The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization that provides a forum for countries to collaboratively address challenging global issues, such as peace and security, climate change, human rights, and sustainable development.
Each of the UN’s 37,000 employees plays a critical role in furthering the UN’s mission to support cooperation among nations and maintain global peace and security. Employees rely on the intranet, named The UN Intranet-iSeek, for internal communications, policy updates, knowledge sharing, and relationship building with colleagues.
Winning Aspects of The UN Intranet-iSeek
The UN Intranet-iSeek is responsive, accessible, and available remotely to the UN’s entire global workforce. Whether people work from home, a duty-station office, or out in the field, the intranet is available on desktop, tablets, and mobile devices. Editors and contributors can create and edit content on the go and quickly respond to new content requests.
Translated in both English and French, the United Nations’ intranet solves a common challenge faced by many distributed organizations: balancing the presentation of global and localized content. The intranet defaults to a global view with content relevant to the entire organization. It also provides 9 different duty-station views, which prioritize content for employees there. This localization creates a sense of inclusion, as the intranet isn’t focused on headquarters alone.
Overcoming Organizational Challenges
The UN’s intranet faced many challenges since its inception in 2005, including:
- Inconsistent buy-in and budget from leadership
- A clunky content-management system
- Limited technological capabilities
- Heightened focus on the headquarters location
- Access issues for employees in the field
- Individual departments leaving the main intranet to create separate intranets
Overcoming these challenges involved the corporate IT, editorial, and development teams working together. They acquired a modern platform (Drupal) that could support all department and agency needs. These efforts resulted in a much-improved intranet and all of the departments that migrated away returned to iSeek and retired their separate intranets. Overcoming fragmentation required a long-term vision and strategy, both of which continue to steer the intranet today.
Content Relevant to Employees
The homepage displays critical news, events, and announcements and provides quick access to frequently used tools. Browsing classified ads, searching for jobs, and accessing essential UN policies are top employee tasks, so links to these areas are prominently featured near the top of the page.
One of the most popular features on the United Nations’ intranet are the classified ads. Because United Nations employees often move to new duty stations, this area helps people quickly sell furniture in one location and rent an apartment in another. Employees can post ads directly after acknowledging the rules and accepting responsibility for their posts.
Featuring data from as far back as 2011, iSeek Statistics provides a historical look at how intranet content and engagement have evolved at the United Nations over time. Among other data visualizations, employees can see how many intranet stories were of global interest versus focused on specific duty stations and the top-10 most popular content types.
Global and Localized Content Strategy
The United Nations follows a distributed content-management model, where employees are encouraged to create and own content on the intranet. This model has proven successful in generating fresh and interesting daily content, as well as a sense of pride and community among contributors.
To support the model, the iSeek team works with a global network of 250 content managers called focal points and uses an editorial calendar to organize the publishing process. While focal points are authorized to manage the site content for their offices, the iSeek team provides the platform, training, support, and governance to ensure that content originated from all over the world meets strict standards that keep it useful, usable, and engaging for employees.
iSeek’s editorial policies align with the era of short attention spans. News articles are intentionally limited to 350 words and contributors are encouraged to avoid UN jargon — two of the many standards that have worked well to increase readership.
An Agile Intranet Approach
The United Nations uses an Agile approach and iterative development to continually improve the intranet. The team integrates new features every month and makes small changes to the design with each release. Employees don’t have to wait for a big reveal to see platform enhancements.
New features and functionality are launched on basic templates. The functionality and visual design are refined as the team collects user feedback and reviews quantitative data. This approach helps the team assess the effectiveness of features, content types, and internal communication campaigns.
Transitioning to Agile development took time, but the team found success by dividing work into small, manageable tasks and using short development cycles. Achieving sprint goals consistently demonstrated progress to crossfunctional partners and management. The team still uses this process today and continuously improves its Agile approach.
Conclusion
The successful reintegration of iSeek across the United Nations reduced fragmentation and saved the organization money. Worldwide employees get the same messages, so they feel more connected in their purpose, which benefits everyone.
The full case study and a library of screenshots depicting the United Nations’ winning intranet design is available in our 2020 Intranet Design Annual.
Share this article: