Employee Intranet Redesign

The Azrieli Foundation’s intranet was built in MS SharePoint. It was initially designed to connect employees working across three office locations globally, as well as remotely during the pandemic.

Upon starting at the Foundation in October 2022, it was my job to update the intranet (referred to by staff as “the Dashboard”) content on a weekly basis. There were five blocks in the header banner with opportunity to highlight news stories about the Foundation’s funding, and three blocks below that for internal office updates.

In January 2024, I took it upon myself to reformat the Dashboard’s layout for multiple reasons.

I wanted to:

1. Create subpages in order to highlight different types of communications (i.e. grantee updates, staff news and events, and a wide variety of internal news).

2. Place importance on internal resources for staff and make it an easy one-stop-shop for staff to find things they would need (i.e. onboarding resources, the employee directory, information on operations and IT FAQs, health benefits, and more).

3. Include more in-depth content that staff would be interested in reading and direct links to news stories on other platforms (i.e. longer form articles posted to the Dashboard, and direct links to external articles).

4. Overall, I wanted to improve the intranet platform for staff globally by including content that pertains to them, and optimizing user experience by sorting content in a way that users would understand, regardless of what team or office they were on.

After designing mockups (see here), working with our web developer to add some new fields, and brainstorming with members of the operations team, I was able to build a new intranet platform for staff.

The new intranet SharePoint website was expanded to include:

• Grantee Program and Updates section, with subpage (articles provided by the Comms team)

• Azrieli Foundation in the News section, with subpage (archive of links to news stories)

• Staff News and Events, with subpage (articles provided by the Comms team)

• Staff Spotlight, with subpage (articles provided by the Comms team)

• Important Dates (i.e. office closures, holidays, staff events, etc.)

• Learning and Resources, with subpage that offers

  • Onboarding resources

  • Operations and IT resources

  • Public events by our grantees

• IT Corner, with subpage that offers

  • Microsoft 365 training for all apps

  • Cybersecurity tips

  • Tech how-to’s

• Community section, with subpage introducing staff to what’s in their office’s neighbourhood

• Health Benefits section, with subpage including

  • Staff access to Calm app

  • Info on health benefits

• Publication library, with subpage that includes links to

  • Impact Reports

  • Newsletters

  • Fellows Program magazines

I am incredibly proud of the results I was able to achieve with this project. I took an internal website that offered very little to employees, and turned it into an internal website that is a very easy-to-navigate hub for staff, no matter where they are logging into work or what kind of questions they may be asking.