Mobile and social have become a way of life. This true is for how we both communicate and manage our everyday tasks. Having similar options for how we work only makes more and more sense.

David Baker, VP of IT for St. Joseph Health, recognized this and set out to build a social and mobile solution at the care organization. His goal: To increase collaboration and improve productivity for employees at 14 facilities across three states. 

“Salesforce had done a case study with Stanford Medical and their use of Chatter. I saw that and had an ‘aha moment’ about the opportunity to do something socially collaborative at our company,” says Baker. “And that was when I saw the vision for being able to rip out our internal intranet and just redevelop it with Force.com.” From that, Staffhub was born.

Keep reading to learn Baker’s development best practices, and join us March 17th for the free webinar where we dive into the topic even further.  

1. Recognize employees need more

Baker describes St. Joseph’s previous legacy intranet tool as a “glorified repository.” Of the company’s 25-thousand employees, only about one-thousand were considered users, of which only 100 were active, and just four were categorized as “power users.” There was also a general frustration among employees about not being able to get access to the information they were looking for. Building a completely new intranet solution was the only option.

2. Make it a place people want to go

St. Joseph Health’s tagline for the Staffhub project has been: “Email is where information goes to hide.” The intranet has liberated data and info for employees, given users a personality, and encouraged interaction and collaboration across the business. “Folks from Northern California, Southern California, and Texas, that may have not had a voice or understood there are other people out there working on similar stuff, can connect. It's helping us to become a true enterprise company,” says Baker. 

3. Get the Business to buy-in

Although he knew it would be a challenge to get the support of the Business, Baker also realized that Staffhub wouldn’t succeed without it. To earn buy-in, he focused on selling the vision of what a truly collaborative social hub could look like. He also emphasized just how big social media is in employee’s personal lives and how vital it was to give them similar tools at work. “We knew if we let this opportunity fly by that we would just limp along,” says Baker.

4. Encourage executive support

Early on, Baker made a request to St. Joseph’s executives that they try to log into Staffhub everyday to read a few posts. He let them know the tool was available on their mobile device and, especially if they had any experience with social media at all, the intranet would be intuitive to use. Lastly, he asked them to post one time a week, as employees are always interested in what their leadership has to say. The result was VPs and CEOs becoming regular contributors from the beginning, which also encouraged adoption company wide.