Benefits

• Quick access to colleagues, forms, and information empowers employees
• Costly and erratic internal mailings eliminated
• Website provides platform for future internal communication innovations

Challenge

A consulting firm with a highly distributed workforce had difficulty communicating effectively with its employees, who had little direct contact with the home office.

The company had attempted to keep in touch through frequent mailings of events calendars, Human Resources notices, and newsletters. Employee feedback, however, was unfavorable, and included complaints about excessive and delayed mailings.

The company hoped to integrate its employees back into the organization, as well as meet their administrative, personnel, education, and professional needs. The company also wanted to improve communications among its three offices and foster a greater appreciation for their interdependence.

Stratagem's Solution

Stratagem proposed the development of a secure website, which would give all employees password-protected access to a wide range of company information. Stratagem interviewed client employees and managers to assess needs and record requirements for the site.

The Stratagem development team located an outside service provider to host the site, using Active Server Pages and SQL Server. Stratagem used the Visual InterDev suite to develop the site. Finding an external host relieved the client’s IT department of any related short-term administrative duties while ensuring that the site could be brought in-house at a more appropriate time.

Adopting a phased-in approach, Stratagem constructed a site that complied with all user requirements: on-line HR and administrative forms, an education page, an area for submitting new-employee referrals, a news page, and a forum for discussing technical problems and issues among consultants.

The site also provided employees with a suite of calendaring, e-mail, contact, task, and other applications, making it easier for them to communicate with the office and each other.

Administrative Web forms enabled client employees to maintain and update the site regularly without acquiring special technical skills.

Finally, Stratagem designed the site to allow and encourage frequent updates and additions to draw users back to the site on a regular basis.

Result

The website has been very well received by the client’s employee base. A monthly count of the number of visits to the site suggests that most of the employees are logging onto the site each week.

Employees now use the website as their ‘one-stop’ place for most company contact needs. The company views the site as a primary means of communicating with its employees.