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01732 759725 28 INTRANET incredible opportunity to offer next gen cloud solutions. We are still recruiting, but the strategy is not to go wide but, rather, to find the right partners and develop much deeper relationships with them. Spreading yourself thin just doesn’t work – we can’t give partners the support they need and if they see there are too many partners proposing Powell Software, there is no differentiator for them,” he said. So far, Powell Software has nine customers in the UK, notably United International Pictures (UIP), which needed a way to engage with and reassure 500 employees spread across the UK who, with cinemas shut, had an uncertain future. “This is when crisis communication is a must-have. How do I get my people to talk together; how do we reassure them; how do we give them an inviting hub where they can go, where they can feel that the company is still here and still strong. UIP were on SharePoint, they were on Office 365, so it made sense from a financial perspective to leverage their existing platform. We delivered the project really fast, within a month and a half, and it looks absolutely amazing. That is a typical use case.” Growth drivers The pandemic is a clear growth driver for implementing and/or modernising an intranet. Another trend that Gomes says is becoming more important is the employee experience and employee wellbeing. “It’s huge, and we hear more and more about it not only from partners but also from customers. For many of them, the third lockdown has been going on for too long and is exposing aspects of hybrid working they weren’t expecting,” he said. In addition to the problem of Zoom/ Teams fatigue, employees miss casual interactions with colleagues, especially expensive and, more importantly, you are going to have to develop again any time you want to make changes. So, it is not necessarily cost-effective or the most evergreen solution. That’s why people use more agile solutions that have a much quicker time to value,” he explained. Gomes added: “If you are a 50-user enterprise, I would say your level of maturity and complexity might warrant looking at SharePoint out of the box and tailoring your intranet yourself. But not if you have a lot of sites and a lot of users and you need to update all the sites at once because you have changed the layout. This is something we can completely industrialise with the management tool underpinning our digital workplace. We can do that at once on 500 sites. This is an incredible added value in terms of cost and time to implement.” UK partners As Microsoft’s number 1 market in Europe for Office 365, the UK is an important market for Powell Software, which last October was accredited on the G-Cloud 12 framework as an approved supplier for digital projects in the public sector. In order to maximise opportunities, Gomes is in the process of building a UK network of partners specialising in Microsoft, Office 365 and process automation. “We have several really active partners, including Doherty Associates, TSG, Synergi. We tend to go with partners that are more boutique from a size perspective, up to 100 employees usually, where we see this unplanned meetings in corridors or at coffee machines and photocopiers. “What we hear a lot is people saying ‘We have Teams; we can be on calls all the time; through social features, we can comment on articles and open a discussion board and it’s fantastic. All of that we can do, but it doesn’t solve the problem of bringing human interactions into the workplace. How how can I bring that back?’. “One of our latest innovations is a Virtual Coffee Machine app, a piece of software that sits on Teams and automatically looks at your calendar, finds free periods and then books you and a maximum of 5 or 6 people for a 15-minute chat. This does two things; it reminds people working from home to stop work for a coffee and it encourages them to take time to chat with colleagues. Some they will know, some they might not, some they will know but never have taken the time to connect with before. This is not a panacea, but it gives an idea of the things that Powell is constantly thinking about for customers who miss those human interactions,” he said. “The other major trend we see is the digital divide – blue collar/white collar – people in factories and people in offices. There has always been a divide, but now that we are all working remotely that divide is getting bigger. How do we make sure we create a digital workspace that is inclusive? How can I deploy an app for the guys in the factory, who won’t necessarily have Office 365, so they receive the same news as everyone else and have a platform where they can voice things about the business? We are doing that as well.” The pandemic has already transformed the way businesses communicate. The next challenge is to improve how they support and engage employees in an era of hybrid working. https://powell-software.com Virtual Coffee Machine app ...continued Business advocates In another innovation, Powell Software is using gamification technology and collaboration in Teams to encourage employees to share company content and collateral through their personal social media channels – and earn rewards for doing so. Its new Employee Advocacy Templates module, built on Microsoft 365, centralises information from internal and external communications so that employees can access and share content and become brand ambassadors. A virtual leaderboard displays ‘points’ and ‘badges’ awarded to individuals who do so (e.g. a Superman badge for 40 Tweets), as well as prizes. Other features include smart bridging technology between the company intranet and Teams so that employees can write or share their own content through a dedicated Powell Teams channel; and the ability for HR to use the Templates to alert employees of jobs vacant within their organisation for sharing on their social channels.