Wednesday, August 5, 2015

Disengagement blues

By Archives of the Finnish Broadcasting
Company Yle [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons
This week, I launched a substantial intranet site for an organization of more than 900 employees. They learned about it via an "all hands" email message.

The site has stories about employees, photos, interactive tools, downloadables, and a live webcam feed. It replaces a very dull, one-page intranet site that consisted of a bunch of links to other internal sites.

And I received two responses.

That's it. Two out of 900.

I feel a little like the nighttime disc jockey who programmed a terrific three-hour air shift -- only to learn that a lightning strike at the transmitter site had knocked the station off-the-air 20 minutes into the first hour.

I didn't think for a moment that a new intranet site was going to immediately engage a diaspora of employees who are spread across multiple locations. It doesn't work that way.

But, two out of 900?

This may not be fixable. Not without cat videos, anyway.


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