The challenge
StepStone was struggling to deliver effective, company wide communications due to the lack of a centralised communications platform. Communications were sent via email and, as a result, employees’ inboxes were inundated with clutter. Additionally, different teams’ content lived in multiple locations, making it difficult for them to find the resources they were searching for.
StepStone needed a centralised location to house all content and company announcements to more effectively distribute communications. They began their search for an intranet to solve these challenges. However, the team was faced with new hurdles when evaluating solutions, including the high price tag and the amount of time it would take to roll out a new tool, as well as the change management that would be required.
Candice Blackburn
Vice President
The solution
StepStone quickly realised their current sales enablement platform, Seismic, contained all the capabilities needed to fulfil their intranet needs. Prior to launching Seismic firmwide, they pitched Seismic as a solution to help internal teams market their offerings to all employees. After receiving buy-in, they moved forward with expanding the use case of Seismic across the entire organisation. When Seismic was first implemented at StepStone, they utilised Seismic’s DocCenter to consolidate and distribute all go-to-market resources for their client facing teams. By launching NewsCenter and providing platform access to their entire organisation, StepStone’s employees now had a single source of truth for all company resources.
StepStone leverages Seismic’s NewsCenter to deliver enhanced company communications that are easily accessible to all teams in one location. Human Resources, Marketing and other departments can easily develop landing pages with timely information directly in NewsCenter. After creating these landing pages, they submit them for final review and approval prior to publishing them to NewsCenter, which ensures a consistent tone and format across all communications. The teams can also embed content within the landing pages to increase usage and awareness of available resources.
To ensure a successful launch of the tool, the team took steps to increase adoption across the organisation. A key to driving this adoption was enforcing Seismic as the organisation’s single source of truth. StepStone’s team shut down access to other repositories which forced employees to go to Seismic to find necessary resources, helping to increase awareness of the tool. Content contributors were required to submit materials through Seismic for compliance approval, which streamlined the approval process and facilitated content audits. To take it a step further, they made Seismic the default homepage across all browsers.
By making Seismic impossible to ignore, the team was able to achieve significant adoption of the tool. Additionally, employees no longer had to search through their inboxes to find emails containing the timely information or content they were looking for. Now, they can easily search for resources from right within Seismic and have full confidence that it is the most up-to-date information available. Furthermore, internal teams can utilise the highlight panel to showcase the most important employee communications. This allows them to narrow employees’ attention on the top priorities for the organisation.
Results
By leveraging Seismic’s NewsCenter, StepStone saved their organisation the significant cost of building out an intranet solution. NewsCenter has become the single source of truth for all company communications, which enables their employees to easily access company announcements and resources. Additionally, teams such as HR, Marketing and others can efficiently deliver communications to help market their internal offerings. StepStone’s strategic approach to rolling out this tool led to impressive adoption results. In just 30 days, they saw 86% adoption across the organisation. After 1 year, adoption grew to 98%.