(NEW YORK) Intranets help empower employees and sales teams to increase sales; a revenue enhancing benefit that is far too often overlooked by too many organizations. The IKEA intranet and other top-rated intranets were showcased at The Intranet Insider World Tour Live (New York, April 16 – 17, 2009).
IKEA U.S. has 37 stores, with over 12,000 co-workers; an employee audience that is both geographically dispersed, and has limited capacity to connect to the intranet. However, a challenging retail environment with a dispersed target audience and a limited attention span has not daunted the IKEA intranet team from focusing on the bottom line: decreasing costs, and increasing sales.
IKEA’s intranet team began with a series of philosophies that guide their work and execution:
- An emphasis on the power of people.
- Decentralization works!
- The Intranet is part of a total information landscape.
- It’s good to be a passionate fanatic!
- We are obsessed with impacting the bottom line!
The last philosophy ‘obsession’ with the bottom line has also served them well – leading to increased sales, and cost savings of more than $500,000 per year:
- PAPER COSTS = $192,000
- STREAMLINING PROCESSES / SELF-SERVE TRAVEL PROCESS SAVES $4,590
- MODERNIZING COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES VIDEO CONF to WEBEX = $90,000
- SELF-SERVICE HR = $219,000
The intranet is particularly focused on supporting the sales organization; especially sales events and the monthly “seize the day” sales. In particular, the intranet team delivers content that is highly focused on sales events with:
- Photos
- Stores “reporting in” with lots of co-worker quotes
- The good and the bad
- Employee discussion boards
- Sales number & metrics
Demonstrating their success in covering their big sales events, IKEA has consistently exceeded its sales goals since the third sales event proactively targeted by the intranet team.
IKEA’s intranet team also delivers key content and tools based on personas or “key roles” in the stores. The team built manual pages called “dashboards’ for role specific functions. In doing so, the intranet team hit the road and visited employees on the store floors to determine the scope and focus of these dashboards, working side-by-side with employees to understand what content and online they need.
