Making an intranet impossible to fail

Making an intranet impossible to fail

A multi-brand health and wellness company needed an intranet that was accessible by deskless workers and would draw their frontline deeper into their culture. We helped close the gap between the platform and the people, migrated roughly 5,000 pages, and launched on schedule despite delays. Over a year later, we’re still building together.

Watch: The client’s Director of Communications reflects on what it was like to work with us.

They loved their intranet, even though it was failing them

More than half of this company’s employees don’t have a desk. They work frontline shifts on production floors covering a portfolio of supplement and nutrition brands. Their intranet, though, had been built for desk workers. It was desktop-only, behind multi-factor authentication, and inaccessible for most of the workforce it was supposed to serve.

At the same time, the company’s CEO was several years into a company-wide culture initiative to refine the company’s purpose, values, and beliefs. The CEO had done such an exceptional job at defining and living up to a vision of culture that they all wanted, the people didn’t mind that their experience wasn’t right for them. They still loved being a part of it.

Before jumping to fix the current intranet or shop for new software, the company’s Director of Communications turned to the people. She ran an employee communications-channel survey and didn’t just ask employees “Are you happy with our intranet?” but “Are the vehicles we use serving your day-to-day needs?”

Two findings came back clearly: employees wanted real human content, peer spotlights, and quick stories they could read quickly. But they needed it on mobile.

Knowing this changed everything and gave the company a clear mandate: they needed to optimize their delivery channel… but that didn’t give them a way to execute it.

To start, they looked for what would be the best software to host their mobile-first, frontline-friendly platform – and Staffbase offered exactly that. But, even working together, they still hit the gap that stalls so many intranet projects. Staffbase knew its software; the internal team knew its content and culture. Neither knew how to translate one to another.

Staffbase knew who could though, and recommended Local Wisdom.

Marrying technology and communications to create magic

Our role was translation: turning what employees needed into a platform that felt built for them. As a communications team with deep technical expertise, and as a tech-agnostic partner who works inside platforms like Staffbase every day, that middle ground is exactly where we operate.

Content migration and architecture. We mapped every piece of the legacy platform and audited and migrated roughly 5,000 pages and documents, from HR policies to news to team directories. When an early delay threatened to push the timeline back by about four weeks, we pivoted together, adjusted the plan, and focused on what we could do without templates, like migrating the news content first, so we stayed on track. And the launch date held.

Custom UX where the templates stopped. Staffbase’s templates got the build about 80 percent of the way there. The remaining 20 percent was where this intranet either became the company’s own or stayed generic. Our UX and development lead, Mary, reworked default layouts into custom page builds, custom photo treatments, and a built-in way to celebrate employee recognition, pulled from the company’s existing rewards program, without cluttering a small mobile screen. She tested, edited, and reworked each piece until it tested well with real employees.

Ready for the gotchas. About three weeks before launch, we discovered Staffbase’s mobile menu could not handle the volume of quick links employees needed to access – over 50. Again, we came together as a team to pivot. We huddled up, brainstormed, and sketched ideas together on a whiteboard. And overnight, Mary coded a working, animated prototype of the “Quick Links” mega menu that expanded on tap and housed all the necessary links. We tested it with five employees the next morning, adjusted, and pushed it to production the same day.

Launched content that drove adoption. Our team, including Cece, Brielle, and Erin, produced two custom walkthrough videos, one desktop and one mobile, with animated cursor movements, highlighted clicks, and voiceover so every employee could take the tour. Over a year later, those videos still onboard new hires.

Success comes from successful teamwork. Throughout, we worked as one team with the company and Staffbase: daily stand-ups, shared ownership, and a standing rule that when something broke we asked “How do we fix this together?” rather than assign blame. We think of it like improv dancing: partners who never rehearsed a step but trust each other enough to lead, follow, and adapt in real time.

The results

The intranet launched on schedule, delay and all. Rather than waiting for it to be perfect, we shipped “Version 1” and iterated with the company over the first 90 days, treating the platform as a living project instead of a finished product.

• Roughly 5,000 pages and documents migrated and restructured for a mobile-first experience.
• Launched on time despite an early, potential four-week setback by pivoting together, reordering the work, and building what we could without the delayed templates.
• People actually showed up. Sign-ups and everyday use climbed quickly once the platform was finally in people’s pockets, especially among the frontline employees who’d never really had an intranet they could use before.
• Built to last. The two custom walkthrough videos we made at the start have continued to be used to onboard new employees well beyond the initial launch.
• Playful ideas that worked. A quick trivia contest, timed with the opening of a new facility, got more people downloading and using the mobile app. And, a new notification tool we tested inside the platform got better open rates than email.

The best proof came after. Six months after the intranet launched, the company came back and asked us to build their new corporate website. We spent about eight months on it, and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. As the Director of Communications put it, it felt like an extension of their own team, no heavy directives, no grinding review cycles.

And it still hasn’t stopped. A year after that first launch, we’re back at the table together, working on what’s next for the platform. With a relationship like this one, there was never really a question of whether there’d be a next project, only what we’d build together next.

In the client’s words

“Local Wisdom was a lifeline for us. They picked up all of the pieces we didn’t have the bandwidth or the expertise to do, and worked with us as an extension of our team.”

“They’re a team of communications professionals, but they also have deep technological experience and expertise, and they’re great at marrying both technology and communications together to create magic within organizations.”

“We signed with Local Wisdom because we had a very specific need: content migration. We evolved very quickly to content production, UX design, custom integrations. And it didn’t stop there.”

Hear more in the full testimonial above.

Facing the same thing?

If more than half your people are deskless, or your intranet is a project no one on your team has the bandwidth to own, that’s exactly where we do our best work. Let’s talk about your intranet.