SBC Communications Inc. used employee communications to launch an employee communications tool - its intranet. It also found employee diversity and user needs the most challenging issues when it created the award winning intranet site earlier this year.
SBC, a telecommunication firm, has over 100,000 employees representing every sector of the company - human resources, corporate and technical staff. The employees also differ in race, gender and age. Ed Araiza, associate director for the SBC intranet operations, says 53 percent of employees are women and 38 percent are minorities such as Asian, Hispanics and African Americans.
So the company created a task force to work with selected employees to redesign the site. These employees expressed what they wanted from the intranet in the way of graphics and navigation.
By using a standard called "human factor," Fleishman Hillard, communications consultants, redesigned the firm's intranet site by understanding the diverse characteristics of SBC employees. The "human factor" means heeding the needs of SBC employees.
The intranet includes company news, corporate policies, employee benefits, employee payroll and a corporate phone directory. Every one of the Fortune 500 companies have intranet sites as do 90 percent of the Fortune 1,000 companies.
David Lowey, VP and director of multimedia for Fleishman Hillard, says SBC's site needed to be more consistent so employees could easily understand how to use the resource. In the redesign, Lowey focused on presenting important information at the top, with clear categories and titles.
Testing, 1, 2, 3
Ongoing testing of the intranet before it was launched in June 1998 made the site a success, say both Araiza and Lowey. The testing group consisted of a cross sampling of employees from different levels and functions in the company. Over 200 employees tested the site multiple times on four criteria: usability, design, navigation and categorization.
"The opportunity to test our work with the employees, essentially the users, was fantastic," Lowey says. "Some companies are protective, but SBC took time to research and solicit employee input. I would suggest doing that to anyone creating an intranet site."
Testing the site also saved a lot of time in the end, Araiza says. At one point, employees did not realize that the "employee services" icon was only payroll information.
"It was as simple as changing the icon to 'payroll information,' but we would have never known it was a problem," he says.
Using diverse and ethnic images on the intranet site helped fully represent the corporation and address the needs of the different genders and races of employees, he adds.
Success came quickly for the company as hits to the site increased dramatically with the redesign. Today the site gets 21 million hits from employees per month, compared to 500,000 before the redesign in November of 1996. SBC's intranet site has 50 times the volume of its Internet site, http://www.sbc.com.
Reading is Fundamental
A lesson learned during the redesign is that not all employees use the same computer. Images were designed in pixels and the intranet was redesigned for a 640 by 480 screen resolution.
"Everything was designed for people with lower resolution screens. If you had higher resolution, images would look smaller," Araiza says. The solution was increasing font size for better readability.
Another "usability" problem was with background colors. SBC employees had difficulty reading black text on a gray background. Again, an easy problem to eradicate, but designing the functional intranet site was a "constant learning process," Araiza says.
The learning process also is expensive, as the operational costs of maintaining the intranet was $2 million over the past four years. The site is maintained by nine SBC employees.
The months of hard work and investment culminated when Fleishman Hillard won an award from CIO WebBusiness magazine for top 50 intranet sites in April. Karen Foggerty, spokeswoman with CIO, says the "50/50 Award" goes to an innovative intranet site that serves to increase customer service. It's "the best of the best," she says.
(CIO, 508/935-4091; F-H, 314/982-1700; SBC, 210/351-2515)
SBC Communications
Ticker: SBC, NYSE
Headquarters: San Antonio
Brands: Southwestern Bell,
Pacific Bell, Nevada Bell and Cellular One
Customers: 5.6 million nationwide
Revenues 1997 (in millions): $24,856
Employees: 118, 435
PR Executive: Gary Shutt
PR Agency: Fleishman Hillard