Reworked TV
In Brief
- From many into one. Chris Harrer led the project to consolidate Comcast's fragmented digital ecosystem into a unified digital employee experience. The three-year effort integrated multiple intranets and platforms into one streamlined system, simplifying the user experience and improving accessibility to information.
- The importance of a robust discovery process. The project required extensive stakeholder engagement and customization to ensure success. Chris and his team conducted numerous discovery sessions, research and user testing to understand the needs and preferences of various stakeholders and made strategic decisions based on these insights, such as retaining the strong ComcastNow brand.
- Digital employee experience work is never done. The relaunched ComcastNow has been well-received, with significant increases in content consumption and user engagement. But Chris knows the work doesn't end with launch: continuous improvement and adaptation based on feedback will always be needed to further enhance the platform.
Reworked editor in chief Siobhan Fagan welcomes Chris Harrer to this second episode of Three Dots. Chris was associate vice president of digital internal communications at Comcast. At that time, he led the team that pulled together a disjointed, siloed and difficult to navigate system into the award-winning digital employee experience that brought him to the show.
They discuss why ComcastNow needed an overhaul, how his team established the employee and business needs, why they chose to save the original ComcastNow brand and what the reception has been since relaunch. Tune in for more.
Table of Contents
- Introducing Impact Award Winner Chris Harrer
- The Relaunch of ComcastNow
- What a Discovery Process With 100,000 Employees Looks Like
- Surprises Along the Path to Relaunch
- What Goes Into a Modern Intranet
- The Decision to Customize a SharePoint Intranet
- What's Been the Post-Relaunch Response?
- Reaching Frontline Workers
- If I Knew Then What I Know Now ...
- Stay Tuned for the Next Impact Awards
Introducing Impact Award Winner Chris Harrer
Siobhan Fagan: Hi everybody and welcome to the show. My name is Siobhan Fagan, I'm Editor-in-Chief at reworked and I am super excited to have today's guest today. He is Chris Harrer. He was until recently the Associate Vice President of Digital Internal Communications at Comcast.
But for today's purposes, he is here to discuss his award-winning work at Comcast. He has been recognized by the Reworked Impact Awards, both as an individual, where he was a runner-up for the Employee Experience Leader of the Year Award, and also for his team at Comcast and its innovative use of workplace technology.
So Chris, welcome to Three Dots.
Chris Harrer: Thank you. It's great to be here. I can't wait to talk shop.
The Relaunch of ComcastNow
Siobhan: Yeah, I know so, this is quite an introduction! So I know that you have won many awards for the work that you're doing at Comcast. So I'm super excited to dig in.
When we were talking about what we could discuss today, there was a lot of different topics that we could jump on. But the one that I decided to tackle, foolishly enough, in a half hour period, was the biggest one, which is the relaunch of ComcastNow. That was quite an undertaking, that took you about three years in total.
And I know that it involved wrangling a bunch of different platforms and trying to bring them all under one roof in an effort to simplify things for the employee experience. So can you just kind of give us the lay of the land?
Chris: Absolutely. Yeah, I called it the fragmented digital ecosystem that we had at Comcast. And what I mean by that is that there's just a lot of platforms that we have. And then bringing, I always said we had like 15 intranets, give or take, but everyone had a platform or a type of intranet, I'll say, and bringing them into one ecosystem, into the ComcastNow ecosystem, was a big goal of mine.
And I'd say we probably did about eight to 10, give or take. There were some of the larger businesses like advertising that had their, a really large intranet of their own and bringing those in was really important. And then we had all the departments had their own kind of SharePoint sites. They had other types of sites, internally grown sites.
And just to bring them all together was one, a big undertaking. But two, we just wanted to create an intranet that can have everybody's content on it, so you can find what you need. Our old intranet, which was very good, it served its purposes very well, but it was very much a corporate comms news type of intranet. And we wanted to expand on that and create a bit more of an experience and have a lot more integrations and all that type of fun stuff.
So I think we accomplished that with our launch in July. But it did take a lot of, a lot of stakeholdering, a lot of talking to people, why do you wanna do this, you know, to bring it all together. Cause everyone's like, well, we have our site, it's great, people know where to go. But if you didn't have a link, you didn't know where to go. And that was always kind of the issue. Now everything's right on one system and you can search for it, find it, it's in the nav. So much easier ecosystem now. And there's more to do, but we're in a good place.
Siobhan: Yeah, you're never done with a platform.
Chris: I always say, once you launch, the real work begins.
What a Discovery Process With 100,000 Employees Looks Like
Siobhan: I want to talk a little bit about those conversations that you had there. There was obviously a bit of a discovery process and a lot of sort of preliminary change management or stakeholder buy-in that you had to get.
Can you, can you walk us through what that looks? Because just to put in perspective for our audience, if you do not know Comcast, we're looking at over a hundred thousand employees.
Chris: Yes, global company, over 100,000 employees, a lot going on. So there's a lot of stakeholdering that needs to be done. So everyone could be on board with the vision and the direction that you're heading.
So and to get everybody, all these other sites on board. Yeah, there were a lot of discussions and with everyone from senior leadership down to, you know, director level to get them to join. Some people really didn't want to at first. They said, you know what, we're good, our site works. And I said, well, but, you know, it would be better if you're on board. And the reasons behind that, but a lot of those types of conversations had to happen and a lot of presenting. I did a lot of decks and presenting over the first year.
But we also did, we did a lot of research. And with all that, I mean, we did surveys, obviously, and we did many sessions with individual stakeholder sessions. I think we did 36 stakeholder sessions, and that went from everywhere from literally the CIO, the CHRO, all the way down to department heads and that type of stuff. We did end users just in general, all the way from frontline all the way up. Everyone's a user in the end. We did SME groups, so we did like an analytics group just so we could understand all the different aspects.
Did IA testing, which we did a bunch of IA tree testing, which was fascinating. To understand how an executive finds the same document as a frontline employee and the routes that they take to get to that document was just wow. And, but based on that, we had an original IA information architecture laid out. From that testing, we were like, we need to rework this. This should be easier.
So through all that, we made decisions and changes. And that went on for probably six months with all of the research and all of that. But we had some key takeaways from the research. And the good news was that the brand, I'll call it the brand of ComcastNow was really strong because we were thinking originally, let's totally new platform, new look and feel, let's rename it. But the brand was so strong that we're like, you know what? No, let's keep ComcastNow and that brand because it's super strong. It was just falling a little short of what expectations were.
And the expectations nowadays are I want a commercial kind of feel to my intranet. And I always say, we need to give our employees a weekend experience during the week. That's kind of how I always put it. And that's what we need to do. A lot of internal systems are just antiquated and they don't give you what you need so.
Surprises Along the Path to Relaunch
Siobhan: Yeah, it's not exactly as easy as going onto TikTok and just flowing into the next video. I could see that.
When you were doing all of this discovery, you said one of the surprises that you found was that the Comcast brand name was very strong and that you should keep that. You had an idea that you were gonna change that and you were like, oh wait, no, we gotta go back to the drawing board there. Were there any other surprises that you turned up where like you clearly came into this with a vision. And was there anything that you learned from your stakeholders where you were like, I thought this was a great idea, but hey, let's chuck it out and maybe restart.
Chris: One of the big surprise, well, I shouldn't call it a big surprise, but one of the things that really we had to work through was the people data.
We had that the old system was targeted, but it wasn't really personalized. Going into the personalization realm, you really need strong data if you want to do personalization well. And we are such a big company and we've acquired other companies to grow and through the years, so our people data, in Workday in Azure and all that is it gets a little, it's great at the top level, but as you get dig deeper and deeper to get more and more personalized, it can get a little messy with all the different job titles and divisions and regions and businesses. So working through that was a lot of work.
There was a lot of kind of patches in there to make it work on the old system. but we said, you know what, if we're gonna do this right, we need to fix that data. And most of the data is in Workday, and then it comes over into Azure, and we needed to get more of the Workday data into Azure.
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But that being said, you have to work with compliance, with security, with legal to say, okay, we're allowed to bring that over into Azure, because now it's going to be in the Microsoft cloud, not just the Workday cloud. So a lot of that, those types of conversations had to happen to really get that. Sorry, that was a really long answer.
Siobhan: No, no, that's it's interesting because I mean, when you get into the nitty gritty of these things is where it's just like, oh, this sounds like a great plan, but we got to patch up here, we got to do that. And then, yeah.
Chris: And that's why it takes three years. It's not like, you can go right out of the box and launch an intranet in like six weeks if you really want to, but if you're going to do it right and get the whole backend working — it just takes a long time.
What Goes Into a Modern Intranet
Siobhan: And I think a telling thing that you said at the beginning of this conversation was the fact that we started off where this was, you know, you were bringing together a bunch of intranets, but you said, no, we're creating an experience. And you've already mentioned that you pulled in Workday and all of the information there.
So I want you to talk a little bit about like all of the different technologies that are now going on in this experience that you're delivering for employees.
Chris: Yeah, you know, the core, I'm in communication. So the core of the intranet is news. You know, we want to get our information out to employees, but you have to create that experience because no one's just going to be like, I need to read the news today. You know, everyone's busy at work.
Siobhan: Every comms dream.
Chris: Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I'm going to go and spend the next 15 minutes reading news. You know, how do you get people? And creating that experience is a part of it. And it's the integration of all the tools.
And one thing, and the PTO thing was a big one here. Like I think every modern intranet has PTO integrated into it now, at least 90% of them I would say. That was an interesting conversation or conversations I should say, with leadership here because there was a lot of, we'll just send them to Workday. Yes, but it's seven clicks to get that PTO. And I did the analysis for all that and it ended up being about 17,000 hours worth of time wasted clicking to your PTO, which equated to about $890,000 a year in productivity costs. Now that's soft money, so, but in the end, we saved anywhere from five to 10 million clicks a year. Just on a PTO integration, because now it's one click. That's the type of stuff you wanna bring in. So we did that.
We also did learning and development. Those numbers are even more than the PTO, which was interesting. So those things, you're bringing them in so you don't have to go from platform to platform to platform to do this stuff. And those are the things you really wanna bring in. And that comes through the research that you do. What are those core things that really affect the masses. And then once you get those core ones done, then you can really start to get into the smaller groups.
Like we're going to implement next week, not next week, in a couple of weeks, our thank you platform, which is another platform. But we have a piece of it that is going to be, you can do the thank you piece right from the intranet. So you don't have to go to the other platform, find the thank you section of it. It's just literally, thank somebody right there. And that's a great thing to have. And it's quick and easy, again, saving time. I didn't do the analysis of what that's gonna save, but that's gonna save time as well.
So all those types of things and like paycheck, I wanna, we have a paycheck button to actually have your pay stub show. There's some legal ramifications there and that has to be done a certain way. That's another one, that's a big one. But just discovering all those things that you can accomplish within the intranet without having to leave, that's the stuff that's going to bring them there, which then you will say, oh, you know what, while I'm here, let me just read this article that popped up.
Siobhan: Yes, you're building habits.
Chris: Yeah, exactly.
Siobhan: I love it. I love the cost per click. I mean, that's something for the marketing side, you know, that they're always looking at that, but I've never heard about it from this digital workplace side.
Chris: That's the ROI that you have to give back to leadership because all they want is numbers. Like, why are we spending $2 million on an intranet? Well, this is why.
The Decision to Customize a SharePoint Intranet
Siobhan: So you made the choice, or collectively you made the choice, that you were going to customize parts of Microsoft 365, which there is always a debate. Was this a difficult decision to make, and was there any trepidation in terms of, I mean, Microsoft is just at a breakneck speed with the rollouts and the updates and all that. So talk me through that.
Chris: Yeah, well, there's many reasons why we went with SharePoint and Microsoft 365. I mean, integration, cost effectiveness, because we're very much a Microsoft shop here at Comcast. IT pays for it, so I don't have to from a communication standpoint pay for a separate platform.
But the customization piece, I really, with SharePoint intranets, No matter when you see a SharePoint intranet, you say, oh yeah, that's SharePoint. I did not want people to see our ComcastNow and say, oh, it's SharePoint. So I worked very hard to make it not look like SharePoint. And that's where all the customizations come in.
So there's always the fear that they're going to push something and it's going to break your system. But luckily, with everything that we've done, everything's in SPFX, or based in SPFX. So that's the kind of the, how you want to do it if you're, you know, that's Microsoft's safe way to say, build like this.
So we build everything like that. And I'm happy to say that nothing has broke with all the pushes from a standpoint of the web parts. Now, have we had some issues? Yes, but they're most of the time, they're, I was gonna say sharing. I apologize, it's a search. Search is like 90% of how everything feeds through is all search-based with Microsoft Search. That's where the issues lie when they push something, it breaks search and then it breaks all of our stuff.
We've had that a couple times, but it hasn't been that bad. So, and that controls a lot of the backend. Our main search, excuse me. Our main search is actually, driven by Coveo. We use Coveo search, which is Coveo's fantastic. So it's a big mix of Coveo is our main search, but then Microsoft and SharePoint search are doing all the kind of the back-end stuff with the news and the articles and type of stuff.
What's Been the Post-Relaunch Response?
Siobhan: Nice. So you said you launched this last June, last July?
Chris: July.
Siobhan: July, what's the response been so far?
Chris: Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. The numbers are awesome. We've from I just did a quick assessment and. We're up from a content consumption standpoint, year-over-year, we're up 60%. So it's like 3.1 million content views. And I say content because it's articles, it's evergreen content, all that minus the homepage. I don't count the homepage because that's hit millions and millions of times. But we went from like 3.1 million content views, year-over-year from the second half of the year, to 5.6 million. So just a massive amount of uptick in content.
And there's many reasons. I mean, the new user experience with the new IA, all of that, there's so much involved. The global nav, how we kind of laid everything out. More people are on there. We have those other intranets on there. So a lot of reasons behind it, but it's been a huge success so far.
Siobhan: And what are you using in terms of following the metrics? What are you particularly following and is there a specific platform that you're using to...
Chris: I use Adobe, so we've heavily integrated Adobe into this. It tracks everything basically.
So I look at everything from content consumption to usability, because I also wanna know like what works and what doesn't from a usability standpoint and navigation and all that type of stuff. So we do a lot of tracking, a lot of content tracking and how do we improve our content and what's going in where because we made some of the customizations that we made for the news, we've taken control. Because one thing with Microsoft is everything is just automatic. It's done by date. It flows into a web part. Our main web part at the top for our news is completely manual.
So nothing gets in there unless you manually put it in there. But it's designed very specific because Microsoft is great if you're a small company and you want to just have stuff automatically go in there. But as you, you know, being a huge company, you have to have some control over your content. So we wanted to make that whole section at the top, that main featured news, as we call it, a manual process so that we can, if we want to leave something in there for a week, we can leave it in there for a week. So, but we just really wanted that control.
Reaching Frontline Workers
Siobhan: No, that's great. I want to talk a little bit, because you do have a decent amount, and I don't know what the percentage of, of frontline workers. How are you delivering this experience to them? I mean, obviously, they are not carrying their laptops around while out on the street.
So I'm assuming there's a mobile element. And what are the differences there? Did you have to do a different implementation to roll that out to them?
Chris: Well, luckily, SharePoint does a nice job with the mobile conversion. So that's a good thing.
But for mobile, we launched Viva Connections and then we customized Viva Connections as well. I love to just customize.
So Viva Connections, which is called See Now. So there's two versions of See Now. There's the desktop version, which is within Teams. But then there's the mobile version, which is also in Teams. And it's really great when you're on Teams, because you're already logged in. So you just click the icon, See Now, and it comes up instantly. And that's one of the things with the front line, is when you're doing the mobile and you have an app on your phone, you click into it, even if it's the SharePoint app, you always have to log in.
And with Frontline, if you're trying to get stuff to the Frontline, as soon as you hit that login page, you're logged in. You're not getting through to them. They don't have a lot of time. So having it embedded in Teams with connections has been great. And we changed up things a little bit. And on the desktop version, if you click See Now in Teams, it brings up the actual site. The mobile version is the connections card, dashboard cards, they call them.
So we brought in the Workday PTO. the Workday inbox, Workday learning and development into that experience as well. So it really matches one of the My Resource page, we call it, on the core site. So there's this, it's a seamlessness that just, you're seeing the same designs in the cards and then on the site. So you're thinking it's the same thing, it's just a really cool mobile version of it. So that's worked just, it's simple, it's fantastic. The integrations into that work out really well. So that's kind of, that is our mobile experience.
And I was actually just meeting with our central division comms team yesterday, talking about how to cut through to the frontline. And I said, well, I think you need to push the mobile version a bit more. And we need to create some custom cards because those cards you can personalize and target. I said, we need to work. through that a little bit and get you guys into that. And you can boost your news. The feed works really well. And that feed in Microsoft also includes the Viva Engage content that you're following. So you get a mix of the news and the Viva Engage, but all the stuff that you're subscribed to.
Siobhan: That's great. It's been wonderful to see all of the efforts that have been done on the frontline experience over the last few years. I mean, when we talk about desk-bound needing the weekend experiences, it's like frontline was even further back. So that's really great to hear.
I'm wondering if, I have a final question, but before I get to it — if there's anything that we didn't discuss that you would like to bring up or something that you're particularly proud of that you did with this thing because I again I took a massive, massive project and I'm like let's talk about it for 30 minutes.
Chris: No, I'm just so happy that one, we got it out the door. It took a long time and that the employees are enjoying it. I've heard so many great things just about the experience itself compared to the old.
And now I did a survey, you know, a few months back and there was some, you know, there are still some that are like, hate this, love the old one, give me the old one back. But I always say, when you're moving people's cheese until they get used to it. Because they had their specific links that they had there. And now that we took them away, they're like, oh my goodness. Other than that, most people just love the change and what this system is doing for them.
If I Knew Then What I Know Now ...
Siobhan: Yeah, so my final question then for you is, is there anything that Chris Harrer of 2024 wishes that he told Chris Harrer of 2020 when you started this project?
Chris: Oh, I knew if I knew then... I would say if I knew the complexities of the ecosystem at Comcast and because it's a really big company and just how expansive the technology teams are and all the different sections and just understanding some of the process that was involved to get certain things done. You know, if I was to do it all over again, I'd probably do more stakeholdering.
But, you know, just learning the ecosystem of Comcast. Because when I started this, I was right in the early stages of being at Comcast. So I just hit four years. We started this within like six months of me starting. So I didn't really know the ecosystem and how everything worked. So if I knew that now, going into the project definitely would take a few different right turns and left turns.
But overall, I mean, where would we come out? I think we'd come out in pretty much the same place. Would have been just a little easier, probably.
Siobhan: Would have been a little easier. I'm glad that you took on such a small project though as your first one at the company.
Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations again for being recognized for this work that you've been doing. Both as an individual and with your team at Comcast and thanks for telling our audience about it.
Chris: Well, thank you so much for having me and for picking us for the award. I was so excited when we got the email, you know, just coming from where you Reworked. I read your stuff all the time, obviously get them every day. And I love the content here. So it's fantastic to be recognized by you. So I greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
Siobhan: Thank you so much. Thanks, Chris.
Chris: All right.
Stay Tuned for the Next Impact Awards
Siobhan: And that’s a wrap. Thanks again to Chris for sharing the amazing work he and his team are doing to improve communications at Comcast.
Have you done exceptional work in the digital employee experience? We’ll be opening applications for the next Impact Award cycle in August. So be sure to watch out for those announcements if you’d like to be considered.
The best way to stay in the loop on the Impact Awards and all things EX and Digital Workplace is to sign up for the Reworked newsletter at reworked.co.
And finally, if you enjoyed this episode please share it with a friend, word of mouth marketing is the best marketing that anyone can ask for.
Be sure to join us for the next episode when we’ll be speaking with one of the digital workplace leaders at BlackRock on the innovative digital workplace they created for the company's new headquarters in Hudson Yards located right here in New York City. Check back in again, and thank you!
