Email in the workplace has become a blessing and a curse. While it has improved communication to a great degree, it has also started to impact on performance. Just keeping on top of the inbox was becoming a job in itself. In contrast, the intranet is often overlooked as a valuable communication and service tool across Local Governments. Moreland City Council in Victoria has tried an innovative solution through its intranet site MoreNET to provide a better place for non urgent communication across the organisation.
Corporate Services Director, Adrian Robb, said the redevelopment of the Moreland Council intranet involved extensive research to discover how an intranet could be improved.
“We needed to ensure it met the needs of employees and functioned as a useful and efficient part of an organisation’s communication and information technology,” he said. “Non urgent general communication was directed to the intranet site to take the load off the email system. Moreland set up a series of measures to see how the site was working and if people used it.”
Council’s original intranet, which dated from 1998, was being seldom used by staff and then, only a handful of areas were being visited.
A new intranet with a new design and outlook has been in operation for just over a year with a clear improvement in the use of the site over that time.
“New functions have been developed during its first six months to ensure that the intranet now occupies an important niche in the internal communication of Moreland City Council, particularly in providing news type information,” Adrian Robb said.
The first challenge was to develop a set of functions that were needed by staff and that an intranet was able to provide. Having developed a set of key applications, people became more comfortable in using the intranet and then began to explore the entire site.
Staff also needed to be involved in all aspects to encourage ownership of the site across the organisation. Groups, discussions and surveys helped achieved this aim. By using internal teams and staff members to maintain and develop their own part of the intranet, ownership was developed across the organisation. Staff have begun to volunteer for training in order to use MoreNET to add and change their own information.
For further information contact Adrian Robb on (03) 9240 1111.
