Platforms to People: Powering Global Connection
Prologis
AMER | SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Discover how Prologis leverages their intranet to connect employees across global offices. This presentation explores the collaboration between Internal Communications and IT to empower local voices, streamline content sharing, and elevate the employee experience worldwide.
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Next, we have Sofia Espinosa and Aaron Delong from Prologis, who will be presenting. And in this presentation, we'll see how the importance of having IT and internal comms working together in creating a unique user experiences for their intranet users. So with that, I hand it over to Sofia and Aaron.
Thanks, Coco. Hi, everyone. So I am Sofia and I'm so delighted to be here today.
Let me just get my screen set up. So we're here to chat with you all about powering global connection and how we partner between comms and IT to do that. So before I get started, I'd love if everybody could open up the chat and give a thumbs up.
If you use your intranet or have a platform to share with employees when someone is celebrating their 15th anniversary with the company, when an exec is visiting a different office or even when your local Dallas team goes line dancing together. So at Prologis, we use our intranet to share all of those things with employees and we use that to power that global connection. So as Coco mentioned, my name is Sofia Espinosa and I'm an internal communications manager here at Prologis.
I oversee all of our digital channels, which includes our intranet. And I'm joined today by my colleague, Aaron. Yeah, I'm Aaron Delong.
I'm the lead SharePoint architect and developer at Prologis. I work on the collaboration tools team as a part of our IT infrastructure department here at Prologis. And I try and help people like Sofia drive strategy and learn how to leverage SharePoint as an effective communications tool.
Awesome. Thanks, Aaron. And before we dig in to give a brief overview of Prologis and our culture, Prologis, we build big warehouses.
So about three percent of the world's GDP actually runs through a Prologis warehouse, which means that even if you've never heard of us, the shirt that you're wearing today was probably made elsewhere and shipped to your local area through a Prologis warehouse. So we create the intelligent infrastructure that powers global commerce and we are a global company. So we are around 2,700 employees and we're all across the globe.
So we're in 20 countries spread across four different continents. As you can imagine, we speak a lot of different languages. We also have a lot of different cultures and a lot of different customs on our team.
We have employees who are out in the field, you know, leasing warehouses and managing warehouses. And then we have folks like myself who are based in an office and on our screens most of the day. So it can be difficult for somebody based in Cincinnati to feel connected to somebody that sits in Tokyo.
But our role across comms and IT is really to make sure that those employees feel connected to one to one another. So as internal communicators, I think we're all obsessed with increasing employee engagement and work satisfaction. Right.
It's in all of our scopes. And at Prologis we do that through a few different ways, one of which is virtual events. So we host a variety of different global webinars that spotlight executives and different employees that people can either attend live or watch the recordings for.
We also have a weekly newsletter that gets delivered straight to everybody's inboxes on Monday mornings and shares everything people need to know for the week ahead. We have our quarterly global town hall, which is a chance for employees to hear straight from executives around what's happening across the business. And we have emails that our team is responsible for.
Any corporate emails going to all employees go through our team. And finally, what we're all here to talk about today, we also own the intranet, which we call the hub at Prologis. So if you hear the hub throughout this presentation, that's what we're referring to.
And this is where we house all of our employee stories, our resources and our business objectives for folks. So, Aaron, tell us more about the hub. Yeah.
One of our main objectives with the hub is to make content discoverable and give resources a home. So this could be anything like, you know, things we've talked about already, policies and procedures, things that need lots of visibility. Be it today, be it tomorrow, a location where people know that they can trust that the content that they're looking at is authoritative.
And then we also really try and give people a platform. So this could be things like announcements or newsletters. This could be newsletters for the entire company, or we've even driven teams to start leveraging the news web part in their own team sites.
And this could be, you know, up to five different languages. So, yeah, I'll turn this back over to Sophia. Thanks, Aaron.
And yeah, so when we talk about building global connection, we're really talking about giving people a platform here. That third goal that's highlighted here on the screen. And you can actually see a preview of what our homepage looks like on the right hand side here.
But in today's presentation, we're going to take you through three ways that we use our homepage and that we use our Internet to build that global connection. So the first of which is faces and places. And we love something that rhymes.
I know I personally do. And this is really beloved across all of our employees. So this is an employee driven feature where anybody at the company can submit a photo, a caption and their name.
And once it gets approved, it can actually go straight to our hub homepage. So it's a really great way for people to just amplify what's happening in their local areas and to give employees the mic. Aaron, why don't you tell us a bit more about how this came to life? This is a SharePoint framework web part that we built custom for our homepage, but it really leverages a lot of the out of the box features from SharePoint.
So this is a combination of two picture libraries, one where employees can submit a photo and a caption. As you can see, there's a little button in the upper left corner of our faces and places little screen there. And then it follows an approval process.
So the first being the faces and places library where employees can submit their ideas for content they'd like to share on the homepage and then an archive library, which contains all of the faces and places posts that have been approved by the comms team. And people can look back historically all the way back to five years ago when we launched this feature. And I'll let Sophia talk a little bit more about how we surface faces and places.
Thanks so much, Aaron. So, yeah. As I mentioned, faces and places lives its home essentially is on our homepage.
However, we amplify that content across a lot of our different communications channels. So in the middle two photos here, those are actually screenshots from our weekly newsletter that I mentioned. Each week we choose two submissions from faces and places to amplify in that newsletter.
Our newsletter gets around 80 percent open rate across the company. So it's really getting amplified to almost everyone at the company. And then the third row of images here is actually a screen grab from our TV screens in our offices.
So we amplify faces and places on our digital signage as well so that anybody in the cafeteria, anybody walking through their desk can have a look as well. And through faces and places, people are able to see that Susan, our energy leader, visited our Amsterdam office and toured a property. They know that Rob and Maribel in Los Angeles each celebrated their 20th year anniversaries with the company.
And they know that in Japan, our team was celebrating the Great Place to Work Award. I also love to see that a lot of people call their internets the hub too. I'm seeing that in the chat.
The backyard is a very fun one. I haven't heard that one before. But on the hub, another way that we engage our employees is through our blog.
So we call our blog content Hub Stories. And about 50 percent of our quarterly intranet content is focused on employees and uplifting their voices. So it was great to hear Kai earlier talk about how employee stories really drive engagement because we see the same thing here at Prologis.
We have some fan favorites like Babies of Prologis, which is where we shared photos of people's newborns from the year before. We also have Pets of Prologis, where we share people's furry babies. And then the top one that you see here, Passions That Power Our People, which was focused on hobbies.
So you can kind of see in this photo some of the hobbies were cycling, fishing. Somebody even raises miniature ponies over in England. Drop in the chat what your hobby is.
We'll build some global connection while we're here. Mine would be running in yoga, personally. But we really have seen that it's our top performing content when we spotlight these employees each quarter, far and above the other pieces of content that we promote.
And that really speaks to the fact that people want to know each other, right? They want to know you not just on a professional level, not just what your title is. They want to know who you are, and that just makes everybody's work experience a little bit more enjoyable. I'm loving this water skiing, watercoloring.
Gardening was a big one we saw as well. Sailing. Oh, crocheting we have actually over here.
Some of the ways that we also drive engagement with our blog content is by posting two times a week and using Smart Brevity. I saw somebody mentioned that in the chat earlier, but really making sure people have enough time to digest these blog posts. So two times a week we've found to be the sweet spot, and we try to aim around 300 words a post.
Also, if we don't have an employee image, we'll use pop culture. So you can see what this Mother's Day post we spotlighted the office, my personal favorite sitcom, because it drives that engagement. To source these stories, anybody is able to submit an idea.
So Erin helped us build a form where people can go onto our homepage and actually tell us something that they want to see us talk about or an idea that they want to share. They can tell us who to reach out to and share any photos. And then, of course, as the editorial controllers, we can either run with the story or leave it be if it's not necessarily fit for front page news.
But it's a great way to get people involved with what they're seeing. We also leverage Viva Engage to source some content. So with this Passions That Power Our People story, we actually posted on Viva Engage and our all company channel and asked people what their hobbies were.
People shared their photos. People got to interact with each other. And then we pulled those into this blog post.
So again, Hub Stories are just a really amazing way to share some more fuller content stories than Faces and Places. And the third way that we use our internet to build that global connection is through regional hub sites. So here's where we're empowering our local content owners.
Erin, why don't you tell us more? Yeah, so we have set up three regional hub sites abroad. So we have a Japan internet, a China internet, and what we call the Europe Insights internet. Each of them kind of has their own goals and objectives, how they want, what type of content they're trying to promote and leverage.
So, you know, for example, China really likes to highlight big events and big wins. They tend to like to show the things that are going on, big company events, that type of content. And the Japan team really likes to use the internet to highlight employees.
They like to talk about things like, you know, team member announcements and awards and all the way to, you know, things like the birth of a child. And so we'll see all sorts of really neat content that's driven from the Japan internet. And then Europe really likes to highlight the things that are happening in Europe.
You know, everybody wants their own platform and giving people a place that's their own in their own local language, that's their own local content, really helps to drive readership. And amongst these and regionally amongst these sites, we've seen about 80% readership on average between the three. So giving people a location that, you know, us as a global company where they can highlight their own personal content really has been a big benefit in terms of communications for Prologix.
Thanks, Aaron. Yeah, and we've really, I mean, it makes sense, right? Like you're going to be more tuned into what's happening in your local area. So we've really seen regional hub sites or pages, if you will, be a place where that culture can thrive at a more local level.
And so those are three ways that we use our homepage and our internet to power that global connection. But, of course, more things exist on our homepage than that. So, in addition to hub stories and faces and places and those regional pages, we also promote our events on our homepage.
So if we haven't asked me anything with a global leader or even an employee led, an employee driven event, we'll promote it on our homepage here with all the details for how to join and an overview. We also have a Viva Engage feed here, which I saw an earlier company has as well. But this is where people can see what the most recent posts from Viva Engage are.
They can also engage directly. So you can see all three of those posts have a lot of likes and some comments there. And Aaron, tell us more about how you built the news feature.
Yeah, the in the news feature is just a custom SharePoint framework web part again. But this time we've extended the news link feature that SharePoint already has in place and added the publication. We found that big publications where Prologis is being mentioned in the New York Times or in the AP or Hamid is in the news and has done an interview.
These really help to drive people to those locations and help bring awareness to Prologis being in the news throughout our Internet. So it gives us a really great opportunity, again, to leverage all the analytics features that are in place in SharePoint. So anytime someone makes a click on our in the news feature, we track a view.
So that's a little bit about in the news. And then being your I.T. team's best friend. This this was definitely coined by Sophia, but it's easy to be a best friend with the team because we get an idea of what the goals of the Internet are.
So, you know, I understand SharePoint as, you know, a file sharing feature as a communications platform. But we're really trying to take what SharePoint does well to help the comms team leverage their goals and objectives for global comms. So we have a regular biweekly check in.
And sometimes this meeting is very, very short. Sometimes this meeting is a little bit longer, but it gives us an opportunity to discuss what our objectives are, things that are coming up, things that we want to highlight on the Internet and how we might do so. And one of those at one of those check ins, we actually discussed a feature, the new SharePoint news by email feature.
And I'll let Sophia talk a little bit about how this comms team was able to leverage that. Thanks, Aaron. Yeah.
So I'm curious to know how often you're all meeting with your I.T. teams. If you drop it in the chat. I know Aaron mentioned we have our biweekly team call where our whole internal comms and SharePoint I.T. team meet.
And then Aaron and I actually have a monthly sync. That's about 45 minutes where we'll share more longer term like project planning and strategy planning. The biweekly one is more of what's top of mind for us.
And I'm loving seeing this biweekly, weekly, monthly. This is so great. Really encourage those regular check ins.
So as Aaron mentioned in one of those biweekly calls, we were very transparent with our goals and challenges we were having. And one of our goals was to increase viewership of our internal blog posts or those hub stories that I mentioned earlier. We wanted to move that number up before the end of the year.
And Aaron actually flagged this news by email feature where you can share SharePoint news posts via email with your company, either with an individual, a team or the full company. So after hearing about this, we met with Aaron regularly and really focused on how we could roll this out. So how could we change the subject line to say new hub story like you see in the top right corner there? And how could we make sure that it always comes from the communications team or maybe even take out an image? Ultimately, we actually saw a six percent increase in our quarterly unique viewers, which got us to where we wanted to be.
And we publish now to hub stories per month via email. So we'll share them out via email just based on what the highest priority is. But this is just one of the ways that our close partnership with I.T. has really allowed us to collaborate and ultimately enhance the employee experience.
So to summarize our presentation for you all, at Prologis, we build and power global connection by giving people a platform. So Faces and Places is our way of giving people a platform to share a moment in time. Our blog is giving people a platform to share their unique stories.
And then our regional sites are where people can share their local content and resources with each other. And that being said, if you're going to give people a platform, you have to have the appropriate guardrails in place. So I know Aaron mentioned how we have those approval processes baked in for Faces and Places and our blog.
And that it's just a really important part of making sure that you're still in control of what's being shared. And finally, you know, be your I.T. team's best friend. It's so critical to our success as communicators and to I.T.'s success for us to partner together and ultimately deliver that amazing employee experience that we're all seeking and that we're all after.
And Aaron and I being here today is just proof of the fact that we do have a close partnership and close collaboration. And that's been what's been that's what we have been able to use to fuel that global connection for everybody else. So with that, I'll hand it back over to Gemma and Coco.
Meet the speaker:
Sofia Espinosa
Internal Communications Manager, Operations
Aaron Delong
SharePoint Architect and Developer
