Digital workflow for RVA

The essence

The RVA (National Employment Office) holds an enormous amount of knowledge, but it was not equally easy to find or accessible within the organisation. To bring all the scattered tools and platforms together and thus increase their digital maturity, they knocked on The Flow’s door. The result is a two-year journey to optimise the digital workflow with the help of Microsoft 365 tooling. One of the most important steps in this: a uniform, consolidated intranet under the name “Kiosk” under which all available information sits.

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The question

The National Employment Office – RVA for short – is a federal public social security institution that provides, among other things, unemployment insurance and schemes for career breaks (e.g. parental leave) and time credit. The organisation has 30 offices across Belgium and around 3000 employees who, in addition to general procedures, also have specific processes per team and office – and therefore a lot of in-house knowledge.

“The biggest challenge was that our information sources were so scattered across different tools and platforms, each with its own search function. There was no clear overview, no logical structure and no management by a business owner.”
Inneke Hemmeryckx, Head of Knowledge Management & Digital (collaborative) working, RVA

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And so RVA turned to Cronos Public Services, our partner for governments, who immediately referred them to us. Together we got to work on a complete digital workflow journey. Including one large consolidated intranet that connects to the digital workplace employees need, and that boosts the organisation’s digital maturity.

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Solution design

On 16 May 2023, Kiosk went live for 3000 people. Laurent Schoenaers, project leader The Flow: “The Kiosk intranet is the first thing employees see when they open any browser. It is a consolidated source where everything is directly accessible, set up fully bilingually. Employees see personalised, local and national internal news there and have direct access to all applications and sub-portals that apply to them. Everything has the same look & feel, the same structure and the same way of navigating and searching. See it as a gigantic SharePoint environment with all kinds of sub-SharePoints underneath it.”

“We also ensured that access is function based: depending on your position within the organisation, you have access to the right information and applications. If you change function, team or office, the access rights change automatically. A lot handier than checking and setting everything manually!”, says Laurent.

The Kiosk is intuitively and logically organised and contains all the links to documentation, applications, processes, and whatever else is needed for an employee to do their work smoothly and efficiently. There is also a page per office full of information about access, accessibility, facilities, etc. The onboarding time of new employees in particular will drop considerably thanks to the efficiency of the new portal.

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Project flow

User research

Inneke Hemmeryckx (RVA): “The first step was analysing what the new intranet should look like. We sat down with a design team to look at how we could approach the project from a user experience perspective. We listened to what the employees said and put ourselves in the shoes of new employees. Which flow is logical for them? What do they want differently? Based on that, we formulated a vision with a number of requirements for the intranet. That is our checklist throughout the entire project: every time something new is developed or migrated, we test it against our vision and checklist.”

“We also went to listen to the employees for the name. Previously the intranet was officially ‘RIO’, which stands for ‘RVA Intranet ONEM’ (ONEM is the French-language name). But no one in the organisation knew exactly what that stood for. ‘Kiosk’ was a name that was known, the name of our former internal newspaper and unofficially the intranet. So the name was quickly chosen.”

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Digital flow

Inneke Hemmeryckx (RVA): We developed a structured framework based on our vision and checklist, together with Jan Sabbe (The Flow). For each process of our digital workflow project that we start, we do a kick-off, in which we determine the ‘peg’ or navigation structure together.

We also carried out a Digital Maturity scan, so that we could draw up the digital change & adoption tracks based on it.

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The team

Laurent Schoenaers is project leader at The Flow, Inneke Hemmeryckx is business owner on the RVA side. Six of our consultants work on RVA’s digital journey, one of whom is dedicated and sits at RVA two days a week as the central point of contact for technical problems.

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The bigger picture

The Kiosk is the second process to go live within the broad project of building out the digital workplace. We integrate a whole series of tools that RVA already had, or of which they use an outdated variant such as Lotus Notes.

Laurent Schoenaers (The Flow): “A lot runs in parallel. The technical implementation goes somewhat faster than the substantive collection of documentation and knowledge – work that inevitably takes a lot of time for the employees, on top of their daily work. So at The Flow we are now working on the next portal site that will be integrated into Kiosk.”

Not all portals exist yet; we are developing a whole series of new portals and rebuilding existing ones. In the Kiosk we bring them all together. They look better, are easier to search and access, and this way the available knowledge within RVA is gathered in 1 central, large place.

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Feedback

The “Kiosk” intranet is now live for all RVA employees – what do they think of it?

Laurent Schoenaers (The Flow): “The first reactions were generally positive, despite the big change and different way of working. Now, from the project and internally at RVA, a large part is dedicated to change & adoption. Including various trainings, tailored to the digital maturity of the employees and provided with clear, transparent communication. The navigation in particular takes some getting used to, because it is completely different. It works faster, more logically and more intuitively, but for employees who have worked in the old environment for years, it is of course a bit of an adjustment.”

“As an RVA employee you no longer have to go looking for the info, the info comes to you.”

Laurent: “Because this is only the beginning of the journey, we started with a baseline measurement of digital maturity. That survey was very wide-ranging on general knowledge and use of digital applications. In two years we will do the same measurement and see the effect of the new digital workflows. With every roll-out of a new product, we get closer to the goal.”

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The Flow X RVA

Laurent Schoenaers (The Flow): “The collaboration between us and RVA runs very smoothly. It is a very mature and complementary team, both our profiles and the RVA team members. We all complement each other well, the work is well divided between the competencies of our consultants and those of RVA.

“There is also a lot of transparency and flexibility, and that is really great to work that way. Both RVA and we ourselves are far from a 9-to-5 mentality because everyone is so involved in the project, which makes for very pleasant work! That is why we enthusiastically bring donuts and Berliner buns when the occasion arises. 😉”

Inneke Hemmeryckx (RVA): There is open communication – which I do find important. If something is not going well, we can talk about it and we always find a solution. It is a large team (6 people from The Flow, 8 people at RVA), so in the beginning you always have to align with each other a bit. In the meantime we have found a good rhythm to collaborate smoothly!”

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What else is in the pipeline?

Over the coming year, the intranet portal will mainly be expanded with knowledge and documentation. The technical part of that is for us; the content is a job for RVA itself and is led by Inneke’s Knowledge Management & Digital (collaborative) working department.

Laurent and his team focus on preparing and delivering the trainings to employees who publish knowledge on the portals; later they will train RVA employees who take over the training (“train the trainer”).

“We don’t want to limit ourselves to what we are going to build; after our training, the user must be able to get to work themselves. So we work together with RVA’s technical team to check whether we use all the right terms and contexts.”

In addition to trainings, we also help with communication around change & adoption, and how we get all employees on board with that new digital flow.

Laurent Schoenaers (The Flow): “The next big step in the project is the roll-out of Microsoft Teams for head office. They do already have Microsoft Teams, but do not yet use it as a collaboration tool. By drawing out a complete digital flow tailored to them, we ensure that the full potential of MS Teams, and by extension the full Microsoft 365 tooling, is used.”

Follow us on LinkedIn and stay tuned for the further course of this great project.