Who truly owns the intranet?
Velux
EMEA| SharePoint Intranet Festival 2025
Is the intranet an IT-managed digital tool or a communication platform led by Internal Comms? The answer—both!
The world's premier skylight and roof windows manufacturer VELUX, will share how their intranet thrives through collaborative ownership between IT and Internal Communications. By fostering structured collaboration, ongoing knowledge-sharing, and clear task allocation, they ensure the intranet remains a dynamic, effective tool for everyone.
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Kicking us off is Signe and Christian from VELUX who have a talk titled Who Truly Owns the Intranet? So, can I hand over to the two of you and you share screen and we will take it away. Thank you. Yes.
Thanks, Pete. I'll just get our presentation started. Let me know when you can see it.
Gotcha. Yes. Excellent.
All right. But hello, everyone, and thanks for having us and showing up and listening to this little talk about how we work with the intranet in VELUX. My name is Signe Lukowski and I am the Senior Corporate Editor in VELUX.
I'm based in a department called Strategic Change in Communications. It's a bit of a tongue twister for non-native English speakers, but basically it's the global internal comms department in VELUX. And I am joined by my partner in crime, Christian.
Hi, everyone. My name is Christian. I'm a Senior Digital Workplace Consultant and I work in a team called Digital Employee Experience, which is a team in our IT.
Excellent. Let's get started. So, this is the topic of today, Who Truly Owns the Intranet? And I will jump right in to just show you.
We have an agenda. I'm not going to read it out loud, but just so that you can see, we have thought about this a little bit before coming on. But to get us started, I just want to share a few facts about VELUX in case you haven't heard about VELUX before.
We're a Danish founded company, but we have country sales companies in 37 countries across the world. And we also have 20 factories in 12 different countries. This is just to say that the colleague or the employee landscape is quite complex.
Also when we talk about the intranet, we obviously have people speaking a multitude of languages and also being based in different time zones and so on. We have approximately 12,000 employees. And I just want to highlight that half of these employees approximately are desk-based employees.
And this is important because the desk-based employees are the ones that have access to mobile devices and company laptops. So they have easy access to our SharePoint. For the production colleagues, it's a bit of a different story, but we will get back to that later in this presentation.
And then I will hand it over to Christian to share more about how we work with the intranet. Sure. So I do have kind of a timeline, a journey, a couple of slides ahead, but I just wanted to start out in a different place.
So this is a community of people across our sales companies, our factories, and our major departments in our headquarters. This is a community that was established back in 2014, and we have leveraged this as we introduced our new SharePoint modern intranet back in 2020. And so basically some of the key things that we decided before we made our SharePoint modern-based intranet back in 2020 was, first of all, we had a strong management commitment.
We wanted to build a more standardized intranet, so we did not want to make a lot of web parts and other things. We focused on having that translation web part, and then basically also looking at analytics. We didn't want to develop or invent something new.
So we did not migrate any content. We wanted to train our ambassadors and our editors to do great content. And we also established some governance, something we called editorial boards, based on each hub in the new intranet.
So people is very important to us, leveraging, working together. This is a photo from one of our bigger meetings in the process of making the intranet. So we had this two-day seminar where we made some decisions and made the signs and all that.
So we started making the new intranet. So here's kind of for your reference, the timeline, how we did it. So we decided to do it and made it together with all our colleagues.
We did not use a lot of money. We handed back half the budget, and basically then we launched it early 2020. And we also won the Danish Best Intranet in Denmark award in 2020.
So that's a little bit of a timeline look back here. Again, focusing on great content more than technology, we like to have things like models you can click on, like a strategy model or sales process, things like that, interactive maps, words, clouds, things like this that makes an experience interesting. We also included a few screenshots here so you can see a couple of examples how it looks like.
So let's do a global example here. So here's a page about our corporate values. We have done many big global changes with our new intranet the last five years, new CEO, new values, all kinds of things.
You can see we use a lot of videos. We use a lot of color. We try to make the pages look interesting.
Here's a global news story, which is kind of a feedback from a live event where they follow up from our executive group management to answer certain questions that were not if we didn't have enough time to do that. So either they do it like this on a text or on a video. We also have more functional things on our intranet.
Here's an example of our new innovation house, which is kind of rebuilding an old warehouse. So, again, trying to integrate into things like Viva Engage, using videos and other things. We also have local content.
So here's an example from our corporate headquarters location called Harsan. And here we, of course, have different needs compared to more global stuff or more functional stuff. So this is kind of where we put our emphasis, trying to create great pages, making engaging news stories, etc.
Great. All right. Let me know if you can if you can still hear me now.
Can you hear Signe now? Yeah. OK, perfect. So I just want to give you a run through of the other comms channels that we do have, because obviously the intranet is the beating heart, as you can see illustrated here.
Our VELUX one is where everything connects. And of course, we have multiple other comms channels than the ones that I've described here. But these are the main ones that we use.
And I have tried to illustrate how they all play into to our intranet. Yeah. So but just saying that we're also, of course, integrating Viva Engage feeds and conversations in relevant places on our intranet.
For Teams, obviously, we use this mostly as a as a collaboration tool, but we do have links straight to the VELUX one in the in the team's menu bar and also many colleagues who are getting notifications when we publish news from a site that they follow. Then, of course, we have Outlook. And this is a one way street in the sense that we have different departments sending newsletters based on SharePoint, based on VELUX one news to compile.
And again, it's to highlight the content that's in there. And then also importantly, we have buy in from all the managers in VELUX that VELUX one is where all the global information comes out of. So we don't send out mass emails.
Outlook is never used for mass communication in that way. Everything always comes out of VELUX one. Then we have a global magazine that's called View Magazine.
It's an employee magazine coming out three times a year. And in that we have lots of great articles, featured colleagues and so on. We often have the possibility to learn more, to read more based in SharePoint.
So we'll link from the magazine back to the intranet. And of course, we also use VELUX one to highlight whenever there is a new magazine out to highlight specific articles and so on. So a two way street in that sense.
We also have offline comms channels, obviously, especially because we have a lot of colleagues in production. So we have posters, we have table standees and so on. We also have info screens on most of our factories.
And for both of them, usually we will share some pretty condensed information, but they will always contain QR codes to a place, again, on VELUX one where people can learn more if they want. So it's another arrow back to the beating heart of our comms. This is just a quick run through of how we work together.
This is why we make it work so well. We have the two teams, the global comms teams and the DEX team that Christian and I are representing today. We're not the only ones, fortunately, doing this.
But one of the reasons why we make it work is, of course, because we have a shared interest in this, but also because we have a very clear line of responsibility so that we don't step on each other's toes. So when it comes to content, this is mostly on the global comms side. So we also advise colleagues.
We help write articles and guide on where to share different content. Also, we're overall responsible for the content. So in terms of governance, we're also the ones to kind of double check with.
On the other hand, Christian's team and the DEX team, they own the platform, they own the solution, and they make sure to keep us up to date on any developments, any new technologies that we can try. Christian also runs the new editor training. So whenever we have new local editors, they'll take part in a course that Christian is running.
And then we help each other and our colleagues build new sites or advise on how to do new things on the sites that they're already running. And of course, also the community engagement that Christian touched upon a little bit earlier with our internal communication ambassadors. So we also run that network as a collaboration to get both sides of the coin or all the good stuff that you can get out of both the comms side, but also the IT side.
Running fast, obviously, this is a SWOOP festival. We need to talk about analytics for a little bit. And yes, we also use analytics.
And from a global comms perspective, we use analytics mostly to track the reach of our corporate news. And this is super valuable in separate ways. So we use it externally.
I like to call it externally, internally, obviously, but for stakeholder management. So we have a lot of stakeholders who think that if you share something on the Internet, everyone's in the know. Obviously, as you can also see from the benchmark report, that's not necessarily true unless you have a 100 percent visitor and reach rate of all your news.
You need to to take a multi-channel approach. So using analytics also enables us to have that conversation with stakeholders to show them how far can we get on VELUX One and what other channels do we need to add to get the message even further out in the organization? I also use it in a slightly different way. And some of you might do this as well, because we can also use it to gauge reader interest on specific topics.
So sometimes I will use it as an indicator of specific news being shared on other channels than on our global comms channels. If we can see that reader interest is low or if it's a specific department related or functional area related news, I will advise them to go to other channels rather than than use the global channel. So it's super useful in that sense as well.
Internally, in our comms team, we use analytics to guide us on how to improve the content that we do. We test stuff. We experiment a lot.
Our founders said one experiment is better than a thousand expert views. And this is something that we we try to live by in VELUX. So we experiment with the design of articles, with the titles, with the images, the length, different formats and so on.
And then we refer to analytics to see, is this working? Are we improving reach? Do people like longer headlines? Do they like the shorter formats? Do they want podcasts? Do they want to see more videos and so on? So it really is a great tool for us to keep testing and improving the content that we do from global comms. And then obviously, from a DEX point of view, Christian will share a bit on that side. Yeah, from our viewpoint, it's more about, you could say, system health and that people can actually get to things, the finability of using an intranet.
It's also cleanup of content, making sure we don't use a lot of storage for old stuff, things that confuse people. And then, of course, we also look at search results. So again, back to findability and making this work for our employees.
Engagement is also something that has a little bit of interest, especially if we have campaigns or big changes in the company. Then we also look a little bit on engagement that could be either SharePoint or Viva Engage. A quick note about our factory workers, as Signe said in the start, they don't have laptops or mobile phones.
It basically is a very different world than people that are working in an office or working with sales or installations and other things. So we have initiated a couple of times a project where we wanted to enable our colleagues in the factories and warehouses better. So we had a project called Digital Workplace in Production that ran from 2018 to 2020 when the COVID-19 situation hit us, where we interviewed and did a lot of analysis.
What is the daily life of a production worker, et cetera, trying to figure out how we could best include these colleagues in our way of working. So we did do that for a couple of years and then we had to put the project on a break and then we started it up again in 2023. But to be honest, we have run into some limitations and we are not fully scaled this up.
There's a lot of things, barriers, things like they don't have very little time at work to actually work with digital solutions. There's a lot of safety requirements that you cannot stand by, stand at a machine doing work and look at your mobile phone at the same time. We used a bring your own device way of doing it, which has introduced some challenges for us with the Microsoft solution we chose.
We were using Viva Connections to kind of make a bridge into our SharePoint based intranet and we've engaged in other channels. And we basically have had some issues with some of the phones and some of the use cases. So not a success on the factory side yet, but it's something we are still looking at improving in the future.
All right. So just we've already gone over time, but I'm hoping it's OK that we still just one more minute to just sum this up in a sense anyway. So we pose the question, who truly owns the intranet? And while this has been a fast presentation and we could probably discuss this for a long time, our main takeaway on this is obviously that no one person or one team can own the intranet if you want to run if you want to run a successful platform.
And the more complex your organization is, so if you have production workers such as ours, people who are not necessarily on your different digital tools, it becomes even more necessary to involve a whole lot of the of the organization and HR and finance. You have to have managers involved, the safety teams and so on. So it really has to be a collaboration for for this to work.
Second takeaway, obviously, is unless you do all the content you're and I've yeah, I've yet to meet a company where one person can do that, then you need to to engage with with local editors because they know their colleagues best. So so get them on board, get them to help with the content and get feedback from them on the local needs and experiences so that you can improve overall and also so you can share tips and tricks across the organization. It's really the most valuable network we have as comms people in the local the local communications ambassadors.
And then finally, keep experimenting. You can't let your intranet become that kind of stale archive that you've seen, because when when that happens, that's when you launch the new intranet, when it becomes so old and you run out of 100000 pages and someone comes in and says, no, let's do this over. So to avoid that every four years, keep testing, keep learning, helping.
And this is where the performance metrics are really a great friend to have. So with that said, we'll we'll hand over to two more on the analytics side, I guess. Yeah, right.
Thank you. Thank you so much. See now in Christian.
Meet the speaker:
Signe Lukowski
Senior Corporate Editor
Christian Skjæran
Senior Digital Workplace Consultant
