Vaasan Sähkö was founded in 1982 as one of Finland’s first electricity companies. Today, Vaasan Sähkö Group employs around 150 people.
The objective of Vaasan Sähkö Group’s internal communications strategy is to ensure a continuous flow of information, foster social interaction and build team spirit with inspiring content.
‘We want our staff to see the intranet not only as a place where they can easily find whatever information they need but also as an environment that brings a little cheer to their day’, says Communications Specialist Oona Björkbacka from Vaasan Sähkö.
Content editing for the intranet is coordinated by Vaasan Sähkö Group’s communications team. Other teams and units also regularly contribute content, such as news stories and features relating to their respective areas of expertise.
Vaasan Sähkö uses the Microsoft 365 workplace productivity suite and has been a customer of Advania since the company adopted Valo Intranet in 2019. When the provider of Valo Solutions, Staffbase, announced in 2023 that it will phase out support for Valo by July 2025, it was time to start looking for a replacement. After weighing up its options, Vaasan Sähkö decided to go with another SharePoint-based solution: Fresh Intranet.
The company’s representatives liked the look of Fresh Intranet and felt that it was an up-and-coming product with a good mix of productivity features and communication tools.
A hassle-free migration process
Upgrading from Valo to Fresh is usually straightforward, because the Valo Intranet site runs on top of SharePoint Online. All that is needed is to strip away the Valo components and install Fresh. Content does not need to be migrated separately.
‘Our new Fresh Intranet is very similar to the old Valo set-up. We have not heard of any major issues with content editing since the launch of the new environment in the summer of 2024, and we have had to give users very little support. It therefore appears that the switch has gone very smoothly’, Björkbacka says.
Fresh comes with a range of sophisticated analytics tools that help administrators to design and manage content.
‘We are learning what type of content appeals to users and can now design new content based on what the analytics data tell us. The tools also help us to identify content that is no longer relevant.’
Feedback from users will become available over time.
‘We ask everyone to complete an internal communications survey once a year. From the users’ perspective, the biggest change is probably the customisation options on the homepage. It will be exciting to see in the next survey whether users have taken advantage of the new feature and personalised their feed’, Björkbacka says.
