Australian members share intranet top tips…

By Katrina Andrews, Director for Asia-Pacific, Melcrum

How can you use your intranet to better connect a diverse group of employees? This question was addressed at Melcrum’s first-ever Australian member event held in Sydney last week.

Over lunch 65 internal communicators gathered to hear presentations from Telstra, NSW Department of Primary Industries and Railcorp, all discussing how they get the most from their intranets. 

Here’s a glimpse of what was covered:
Railcorp: They have created employee intranet person as to help understand a diverse workforce. One problem: One intranet – 2,900 job descriptions! Jane Floyd, Railcorp's web channels manager for its Communications Group kindly let us share her slides publicly, so feel free to download them to see how it used these personas to establish the needs of the greater workforce when redesigning its intranet.

New South Wales Department of Primary Industries (NSW DPI): Focused on how to maximise your virtual research. With zero budget available to bring together the intranet reference team, 
Kate Needham (pictured onstage, left), internal communications manager at NSW DPI used various “virtual” research methods to gather the necessary information needed to relaunch its intranet. Kate has also kindly volunteered her slides so you can view her suggestions.



Telstra’s manager of Corporate Employee Communications, Anthia Galanis, spoke on the difficulties of having to compete with a lot of other internal information channels. One successful approach it has adopted is video messaging with Telstra employees, who now all carry mobile phones. She shared one example where the comms team (or internal news bureau as they consider themselves) found out that their CEO was being interviewed on CNN at the World Economic Forum in Dallas. They managed to get a video message out to the employees that very same day…pretty impressive. Readers of Melcrum's Source for Communicators enewsletter will hear more about Telstra's story in this week's forthcoming issue.

We’re currently planning the next event and I’d love to hear what topics you’re interested in at the moment, or which speakers you’d like to hear from. Feel free to drop me an email with any suggestions you have so I can make sure we create another relevant and successful event. I’m all ears….