Barclays
Transforming the Digital Colleague Experience
to better engage colleagues and enable them
to do their job more effectively
The context
Cognizant partnered with Barclays to reimagine their digital workplace platform - Barclays Now - to deliver a new experience to over 120,000 employees globally. The core objective for the project was to deliver a revitalised digital workplace, aligned with Barclays’ broader work transformation agenda, based on four key pillars;
Better leverage expertise. Ensure knowledge and skills are shared and leveraged for commercial advantage, and provide real time, personalised accurate information to all colleagues
Streamline process. Ensure day-to-day tasks are simple and easy to complete and better enable the access to and execution of processes
Modernise working practices. Ensure colleagues are effective and engaged, wherever they are. Deploy a ‘campus-like’ experience with simpler, newer, easier to use technology
Support Barclays innovation agenda. Enable an innovation and risk-taking and create a proposition that embeds the right mind-set and behaviours needed to accelerate innovation.
My role
Working alongside Barclays’ internal experience design capability, I led an integrated, multi-disciplinary team combining onsite and offshore Designers, Experience Strategists, Business Analysts, User Researchers, Technical Architects and Engineers to transform the digital colleague experience, better enable collaboration, enhance communication and increase employee engagement. I also provided the overall strategic direction for the project, supporting business case development and facilitating change management activities, leading the agile, tactical project delivery across four key areas of focus - User Interface, Search, Collaboration and Tools.
Initially, the team planned and delivered a range of stakeholder engagement, and qualitative and quantitative research activities, designed to gather and prioritise business and user requirements. The outcomes from this research subsequently shaped and informed a multi-phased programme of delivery, centred around an Agile, iterative project approach;
Discover. The team learnt through empathy and analysis to understand colleagues’ goals and needs
Create. Quickly creating ideas and designing solutions that could be tested with employees
Validate and iterate. Continually iterating to improve solutions through measured data analysis.
Throughout the project delivery phase, the team designed and facilitated a range of collaborative activities to provide context to end users and bring the design process to life, including the development of research-based personas, testing sessions in the office canteen, ‘Tech Excite’ days, and interactive user feedback workshops. This ensured that Barclays colleagues felt engaged, empowered, and an integral part of the design process.
What was a ‘stuffy’, traditional intranet has now been transformed into world class digital workplace. The new platform delivers more personalised content to each employee, based on role and location, supported by a suite of integrated collaboration tools, improved search capability and a new mobile app to support new hybrid working models post-pandemic.
The results
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75m+
Barclays Now homepage visits every year since launch
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12m+
tools and applications launched from Barclays Now
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25k
PhoneBook searches every day using Barclays Now