Grant Thornton Modernizes Intranet, Boosts Employee Engagement with Jive

How a revamped intranet has helped the international financial services organization engage employees, spur collaboration and make things simpler for IT.

Transcript

Our traditional intranet was great with content, but you needed to know where things were. It was siloed. What Jive is, is more expansive, it’s got a good search capability and it adds context to discussions and indeed to policies and documents. It’s about people having a place to go to share their thoughts and for other people to know what those thoughts are.

People are using Jive on tablets, they’re using it on laptops, they’re using it on smart phones. And that’s the way people want to work today. They don’t want to have one device that they have to do something on.

What Jive has done is take a big load off my team from an operation perspective, but also providing a collaborative, modern, engaging platform for our people to collaborate with us around the IT enhancements we bring to the firm. As a CIO, I need to know that partners with our hardware and software services really want to make their solutions work for my company. From the very first time that we met with Jive, that came through. We’re confident that Jive is the platform that will enable us to engage with our people at all levels and for them to contribute and really help build the business for Grant Thornton going forward to 2020.

Before Jive, we were using an old static intranet based on Lotus Notes databases, which obviously didn’t allow collaboration or interaction. People were just expected to digest information that was on there. We’d also noticed there were a lot of silos around the business. People weren’t sharing the information and the knowledge.

Having Jive in the building, it’s opened up that collaboration aspect and allowed people to talk to each other and have conversations and share that information and knowledge. As a result of that, we are actually now shutting down and archiving our old intranet because everybody just wants to be on our instance of Jive. Jive is being used primarily for people to communicate with each other, to share key messages with each other. They’re using it in teams to be able to collaborate and work on documents.

Our bids team are using it as well, for example, to put bids and tenders together. There’s lots of people on there sort of sharing videos, sharing status updates, what they’re working on, what projects they’re involved in, maybe what clients they’ve just been out to talk to. And it’s just opened up the whole ability for people to have a voice. So everybody can say something, from the CEO all the way down to one of our executives. Everybody’s now talking together. It’s huge, I would say. Like I say, everything that I’ve obviously just spoken about, the allowing us all to talk together, to share ideas, to be innovative, to obviously take those ideas, take that knowledge and take it out to our clients, is just massive. And it’s obviously then helping to build our brand and our brand advocacy outside as well.

Well, I think the last comment that I heard from one of the users was, “Without Jive, I’d be lost.”