The future of intranets: Human, helpful, and powered by AI

Samantha Grandinetti: What if companies designed intranets that act less like bulletin boards and more like campfires, places where people gather, share stories, and make plans? What if generative AI could help us rediscover human connection at work instead of replacing it? These are questions that today's guest, Jay Erickson, is working on.Jay Erickson is the Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Modus Digital, a consulting firm that's helped some of the world's biggest organizations rethink how people connect. From hospitals and healthcare networks to global enterprises.In this conversation, we'll talk about burnout, belonging, how side conversations can change a culture, and why the future of the intranet might be more human than ever. This is You've Got Comms. I'm Samantha Grandinetti, and here's my conversation with Jay Erickson. Jay, it is great to have you here. Welcome to the show. I see you're joining me from a very cozy hobby cave. It looks very nice in there. How are you doing today?

Jay Erickson: I'm good. I'm happy to be here, Sam. Thanks for having me. Yes, all the things I love here, my guitar and books. So, I have everything I need.

Samantha Grandinetti: I also have a lot of things that I love and some things that I don't, like documents to shred or some junk my toddler left in the room. So, it's a little less curated. Well, let's kick off the conversation. I want to walk back to the phone call that we had in preparing for this. I was inspired when doing my research about you. And I saw you wrote an article about creating more human digital experiences. That's where I really want to start us off today. So, you say, "There is no B2C software, there is no B2B application. There is only human-to-human or H2H." What happens when we just forget the human aspect of intranets?

Jay Erickson: Yeah. I think intranets are sitting in the context of the corporate world. And I think if you look back, historically, the corporate world really came out of the Industrial Revolution. And it's this very mechanistic model of looking at the world. There's gears and cogs. And you're at your desk, and you're a certain kind of cog, and a certain thing comes to your desk, and you do a thing, and then it goes down the line. And it's evolved, obviously, but there's a view of corporations like that, and looking at the assets of a corporation through the lens of what's our inventory, and factories we have, and IP. In my opinion, all of that matters, but what really is at the heart of all corporations are people. At the end of the day, you have a person who is making a decision, who is doing something. And even there's a person who's the customer, who's the outside, and they're doing a thing. So, that's a human involved with it. And all those humans, from the board to the line worker, involved with these other humans that they're trying to interact with. So, when you pull it out, it's human-to-human. I think with intranets, that can get lost, and you can get caught in this functional mechanistic view of, okay, we've got all the forms available that people need, and we've got the information, and all the boxes are checked. But what does it feel like for the employee or the team member to interact with it? And is it promoting a sense of belonging? Are they inspired? These things which machines don't really care about, but humans do. Humans are emotional. Humans get tired. Humans have good days and bad days. We want people to be inspired and have a sense of safety and belonging. And, so, I think about intranets. I love the image of a campfire, and I think about it anthropologically that for 100,000 years, for the vast majority of that, the meetings were getting around the fire and talking and sharing stories and making decisions and exchanging information. And there probably weren't a lot of PTO forms going back and forth around the Neolithic campfire, but we evolved in that. And it feels good when we're in those scenarios. So, how can we think about the intranet and create a space in which it has that sense of togetherness, a sense of safety, a sense of orientation to something, and being able to share stories and make plans? So, I like to think of it that way.

Samantha Grandinetti: Yeah, bringing it back to that connection of how a group of people functions together, works together, lives together, makes progress, instead of just, "Here's the form you need. Please complete this by X date or please acknowledge." It's a different ask, right? It's a different way to show up.

Jay Erickson: Yes, and it can be both.

Samantha Grandinetti: Yeah, absolutely. So, when you look at an organization's intranet or digital workspace and you're thinking about all these different clues, belonging, you're thinking about bringing people together, what clues does a company's intranet give you about the culture behind it? And for the leaders who are shaping those spaces, what should they be asking themselves if they want the experience to reflect the best of their culture and not the blind spots?

Jay Erickson: I think it's a lot of different things. When we think about design and experience, we think about the whole thing. So, it's everything from how easy is it to use, like, is it easy to log on or do I have to do 15 different things that creates a lot of work and frustration? Or is it easy to use and easy to find stuff? So, creating basic UX principles to make it easy and accessible. And then, does it look good? Does it feel good? Is it inspiring? Is it pleasant? Does it make me feel, "Oh, I want to be in here'? You know, all employees are also consumers. They're using Uber and Netflix and all these other things which they're used to a certain experience and then they go here. And when it's not that or very far from that, it can feel not as good. And that's just a very basic emotional reaction to an experience. And these platforms can be underinvested in because companies are so revenue-driven and the CFO has a lot of influence, and the intranet or the internal communications platform generates $0 on the surface. But having done many ROI studies around intranets over 20 years, it is a huge opportunity to do things like decrease turnover, increase productivity. These things which have serious financial impact are harder to measure. But moreover, to your point, I think reinforce and promote culture. So, that can happen in obviously how you project your brand. A lot of times companies invest in brand and they project that to the outside world. Well, it's just as important to project that to the inside world. And then for those things to be also concordant. I think when the company's out there putting out press releases, "We care about this and this is our thing," and the intranet doesn't reflect that, that discord can also be not great over the long term. And I think it can be simple things, too, like, what's the tone? Proactively decide, "What's our editorial tone? Are we friendly, gregarious, informal?" Deciding really what the writing is going to be like. And now with today's tools where we are using bionic tools to help us write and edit, you could build a GPT, a bespoke filter thing very quickly in a day and embed those things and say, "This is the tone we want, this is our culture, here's our mission statement. And any piece that you're putting out, run it against that. Is it reflecting that? What are your suggestions to make it more aligned?" We have some very interesting tools now to do that sort of thing. Does that answer?

Samantha Grandinetti: Yeah, I think that does. And it brings up some interesting examples that I've experienced, too. I'm on the comms team and we do internal comms at Staffbase. And when I joined, we sat in the people experience department. And I remember seeing the exact example that you gave of all these press releases, all these external campaigns we were doing. And I thought, "When is anyone going to tell us about this stuff?" Because we need to talk about it internally, and I thought that was such a miss. And now, we sit in a different department. We're in the go-to-market department. And so, we get way more access just to know the goings-on of the business and our initiatives and things like that. You're right. You can see when it's discordant. You can see when it works really well. For example, when I started at Staffbase, people would share these amazing personal stories on our social wall. And I thought a culture like that where people can share so openly on the company intranet is really cool. I think your examples, I've experienced that. So, the idea of these digital experiences reflecting the people behind them, it makes me think of your work in healthcare. It's such a purpose-driven, but also one of the most burned-out industries out there. You've talked to me, in a previous call that we've had, about how everyone in healthcare starts from this place of deep passion and calling, but that it's easy to lose sight of that purpose under the pressure and the burnout. So, I wanted to ask you, how do you think communications and digital tools can help people in those environments reconnect with the why of what they do?

Jay Erickson: Yes. I think part of it is this opportunity to do storytelling and come around the campfire. And I think what I've noticed in healthcare . . . we do work with healthcare systems, with life sciences companies on patient-facing things, and also internal things and intranets. And what I've noticed is there are inspirational stories happening every day across the health system, or even for a life sciences company. Drugs are saving lives. I myself, I'm a cancer survivor. Without a certain set of molecules, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. So, I think there are miracles happening all the time, every day. And, so, what is your mechanism for journalistic practices, or what is the mechanism for finding out those stories on a regular basis and putting them upfront? It takes an investment, but it's one of those things, in healthcare, everybody comes into healthcare with a passion to do something. We're all patients. We all have patients in our lives. It is a very noble calling, and then people can get burnt out. And I do think that surfacing those stories, not only celebrating those individuals who are involved with that, but also allowing others to be inspired by them, "This is who we are, and this is what we're doing, and this is why we're doing it," I think that's a huge opportunity. And I think there's another opportunity for these systems to . . . As we are increasingly working through digital media, you and I are speaking over some fiber and all this stuff. We're not in the same space. It's pretty amazing and magical that we can do that, but something is lost. And especially since the pandemic, people are working more remotely, or also since the pandemic, especially our nurses. HCPs, in general, healthcare providers, but nurses especially, have not recovered as a community from 2020. And there was burnout in the nursing community before that. And, so, how can you create safe spaces to have conversations just to connect human to human? And that might be in-person, it might be over Zoom, it might be . . .There's a company that I'm involved in called Slow Talk that came through the Modus incubator, and it's working with nursing populations to create, and it's voice-only. It's saying, "We're so burnt out by all screens." So, it's just voice-only, but it's curated by AI. And it also allows leaders in an anonymous way to track engagement and dissatisfaction. This population on this unit, they're really suffering. Can we put attention towards them organizationally? It's a pretty cool thing. But there's just a lot of power of connecting individuals to have human-to-human conversations, but using technology to do that and curate and facilitate those conversations.

Samantha Grandinetti: I think that's such a cool example. And I think when you say, "Oh, it's audio only," I think people can be so much more candid when they're not thinking about how they look on their screen in a meeting or something like that. I think they can imagine they can be a little bit more themselves. Do you think that's probably the case?

Jay Erickson: Absolutely. I think it's better for the nervous system. And I think they can also pop in their earbuds and go for a walk. You can have a different kind of conversation. And people listen more because when you're on the screen, you're paying attention to a lot of visual cues and things and then multitasking. We're in this thing now, and I am paying attention to this conversation, but I also have three screens with a lot of information on it just there. I do think there's something powerful about going audio-only. In my meetings, unless there's something to be shared on a screen, I often will ask, "Is there anything we need to look at on a screen?" If not, I'll just pop the earbuds in and walk and listen. I find I'm a much better listener when it's audio-only.

Samantha Grandinetti: That's a really interesting observation, I think. I'm curious, you have this company, Slow Talk, that has this initiative. I'm wondering, what other ways can we create these little moments of connection? I imagine that this same need for this one-on-one connection or this really authentic connection, it must be ubiquitous. You must see it across lots of different companies. Do you see that same pattern across other industries? And what are some good ways that we can mimic something like Slow Talk?

Jay Erickson: Totally. In part, that has inspired us. We've been working remotely as an organization since 2002. So, we've done a lot of things over the years to . . . How do we build and maintain culture and belonging? I mean, we've had offices, but there's been significant remote components of the business for that time. How do we do things to promote culture, create connectivity? And we have . . . What started as a program called Donuts is now a program we have called, as you used the word, Moments. And so, it's Moments. And it really is pretty simple. There's an administrative way to, we're like, "We want this group to connect with that group," and set some business rules around it. But what it does is it just goes in the background and has access to people's schedules and just randomly takes two people, and you can set it, could be three people, whatever, and puts them together, creates a meeting. And there's a half-hour moment on their calendar and they just show up and they just talk. There's just no agenda and you just talk. And then they . . . Part of our culture around it is to post to our water-cooler channel a screenshot of them. You're seeing other people, "Oh, they connect." And people often will say, "Oh, we talked about our trip to Venezuela," or not trip to Venezuela. It's in the news. Probably nobody's taking a trip there right now.

Samantha Grandinetti: Probably not.

Jay Erickson: We talked about our trip to France and we talked about this and that. It's just these little moments that are getting dropped into the water-cooler channel where you, as an observer, you learn a little bit about someone. It’s that sense of, it kind of adds some real-life feel to the water-cooler channel in a way. And it's fun and it's relaxing. People look forward to it because it's not like they can just show up and just hang out and talk and get to know each other. It's all across the company, different functions and reports. Everybody's involved and we found that to be really helpful. So we've developed actually a plugin for Staffbase and we're about to go into alpha on it. It's a standalone piece of software, but now there's a Staffbase plugin that hopefully will allow people who use Staffbase to turn this on and have this run and just create these moments. That's going to be interesting.

Samantha Grandinetti: I just love that idea. I do something, this is like a remnant of a piece of culture that was around when I first started at Staffbase where you just, whoever's new, you see like, "Hey, there's a new person starting announcement in our company Slack."I just set up a meeting with them and just have coffee and chat with them. Because I don't know what they do yet and I want them to feel welcome. But I also just . .  I work 100% remotely. So, this is a great opportunity for me to actually just make a connection when I'm not going to hang out with them in the office because I'm not going to be in the office very much. I think implementing that across a company would be so powerful because I've seen how powerful it can be in my own conversations.

Jay Erickson: Yeah. And the key there, like all UX, is just make it simple, make it easy. A meeting just shows up and it shows up at a time that works for everybody. Nobody has to do anything. That's a big part of it, too.

Samantha Grandinetti: Well, and so, I think you've come to, of course, a topic that everyone is talking and asking about, which is AI. In a previous call that we had, you said something that got me excited. You said, "Gen AI is going to replace the intranet," and that's a big statement. I think it might scare some people. So, what do you mean by this? Is this a doomsday prediction for intranets or something a bit cooler?

Jay Erickson: Well, I'm not sure it's as dramatic as any of that. First of all, what is an intranet? I like to say internal communications platform, which might include a SharePoint, and it might include a SharePoint site. It might include Staffbase also as a communications platform. So, those things can coexist. Sometimes it's just one or the other. I'm thinking more of the SharePoints of the world where it's this website, this monolithic thing that has a tremendous amount of information to navigate, and find, and search, and you go to, to get the thing that you need. And as people have designed a bunch of intranets with folks, there's this myth that, "Oh, well people are just going to browse around and find stuff." And I think that's pretty funny sometimes that . . .I mean, what world is it where it's like, "Oh, I have 15 minutes. I'm just going to see what's going on down this deep click path on the intranet." Maybe there's some news on the homepage that people get excited about. That's that storytelling piece I do think is important and that needs to live somewhere. And that might live, if this bigger monolithic thing goes away, there's places where those things can live and through more internal communication platform like a Staffbase, but more of those, a Sitecore or SharePoint or these monolithic intranet things are going to go away because it's just going to be so much easier to go to an interface. And that might live on a website, but an interface that is conversational or you're not navigating. You're not using traditional search. You're just saying, "Hey, I want to go on vacation," "I need that form," or, "Remind me of the policy."And it's going to start to hook into more systems, too. If you have Workday, for instance, you say, "Remind me of the vacation policy. And how much do I have left for this year, and will it roll over?" And it'll know your account in Workday and it'll know the policy. It'll be able to make sense of all that and advise you on what your vacation PTO situation is. And what I think is very exciting, too, is that this is going to start to show up inside of Slack and inside of Teams. In UX we say, "Build the sidewalks where the people walk," so people are living in those systems. Once you have that conversational layer in the middleware, it's relatively easy to expose that to a user inside of chat or Teams as a bot or a channel and it's able to work with it conversationally. I don't think internal communications platforms are going away. I do think the monolithic internal website pattern of internal communications is going to go the way of the dodo.

Samantha Grandinetti: Well and I think the way, right now you're talking about, "I need to find information. I have to search for information," versus, "I need information. Information is served to me based on what I ask for." I think even just in the way that information is surfaced will be different.

Jay Erickson: And also, I think what's exciting, too, is something will happen that hasn't happened before, which is not only will you get information, you'll get advice. So, it'll say, "You have 11 PTOs remaining. It's October. You should really schedule that because only two days roll over. Think about taking your time off." I mean if that's something that the corporation wants to promote, which I think the smart ones do. They want people to be recharged and rested and actually use the PTO.

Samantha Grandinetti: Of course.

Jay Erickson: So, I think there will start to be this more of an advisory capacity as well. It'll do a little more than just serve you the information.

Samantha Grandinetti: Well, and if we're going to be having all these conversations with AIs in the future, I think as the people building these experiences in comms, you want to maintain your relationships with all of your employees. What can we do to keep this experience human while still embracing AI?

Jay Erickson: I think it's part of how you build the AI and thinking about the tone. Again, if you want that editorial guide for your copy to be friendly and humorous and whatever you want it to be, whatever that internal brand identity is, when you build those systems, build that in so it reflects that. Like bots who write patient communications, there's been a few studies published in journals in healthcare, they score significantly higher on empathy scores than healthcare professionals. Now, I don't blame healthcare professionals because they're overtaxed. They have two seconds to write something. They can't sit down and take the time to write something that would feel empathetic to the patient just because of the volume of what that is. But these systems are doing that, and so it's providing what feels to the patient or to the user more human. So an answer to this is, if you create these bots and you do it right and you have the right tone, it can feel human. So, obviously, it's not human. I'm playing with the question a bit to say it's human-esque, it's human-ish, it's human-like. It is, on some level, more human. And then as all the cogs in the machines of the corporation start to get replaced by AI, then what's left is the more relational work, more visionary work, more collaborative work. Work that these machines are not going to be able to do for a very long time, in my opinion. So, I think there's going to be less work of someone sitting at their desk and cranking stuff out and more work where people have to actually collaborate together in spaces. I think that trend is going to happen. And then you can use AI to create those connections and say, "I see you're trying to solve this problem. Let me put a meeting on your books with this person in the organization who knows a lot about that," and connect the humans. So, again, how can we use this technology to make people bionic and also create more human connection on purpose? That's the invitation.

Samantha Grandinetti: That's so interesting. In the case of the patient seeing notes from an AI, that AI is built to acknowledge humanity with empathy, in a case where a burnt-out nurse is probably just trying to cross this off her list, just trying to get it done. But then you have another opportunity to think about how to make the space in your workday to get together to problem-solve, and be creative, and be strategic, instead of, like you said, just cranking stuff out.

Jay Erickson: Right.

Samantha Grandinetti: Very cool. If you think, again, we're looking to the future here. If you think about the next few years where comms and IT leaders are heading, what's one thing that you hope they remember about the human side of digital transformation?

Jay Erickson: Look, there's no question that we live in a golden age of technology. And there's amazing stuff that can be done and happening, and it's very exciting. People can get very focused on that and put their gaze there and their energy there and what we can do with this implementation, how quickly we can do stuff. But to just remember that at the end of the day, what matters most is a bunch of human beings who are in relationship to each other, who are trying to do a thing, which is pretty much the same that our ancestors did 50,000 years ago when they were gathered around a campfire and say, "Hey, should we go over to that next valley?" and, "Oh, tell me that story from what happened today out in the forest."And we've evolved to be that way. In a world where we're seeing rise of what is being called an epidemic of loneliness and some other things, how can we create spaces to get back to coming together and belonging and really giving people a sense of connectedness in a felt way and not just in a way that shows up in a spreadsheet?

Samantha Grandinetti: And I think that's such an important thing to remember because every time we talk about AI, we're thinking about productivity maxing. We're talking about how can we squeeze more out of your workday by getting our AI to help us write something or complete something or analyze something. But you're just really taking a step back and saying, how can you actually just make room for humans to be human at work? And with these digital experiences, actually create that space or platform for that.

Jay Erickson: Yes, and all that other stuff. It's not mutually exclusive. You can do both.

Samantha Grandinetti: Well, I think that's actually a very hopeful way to round out this conversation. There is actually room to be human in the age of generative AI and productivity maxing and everything.

Jay Erickson: Thanks for having me.

Samantha Grandinetti: Thank you so much for this thoughtful conversation. I love how we've talked about intranet. It's not as this big static technology, but this living thing that evolves and can look different based on whatever organization you have and what needs you have. I hope people take away some energy for using this technology to build connection and really support their people, and learn more about Slow Talk because that sounds really interesting. For our listeners, if you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to follow You've Got Comms on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We release new conversations every two weeks with the people shaping the future of internal communication, from leaders like Jay to the voices redefining how we connect at work.

Jay Erickson: Thanks, Sam.

Samantha Grandinetti: Thank you again, Jay. I really enjoyed this.