadata that has good hygiene,
it's easy to use and well-governed.
We're not there yet, we're getting there,
but a lot of what we use to help us make decisions
around this is our SWOOP Analytics dashboard.
So in particular, we pay attention to the top content.
So what pages are people clicking on?
What news is resonating?
What are the hotspots on our intranet,
the pieces of content that are really popular?
What people are trying to find but can't,
and this is a really important piece for us
that we look at regularly so we can kind of
evolve the intranet and make tweaks.
We also look at our content health signals
such as our health score,
and we look at the behaviour panels.
So we have a lot of glances in our intranet,
which means we don't have their attention for very long.
So every second on there really has to count.
So now I'll just go through some of the improvements
that we've made.
Excuse me.
Sorry.
For each, I'll talk about what the problem was
that we were trying to solve,
how we solved it, and what the result has been.
So the first problem that we had,
which might be common to people
who have SharePoint intranets,
is that our search function actually pulled up content
from the entire SharePoint ecosystem.
So it wasn't just limited to what was on the scoped sites
that make up our intranet.
So that was one of our biggest complaints.
Like I'm trying to find something that's on the intranet,
and I'm also getting stuff from drives
that I have access to that I don't really need.
We had tried a couple of times to refine our search,
but because our intranet architecture was quite,
so it was spread out over nine hubs,
we actually couldn't implement scoped search.
So we shifted our intranet architecture.
We changed to a single hub and spoke model,
and then we were able to sort of re-scope search
to focus only on content that truly lives
on a central net.
And this has led to a reduction in complaints, importantly,
but also we have less need to rely
on kind of IT intervention.
So what we used to have them do was say,
okay, if someone types in this keyword,
can you kind of artificially pin this page as a result?
And it was a way that we kind of worked
around some legacy architecture and also the search issue.
So that's been a huge improvement,
didn't cost anything to do,
did need a bit of rejigging,
but has been really successful and had good results.
Next to that, and at the same time,
we also refreshed our structure
and our navigation importantly.
So here's a hot tip,
never structure your intranet around your organisation
or your corporate structure,
because it inevitably moves on through restructures,
through team changes, shifts, et cetera.
And it's much harder to move an intranet
that's been set up that way.
So at the top,
you can see how our intranet navigation used to run.
So there was, you really had to basically know
what you were looking for to be able to find it.
There was a lot of assumed knowledge,
like does that team sit under health and safety?
Is it part of ops?
Is it in assets or is it in engineering?
And people really couldn't find things,
they relied on bookmarks.
And between that and the bad search experience,
we had a lot of helpful feedback about our intranet.
So what we did was put together
a really killer business case for a little bit of budget
to work with an external agency
who sat down and did a lot of qualitative
and quantitative research
with a broad cross section of our staff.
We also used SWOOP to look at
what the most popular content was,
because we knew we had to make that accessible
right away in the new navigation.
And we also really tried to break this idea
that because the team that looks after this
sits in this team,
it shouldn't go where someone might intuitively look for it.
So you can see in that kind of second snippet,
what we changed it to.
So we reduced it from nine to six.
And it also, it makes things a lot easier.
We once again, get fewer complaints.
We also changed it so that it goes three levels deep.
So really, people can find a lot of stuff
very, very quickly without any need
to know how our business is structured.
They just go to intuitively
where they would look for that piece of content
and they can find it.
The next one.
So we had an area that was kind of on fire for us,
which was our news.
So a lot of projects are happening
at any one time within our business.
And we'll often have people who are with the business
for a short amount of time
to communicate about a specific project.
They might be tasked with communicating about it,
but it's not necessarily a skillset that they have
or an area where they feel comfortable.
So we ended up with a lot of very long news
that kind of didn't spell out to people
why it was important that they understand
what the news was,
or like it didn't spell out the what's in it for me
for our people.
So we have co-pilot enabled at Essential Energy.
We trained an agent and we gave it every piece of content
that we were previously kind of throwing
at our publishers and editors and expecting them to digest.
And instead we made it the job of the AI agent
to digest all of that.
So our style guide, our corporate narrative,
all of our news best practices.
So what's the ideal word length,
everything like that, all of the advice that we have.
And we've just got three simple prompts there
that you can see.
So we just get them to paste in their rough and ready notes.
And what this does is spit back out
a really good first draft.
So obviously it needs human intervention,
but it will make sure that there's a catchy headline
that's only a few words.
It will make sure that there's a crisp summary
so that people can understand at a glance
what the news is about.
It won't go longer than 250 words
and it will really go hard on why this is important
to our people.
So that's made a huge change for us,
a big improvement in our news.
And at the same time, we also introduced a news template.
So this was another thing that was free to do.
So we developed these templates
and one of the biggest changes that we added
was of course we knew from SWOOP
that we got a shockingly small amount of people's time
when they were looking at our news.
So we kind of hard coded into the template
the need for a summary and it is a true summary.
So it's not just an intro.
It is supposed to be that if you read these 40 words or less,
you completely understand what this news item is about
and why it relates to you.
And then you can read further,
if you have more time or if it's a topic
that you're interested in.
It also helped us create a bit of a visual distinction
between news and other content
because we had nothing that visually defined news
or differentiated it from our pages of content.
It was hard for people to know at a glance previously
if they were looking at news or a bit of content.
So this also helped with that.
There's also compulsory fields around who to contact,
how long it takes to read this news item
and when it was published.
So that's been a huge improvement for us.
It's also saved our team a lot of time
along with the AI news agents.
So we really have to spend a lot less of our time
helping people with news
when that was previously a massive drain on our resources.
We also have, so EssentialNet is made up of 63 sites.
This is how we inherited it.
And every day we try to shut down a few more sites,
consolidate content.
But there was no approval for a flow
on any of our pages or any of our sites.
So people were free to build
whatever they wanted in there.
And obviously, people have different skillsets
and sometimes the skillset
of the people building these pages
was not necessarily usability, user experience,
making things concise.
So it had really become like a Wild West
with mega cities of content across various sites.
There were poor quality content,
information spread across many pages
when it could have been one, et cetera.
So this was, once again, another free thing for us to set up.
And it's just really good governance.
So we use Power Automate to set an approvals flow
on every single one of our sites.
And between our little team,
we set up a rotating roster of approvals.
So every single time that someone updates content,
adds news, publishes news, publishes a page,
it goes straight to us.
And then we decided among ourselves,
what's the criteria which makes a parcel fail?
And we have that kind of visibility
and that governance over everything.
And that also means that every piece of content
on our intranet has been through at least two sets of eyes.
And then Michelle has also,
she runs a monthly meeting for all of our publishers.
She'll keep track of what's been some of the common errors
that we've seen come through the approvals flow.
And she'll deliver a tailored set of training
based around common rejections for that month
so that we continuously improve that cohort as well.
We also had an issue on EssentialNet
that you could publish a news item
and it lived rent-free forever on our intranet.
So it was never ever archived.
So it caused a lot of confusion
because it would pop up in search results.
People wouldn't be sure, is that initiative still running?
Is that safety advice still current?
There was just kind of no way to sort out
what was current and relevant to what was a legacy.
So we set up an archive flow.
So once news is older than 18 months,
it gets swept into a little folder
and then pushed completely off EssentialNet.
So it's there and accessible to editors and publishers
if we have to meet any,
for instance, regulatory requirements
or we have legal obligations to keep the content.
So it's still accessible, just not to our users.
It doesn't pop up in search results.
It doesn't kind of muddy the waters
and it makes sure that our content and our news
are just what is most recent.
And our SWOOP dashboard came in very handy there as well
because we could point to the fact
that legacy news was being accessed
and that it was confusing for our people.
So we got IT support to kind of help set up that flow
and push everything off the intranet that was legacy.
We also used AI for what for us was a really novel use.
So we have a lot of content being published frequently
on our intranet by a lot of people across all of those sites.
So those 63 sites I mentioned earlier,
they're all sites that can be published from.
And we had the problem that news was rolling through
on our homepage really quickly,
sometimes not even spending a day on there.
And we had, as probably a lot of you have,
our homepage set up with the Hero web part.
So we had just kind of five images and five links.
What we decided to do was trim that down
and use editorial cards instead of the Hero web part.
At any one time, we're only showing three top news
and we can also give a little bit of context
and framing to that news
instead of just a picture and a headline.
So we used this where we built the editorial guide
after literally a full day conversation with Copilot,
talking to it about our challenges, goals, company strategy,
key projects, values, et cetera.
We popped all that knowledge into an agent
and now we say, hey, here's the headline
and here's the summary.
Where should we surface this content?
Is it tier one?
Does everyone need to know it?
Is it tier two?
Is it just sort of nice to know?
And is it tier three?
Maybe that's something that's relevant
just to a particular project or a particular team.
And that really helps remove our biases
because of course we all have topics
that are really dear to us
or stakeholders that we have strong relationships with.
This helps us kind of, we make the final decision
but it really does give us some solid grounding
for those decisions.
And it's not just for EssentialNet,
it's also for our Viva Connections dashboard,
our Roundup newsletter that we send out once a week.
So anywhere where we have to make decisions,
tough decisions about what content gets priority,
we use this AI agent.
So there's some of the things that we've done
on like the sniff of an oily rag
with very few people are really like skeleton staff
to make some huge improvements to our intranet.
Of course, everything didn't go smoothly right away.
So for the approval flow,
it did elevate the content quality across the intranet
and really helped improve that.
But as our stakeholders got used to it
and as we ourselves as a team of three got used to it,
it did slow things down.
What I might just wave through somebody else in the team
might say, no, no, hang on,
I think we need to pull that up
and make some adjustments to it.
So we've kind of worked among ourselves
to get a pattern and a rhythm to what goes through
and what doesn't,
and we don't let perfect be the enemy of good,
but we have still managed to raise the quality
and also have oversight of what's being built
on our intranet.
The news template, this was a little bit hard at first
because what our publishers would often do
is just go to an old news item and then copy it.
So it was very hard to get them in the beginning
to get used to using the news template.
We supported that rollout by making it,
so it's pinned as the first thing.
So if you go create a new news item,
the first thing that comes up is the news template.
And we also rolled out a folder of assets
to every single site on EssentialNet
that had common logos, icons, and imagery.
So we really supported the uptake of that.
And the template itself kind of prompts
for all the bits and pieces that you need
for a good news item.
So it's got instructions within it.
The new navigation removed a lot of reliance
on kind of assumed knowledge,
but we've got a lot of people
who've been with Essential Energy for a long time
and they'd gotten used to things being in a certain place.
So there was a little bit of confusion
when some of that changed, oh, I beg your pardon.
But we, and we did actually over-communicate,
I would say, the new navigation,
but still there's always teething issues.
The globalised search worked really well,
but it, and when I say globalised,
so actually re-scoped probably
is a better way to phrase that.
It also highlighted the fact that
now that they were only surfacing content on EssentialNet,
it was bringing up a lot of subpar content on EssentialNet.
So that's kind of where our next focus area is.
But it's definitely reduced the number of complaints
that we've gotten,
and it works much more smoothly for our people.
And the AI writing guide,
it's made things so much smoother and easier for us
and also for our stakeholders.
But it did, in the beginning, hallucinate.
It wrote essays, it missed nuance,
it went off the rails a couple of times,
but every time we just kind of went under the hood,
tweaked the instructions to make them a little bit tighter.
And over time, it's really become kind of a go-to tool.
It's never gonna be perfect.
It's a co-pilot, not autopilot, as we always say,
but it has really helped our people
not be staring at a blank page
or have to spend a lot of time thinking
how they could write something.
So they were our learnings,
and we can see that our health score is elevating,
we can see that engagement is increasing.
We still do have a long way to go
and we've got a lot of what's next,
but I'll just stop there and answer any questions
because I think I'm getting pretty close to time.
So that's it.
Stop sharing.
No, that's perfect.
You're spot on, Sian.
I think, oh, Fran, did you have a question you wanted to-
Sorry, I was just very happy
and I wanted to do a reaction
and I just put my hand up there,
but I'm thrilled with the concession
that I've been granted.
On that note, thank you, Sian.
Thank you so much for sharing such practical insights.
I can see everyone in the chat are just so stoked
to have all of this information.
So we really appreciate you bringing it all together.
At the same time,
we have some really great questions that are coming through.
So I might just start with a really simple, practical one,
just so that we're all on the same page.
Great feedback on the news writer, of course.
Did you need to pitch for co-pilot licensing costs
or did you already have co-pilot licenses?
So Essential Energy rolled out co-pilot last year
and there was a big push for uptake.
It was only two particular segments of the business,
but our area was one of the places
that picked it up really quickly and ran with it.
So no, it was something that digital services
had already made the decision to roll out,
which was very lucky for us.
Perfect, got it.
And just a question as well around the approval processes.
So for your approval process for every time,
oh, sorry, is your approval process
for every time a page is published,
how do you deal with repeated submissions
or small changes, for example, fixing a link or a typo?
We just wave them straight through,
but yes, it is for everything.
So the limitation of setting up approval flows
in SharePoint is that it's either everything or nothing.
So we kind of weighed up those costs
and decided we would rather see everything.
So there is actually a comment submission box.
So when people submit it for approval,
they can type in the little comments box,
like just added a link or updated something.
And we've kind of mandated that they tell us
what this change is about or what this page is about.
So that makes it a lot easier to just hit accept.
Fantastic, thanks, Sian.
And then I guess just in terms of some of the things
that you mentioned earlier and in the presentation
about moving away from the org structure navigation
towards more of the topic-based user-centric navigation,
what were your strongest pieces of evidence
from your research that helped you kind of
win that internal argument about making that change?
So I'm pretty sure our executive leadership team
had tried to use the intranet themselves
and had also been frustrated.
We also had a lot of comments that we'd collected
and we had received a lot of anecdotal feedback
from our people.
So the business case was pretty rapidly approved.
And the hard part actually was then sitting down
with our stakeholders and saying,
particularly the ones who had a top-line navigation item,
saying, hey, you're not gonna have that anymore.
Your topics might actually be split over two or three.
That was actually the hardest part.
So we did a lot of, we started from the very top
and got buy-in from our executive.
And then we kind of used that weight
to push the changes through.
There was a little bit of resistance,
but I think once we presented what it was going to look like
and everyone could see that their topics
were all mapped to different places,
they actually weren't losing real estate.
They were just probably going to gain more clicks
and more prominence for their content.
That made it a lot easier.
Fantastic, great insight.
And then just for a lot of the work
that you've done there around agents,
like do you have a, I don't know,
one particular learning to call out around creating agents?
Like anything else to add?
Yeah, I would say it's never one and done.
So you think you've captured everything
in the backend, you've given it every piece of grounding
that you can, you've made your instructions really explicit.
I actually had the words in there,
do not exceed 250 words per news article,
and it was still spitting out thousand word essays.
So you just have to constantly go back and tinker with it.
So I think that's the thing,
just getting a lot of beta feedback,
getting people to really put it through its paces,
ask it questions that aren't in your designated prompts
and just road testing it
and then seeing how you can tweak.
It will actually, you can also use Copilot
to give it the instructions of your agent
and say, hey, how could we refine this?
Cause this is a behaviour that we're seeing.
So it can kind of self heal a bit as well.
Got it, and I've got a question here from Dasha.
I love how Dasha's kind of given a bit of a disclaimer
about this one being an annoying techie SharePoint question.
So let's see how we go.
I might not be able to answer it, yeah.
We'll see how we go.
So the moving to another site
is the solution that they're looking for as well.
Is this essentially deleting the original
and the flow moves to a copy,
moves a copy to the archive site?
Is that maybe related, might be related to the news?
Michelle, would you like to come off mute?
So it does actually, I think it's a straight move.
I don't think it's a deletion
cause we do preserve the metadata.
That was something that was really important
cause there's a lot of tags and a lot of stuff,
particularly with our safety libraries or safety news.
And so we needed to preserve that metadata.
My understanding is the flow is actually a move,
but I just, Michelle, if you want to come on back.
Okay, yeah, there we go.
Initially we put them,
moved them into folders within the sites
in the pages library, but that didn't help our stats.
And we really did want to make our stats look better.
So we've moved them into a Teams SharePoint site,
but people still have the same access.
The publishers can still find them
if they want to refer to them.
So it's just a move.