Tesco Bank’s vision is to be the bank for people who shop at Tesco, offering retail banking and insurance products to those customers.

The bank engaged CompanyNet to deliver an enterprise-class intranet on Office 365. Its requirements were a great fit for our Kira intranet platform, with ownership of the project shared between Tesco Bank’s Internal Communications and HR teams.

At the core of the challenge was a need for more efficient and effective communications across Tesco Bank. The team wanted to make it easier for colleagues to connect with each other, and make it possible to socialise content more widely across the organisation.

To deliver on the core set of requirements in short order, Tesco Bank decided to adopt an ‘MVP’ (minimum viable product) concept to implementing their new intranet. Working through Tesco’s requirements, we put together a solution based on our Kira intranet platform, built on SharePoint Online and augmented by Office 365 internal communications tools including Yammer.

A soft launch to 500 users was initiated three months after the project began, followed by a full rollout to 4,000 users just three months later. The team at Tesco Bank supported the rollout with a comprehensive Communications Plan, which undoubtedly helped guarantee the success of the launch.

Mike Sterry, Senior Internal Communications Manager, Tesco Bank said: “We’re absolutely delighted with what CompanyNet have helped us to deliver. The development, implementation and adoption of our new platform has been incredibly successful.

Kira has enabled us to deliver a modern, intuitive social intranet that allows us to deliver a personalised experience for Tesco Bank colleagues, and currently sits among the best-in-class of corporate intranets within our industry.”

The soft launch was a success, with users taking up the new communications tools straight off the bat.

One of the biggest success stories for Tesco Bank has been the adoption of Yammer. The Communications Plan incorporated a “Yammer Week”, which saw 1,500 new users welcomed onto the network.

Yammer Week placed a strong emphasis on the impact of the cultural change of introducing new enterprise social tools. The results have been extremely positive:

• Senior leaders are regularly “Yamming”, sharing information on Yammer and setting a positive example to colleagues.
• Colleague achievements are being recognised and celebrated through the ‘Praise’ tool.
• Yammer insights and successes are being shared to make the new environment even more engaging. For example, more than 90% of the top 50 most followed Yammer users have a profile picture.
• Examples of how effective Yammer can be as a feedback mechanism are also being shared. For example, staff have used Yammer to provide feedback on the latest issue of Colleague Conference, the bank’s in-house magazine.

With the MVP intranet now well-established, Tesco Bank is fully embracing the idea of ‘continuous improvement’ of its intranet. The organisation has already started using Microsoft PowerApps to model a set of HR forms, and is keen to exploit Microsoft Flow to put more power in the hands of business users, reducing the reliance on IT.

The next wave of activity will focus on the needs of the Operations side of Tesco Bank to meet a set of specific-targeted requirements which are currently being defined.