A digital workplace with a ‘social flavour' for 160 colleagues across 42 offices.
How health insurance fund VNZ replaced an outdated open-source intranet with Involv – accelerating information flow and giving every department its own voice.
The Flemish and Neutral Health Insurance Fund (VNZ) is a health insurance fund operating throughout Flanders. VNZ is a customer-oriented and social organisation that aims to provide friendly, fast and high-quality services. As a company active in the social economy, it primarily offers mandatory health insurance – reimbursement of medical costs and replacement income in case of disability – alongside a supplementary package and programmes that promote a healthy lifestyle and preventive healthcare.
With 42 offices throughout Flanders, members can turn to VNZ for advice and support. Of its total workforce of 160 employees, a considerable number serve as social workers or advisors dedicated to providing remote or in-home assistance to people in need.
Challenges
Before VNZ implemented Involv intranet, the organisation used an outdated open-source intranet environment. It was difficult to update and maintain, and not very user-friendly for end-users. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when employees often worked from home, there was a growing need for a more advanced solution to expand and optimise internal communication.
There was also a need to speed up the flow of information in order to respond more quickly to changes, emergencies and other situations – while reducing email traffic and saving time. On the old intranet, the presence of all departments was fragmented. VNZ's ambition was to give each department better representation, enabling them to manage their own page and post their own content for their own and other employees.
Solutions
VNZ started with a thorough needs analysis, consulting all departments and management and surveying end-users to understand why they use an intranet and what they expect from a future one. VNZ, being a Microsoft-oriented organisation, needed their new intranet to be built on the Microsoft 365 platform, and also had to consider scalability and budget. Ultimately, Involv met all the criteria and was chosen to develop their new intranet.
“It was of great importance to give the intranet a ‘social flavour', so that employees would not only use it for serious matters, such as consulting the knowledge portal, but also for informal matters such as fun news and snippets within the organisation. In short, a broader and richer flow of information for everyone.”
Tom David Van MeelOperational Director, VNZ
Tom David Van MeelCurrent situation
The intranet contains useful tools such as the classic “Who's Who” component, so people can easily get in touch with each other, and an events calendar that keeps everyone aware of important activities and milestones.
It also provides detailed information about various processes – formalities for payments, printing processes – which has significantly reduced the number of internal emails and improved the flow between front office and back office. The incidents component has helped reduce calls and emails to the IT helpdesk, ensuring everyone is quickly informed of important announcements. VNZ holds regular intranet meetings to align on goals and means, and plans to further leverage Involv's analytics to understand how end-users use the intranet.
“I can say that the intranet has definitely been a success story for us, despite the challenges posed by COVID-19. The main objective was to create a digital workplace for all our employees. We have succeeded in achieving this and have accelerated the speed of information flow. No matter where you are, you can stay up to date with changes within the organisation, and the intranet supports collaboration in a continuous dialogue.”
Who creates intranet content?
For creating and managing content, VNZ developed a new governance structure. Instead of centralised management by a communication service, a team of four super users is supplemented with intranet service managers from each department.
“Super users” have more rights and responsibilities for editing, adding and removing content: one is responsible for the organisation's main page, another for answering technical questions. Three of the four are experts in content creation, while the fourth has an IT background. On each department there is an intranet responsible person in charge of updating and maintaining their department's page. In addition, every employee has access to the bulletin board, where they can post messages about events, offers and other social matters.
Collaboration
The entire project spanned about one year, and the client found the various workshops very useful. The implementation was done in a big-bang scenario, with a full setup and all service pages functioning from day one. During the Involv meetings, specific requirements and wishes were well mapped out. Technical workshops helped super users explore and learn the product, and VNZ used the teach-the-teacher method to spread knowledge and usage throughout the organisation.
“To this day, we still maintain contact with Involv to discuss future changes and developments. We then jointly consider whether certain new requirements can be achieved within our environment. We are currently satisfied with the stable and robust intranet that Involv has developed for us.”
Launch
The launch took place at the end of September during a staff meeting in the UGC hall in Mechelen, where a large cinema screen counted down to the reveal of the new intranet. To keep the excitement going, a contest was launched shortly afterwards: services could win fruit baskets as a reward for their achievements on their service page and for keeping it up to date – a great example of how to create more adoption and interaction on the intranet.
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