In a busy working environment, how do you get employees to fill out personal details and enhance their intranet profiles? Apart from having hectic working lifes, cultural issues may also hold employees back. However, without additional details on skills, competences and experience, you have little more than an oldfashioned intranet phone book containing simply e-mail addresses and phone numbers.
At Danish international pharmaceutical company Lundbeck they've managed to integrate their intranet with LinkedIn, so that employee profiles and search results are enriched by LinkedIn data. This means that a search for a specific skill, eg. deep technical knowledge of a particular protein, will also find both new and long-time employees that have the skill posted on their LinkedIn profile.
I spoke to Lundbeck's Web Application Specialist Maria Schmidt Sander to hear more about this innovative project.
The challenge: How to find talent inside the organisation
Many organisations strive to make their employees as effective as possible. That's also the case at Lundbeck, where a stated objective is to create a high performance culture. An important part of this is to be able to find talent inside the organisation.
The traditional approach to finding out if anybody internally have the relevant skills and experience is by consulting HR or relying on interpersonal networks. Unfortunately both approaches have their flaws as most HR departments don't have updated systems to track competencies and interpersonal networks only cover a smaller subset of the organisation.
The solution: Lundbeck Profiles integrated with LinkedIn
As a brand new people directory, Lundbeck Profiles was launched in January 2011 on BrainWeb, the Lundbeck intranet. Aiming to have elaborate profile information, including specialties, past projects, interests, educations and professional experience. Lundbeck Profiles also provides an enhanced search facility to help find people with the right knowledge
Integrated with LinkedIn, Lundbeck has now made finding talent a self-service process without HR involvement and substantially increased the likelihood of actually finding relevant colleagues and competences.
Employees have to allow integration between BrainWeb and LinkedIn manually, so not all employees are yet included. As of writing about 20% of the workforce have connected their employee profile with LinkedIn.
The below example shows Maria's profile which has been connected with LinkedIn:
At first glance this might look like a normal employee profile, but scrolling further down on the page reveals the information pulled from LinkedIn:
The great value lies not so much in the employee profiles themselves, but if you do a search for say organic chemistry or SharePoint as in the below example, then you get a blended results page, where intranet pages are on the left and relevant Lundbeck Profiles are on the right, eg. the names of several research scientists.
What's next for Lundbeck Profiles?
On the intranet roadmap at Lundbeck is to improve the results page when you search for people. They want to make it visually clearer than today and show people on the same level as results from other categories, eg. tools and units, as illustrated from the sketch below:
In addition, they will soon have a workshop focusing on even better usage of the LinkedIn integration and according to Maria, they are hoping to make even better usage of the LinkedIn profile data in the future.
Thanks to Lundbeck for sharing!
If you have any feedback or suggestions for Lundbeck, please feel free to write a comment below.
Very interesting. Did they get any support from Linkedin themselves or was that not necessary? And from what I gather this was all done in Sharepoint 2010? We might just give something like this a try soon at Innogenetics.