Optimising your digital footprint internally will help your team to achieve its key objectives.
As in-house lawyer, you provide a specialist support function and unique expertise.
To promote your services internally, maintain visibility and deliver services, you’ll need to communicate effectively. That's a challenge when resources are tight and teams are small, so using the internal digital channels at your disposal is critical.
Remember that your job is not just to know the law that affects the business but also to ensure that all of the relevant people in the business know which bits of law they have to adhere to and why - technology can be your friend in achieving this!
Do more with digital
Making full use of your organisation’s internal digital channels can help you:
- Spread the word about your activities and your expertise to stakeholders and employees;
- Increase internal brand awareness;
- Enhance communication within your team and with other functions;
- Train business client teams, efficiently, effectively and auditably;
- "Safely Empower clients (using FAQ, training and automated tools) to take the pressure off you; and
- Improve your processes.
Often, it’s the in-house legal team’s job to provide policies and guidelines for the use of internal digital channels. This means you’ll need to know them inside out (as well as having a good general understanding of the company's whole digital ecosystem), which in turn equips you to use them to the best effect for your department.
Exactly how useful these channels will be for you will depend on the technology available, the size of your team and even the culture of your organisation. However, in our experience, there are always opportunities to achieve something positive.
This can often be done with entirely off the shelf software if you use it inventively and focus on getting 80% of the benefit for 20% of the effort now rather than perfection which may never happen due to costs, IT approvals or time commitment. .
In looking at all of the tips below it is good to start from the perspective that you and your team are a scarce and expensive resource and so you should be focusing on:
- dealing with the most complex and novel things that affect the business legally; and
- "safely empowering" a tool and/or a client to do the repeatable lower complexity and lower risk work.
In this context it is important to think about the "rule of 3" - if you find yourself doing the same thing for the same person for the third time then it is starting to look something that can be turned into a process and handed over to someone or a software tool to do in order to save your team form doing low value repeat work.
It is also important to recognise that unless staff know what your team's purpose is (and is not) - in their language and about the aspects of your role that work for their benefit - then they will not understand when and how to use you and will not do it well or at all.
In an increasingly "comply or explain" corporate culture; the use of technology can be your friend not just in ensuring that the right information is getting to the right people; but also in ensuring that you can prove that they are actually using it!
Here then, are our tips and priority areas for optimising your digital footprint:
Build your own personal profile and team pages
If your organisation’s intranet has a staff directory, be sure to complete your personal profile, including details of your experience and expertise. Encourage your colleagues to do the same and keep the information up to date.
As well as personal profiles, create a departmental area on the intranet, too. These pages will act as your internal shop window and enable colleagues across the whole organisation to find you, learn about what you offer and contact you.
Ideally break your intranet page down from their perspective, either by client area (procurement, sales, finance, etc.) and/or by query type (I need an NDA, I am starting a new project, I have received a subject data access request ...etc.).
Use external social media
Use external social media to raise your profile internally. Connecting with colleagues, for example on LinkedIn or Twitter, will allow them to see your activity and contributions. Some organisations integrate their employees’ LinkedIn profile data with their internal staff directories.
Where possible, use other external facing channels to make a splash inside your organisation. Having your content featured prominently in the media or on influential blogs and websites can raise your profile among your colleagues.
Focus on team communication
Team communication can be difficult, particularly if you’re located across different offices. Remember, as well as departmental colleagues, your team may also include people from other business units working with you on projects or in wider areas relating to risk.
In general, using email and file networks for communication and collaboration is inefficient. It makes version control a vexing task and leaves colleagues exposed to the risk of missing vital updates. Online tools are more sustainable and focused.
There are numerous team communication and collaboration tools that let you share updates, calendars, and files. Common solutions include Yammer, SharePoint Team Sites, Box, Slack, Trello and more. Some of these put the emphasis on file sharing, while others focus on messaging. If you’re lucky enough to have options, do a bit of research to find out which one of these tools will work best for you.
Remember that your aim is for the whole of your team to be properly informed on what the business is doing, the law that relates to that activity and on the information that clients need from the team to be doing that business activity legally. "One team one answer..." as we say elsewhere - so the more that your team's internal knowledge is shared and documented accessibly for the benefit of your team as well as, separately, for your clients, the better. This also protects you against leavers, sickness and staff who try to make themselves indispensable by keeping key knowledge in their heads only.
Work with internal communications and digital experts
Most digital channels or platforms within a business have an individual manager or team (normally within IT or corporate communications or HR) that promotes the optimum use of that channel. Work with these people to make your content or site more findable, readable and effective.
You may want to craft news items, announcements or promotional stories to draw attention to your team’s work. Your colleagues in communications will be able to help you create these and optimise your department’s intranet presence. When working with them focus on what the message that you need to achieve is and who the audience is. Try to let them own the language as you want your message to be understood effectively by the recipient in their own words and terms, even if the exact words chosen are not how you would write it yourself.
When creating pages, contributing files or commenting on other people's items, think internal SEO (search engine optimisation). By using tagging, keyword-rich phrasing in titles and headings, you’ll make your content and contributions easy to find for your colleagues.
Remember, writing for online channels is different to writing for print. Be concise; include images and use structure and formatting to make your content easy on the eye. If "writing for the web" training is available, consider taking it up.
Adopt a self-service approach
Look beyond shop window or "(sales) brochure ware". Obviously, it's important to describe and promote your services, but think too about the opportunities to drive efficiency and achieve your wider goals.
For example, creating a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section or a series of fact sheets could enable colleagues to find the answers to their questions themselves without having to contact you. You can direct employees to these resources with links in emails. Your site could also provide access to other relevant materials such as courses, discussion groups and external links. A self-service approach to simple yet common requests could save your team time while raising awareness of important issues.
Use a group or workflow to improve processes
If you receive a high number of queries or requests, digital tools could help you manage them.
A custom-built form with specific fields is great for streamlining queries or process requests as it captures and categorises the information you need upfront. It can also be used to build Key Performance Indicator data on who is working with you, on what and why.
Some intranets or collaboration platforms have this capability. If you deal with generic queries, use a discussion forum to answer queries, then add them to your FAQs. You may need to moderate some discussions if they include references to individuals or sensitive topics.
Larger organisations often use ticketing or issue tracking systems to help people submit queries to internal service providers. If you don’t have ticketing or helpdesk software, "Kanban boards" like Trello or a SharePoint list to track the progress of queries or requests can be very effective. If you work in a smaller organisation, you may find a dedicated query email address, which anyone in your team can access, perfectly adequate.
Use your learning management system
If part of your remit is to educate staff on legal or compliance issues (and if it is not clear to you who else is doing this then it is probably you), use your organisation's learning management system (LMS) to host details of any courses you’re running or to house e-learning content and, ideally, infiltrate your content into other people's training material so that they train it out for you. Ideally you should get all repeat,routine training done by other people and save your team's resource for the novel and the complex training and the really sensitive issues.
Being on the company's course catalogue will increase visibility for your training and make it easier for people to book their places. Many people don’t like using an LMS, but it’s better to have one than not.
Be visible on internal social media
Different organisations use internal social networks in different ways. Some use them to provide communities of practice while others focus on answering questions across the company.
However your organisation embraces internal social media, play your part. Answering questions, adding relevant comments to discussions, posting updates and making relevant contributions are all good ways to increase the visibility of your team in a targeted way.
Use feedback and metrics to make improvements
Most digital tools will come with metrics and reporting. Some companies use a third-party tool like Google Analytics to measure the number of visitors or interactions to their pages or sites. Use whatever numbers you can access to get insights and make improvements.
Ask employees for feedback, too, and find time to make changes based on what you learn.
An exception to acting on analytics and feedback is that in smaller organisations, they may be too small or too infrequent to deliver any real insights.
Engage your team with digital channels
If you manage a wider, or dispersed, team, use digital tools to keep them engaged and feeling recognised. Some larger organisations have digital systems for praising people or publicising their achievements, which then get wider exposure on the intranet or via email. You can also feature individual efforts in news items or other content. Recognising the achievements and efforts of your staff also helps promote the activities of the whole team.
Be a good digital citizen
It’s vital for you and your team members to be good digital citizens and exemplify excellent online practice. This means following your own guidance and advice. For example, don't be caught using an image which infringes copyright while telling others not to infringe copyright. Good digital citizenship will help ensure your colleagues and stakeholders take you seriously.
Keep a sense of perspective
It's easy to get carried away with digital channels, so be sure to maintain a sense of perspective. Not all employees will want a weekly email bulletin telling them what your team is up to. Nor will you need to create an elaborate Q&A page or complex workflow systems when a simple form may do the job just as well.
Make sure the value you’ll get from a digital channel will justify the effort and resource you’ll put into it. Don't bombard employees with too many messages and don't do digital for its own sake. Sometimes face-to-face interaction will do just fine - and has more impact.
Conclusion
Digital tools can raise your personal profile and help you and your team deliver your services. The key is to have a digital strategy for communications and collaboration and a set of related actions and responses to incoming queries or requests.
Spend time thinking about what you want to do and how you’ll to execute your plan both for individuals and for your team as a whole. Get into the habit of using digital tools and improving continuously, as managing your internal footprint is a task that never ends.