In the biennial survey of Evolve Embrace user Samen Katholieke Scholen (SaKS) was highly regarded by the use of internal social media at various organizations. They rank fifth as the highest-scoring organization overall and no less than third place for increasing awareness of the business strategy (alignment). This great achievement is the culmination of six years of efforts by Rodney Bieman, Rob Boekelaar and Elly Spanjaard. Together, they proudly talk about the success of their social intranet Sam.
SaKS is an educational board for primary education. The affiliated schools are located in Alkmaar and Bergen. “We try to be innovative and look for the innovation that is possible in primary education. That's what we really want to distinguish ourselves with,” says project coordinator Elly. Together with system and network manager Rodney, she translates the wishes of the schools into a Sam that works as well as possible. Rob is director at De Lispeltuur primary school in Alkmaar and was closely involved in the implementation of Sam in terms of content: “We wanted to become more efficient and more effective organizationally and work together in terms of content in order to achieve education that matters to the 21e century.”
The starting signal for digitization
“That need was the main reason for the switch to a social intranet”, explains Elly. That is why SaKS was looking for a medium that made this easier for them, so that colleagues do not have to figure everything out on their own, but can easily find each other and also different topics. “That's also one of our strategic points: growing collaboration between employees and innovation throughout the organization.”
A social intranet is the ideal medium for this and was therefore a logical step for SAKs. This meant a major digitization effort, because SaKS was used to working mainly analogously and not with a digital platform. “What's not known is not loved,” says Rob, “and that was a phenomenon we encountered. Change processes are drastic and simply take time. So once we had made the choice for the system we wanted to work with and it came into the air, the employees were suddenly confronted with this and there was also misunderstanding.”
“Our new intranet impressed with its ease of use and the enrichment of your own work environment.”
The usefulness and necessity of the new intranet
Rodney also remembers this well. “They mainly saw it as just another thing. What has helped a lot is that we have made a broad and full effort into our new social intranet. For example, we set up the home page on our intranet at all our workstations, hung posters of Sam on the coffee maker, and handed out Sam keychains.”
To help employees get used to the social intranet, SaKS has made all the applications they use available in Sam. This has made their social intranet a convenient base and logical starting point for the working day. Rodney: “We made utility a necessity and vice versa. If people need something, are looking for something or want to get into something, you can do it all via Sam. There was no way around it anymore.”
With the arrival of Sam, in the long run, the news service also only took place via the platform instead of e-mail. “We had agreed that all news and messages would be posted to Sam, no matter how important, and that people can go there,” Elly explains. “Our director maintained that very well, even when employees thought a message was so important that it should be emailed to everyone.” This persistence has also helped embrace the social intranet.
From resistance to enthusiasm
To make Sam even more practical and thus more user-friendly, SaKS has opted for the Microsoft 365 integration. Logging into the social intranet is therefore very easy. “We all know how it works when you have multiple passwords for multiple systems — that doesn't work,” Rodney explains. “So single sign-on, which you can log in with your own email address and password, was a decisive factor for our employees to use Sam and has contributed enormously to its success.”
Each school also had its own ambassador, someone who has an affinity for the social intranet. “You really need a point of contact, someone who sees the need for it and can explain it to someone else,” explains Rodney. “We did a good job with that”. Rob agrees: “In the early years, we spent a lot of time working with these ambassadors, so that we had a good idea of what happened and what was going on. Hand over hand, we saw resistance decrease and enthusiasm grow. Our new intranet impressed with its ease of use and the enrichment of your own work environment. By now, we don't know any better than we have this social intranet.”
“Our social intranet is now in the heart of the organization. As a result, our field of view has become much wider and we are a lot more decisive. '
Valuable additions to the social intranet
In addition to the fact that their social intranet meets SAKs' need for a central, digital place to collaborate and share knowledge, it has also brought welcome additions. “Being able to let external parties connect is a very valuable addition for us, because we have a lot to do with that,” says Rob. “In doing so, we also meet the desire of colleagues to be able to work with parents, external advisors and other people who are not employed by our school foundation.”
SaKS has another nice, additional wish for this: to be able to further segment the various users on their social intranet or even give them specific roles. In this way, they hope to be able to further tailor the content on Sam to the needs of the users, so that their social intranet becomes even more relevant and user-friendly. After all, how nice would it be if SAKs, for example, could show parents and students different or more things on their intranet than external relationships?
The registration module also proved to be a hit, as it takes a lot of work off SAKs's hands. “We are so happy with our learning platform,” says Elly. “Here we now offer our e-learnings and live courses, for which our teachers can register via the registration module.” This convenience proved doubly useful during study days, when hundreds of people travel to ten locations. Manually keeping track of all logins, cancellations and preferences in excel was an extremely time-consuming task. “For one of those study days, we had 260 applications and thanks to the registration module, we were able to see exactly who went where and easily check for last minute changes. That worked optimally and is therefore certainly an added value for us.”
Making and keeping the social intranet a success
The key to the success of the SAKs social intranet is clear: thorough process guidance without losing sight of your vision or your employees. “It takes some getting used to and persevering,” Elly notes, “but it will work out in the end.” Rob adds: “It was often just small moves that were necessary here and there in the early stages. That is no longer necessary, because it is now simply in the heart of the organization. As a result, our field of view has become much wider and we are a lot more decisive.”
In addition, SAKs remains critical of what they use, why and how. Education for the 21e of course, never stands still. In addition, the corona pandemic has also accelerated things. “You have to keep up with new developments and take a good look at the added value you experience. What we have now achieved together, we don't want to lose!”
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