From Feedback to Functionality: Transforming NRMA’s SharePoint Intranet
NRMA
APAC| SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Explore how NRMA turned 600+ employee insights into an engaging and user-centric intranet, transitioning from SharePoint Classic to SharePoint Online while fostering a strong community of practice.
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Let's jump on to our next fantastic speaker of the day. Please join me in welcoming Elena Sergis, who is NRMA's Digital Workplace Manager. Now, Elena is going to share how NRMA transformed the intranet from a traditional corporate tool into a much more dynamic people-first platform.
The initiative that Elena is going to talk about was powered by nearly 600 pieces of employee insight, which took them on their journey from SharePoint Classic to SharePoint Online. I promise you, please be ready to take notes for this one. I'll hand over to you now, Elena.
Thank you so much. Okay. Good afternoon, everyone.
Are we good? Thumbs up? Can you hear me? Perfect. Yeah. Amazing.
Hi, everyone. Elena Sergis here from the NRMA. It's always good coming on after a break.
Hopefully everyone's revved up and got their caffeine hit and ready to go. So yeah, Digital Workplace Manager at the NRMA. And yeah, I'd like to thank SWOOP for the opportunity for NRMA to come and tell our story, our intranet story today.
I thought it was quite ironic that this image, this first slide, not only reflects our business at the NRMA, but I think it also aligns really well to our intranet journey, which I'm sure many of you can also relate to. In the land of intranets and SharePoint, there have been many winding roads and times you think something so simple has just taken the longest route. There have been times we've all needed a beer or a wine at the end of a long day, especially during content migration or content cleanup.
And surprisingly, though, some days have been smooth sailing, where you may have discovered a new web part or a SharePoint list has solved many of your problems. And in the world of DEX, most days we need to ensure we are fully charged and ready to tackle all things digital employee experience and comms and intranets. So if you can relate to any of this, you are definitely not alone.
I'd like to just kick off and just shed a little bit more light around who we are and a little bit more around our organisation. We are Australia's largest mutual organisation with over 3.2 million members. We exist to keep the country moving by connecting people and places.
And you can see that here through the range of businesses we own and operate. You may all know us for our legendary roadside assistance, the yellow patrols on the side of the road. And although that is really at our core, our roadside arm is also heavily involved in all things motoring, like driver training and road safety and education programs.
Last year, last financial year, we actually took 1.5 million calls for help from stranded motorists on the side of the road. We recycled over 145,000 batteries. And this is a good one for everyone.
We rescued over 1,600 children and animals from locked vehicles. So help is really at the essence of what we do and what we're about. Moving over to Sixt, which is our car and truck rental business.
It operates in over 100 countries and really leads the market with the largest fleet of electric rental vehicles and offers customers a range of mobility options. We've also got our NRMA parks and resorts really proud to own and manage a vast portfolio of tourism assets in iconic locations across Australia, from North Queensland to New South Wales, Victoria and into South Australia. And we've also got lodges in Tasmania as well.
So we really focus on helping members explore further with real unique opportunities to connect with each other, communities and our beautiful country. Parks and resorts welcomed 456,000 guests last year. And really interesting, when I first started with NRMA, we had four holiday parks.
And this was a long time ago, but it was four parks. And now the total owned, leased and managed parks is 59. So a really amazing growing business.
And if you haven't already checked them out, go check one out, you get your member discount. Hopefully you're all members. So very lovely part of our organisation.
Over to cruises, we own and operate 23 vessels as part of our My Fast Ferry and Fantasy cruising business. You would probably know our harbour cruises and ferry services. It's the Sydney Ferry Service, Manly's to Circular Quay, Watson's Bay to Wurrungazoo.
And we've also got Coral Seas Expedition Cruises, which explore Tasmania, Kimberley and beyond. And finally, the NRMA Electric Charging Network, which is a partnership with the Australian government to really build a national network of EV charging stations, aiming to connect towns and cities across the country and really support the transition to electric vehicles. So we currently operate over 100 EV charging stations across more than 70 locations in Australia, with a really strong focus there on regional New South Wales and Queensland.
So that's just a little bit about who we are. And as you can see, a very vast and diverse business unit we operate in. But moving along to what we're all here for today, intranets, and to help set the scene, I just wanted to quickly take you through a little snapshot of our intranet journey at the NRMA.
And just like all of you, we have been on a very long journey. And I believe the fun has just begun with SharePoint Modern. So in 2010, we moved from an internal magazine, physically printed and popped on everyone's desks, to an intranet in 2010.
And this was really the start of our intranet experience, our digital intranet experience. In 2014, you know, we didn't have as many businesses as today. But we then moved into the cloud with one single intranet across our businesses at the time.
2015, we really started playing around with customisation and built a custom search engine to improve search for our people with org charts, online directories. And obviously, using SharePoint Classic at the time, that took a good, you know, 12 to 18 months to build. So it was definitely a complex environment we were working in.
2016, we sort of started tweaking the design. We embedded Yammer, now known as Viva Engage, on the homepage, as we really started focusing more on internal collaboration. And 15 years later, in September 2023, the real star was born.
And this was the start of our new intranet experience as we moved from SharePoint Classic over to SharePoint Modern, really designed with the employee at the centre. So just like our overarching strategy is really about connection externally with our members and customers, we're laser-focused on internal connection, and Blue is just one place for that. So why is this so important? You know, as you saw from slide one, reaching frontline, and, you know, I'm sure a lot of you on the line can also relate to this, you know, challenge.
It still is, and it still has challenges for us as a business, especially with such a remote, geographically dispersed workforce. We've got staff on boats, we've got patrols on the side of the road, we've got people using their own devices. So we know we still have a lot of work to do.
But, you know, we've just launched this new platform for our employees. How do we really ensure it's meeting their needs, it's serving a purpose, that they can access the information they need quick and easy? How do we ensure employees feel heard and valued, regardless of their work environment? I mean, that's essentially what we're trying to achieve. And that's really critical to the success of our intranet.
So how did we tackle the migration journey? You know, we listened deeply to our employees. So, you know, on the surface, employees shared their frustrations. We sifted through many employee insights and verbatims.
We heard some really key themes around, you know, search, ease of access, making it simple, having a really engaging UI, having trust in the content. So, you know, make it easy for me to share information with my team. So a lot of those key themes started coming through.
Our findability score at the time rated 2.8 out of 5, which, you know, which is not great. And that was not just because of search, but also because of old content and lack of governance. And, you know, that was something we wanted to tackle.
So that was on the surface. And then in the back end and behind the scenes, we knew other challenges existed as well. So we at the time had a lack of data and analytics and insights.
There was hours of manual work that was put into understanding the performance of our site. Who's using it? When are they using it? You know, it would take hours to build in Power BI. It was single point sensitive to our, you know, our intranet manager at the time.
So we knew that was a challenge. We had overwhelmed content owners. I was one of them at the time before I moved into this role.
And, you know, we did need a lot of support. It definitely wasn't as easy as it is today. So, you know, SharePoint Classic, it was a complex environment.
There were inefficiencies in processes, more support tickets and training needs due to sort of usability challenges that we had at the time as well. And also as a content owner, they didn't have insights to their performance of their page. So putting a lot of work into creation of these pages, but, you know, how are they actually performing was lacking.
UI, you know, SharePoint Classic, I think we all know the user interface is less intuitive and visually appealing. It was harder to navigate. Obviously that leads to lower engagement and productivity onto our intranet.
Customisation complexities, creating a slower development cycles, you know, even hyperlinks needed coding at the time. So you really kind of needed that unique skill set and that deep knowledge of sort of legacy technologies in order to really make the most use out of that platform. A big one as well, you know, SharePoint Classic pages were not fully responsive on mobile devices.
And obviously looking at our workforce, this created poor experience for remote or even on the go employees as we started moving into hybrid world. It created some difficulties in supporting a hybrid workforce through a mobile first approach. And then another important one was, and I think it's also good to talk about the structure of teams in comms and DEX.
You know, I think it's a lot of question that gets asked a lot. But, you know, I truly believe having that centralised approach has helped us as an organisation. We're very closely aligned with the comms team.
We're on the one team and that was lacking at the time. So it hindered the flow of work. And although there was part alignment, it wasn't sort of quite working.
So we have moved into that centralised structure now, which I'll talk through a little bit more. So we packaged all this together and some real prominent key themes existed. We were very clear what we needed to do and knew we had a lot of work to do.
So, you know, we heard things, sort of key themes around make my life easier as a content owner, help me trust the information, help me find information easier, give us better data and insights, simplify the layout. You know, we want it to be an engaging platform, not just a one-way place to read a policy, but how can it be that real two-way engaging platform, mobile friendly and sharing content easier as well with the key themes we heard. So without further ado, I know you're all dying to see what our intranet looks like and hopefully my sound does work.
Maybe Emily, I can see you, so just give me a thumbs up. But I'd like to introduce you to our intranet, Blue 2.0. And, you know, considering this is a festival, feel free to bop along to the music if you need. And I'll just introduce you to our intranet.
Cool. So hope you enjoyed that. Shout out to Andre in our team for his amazing work in the creation of that video.
It really brings to life the amazing work that has happened throughout our intranet journey. So the question I'm sure most of you have is how did we get here? So since we launched to Blue 2.0, we've really looked at four, sort of these four pillars to drive our continuous feedback and continuous improvements to really ensure our intranet is useful, is used and is usable. And employee feedback loops, you know, this is, you know, they're all as important as the other, but our focus for the next 10 or 15 minutes will be around our employee feedback loops because they've had a critical role in our continuous improvements.
We know that user experience is essential to design, to design an intranet that people actually want to use. So I'll talk through a little bit more around our employee feedback loops and how we tackle that. Agile practices.
So really having that close working relationship with our tech counterparts. We work both asynchronously, so we have a weekly stand up every week with a planner board. We go through big, small sort of strategic improvements, but having that, having those weekly stand ups and being really close to keeping things moving.
We also, obviously, comms and DEX are in the same team and we really take the opportunity every week to have robust discussions about all things intranets and DEX. So there is absolutely no way we would have the success of Blue without our amazing comms teams and our amazing comms partners. I think we've got a couple on the line.
Shout out Kelly and Naomi if you are there. But yeah, amazing, amazing job to the success of our intranet. Community of practice.
Again, really, really critical part of what we do. It's really important to foster our content owners in a, you know, we have a decentralized content environment. We've got just over 100 content owners and we work both synchronously.
So we work together at the same time. We catch up every week, every six weeks, sorry, six to eight weeks. And we also work asynchronously with a Teams.
We've set up a Teams environment with different channels where we can just work together but not at the same time. People are sharing stuff, asking questions. So we've got those two ways of working with our community of practice and really making sure they're feeling supported and learning from each other, I think most importantly.
And then, obviously, what's an intranet without good data and analytics? And we're very fortunate to have SWOOP, which has really, really helped us make data-led decisions. You know, we use our platform, our SWOOP for SharePoint platform to set and measure our metrics. And we use a lot of the metrics from there to be able to report up to leadership as well.
So, you know, not having those, you know, has been challenging. But, you know, I think also for our content owners, they can also self-serve. So anyone in the team can find the information they're looking for.
All underpinned by strong governance, you know, these four components together have really been fundamental to the success of our environment. So just a little bit of a snapshot around our SharePoint modern journey, some of the key milestones along the way. You know, back in October 23, we had our first community of practice.
You know, we welcomed new content owners via their own channels. So probably a little bit small there to see, but that's basically our team set up with all content owners. When someone joins, we welcome them.
We let everybody know what pages they're working on. So we really do make sure we're fostering our community of practice. In November 23, we introduced polls.
We are on our eighth poll now. We've learned so much through having this poll feature on our intranet. You know, we've learned about learning and development needs.
You know, what learning and development opportunities do people wanna see? We've learned how people are feeling about AI readiness. You know, we've learned what new stories people are most interested in. I'll touch on more of our topics as we go through the slide, but you know, that has been a game changer for us and embedding that quite easily on the homepage of our website.
We have managed to really gather so many great rich insights to help shape our intranet. Dashboard card optimization. We've, you know, started leveraging SharePoint capabilities more effectively.
We've really, you know, chosen complementary colors and imagery that reflects our brand. You know, I think it's the little things that make a difference. The images used, the colors you use, you know, I think that has really helped as well, just bring it to life a little bit more.
So dashboard card optimization was back in February, 2024. We introduced for SharePoint in July, 2024. So that was, again, another game changer for us as we had a platform to provide insights for our team.
The ability to pull reports up to leadership if they want a quick snapshot on how stories or pages are performing really quickly, much more efficiently with a few clicks of a button. So, and also for content owners as well, you know, previously to having worked for SharePoint, we were getting lots of random, how's my page performing, some manual intervention there, but having that opportunity for content owners to be able to self-serve and view their own analytics, again, has been a game changer for us as well. In September, 2024, we introduced banners to our intranet.
We knew we were getting about 800 eyeballs a day on our intranet. And it was the first thing when people open home via Teams or they open a new browser, it's the first thing that they saw. So, we know we had an opportunity, there was real estate there to really push some big news stories for us.
And we're actually seeing a correlation to high views on our stories if it's accompanied with a banner. So, this is all carefully planned out by the comms team, but that again has been a game changer for our intranet as well. We celebrated our first birthday.
I think it's really important to have some fun as well, celebrate the wins along the way. We had a Microsoft MVP come along and just talk about SharePoint and help people understand more about web parts and just the fundamentals of building a page. And again, that aligns to fostering our community of practice, but celebrating the wins along the way is also really important.
And in March, 2025, that just passed, we launched our first dynamic dashboard card and we added our social feed on the homepage as well. So again, I'll talk a little bit through that, but overall, these continuous improvements wouldn't have been possible without the feedback and engagement from our users, which is a really key point I wanted to hone in on today. So, drilling down to some more features, we heard, we also heard a lot that employees wanted a more simplified layout and user interface.
So, I just wanna touch on some of the continuous improvements designed by our employees. We know that 90% of the information transmitted to the brain is visual, right? So, being very conscious of visual design, we know that can have a profound effect on ease of use. So, we were really conscious of how we chose to display information to users to have that content flow.
So, we've got seven clear sections on our homepage of our intranet and we added some emojis as well recently. So, that just kind of makes it a little bit more engaging and a little bit more easier to find users and help users navigate to the sections they wanna go to. We shaped our stories around group news and wins.
We've added more people stories. So, we ran a poll to understand how people wanna display our, how they wanna see news basically. So, we had a few different options and we socialize that with our employees and our community of practice and 69% liked this specific carousel setup.
So, we took the feedback for our employees and we've shaped our news carousel based on the feedback from our employees. So, we're getting them involved in these continuous improvements. I think that's really important.
Group news and wins is the number one most interested topic. So, again, shaping our content to what people wanna see. And quick links is also positioned at the top because it's the number, it's the second highest reason why employees use the intranet.
So, making sure that the layout and the user interface is designed with the user in mind. Sorry to interrupt, Elena. I know you've got so much more fabulous content to come.
If we maybe just like a minute or two to roll through some of the last key points. Sure, yep. Thank you.
No problem. So, engaging platform, we've embedded our social feed and obviously having that Viva Engage feed really helps employees collaborate within the intranet environment and mobile friendly as well. Trusting the information, embedding that member count and also having a really strong governance process using Power Automate.
Community of practice with our content owners to really make sure that we're keeping them up to date with all things or new features and helping them learn along the way. I might just maybe finish off on these last few slides. So, again, we wanted to make sure Blue has a personality.
One in five employees want more people stories. So, that's what we're delivering. And, you know, those human interests, you know, Kai talked about it this morning as well.
Those human interest, people first stories perform better. So, you know, almost out of 300 news stories over the past 12 months, all of our people stories have been in our top 50. So, that has also been a big focus for our intranet as well.
So, just to wrap up, top tips for feedback to functionality. Don't fret over the quantity of responses. I think give people the opportunity to have their say.
Any insights are better than none. You know, mind the frequency. I know we, you know, we often do a lot of engagement surveys and polls.
Just find that sweet spot that works for your organisation. It's a poll, keep it short and punchy. People only have limited time on the site.
So, keep it as short and punchy as you can. Position carefully. I mean, we've got ours right next to our socials.
So, just think about where it's the best place on your website, on your intranet, sorry. Communicate when one closes, another one opens, I think is important because people don't know what they don't know. So, if you, yeah, close it up with, you know, we choose to communicate ours to our content owners and we let them know when a new one's opened.
Combine quality of insights with quantitative insights to help paint a clearer picture. Give your intranet a personality that reflects your company values and your brand and celebrate the wins along the way. I think, and bring your people along the journey.
So, just to wrap up, what's next? You know, we're very proud of our journey, but we know we still have a lot of work to do. We're really excited for what's next. So, four key focus areas, you know, what's an intranet these days without AI? So, you know, we're looking at chatbots as well over the next month or two.
Continue supporting and educating our content owners, upskilling them. That's really critical to the success. More, I guess, optimising using audience targeting more effectively and dashboard cards.
And, you know, we have such vast business units now, as you would have seen from our initial slide. So, how do we create that unified interface and consolidate our intranet as well? So, lots more work to do, but exciting times ahead. So, thank you everyone for staying with me until the end.
I hope you enjoyed hearing about NRMA and our intranet journey from feedback to functionality. Thank you.
Meet the speaker:
Elena Sergis
Digital Workplace Manager
