The Güdel Group, based in Langenthal, Switzerland, is a family-run manufacturer of high-precision machine components and intelligent automation solutions with 1,000 employees at 20 locations worldwide.
In this issue of Ask the Expert, we interviewed Matt Roth, Digital Marketing & Communication Specialist at the Güdel Group in Langenthal.
Often the career path into communications is not entirely straightforward. How did you get into corporate communications?
That's true for me too. I was originally a computer scientist, but after a short time I realized that the subject alone wasn't fulfilling enough for me. When I worked for a large telecoms provider, I slipped deeper and deeper into the area of customer experience as a project manager and thus into communication. I was immediately interested. I then decided to get a sound education in PR. At the same time, I also worked as a freelance journalist for a regional radio station. With this wealth of experience, I am at home in both worlds and can combine communication with IT, and vice versa. For me, that's the best possible combination.
You are responsible for digital communication at Güdel in Langenthal, what role do intranets actually play today?
More important than ever! Today, employees must be seen as a valuable asset. They change their job if it's no longer right. There is a huge range of jobs on offer in certain professions, so you have to take care of all your employees. The intranet offers precisely this opportunity to look after employees. Especially in internationally active companies, communication via the intranet brings us much closer to employees abroad. We would hardly have contact with many people without this tool.
Are there any negative aspects?
Few, the expectations of internal communication have risen massively. If there is a new development in the company, employees demand more detailed information after just a few hours. This is a particular challenge when it comes to editing and sourcing news articles. We have to make sure that we provide information to the point and have the relevant topics on our radar at an early stage.
How do you identify topics early on?
We recently launched a newsroom. The newsroom concept is increasingly being used by media companies. All topics are summarized, processed independently of the communication channel and only then played out per platform. Of course, we don't have as wide a range of topics as a media group, but the logic also works very well on a small scale. It gives the departments involved in particular much more flexibility and makes them more aware of the responsibility of good communication.
What demands do you place on an intranet today?
It has to be able to do much more than 10 years ago. It was enough if a collection of links and a few generic texts were available. Today, a product like ahead, for example, has to integrate seamlessly into the rest of the system landscape. In concrete terms, this means that we want to link the intranet closely with our SharePoint platform and our Office 365 environment, because our Internet should be the "single source" as a search platform.
However, employees also want to express their opinions and discuss topics, which is why the social intranet is more important than ever. Entering pages or news must be so easy that as many employees as possible can edit content. This only works if it is as easy to use as creating a Facebook post. Otherwise, the inhibition threshold is far too high.
And last but not least, we want integration into existing tools such as TEAMS and would also like to inform and reach our "blue collar" employees in the factories via a mobile app. They often don't have access to a computer and at most read content on their private phone.
In which direction will intranet communication develop?
In general, the intranet will become even more of a Swiss army knife and should offer solutions for all problems that arise in daily working life. The social character will probably become even stronger. Interactive communication will become even more important, but I'm not sure whether this will be "chat bots". People want to communicate with people.
Breaking down language barriers is very important in international business. With ahead, we are able to create machine-translated articles in several languages and offer our employees automatic translation into many languages. Personalized portals will certainly play a much more important role in the future, because individuality is also very important on the intranet.
