Insights Blog

It can seem like change is the only constant in today’s business environment. The pressures of globalization, technological innovation, and competition continually drive the need for transformation across the organization. Uncovering new business models, revamping and streamlining existing processes, and modernizing technology and infrastructure are the keys to surviving and thriving.

Leading organizations anticipate the forces that will require these kinds of organizational change. Even under ideal circumstances, significant revisions to your operations, vision, and principles can be difficult to communicate. When you’re an industry leader with tens of thousands of employees, it can seem like an impossible task.

Executed poorly, organizational change can create chaos that has a real and lasting effect. Employees can lose sight of the company’s direction, their efficiency may plummet in the face of unfamiliar new processes, and morale takes a hit. In fact, according to McKinsey and Company, 70 percent of large-scale change programs don’t reach their stated goals. It happens when employees are not engaged, management fails to support the initiative, there’s little or no collaboration between teams, and no one is held accountable.

Managing change correctly and efficiently requires a different approach, one that puts leadership, management, and employees on the same page. It’s only achievable when everyone receives the message about changes at the same time, and more importantly, that they actually hear, internalize, and understand that message.

This is why tools like SharePoint are so important as a communication tool. It makes the change real for employees, and helps them decipher the signal from the noise so they can truly understand what’s important.

SharePoint in Action for Internal Communications

At Trellist, we recently helped a leading global agriscience company embrace digital technology to transform their business model. Such a radical transformation required an equally aggressive strategy for communicating changes to employees. SharePoint, which is globally accessible in the cloud through Office 365, was the optimal tool for supercharging employee communication and collaboration. The primary goals were to help the organization communicate:

• What it means to be digital
• Their transformation journey
• Their digital roadmap

You may think of SharePoint as a document management and sharing tool, but in this case it was equally adept at enabling consistent internal communications, video streams, and the presentation of interactive organizational charts. The media-rich environment we helped them create improved employee engagement, strengthened their internal communications strategy, and gave their executive team a voice that resonated more clearly with employees.

Is SharePoint Right for Your Organization?

Yes, it’s powerful, but it’s not all that it can be right out of the box. In order for SharePoint to truly help you communicate your brand message and strategies in the same way it did for the agriscience company we worked with, it needs the right UX and design to generate engagement and traffic. We’ve helped organizations across a variety of industries implement collaboration tools like SharePoint. If you’d like to explore how we can help your organization, contact us at enterprisetechnology@trellist.com.