Since the Intranet is a Corporate communication tool, it looks like a lot of things must actually happen BEFORE a corporate tool can help achieving this “Great Place to Work” vision and goal. I mean, workers need to address their needs to their direct bosses and need to get from them the empowerment, the respect, the credibility, the fairness and so on.

Does the Intranet help? Probably. But, IMHO, as all corporate tools, it only supports the daily work of those who are in charge of people.

In a nutshell, You can have an excellent Intranet because you’ve got a Great Place to Work, but you won’t necessarily generate a GPTW because of an excellent Intranet.

Regards

Marcelo Durruty
http://www.durru.com.ar

And an intranet that was devised to be great can degenerate, once launched, into something unloved, unused and unwanted if the culture of the company can’t or won’t support the interaction and openness it supports.

Building a successful intranet in a perfect environment? Easy. The challenge lies elsewhere…

Interesting issue here. I agree with Fredrik, the comparison is not complete: some awards rely on nomination / application; some are dependent on membership and participation.

Would it be better to refine the comparison by looking at companies that were in the running for more than one of the awards? Are there IBf member who also submitted to Step Two’s list? Which intranets were assessed by NN (I’m assuming he hasn’t done a deep analysis of all intranets worldwide).

My question? Is there an assessment of what factors contribute to making a workplace ‘a best place’ to work? If so, how regularly are intranets cited (either directly or laterally).

Lou

It obviously can’t be done any other way so I guess we’ll just have to live with the fact that the world’s 10 “best” intranets just are the 10 best of the 11, 20 or 200 that entered the judgement process.

But we don’t know if the best places to work have better or worse intranets, do we? They might just have chosen to not send in award papers and screen dumps. Maybe they’re not interested, maybe they haven’t heard of it, maybe they think it’s too much work entering. We don’t know. And we don’t know, as a result of this, if there’s any correlation between intranet performance and work place satisfaction.

Thanks for the good words about our intranet. Actually Human Resources are constantly bombarding me with various awards given to BT as a great place to work – diversity, fairness, etc – but obviously not publicised widely enough!

I believe the key distinction to make about NN/Group awards is they are for great intranet projects rather than just great intranets.

The winners fully justify their award for all their hard work and achievements and I congratulate every single intranet person recognised now.

But for BT it will be harder to show how a great intranet can get so much greater to meet NN/Gp’s criteria.

Am I right or wrong?

Mark

Your article reminds me of a question I posted on the Intranet Benchmarking Forum blog last year. I asked whether they had done any research showing a correlation between organisations with effective intranets (as identified by the IBF) and key organisational performance indicators (such as share price, profitability, employee engagement, financial growth, staff turnover, a great place to work, customer satisfaction). – http://www.intranetlife.com/intranet_benchmarking_for/2009/08/the-inside-out-intranet.html

There was no response to the question so I would assume that the IBF are yet to do any research in this area. As an intranet professional myself, I think if a relationship like this could be established (eg. great intranets lead to higher staff satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement, lower staff turnover, higher profitability), then it would be a lot easier to gain funding and support for the intranet.

There was a study done a few years a go by Alex Edmans, MIT Sloan School of Management, directly linking employee engagement to profitability. He analyzed the financial performance of a portfolio of stocks selected by Fortune magazine as the “Best Companies to Work for in America” from 1998 -2005. By the end of 2005, these stocks “earned average annual returns of 14 percent by the end of 2005, over double market return”.
http://www.hrmreport.com/article/Employee-engagement-is-good-for-the-bottom-line/

As a result of this study (and other similar studies), ‘employee engagement’ is now firmly on the radar of many CEOs and funding is more readily available. It would be great if there was similar research done about intranets!! I have been looking but haven’t found anything yet… if anyone knows of any research like this, please let me know.

P.S. In the post, you mention that 7 of Nielsen’s 2010 top 10 organisations have never been on any of the best companies list. Just to let you know that The MITRE Corporation is number 66 in FORTUNE’s 100 Best Companies to Work For® 2009 (http://www.greatplacetowork.com/best/100best-2009/100best-2009-list.php). And MITRE is also listed for previous years (I would assume it’s the same company).

cheers