The Workvivo solution for the City of Hafnarfjörður

New workplace platform chosen – it was Workvivo

Workvivo is now in full use at Hafnarfjörður Municipality. As is well known, the technology company Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram among other services, decided to discontinue Workplace, the work community platform that has driven the internal communications of many companies and organisations.

„We therefore had to find a new internal social media platform. We looked at various solutions and Workvivo was the one we liked best. It met all our requirements and offered new and exciting possibilities,“ says Ingvar Högni Ragnarsson, Digital Projects Manager for the City of Hafnarfjörður. The project took almost 12 months in total – it was necessary to conduct a needs analysis, familiarise ourselves with different workplace communication platforms, and then implement and train on the new system.

A good experience with the implementation

„The implementation process itself was about 2-3 months from when we started communicating with the Workvivo implementation team. But the implementation experience was absolutely fantastic and the support and preparation from Workvivo was exemplary,“ he says.

„We got a project manager from Workvivo and split up the roles. Here on the Hafnarfjörður side, each person was in charge of a different part. One person handled the technical side, another the data transfer, as security standards have to be met for such critical data processing, and we ensured the data was transferred correctly,“ he says.

„Then we had to configure Workvio to suit our needs here in Hafnarfjörður,“ says Ingvar, mentioning that staff from the Service and Development Department, Human Resources in the Administrative Department, as well as the Development and IT Department were involved in the work.

Ingvar Högni Ragnarsson, Digital Projects Manager for the City of Hafnarfjörður, led the implementation of Workvivo at the City of Hafnarfjörður.

They took action and reduced the groups by 80%

„Implementing such a huge project requires cross-departmental collaboration. It went very well and we knew that an implementation like this presents certain opportunities. We seized them and carried out a thorough clean-up of the data, setting up the system to suit the staff of Hafnarfjörður and our use of Workvivo.“

The clean-up consisted, among other things, of reducing the number of groups found within Workplace by 80%. There was little to no activity there, with as few as one post a year.

„We examined all sorts of communication channels in this process. How best to get the message across to staff and to those who don't work in the building but out in the town.“ The clean-up had certainly been a lot of work.

„I threw myself into the work for two months and did nothing but clean it up, look at groups and create automation so that staff from certain departments would automatically be added to specific spaces in Workvivo,“ he says.

„This automation is linked to staff registrations and updates automatically in Workvivo. This means that managers no longer have to manually invite staff to their areas on Workvivo or remove them when they leave. Everything happens automatically now, for everyone's benefit,“ says Ingvar. „This was one of the new features of Workvivo that we liked so much.“

Ingvar describes how all sites can have their own media, publish news, have their own calendar, their own information pages and share information. „Yes, and just have their own internal social media,“ he says. „Workvivo has got off to a fantastic start.“

Training on the system is important

Over 2,000 people use the system. „It's therefore important that it's set up correctly and that everything works as it should.“ Ingvar says that although the implementation is complete and the guidance from Workvivo has been excellent — with their assistance and weekly meetings to review progress — the work is by no means finished.

„There are several phases to an implementation of this kind. One phase deals with data, another with setup and implementation, but the largest phase is staff training. Now, we've moved on to running courses. We're teaching people how to use the system and get it up to speed. No system works if nobody knows how to use it.“

Training courses will be held in the autumn, because although Workplace and Workvivo are similar in many ways, the platforms are also different. „Content is posted in a different way and the interaction is different. People had questions and needed to get used to the new system,“ he explains.

„We're guiding people through this and we feel that people are ready and willing to take on a new system. Overall, there's satisfaction with Workvivo and the implementation went brilliantly.“

Powerful for a phone

Ingvar says quite a few companies and organisations now need to choose a new system to replace Workplace. „Workvivo is first and foremost intended as a mobile solution (Mobile first) and that most tasks can be done on a phone. „That appealed to us because many of the council's staff are not at a computer but are out and about. We had to take that into account.“

Workvivo is now in full use, in line with the City's branding, colours and design standards. „We were very impressed by this. We were also able to activate our values. When people interact on the platform, we can also link the values to what we are doing and make them visible on the platform. You get this holistic experience that we are looking for.“

But what lessons does Ingvar draw from the setup? „How incredibly important planning and project management are in setting up a new social media platform for an entire municipality. Without such excellent project management from Workvivo, this would never have gone so well. We highly recommend working with them.“

• So, what do staff find on Workvivo? They find key information about their work and everything related to it: the management handbook, the staff handbook, events, news, and shortcuts to the main systems used in their daily work. With Workvivo, everything is in one place.