Removing Internal Communications Roadblocks with Online Tools

Background: Internal communication is often set as a lower priority to public communications at the cost of employee productivity and efficiency.  The CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s (Injury Center) Intranet was infrequently used due to outdated content, difficulty navigating, and lack of useful content, according to usability interviews.  Therefore, in lieu of the Intranet, shared network drives grew unwieldy decreasing efficiency and productivity and creating user frustration.  In usability interviews, users responded that they wanted a solution with more useful and updated content, easier navigation, and the ability to collaborate and reduce email clutter of daily updates.

Program background: Last year the Injury Center’s Health Communication Science Office Web Team launched a completely overhauled Intranet site in combination with a user-driven Wiki.  The two-pronged approach of the Intranet/Wiki combination has proven to facilitate internal communication and collaboration by leveraging both a traditional Intranet experience and the user-driven, interactive, collaborative tools of the Wiki. By providing a dual approach, the specific needs of the users and upper management are addressed. The new Intranet provides a traditional Intranet experience complete with Injury Center branding; better navigation; better search capabilities; and date-stamped, owner-assigned pages. The content consists of static content, such as policies and procedures that infrequently change, mission statements, and links to CDC employee tools and specific user-requested content such as daily weather, traffic, useful tips (such as using Office 2007), and educational injury and violence prevention and control facts. In addition, the Wiki provides every employee the ability to contribute to information sharing and collaboration. When users are given the option to have their content posted to the Intranet versus manage it themselves on the Wiki, the majority choose to utilize the Wiki.  The Wiki allows users to maintain total control of their content, collaborate with other users, and use the additional tools that the Wiki provides, such as automatic document version control, page comments, email notifications of page updates, and user- and group-level page access restriction.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Since the launch of the new Intranet/Wiki solution in December 2009, Injury Center Intranet usage for the first quarter of 2010 has grown by an average of 34% and is in the top 40 sections of the entire CDC Intranet, despite the Injury Center being one of the smallest Centers at CDC.  In addition, over 300 Wiki pages have been created (not including User Profile pages) and the Injury Center Wiki home page is the 5^th most popular Wiki page within the entire CDC Wiki. 

Conclusions:  The results of this project demonstrate that using the right tools for the right reasons can help facilitate internal communication and collaboration and remove communication roadblocks and speed bumps. 

Implications for research and/or practice: The most important lessons learned include the need to conduct usability testing, address specific problems with your solutions, consider multiple solutions to address all the user needs, be willing to provide training, and trust employees with content.