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Need to use a SharePoint intranet due to internal policies, company transitions, or legacy systems? When all the available information is overly technical or negative, where do you turn? Enter Fresh Perspectives: Living in the reality of SharePoint intranets. We provide useful, jargon-free insights and real-world examples to help you maximize the benefits of SharePoint intranets and tackle its challenges. Pro-SharePoint but realistic, we debunk misconceptions and share product management insights from Fresh Intranet.
Jarbas Horst (00:00.634)
There you go. New episode. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, David. Welcome, Abby. I'm Jarbas Horst, Senior Product Manager for Fresh Intranet.
David Bowman (00:11.462)
David Bowman, Product Director for Also For Fresh Intranet. We are joined today by our very special guest, Abby Webster from TD Bank. Abby, you have the coolest job title that I've heard for a while. Why don't you tell us about yourself? Who are you? Where are you? Give us some insight into your role.
Abby Webster (00:34.626)
Well, thank you so much for having me. It's a really great honor to be here and very exciting for me. And I've never heard my job title described that way before, but I'm an AVP and product group owner for the Colleague Digital Experience in Employee Enablement at CD Bank. And my team has four key areas, which are listen, where we are responsible for building and growing our strategic business partnerships and listening to and understanding our end users.
analyze, which is where we do our data science and data storytelling across all the hundreds of different types of metrics that we have available. We have a create team, which is where we define and manage our communication strategy and direction, as well as all our creative work, such as writing and video creation. And finally, our engaged team, which is probably the busiest arm of the team.
which is where we orchestrate and lead our employee engagement program and we do all the change management and education for all our 95,000 employees. And a little bit about TD Bank. So we offer a full range of financial products and services to over 27.9 million customers worldwide through four key business lines, which is our Canadian and US retail banks, our wealth management and insurance, and our wholesale banking team as well.
David Bowman (01:59.934)
It's an incredibly busy business and I was fortunate enough to be out in Toronto recently and visited the offices there and it is very, very impressive to see it live and happening and in action. It sounds like you have a very broad remit, a big team, a lot of responsibility in the business. What's your favourite part of the role, if you had to pick one?
Abby Webster (02:28.482)
If I had to pick one, it's definitely working with our colleagues. You know, we're a really colleague focused team, employee enablement kind of gives that away, the name of the team. And we really put the colleague at the center of everything we do. And we're trying to provide them the best technology experience possible so that they can do the job, serve our customers, just do anything they need to do quickly. And really we want the technologies to kind of blend into the background and them to not really notice it.
Like you said, we've got a huge remit and providing all the hardware, the software, everything that people use. And we want to make sure that they just have the best experience possible. And we have a lot of great people working at TD. So that's definitely my favorite part.
David Bowman (03:18.212)
Amazing, We got to know each other a few years back when we were bidding for the intranet project with Fresh and the team in Advania, UK. Give us a bit of background as to kind of what the world looked like pre the current intranet.
Jarbas Horst (03:21.283)
Very good.
Abby Webster (03:43.916)
Yeah, so our intranet at TD had served us very well over a long period of time. It was, and actually we still have it, so it still is, large and complex with about 12 different landing page experiences. We use that to create the appearance of personalization for our different business lines. And then it was made up of about 40 different sites. It's got about 150,000 pages and documents on there. And in addition to that, also...
contained and still does contain lots of functions that had found a home on the intranet, such as certain farms and databases. And usage of it is just over a million visits a day for a total of about 400 million or so per year. if you were to ask me to sum it up in a very short sentence, I would just say large and complex.
Jarbas Horst (04:36.279)
Right, like, so and so it's that's just the intranet, right? But I think you had like an employee experience that consists of the intranet. And I think you also had like a social platform. And so how was the interplay between that solutions? Yeah. Right, right. And the intranet.
Abby Webster (06:04.236)
That's a great question. And when I think about the intranet platform, it's really all of those different platforms together. So it's not just the intranet where people are looking at the content. It's the social collaboration system as well. It's the people directory. It was our video platform, which we called TD tube at the time. So all of that, is lumped together in the intranet experience. And that's kind of why we call it the Colleague Digital Experience because it's kind of everything together. And we've been working to move off that over time. So we did start off with a mixture of on-premise and cloud apps. So our intranet is on-premise and our video platform is cloud. And we wanted to move over and get the benefits of being fully cloud and not have to do on-premise like a currency cycle and all of those challenging things that you have to do when you have on-prem systems.
Jarbas Horst (07:03.523)
Right, so what was the most challenging aspect about your previous intranet and the combination of all of these tools for the TD Bank colleagues?
Abby Webster (08:25.504)
Okay. For the colleagues, it is a very difficult system to navigate. So you kind of had to have all this knowledge of where everything lives and you had to remember that. So you almost had to have this background expertise in how to navigate the intranet to find the information that you're looking for. And the intranet itself had lots of different look and feels because it had many different platforms to it. And it was causing a sense of learned helplessness for our colleagues.
So they'd be trying to find something. They couldn't find it. They've got a customer in front of them and then they just get lost and feel helpless. And it is really difficult for them to navigate the way around. And then on the management side of it, it's obviously complex on the backend. It's on premise. We have to keep it current and there's many different apps and a lot of differences between those apps as well. So a continuous currency cycle and needless to say, it's also kind of expensive when you've got a system like that.
Jarbas Horst (09:27.661)
can imagine like, yeah.
David Bowman (09:27.846)
Yeah, and sorry, I was just going to say on just kind of picking up on one of those points there that how was that feedback and frustrations being presented to you? Were they surveys? Was that people reaching out to you directly? Was that you going out to people to find out what people thought about this system? How was that kind of coming through to you?
Abby Webster (09:50.636)
Yeah, I would say it's all of the above because we pride ourselves on knowing our employees really well. And we also have a really strong relationship with the business teams who manage the content on the intranets as well. So we were getting feedback directly. We're getting it from the intranet site managers. We're getting it in our business interlocks where we talk about our strategy, our technology strategy and trying to align it with the business strategy.
And then just a lot of anecdotal feedback as well in our feedback systems where people can actually leave comments. So we listen everywhere anyone wants to talk and any avenue that they want to speak with, we're there and trying to hear what they're saying. And what we also try and do, it's not just about hearing what they say, but it's about having a conversation with them and saying, why is this happening to you? What does your day look like when you get up in the morning?
you know, what do you do? And then when you get to the office and put your machine on, what happens then? What's the first thing you do? And it's really having a detailed understanding of what they're actually trying to do and what is happening to them, especially when serving customers, because if someone's in front of them, they might only have a few milliseconds to try and get an answer to them. And we want to really understand what is the most important thing to them so we can build a system accordingly.
David Bowman (11:13.296)
Yeah, I love that kind of not responding to the initial problem, but beginning a conversation about it. It's so easy to kind of fix the thing that you're presented with and then miss all of the rich context that's come along with that as well.
Jarbas Horst (11:13.677)
Right.
Jarbas Horst (11:27.513)
Yeah. So, I mean, you mentioned, you know, like a set of different challenges that you were facing, the employees were facing, the colleagues were facing, people managing the systems were facing, the costs also involved. Was that the trigger for introducing a new employee experience or, you know, were there like also other reasons for going into a new platform?
Abby Webster (11:52.736)
Yeah, that's a great question because sometimes it's easier just to carry on. Even if the system is, even if you get complaints about it, it's, it's a big thing to do and it's a challenging and difficult thing to do to replace something like eight platforms. And then when you start talking to business partners, they can sometimes be a bit worried about what that transition process is going to be like. So yeah, it was, it was a combination of all of that and.
We wanted to definitely move over to the cloud.
Abby Webster (12:33.836)
We wanted to definitely move over to the cloud so we could get out of that currency cycle. It was expensive. It was difficult. And we were in a situation when rolling out technology, if somebody wanted a function or some kind of different way of working in their site, they would come to us. We would say how much it costs. Then we would have to go and develop that. And then we're actually seeing a diverging experience across the different sites.
And that then becomes difficult to manage. So over the years, it had become very complex, very difficult. We knew that we had to modernize because we knew that the new era of AI and all of these things was coming. And so we had to, we had to make that move. And we actually were entering a period of currency upgrades. So we managed to kind of redirect some of our funding into moving onto the new platform as opposed to upgrading the old platforms.
and that's why we've done it over a period of time and didn't just do it really quickly.
David Bowman (13:38.97)
Yeah, yeah. and doing these things in any organization, you know, it's not easy trying to do this at the scale of an organization like TD Bank is really tough. It brings a lot of its own kind of unique challenges. given the sort of diversity of the audience that you have, people in office roles, particularly people in the frontline areas of your business, there's a lot of layers of complexity going on here that...
know, presumably all of this required a huge amount of support from execs from the business. Was this support easy to find? Did you have to work quite hard to get it? Tell us a little bit about that.
Abby Webster (14:19.99)
Yeah, I think that it was quite easy to find. Maybe I'm looking back with rose tinted spectacles, but we put together a business and technology target state on what we wanted to do and why we wanted to do it. And it was a very easy story to tell. And then the business case and the funding part came next. So we didn't necessarily go and ask for money. What we asked was, hey, we're going to ask for this amount of money anyway. So are you okay with those?
using this different approach and modernizing the platform. So it was surprisingly easy when we did it like that. We thought it'd be a lot more difficult and we've obviously had to continue that conversation over the years as we've been doing this because we've been working on this since 2020. That was when we started with our business and technology target state and then we didn't obviously get into some of the implementations until a while later.
Jarbas Horst (14:48.367)
Mm-hmm.
Abby Webster (15:14.946)
But we obviously needed to continue that conversation and decommissioning the old platforms is been a non-negotiable really. That can't carry on forever because obviously we wanted to get off and move to the new platform. So yeah, the funding conversation, we are a bank after all, is continuous. And we will obviously keep making sure we're working in an agile way. So making sure that our direction is correct and that we're providing the
Jarbas Horst (15:36.068)
You
Abby Webster (15:44.67)
best value for money and making sure that we spend TD's money in a very wise way and don't impact the banking anyway.
David Bowman (15:55.026)
Yeah. And, you know, I remember from kind of sitting in on the kind of initial conversations and discussions that we were getting to know each other. And, you know, one thing that came across quite strongly on this project was how clear the objectives were for the project and how upfront you guys were in your selection criteria for a vendor. Would you be able to talk a little bit about kind of how you approach that process as well?
Abby Webster (16:25.068)
Yeah, so I think many of us around the table had been through RFP processes and selection processes before and we all sat down and had a discussion and said we want to give a lot of information to the people who are taking part in this process so that we can have an honest conversation about whether their platform will do what we need it to do and also because they're experts in their area as well we also wanted to
get advice from the vendors who were coming to say, if you were going to use our platform, this would not be advised necessarily, or we could go down this route. And so we consciously put a lot of information together. We wanted to present that out. We wanted to be really clear and honest about what we're going to ask for when the paperwork is signed and we start working together, what will our asks be?
And we wanted to be really clear and make sure that the vendors understood what our needs are because we didn't want to get into a situation where we select a vendor and then it becomes difficult after it. And we just tried to be really transparent throughout the process to end up landing on the right person for us.
David Bowman (17:42.758)
Yes, you know, think beyond the age of seven, no one really likes surprises anymore. So, you know, it's better to kind of actively reduce the number of potential surprises that you're going to get post-selection.
Jarbas Horst (17:46.17)
Mmm.
Jarbas Horst (17:55.611)
One question, did you consider building your own solution instead of buying one?
Abby Webster (18:03.692)
Yes, and actually the prep that we did before we went to RFP, we built our business and technology target state and then the first thing that we did after that was a build versus buy assessment and evaluation. we did build our own mini intranet on SharePoint without any other software on top of it.
Jarbas Horst (18:17.689)
Right.
Abby Webster (18:31.798)
And we, tried a couple of things to see these are examples. This is something that we would want to build. Like how long would it take to do it? One of them was just the homepage and we were like, okay, banner across the top, put the web parts on the page. How long to make it look nice, some good look and feel. and then we partnered with one of the vendors to see what it would be like from the other perspective, from the buy perspective. And we, we quickly realized that.
We wanted to go down the by route and really that was just a validation of, of our opinions. Anyway, we, we kind of knew, but we wanted to make sure we tested that did a test and learn exercise and, just validated that and made sure it was the right direction. Because once you go down a path with an intranet, it's a several, you know, multiple years, because as, as we talked about earlier, it's very hard to get off the old platform. So you've got to live with it for a long time.
So that was why we took our time and wanted to make the right decision.
Jarbas Horst (19:29.774)
Hmm.
David Bowman (19:38.482)
And SharePoint was pretty important to you guys. Microsoft 365 was pretty important to you guys. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what drove that.
Abby Webster (19:47.926)
Yes, we did a lot of evaluation as to whether that would be the right direction. And we partnered really closely with Microsoft. We do have a very good and strong relationship with Microsoft. We partnered with them. We talked a lot about the Viva Engage direction at the time it was called Yammer. We didn't know what was going to happen with it. And they were really great with us and they shared a lot of information, strategic direction type information.
And things were moving very quickly at the time it was before Viva happened, but things were changing and they really helped us and went along with us on the journey so it was important to us when we landed on that.
Abby Webster (20:45.294)
and paint us into a corner. And then yes, we've got a SharePoint intranet, but also we can't take advantage of all the different things that Microsoft is rolling out. That was really, really important to us because we know the speed that they can roll things out. And one of the things that we always heard complaints about for our old site was, now this has come out, so can we use it? And we're like, well, it's come out, but you can't use it because we have our own internal.
barriers to doing it. So we wanted to try and minimize that as much as we could. So that's why we chose SharePoint and why Microsoft are really important to us.
David Bowman (21:24.454)
Yeah. And, you know, we obviously read and hear a lot of people talking about the sort of pros and cons definitely of SharePoint. What would you say to people that don't believe that you can run a successful intranet in SharePoint?
Abby Webster (21:40.332)
Yeah, I would say it's a dated opinion. I think a long time ago, that was the thought because it was kind of a cut down functionality. If you look back in time, but now with these intranets that you can buy like fresh and there's many others to meet people's needs, whatever they might be, know, whatever suits you. There's so many you can pick from. And it's very easy now to develop as well on SharePoint.
It's just much easier than it was before. So I would say it's a bit of a dated opinion and do a bit of research and you might change your mind.
Jarbas Horst (22:19.984)
Hmm.
David Bowman (22:21.392)
Yes, and given some of the statistics that you talked about at the beginning on org size, employees, we haven't really talked about security and data and just how important some of those things are going to be to your organization as well. There's a combination of positive things that drive this decision.
Jarbas Horst (22:43.257)
And like considering all of these aspects that now David mentioned, yeah, now, and you also mentioned before, so TD Bank is a large organization. So you have many colleagues in different locations. So how was the process of launching this intranet for this distributed organization?
Abby Webster (23:04.878)
That's a brilliant question. we kind of had an easy approach to that in that we had those 12 different landing page experiences. So we were able to say, OK, these ones from the 12, they're going to start landing on TD Central on X date. And we did a launch with those. So instead of doing it.
in a phased approach for businesses or locations or anything. We just use those landing page experiences. Some people still land on the old one. So people who have not moved the content across yet or who we haven't moved yet, because we are in the process of doing that right now, it's our final stage of the project, they still land on the old one. But they, but you know, other people land on the new one. So some people are landing on the old, some people landing on the new.
We have put out a lot of education out there as to what TD central is in case they don't land on it when they open the browser, but in case they do kind of find it, find the way there through some of the usage. So that was the approach that we use. just said, we're going to use this landing page situation to help us with our rollout. And when people's content moves, move over, that's when we're going to switch the homepage.
But in the meantime, they will be able to go there. They will be able to access it. They'll end up landing on it if they want to use any social collaboration or anything like that, because we fully moved that over. So they'll end up going there, but the landing page will switch that when the content moves.
Jarbas Horst (24:30.043)
Hmm.
Jarbas Horst (24:38.101)
So the social collaboration and the intranet, so did the launch happen at the same time for both platforms or did you do like one after the other?
Abby Webster (24:46.722)
We did a launch of the new of TD Central and we combined that with the social collaboration platform being moved over and the people directory. And so, yeah, some people's landing page changed, some didn't, but that was kind of how we bundled it together. And people have been using it now for quite a long time, a couple of years now. And they, we've heard nothing but great feedback about how it looks, how they enjoy using it.
The other thing we built as well at the time was a news targeting system. So as I mentioned, we were using the different landing page experiences to kind of hack the personalization so that people could get their own line of business news. We've also built a new center and now we've got personalization in there. So obviously you logged in because it's Microsoft, it knows who you are. So it can show you the relevant news for your line of business and geography at this time.
Jarbas Horst (25:48.962)
Okay, cool. yeah, so it's like having the large organization and rolling an intranet for this amount of people can be a challenge. think like taking like this phased approach helps introduce the thing step by step and take the people with you throughout the journey. I think like your social network platform that runs in only Vengage and so you have the intranet in SharePoint. Like how is the interplay?
between those solutions. Does that work well?
Abby Webster (26:22.754)
Yeah, so we used to have IBM connections previously, which was all of these things were integrated. So the actual sites and the feed were integrated together. So that introduced a bit of a challenge for us when we were moving to TD central, because everybody really liked that. And that wasn't necessarily how Viva Engage was working at the time. So we...
David Bowman (27:32.914)
Are you able to share some info on what your kind of a couple of use cases perhaps for Viva Engage, how people are finding it, what they're using it for?
Jarbas Horst (30:07.484)
Hmm.
David Bowman (30:29.616)
Yeah, really, you know, I've heard other organisations talk about their usage of Aviva Engage and, I really like the kind of description that you gave there and the value that people are getting out of it.
I think it's very easy for organizations to say, well, I don't want people using this for sort of non-work purposes, right? There's got to be a sort of work-based reason behind it. And I think it feels like those people are kind of missing the point of these kind of solutions, particularly kind of community-based content. Because as you say, it makes complete sense in your business that you've got a diverse group of customers walking into the branches. It's important that people that work at TD Bank understand
Jarbas Horst (30:48.305)
Hmm.
David Bowman (31:10.516)
as broad a range of influences to the kind of things that those people are going to be asking for. So I think it's great that this is supported and encouraged for people to participate in these sort of discussions.
Jarbas Horst (31:25.656)
Yeah, I think it's also nice when the technology helps the organization align the company's strategy and culture. So then the platforms help people achieve that. So that's really great. you mentioned content targeting. And I heard you, I think, on a webinar talking about that. How did you implement content targeting on the intranet to bring the content to different people in different locations?
Jarbas Horst (32:52.239)
All right. But we were talking about content targeting previously, and I heard a webinar from you, Abby, where you were talking about how content targeting works for the content. And one thing that I thought was quite special was like, so I think you had the example of an employee working, I think, in Canada, and then that person moved to the US. And then for the person, all of the content on the intranet also changed.
And without the person having to do anything, which was quite special, think we do maybe explain a bit like how that works.
Abby Webster (33:30.818)
Yeah. So it was really important to us that we didn't have to have groups that we maintained. We tried that before it didn't work for us. There's so many people, they move around all the time. So it was extremely important that we didn't have to do that. And we wanted an automated mechanism. So on the, on the intranet side, the content owners, they will tag the content with the geography or, and line of business audience. they, they put some.
audience tagging in there and then on the back end we're logged in so it knows who we are and then we also get a feed from our HR system so that we know where the person is located and it will automatically keep that information up to date and show them what whatever they should be seeing based on where they are and what line of business they're in. So even if they move departments this should change also it's not just the area but it's
Like if they move jobs, which is always happening, it will get updated for them and it will automatically change. And we get the feed every night. It updates the people directory as well. And that's when it will update. So as soon as the HR system is updated, that should trickle through and it should switch automatically.
Jarbas Horst (34:49.581)
It's great for the employees, the flexibility, what that means for them. So they're basically getting the right content and that's kind of adjusted to the role that they are now, to the location that they are now. Really nice. So what I also saw at this other webinar was you were talking about the release calendar. I think that's a space you have on the intranet where employees can come and share their ideas.
How does that work and what is this release calendar there for?
Abby Webster (35:23.426)
Yeah, so we want to keep iterating on TD Central and building it all the time. So we share the information about what is coming and our roadmap information in there. And we want to get our colleagues feedback on what they actually want to see as well. So that's part of our listening mechanism where we go out and talk to people and we listen to site managers, to our end users. And yeah, we want to hear what they think about what's coming next.
Maybe they want to tell us, we'd like you to move this one earlier or leave it till later. But more than anything, it's that transparency again, that we find that once people know what is coming, it helps them with their asks. Because a lot of the time people come and say, we want this and they'll be solutioning something. But we don't want to just do what they say. We want to find out why and what's behind it and why they're asking. And then we can build that into our roadmap and share that as well.
Jarbas Horst (36:22.235)
I love that. So we are running a product development here as well. So when we like know the aspect of collecting feedback from people, clients, and also understanding the reason, right? So why should we build that and not just taking things and build that for the sake of adding that into the platform? But how do you collect the ideas? Is there a form that people are using to submit the ideas?
Abby Webster (36:47.32)
We generally will collect them through co-creation sessions. So we will work with business lines. We have interlocks with them and wherever we can see an opportunity to have a co-creation session, we'll set that up with them. We'll get the employees in the room. We'll have, it might be a virtual room or it might even be hybrid. People can be anywhere. So we don't let that interfere with our activities for listening to people. And then we collect their ideas and what they want. We have discussions with them. may have.
further listening sessions where we delve a bit deeper into what they're looking for. And that's really our preferred way of getting the suggestions, but people can give us suggestions any way they like. So they can send it to us, they can ping us with it, they all know who we are. We're kind of quite visible because we go out and talk about the changes a lot. So there's much of that they can do. They can also put something on fever engage and we can pick it up from there.
So yeah, many different ways. think I said earlier that however they want to talk, we want to listen. So we make those opportunities available, but we really like diving deep with them and having those conversations where we can just thrash something out and say, what is driving this? Why do you actually want it?
Jarbas Horst (38:06.591)
Right. I it's a very nice culture, I think, that you have there. letting the people participate in the success of the platform. now moving a bit like the subject, so you have so many people accessing the intranet, also your social collaboration platform. How are you measuring the success of these different places?
Abby Webster (38:33.314)
Yeah, so we provide the platform provides metrics that people can look at themselves. So we do look at the metrics and we do understand how people are using the site and that's what we're trying to assess. We also want qualitative feedback as well. So what do people think of it? We collect a lot of that too. One of the new areas that we're going to be digging into a little bit more is
And now I've got my analyze team. We're really going to be looking at a lot of the usage stats and trying to understand, okay, is it actually good if we get more hits on the intranet or should we be trying to get less hits? Because historically people over time just go, yeah, we get so many hits and it's great. But is it really like, is it better if we have less? So we are going to be doing a bit more work there to try and understand that. And the data science and the data storytelling pieces really going to come through for us.
So at the moment it's a lot of basic stats. We did have a lot of really good stats on our old platform and it's less on the SharePoint side. So, but we are working with them. finding that they are doing okay for us. One of the top asks actually was better analytics than the old one. So it was a little bit of a change for us to get to it where you can't necessarily go back forever.
and get analytics forever, you would have to collect them over time. So yeah, that is a really good question, but we're finding that we can delve quite deep on the Microsoft side, especially if we collect some metrics over time. And then we're going to create dashboards as well in Power BI that people are going to be able to look at too.
Jarbas Horst (40:16.696)
think that's the built for aspect of Microsoft 365. So you can bring all of that together, right? So we're talking about your Power BI, then well, you're using SharePoint, Viva, Engage, that, know, you're leveraging the different applications that we have like Microsoft 365. And I think that's very special about the system in general.
David Bowman (40:43.09)
Abby, one other topic that I wanted to ask you about is, you've been doing this rollout for a while now. There's a huge volume of employees that need to be communicated with. What's been the approach that you and team and others at TD Bank have been using to keeping employees up to date and on the journey with you?
Abby Webster (41:06.936)
Well, communication with them and, you know, back and forward communication, not just kind of blasting out information is obviously very important to us. We have partnered really closely with all the change managers in all the different lines of businesses, because each of the lines of business definitely has unique needs when it comes to how you talk to their people, what you say to them. You can't necessarily just blast emails out to everyone because they may not read it. They may not.
Jarbas Horst (41:36.06)
Hmm.
Abby Webster (41:36.536)
have time to read it. So we take a central approach where we do a change management campaign. And then we work with the change managers and we say, here's what we want to say to people. Here's the timeframe when this is happening. We've created this campaign in a box and you can take or leave whatever you want. And these are the dates when key messages need to go out. So can we work together and partner to
get these comes out to your business line in the way that you want to send them out. So that's, that's the piece about the project communications, about what's happening and when things are changing. In terms of our engaged team that I mentioned before, we're pumping outcomes all the time to from them to all of our colleagues. So we have tech tips, have a change champions, have technology champions.
We're communicating on many different fronts all the time. And then if there's a, you know, a new thing that we've introduced.
Abby Webster (42:48.58)
there's a new thing that we've introduced, then we may be sending out tech tips about that. We may not necessarily go to the line of business and say, this small enhancement has been done to TD Central, so please tell everyone. Really that partnership is about the changes that are happening that are going to affect people who, when they're trying to do the job, if they're trying to find information. And the rest of it is all the nice to have comms about all the cool things you can do.
that will come directly from us out to the employees in kind of the blasts that we do.
David Bowman (43:25.82)
Yeah. And, you know, I guess if the intranet disappeared tomorrow, what do you think would happen in the organization?
Abby Webster (43:36.532)
I think we would have a huge problem because we have over a million visits a day to the intranet and that is when people are serving customers. So they go there, that's where all our processes and procedures are. They go there when serving a customer to find out what to actually do with that customer. What process am I following? And they can check off as they go through the process, all the different steps. So that would be a massive problem for us if that went away.
And then on the, you know, if, if that was taken care of some other way, then I think it would really be detrimental to the culture of TD if we didn't have this platform, because it's how people connect. It's how people, you know, stay in touch after they've worked together or after they've met each other and been on a team together and then moved on. It's how they stay connected and keep driving the culture of TD.
David Bowman (44:31.068)
Yeah, and you know, I think it would be incorrect probably to say that technology is the answer for employee engagement and culture and making people feel valued. But it's a big part of it, right? You we spend a lot of our time sat looking at screens like this today. And it is a way of being able to convey the organization's commitment to its employees and the culture of the business. You know, it feels like a critical vehicle for delivering that.
Jarbas Horst (44:46.3)
Mm.
Abby Webster (44:58.392)
Yeah, it's an enabler and it really augments the experience.
David Bowman (45:06.16)
Yes. On some reflections then, Abbie, is there anything that you wish that you knew at the beginning? If you were going back to the start again, what's the one thing that you'd want to be able to carry with you?
Abby Webster (45:22.392)
That is a really great question. would say I would, I was uncertain about how TD Central would be received. And if I knew then that it would be so well received, I would have felt a lot better at the time. Like the, the apprehension when you're going to make such a huge change is, is kind of scary and you have to have a lot of grit and determination to keep going. And if I'd have known that people would love it so much, then I would have been a bit more relaxed.
David Bowman (45:40.38)
Hahaha.
Jarbas Horst (45:44.284)
All right.
David Bowman (45:54.418)
Yeah, well, you know, I think it's a sign that you care very deeply about the experience that people are having in the bank and recognise the responsibility that you've got to kind of connect people to the information that they need, right?
Jarbas Horst (45:59.793)
Hmm.
David Bowman (46:11.378)
Any advice that you'd have for someone starting out? you know, I just I just I think this message about kind of staying in tune with colleagues Conversations not communication, you know, it feels like you know for me that that would be a really good piece of advice to somebody any you know build your thoughts on that
Abby Webster (46:35.256)
Yes, the listening piece is key for us and it's helped us to be very successful. I would say communicate often, let people know what you're doing all the time because even if you've got nothing to say, you should tell them, this is still going because sometimes these projects can take a long time and they will forget that you told them if you leave a gap and then come back and say, hey, we're doing this. They'll be like, I don't remember you saying that before, even if you have said it to them.
Or maybe there's changes in personnel, people moving around. So just communicate often, just let people know what's happening and just celebrate. Make sure you celebrate the small wins. Like when you roll out something really small or for you, feels small. But for the business, it could be huge. Like this is what we talk about all the time on my team is like, even if it's tiny, if it's something that makes an improvement.
Jarbas Horst (47:09.617)
Hmm.
Abby Webster (47:30.188)
let everyone know because we don't know how it's going to be received. They could think it's amazing. And we're like, wow, that took us five minutes. know, so that's always talk about everything and just keep building the excitement as you go through. And if you communicate often and you listen to what they want, then they're going to be much more amenable to helping you with the change, the rollouts of any change.
David Bowman (47:55.718)
Yeah, never not be communicating.
Jarbas Horst (47:58.43)
Yeah. I think you had such a great journey with your intranet and you will...
Abby Webster (47:58.976)
Exactly. I know it's a cliche, but it's important.
David Bowman (48:04.946)
Yeah, it's a good cliche.
Jarbas Horst (48:10.353)
Yeah. So I think you had like such a great journey with your intranet and you put also like so much research, you and your team, in identifying the requirements and like improving the intranet and research in different vendors. So what's the one thing you think organizations get wrong about intranets? Now that you have learned so much.
Abby Webster (48:35.992)
I feel like people focus too much on the maintenance of the intranet and not on what happens to the end user. Really the maintenance piece is a few people, managing the site. The end user is, the majority of people who would go in there. So sometimes the main people try to make the maintenance easier at the expense of the, the colleague experience.
And that's something to always be vigilant for and to try and avoid as much as possible.
Jarbas Horst (49:14.993)
Yeah, so put like the colleague in focus.
Abby Webster (49:20.674)
Yeah, put them at the heart of what you're doing and stay in touch. Right. Yeah. The, you know, the, people who are updating content, that's a smaller volume than the people who are using it. So if they have to do a bit extra to make sure that it's easier for, for the colleague who is serving the customer or who's trying to do their job, then that could be seen as okay. They may not like it.
David Bowman (49:22.002)
Do the hard things first.
Abby Webster (49:47.468)
too much and you might have to negotiate with them. But if you just explain, know, we've got 95,000 people trying to use this system and we've got 300 content editors. So you kind of may have to have a bit of a compromise in the way that it works on the content editing side. It's always good to have those transparent conversations so that they understand.
David Bowman (50:16.626)
And then looking ahead, Abby, and it sounds like you've got an incredibly busy time all the time. Is there something kind of specific on the roadmap that you're particularly looking forward to enabling for people? And why is it AI? Sorry, ignore that.
Abby Webster (50:34.244)
You knew it was going to be AI. You knew it was AI. Yeah. I mean, the world is changing at the moment. AI is just coming in very quickly and it's everywhere and it's being built into so many native apps. And we're working to understand how AI can benefit our colleagues, how it can benefit the bank and a lot of work is happening. So it's kind of a blitz at the moment with everyone talking about AI and it is.
Jarbas Horst (50:37.661)
You
Abby Webster (51:04.278)
one of those moments in history where, something really changed. So yeah, AI is the answer to your question and we are doing our best, very best to understand. We also want to really do it safely and make sure that, we're looking at it through an ethical lens as well. Like responsible AI is very important to us. I mentioned about our diversity. We, we don't necessarily know what some of these AI models have been trained on some of the data.
Jarbas Horst (51:06.045)
Mm.
Abby Webster (51:34.274)
And that it's important to us that we want to make sure that some bias isn't introduced into working with that for our colleagues and for our customers as well. So that's something that we're really hot on as well. And accessibility is really important for us too, because obviously a lot of this change means that the interfaces change. People are not necessarily going to go to the pages anymore of an intranet. So.
Jarbas Horst (51:36.221)
Hmm.
Jarbas Horst (51:54.077)
Mm.
Abby Webster (52:04.512)
going to be maybe having a conversation instead and how does that play out for the people who have assistive technology needs.
Jarbas Horst (52:09.885)
Hmm.
David Bowman (52:15.942)
Yeah, and I think it's easy to throw technology out into an organization. It can create some embarrassing moments if that isn't kind of considered and careful and sensitive to what is a huge and diverse audience as well. So I think it sounds like you've got absolutely the right approach in mind.
Jarbas Horst (52:40.273)
Hmm.
One thing I was wondering here, like, because as you said, like AI is kind of the priority for everyone. And here at Fresh, we discuss a lot about there are kind of two directions that we need to think as a product vendor, right? So we need to, of course, build and develop things relate like to AI. So make that enable like for the clients. But we also cannot forget the current challenges that people are facing, right? So building also is solving the issues that people have now.
So do you have like a normal AI item in your roadmap as well?
Abby Webster (53:16.802)
We actually, have a couple of them. So, agentic AI is huge and everyone is being bombarded with that. So, we're looking at agents and how we can use them with the intranet. We also have a in-house develop solution, which is a GPT, which has been applied onto the legacy intranet. And people are using that to get information more quickly. So, it's very important that the information.
Accuracy is kept up when you, when you're using these GPTs because the information that they references has to be really spot on to get the accuracy of responses. Well, those are the two areas. it's agents could be an out of the box agent from Microsoft. could be an in-house built one. We do have an AI team at TD who, who build, lot of in-house AI solutions.
And the one that they've rolled out on the legacy intranet, they're also working on getting that trained on TV Central as well.
David Bowman (54:25.458)
Amazing. Hey, Abby, final question then. Do you have a current favourite app that you're using at the moment? Something that you can't live without? Doesn't matter what it is. Personal work?
Jarbas Horst (54:25.52)
Exciting.
Abby Webster (54:39.928)
I have to say TD Central, don't I? Because I think that it's the way that it is working for our colleagues. No, I am serious because I am so proud of what we've built and how the input that our colleagues have had into the system that we've built. It's amazing. And when I land on it and I see there's a tool selector there and I can just quickly get to whatever I need.
David Bowman (54:47.632)
That is a great answer.
Abby Webster (55:09.092)
You know, I can do it so fast and I can get right there. I don't need to waste time looking for things. I can just go into TD Central and get it. I can get all the news I want. I can keep up with all the people. And yeah, I would say that TD Central, I'm very proud of it. I know the team are and I have to choose that because it's our product.
David Bowman (55:35.602)
Amazing. That's great to hear. Thank you so much for joining us today, Abby. It's been really good talking to you.
Jarbas Horst (55:40.402)
Thank you, Abby.
Abby Webster (55:40.814)
Thank you, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.