PURPOSE:
Facing an ever-growing workforce, the District of West Vancouver needed a place for employees to find each other and maintain useful contact.
WHO IS THE CUSTOMER:
District of West Vancouver. Customer Since: 1999
CUSTOMER PROFILE:
The District of West Vancouver is district-municipality in British Columbia. It is home to over 40,000 people, and more than 750 full-time equivalent employees.
SOLUTION:
IC delivered a platform for organization and communication between employees, including dynamic organizational charts, allowing everyone to easily keep track of changes across a vast employee base.
How West Vancouver Got to Know Itself
With a sprawling collection of hundreds of employees, the District of West Van needed a better way to let employees keep track of their own organization.
Before integrating an intranet solution, the District of West Vancouver was finding that an outdated document storage solution and a total lack of an employee communication platform were becoming bottlenecks that made it difficult to stay agile. The team had exceeded 750 in size, and employees were increasingly able to spend entire careers at the municipal government without ever meeting one another. Employees could not look up one another’s phone numbers, or to see an updated listing of new hires that would let them adapt to changing team structures. The problem was beginning to cause real bottlenecks in the District’s processes, as even simple coordination between coworkers could be a tortured and time-consuming affair.
District managers needed a solution that worked for every employee, and that responded quickly to their highly dynamic situation. Intranet Solutions provided West Vancouver organizers with the software they needed to succeed.
Speeding Approval Speeds Everything
The submission and approval of electronic forms was one of the primary pain points for West Vancouver, and IC helped them speed the process considerably. Employees used to have to manually submit reports for everything from mileage expense reports to onboarding forms, and then wait for an antiquated routing process to slowly present them to a manager who can approve them. By switching to electronic forms that are automatically forwarded to the appropriate authority, or chain of authorities, West Vancouver was able to streamline the process, reduce paper waste, and decrease human error in one simple move. The whole organization is also now united behind a standardized process, removing the difficulty of conflicting types of data.
Centralized Organizational Links
One simple but very important improvement was the centralization of links to crucially important sites and apps within the newly installed West Vancouver intranet. This not only saved employees the time it takes to incessantly look up the same pieces of information, but also helped to unify processes and avoid timing and formatting conflicts. No matter where an employee is or what sort of computing device they’re using, this co-created database of vital links has become one of the West Vancouver municipal government’s most widely used electronic resources.
Feedback Gets Top Marks
Employee feedback and suggestions for management is now handled online via IC’s intranet software, and West Vancouver found this has produced a large number of worthwhile suggestions. Employees know they can trust the third-party platform to maintain their anonymity, leading to more honest feedback, and the hassle-free process removes the laziness or workload excuse for skipping the reviews.
TOP 4 BENEFITS
Dynamic Organizational Charts – that allow employees to track the whole district
Expedited Approval Process – can process expense requests with zero hassle
Employee Phone Registry – without the negative environmental impact
Application Launch Point – so employees never go without the software they need