Reinventing the Employee Experience for 12,000+ Energy Workers

Redesigning an enterprise intranet that drove an estimated $2M–$6M in annual productivity gains

Role: Lead Strategist
Client: North American Energy Company
Industry: Energy
Workforce: 12,000+ employees

The Problem

A major North American energy company had an intranet nobody used. Internal surveys confirmed what leadership already suspected: employees couldn't find information, collaboration tools were fragmented, and engagement scores were declining. The existing platform was outdated, generic, and organized around the company's org chart — not around how people actually worked.

The cost wasn't hypothetical. Thousands of employees were wasting time hunting for documents, duplicating effort across disconnected tools, and defaulting to email for everything. Leadership needed more than a redesign. They needed a fundamentally different model for how digital tools supported daily work.

My Approach

I started with employee journey mapping across multiple roles and locations to understand where the friction actually lived. The intranet wasn't a single problem — it was dozens of small failures compounding. Field workers had different needs than corporate staff. Managers needed dashboards; frontline employees needed fast access to safety protocols and HR tools.

I ran workshops with cross-functional stakeholders to surface requirements and develop personas that represented real behavioral patterns, not just job titles. Three experience principles emerged from that work and became the strategic filter for every design decision:

  1. Personalized and relevant — surface the right tools and content based on role, location, and task context.

  2. Action-oriented — reduce clicks to the things people do most. Stop burying critical tools under layers of navigation.

  3. Integrate, don't duplicate — connect to existing systems employees already used rather than rebuilding functionality inside the intranet.

I used a Minimum Lovable Product framework to define what launch needed to include versus what could come later. This kept scope realistic while ensuring the first release was good enough to shift employee behavior — not just technically functional, but worth choosing over the old workarounds.

Key Decisions

Content architecture by purpose, not org chart. I restructured the entire information architecture around five functional themes — Search and Find, People and Profiles, News and Events, Community, and Navigation — instead of mirroring departmental silos. This meant employees could locate what they needed based on what they were trying to do, not based on knowing which department owned the content.

Site disposition strategy. Not everything belonged on the intranet. I developed a disposition model that defined where different content types should live based on their primary purpose, audience, and update frequency — routing content to the right publishing tool instead of dumping everything into one platform.

Personalized, security-trimmed search. I specified a search experience that delivered role-relevant results by default, with filtering by source, content type, function, and business segment. This addressed the single biggest complaint from the research: "I can't find anything."

Outcomes

  • Estimated $2.0M–$6.0M in annual productivity gains from reduced information-search time, streamlined communications, and improved engagement across the full workforce.

  • A strategic roadmap that extended beyond the intranet launch, giving leadership a framework for future employee-centered digital initiatives.

  • Executive alignment on experience principles that now govern how the company evaluates any internal tool investment.

Reflection

The biggest risk on this project wasn't design — it was organizational. An intranet redesign for 12,000 people touches every department, every stakeholder, every legacy content decision. The workshop-led approach worked because it gave stakeholders shared ownership of the strategy before anyone saw a wireframe. If I ran this again, I'd push even harder to embed analytics from day one so the productivity estimates could be validated with real usage data post-launch.