Intranet leadership: how executive vision and collaboration increase engagement

From insurance companies and healthcare systems to global agencies and nonprofit ministries, these organizations’ success stories reveal a consistent pattern. Intranets that deliver the most meaningful results are the ones whose leaders treat them as strategic priorities.

These Simpplr Employee Experience Excellence Award winners prove that intranet success is as much about people as it is about platforms. Their approaches offer practical strategies any organization can apply to elevate its digital workplace from a basic comms tool to a business asset that drives connection, productivity, and engagement.

Champion employee experience from the top

A thriving workplace requires leadership that keeps people at the center. The winners for Most Employee Experience Impact demonstrate how executives who are dedicated to employee experience drive measurable gains in engagement, alignment, and productivity.

Bond Brand Loyalty

At Bond Brand Loyalty, connection is foundational to how the company operates. With nearly 800 employees across offices in Toronto, Austin, Dearborn, Madrid, and Bristol, they have intentionally created an employee experience that helps people feel informed, connected, and part of something bigger — regardless of geography or team. 

Simpplr serves as the central hub for communication, recognition, learning, and leadership visibility across the organization. Before stepping into her role as CHRO, Trisha Mauro-Barnett — formerly Senior Vice President, People and Values — helped lead the evolution of how Bond uses Simpplr to engage employees in more meaningful ways. 

Rather than relying on top-down communication, she focused on creating an environment where leaders and team members actively participate, share ideas, recognize one another, and stay connected to the business. She and members of her team also became top contributors to the platform, including posts, comments, reactions, and replies. 

Her engagement has had a measurable effect across the organization:

• 98.6% user login rate over the past 12 months
• 75.6% of team members actively contribute content, ask questions, and share knowledge
• A 5 to 10 percentage point increase year over year in engagement survey measures related to clarity of vision, understanding company direction, and connection to broader purpose

Bond has also leveraged Simpplr to support the company’s AI enablement strategy. Teams use the platform to share AI learning resources. This includes prompting guidance, practical use cases, and peer examples so employees can learn from one another and apply AI more confidently.

“Connection has always been important at Bond, especially as we’ve continued to grow globally and navigate change. We wanted team members to feel closer to the business, closer to leadership, and closer to each other. Simpplr became an important part of how we created that visibility and connection at scale.” — Trisha Mauro-Barnett, CHRO

Cook Media Global

Cook Media Global is the parent company of two record labels and two publishing houses. The nonprofit ministry’s stated mission is to “advance the gospel worldwide through creative media.”

When the company set out to launch its Simpplr intranet, it ran into a sequence of obstacles unrelated to the platform itself — acquisitions, a corporate rebrand, and people data spread across four companies stored in incompatible systems.The intranet was built and ready with files uploaded, sites populated, and content fresh. The data wasn’t.

Jana Zachman is the president of Cook Media Global. When she asked about the launch delay, the comms team wasn’t expecting what came next. Rather than wait for the HR software migration to resolve — a process that could have pushed the launch back another six months — Zachman volunteered to assemble and lead a small HR team to manually enter and verify every people-data field, one record at a time.

Within 48 hours, more than 2,500 fields had been entered and the intranet launched before year’s end.

Zachman then became its most visible advocate. She uses the platform daily, posting content, commenting on pages, awarding recognition, uploading photos, and engaging with what colleagues share. When other executives see her on the platform, they follow. “It starts with us, she said. “If we don’t use it, nobody else is going to use it.”

Her presence on the platform has made recognition more visible, connection more consistent, and the intranet something employees rely on daily.

“Without her jump-in-and-help-when-help-is-needed approach, we’d still be waiting to launch.” — Kim Bratcher, Senior Director, Corporate Communications

Texas Mutual Insurance Company

Texas Mutual is the leading provider of workers’ compensation insurance in Texas, serving more than 80,000 businesses across the state and helping take care of their 1.5 million employees. 

Since launching their intranet, TXM Today, in 2022, Texas Mutual has built the platform into a central hub for employee experience. TXM Today connects employees across four regional offices around shared goals, initiatives, and culture.

When Texas Mutual unveiled three new core values in April 2025, President and CEO Jeanette Ward championed the launch and led by example. She made TXM Today the primary home for the rollout. 

The platform hosted a nomination form for Texas Mutual’s Our Values in Action series that featured employee stories tied to each value — doing the right thing, getting the right stuff done, and showing up the right way. It also anchored a 3 Things with Jeanette episode that drove submissions and kept the conversation going in the comments. 

Ward is one of TXM Today’s most active contributors, routinely commenting on content and sending newsletters to reach employees. She has championed decentralizing the intranet so employees across departments can share content and own the topics they know best.

The results across TXM Today reflect that approach:

• 1,890 views, 175 likes, and 30 comments across five stories in the Our Values in Action articles
• 10,071 views, 738 likes, and 311 comments across 20 articles in the Employee Spotlight series
• 93% of December town hall respondents called the event engaging; 98% said the values messaging was clear

Ward has also used TXM Today to support the company’s AI adoption initiatives. Texas Mutual built ChatTXM, an internal AI tool, and used the intranet to publish guidance, share employee success stories, and drive adoption. Employees have logged more than 73,000 interactions with the tool since launch. 

“Our intranet has served as a great avenue for demystifying AI and encouraging our employees to adopt it in their work and personal lives,” she said.

“Jeanette leads by example and in her messages, whether on the intranet, via email or during town hall events, will shine a light on our values.” — Jimmy Daus, Senior Communications Specialist

Apply technical expertise for seamless experiences

Great technology strategy starts with people who see what’s possible. The winners for Best Digital Visionary transformed their platforms using modern intranet and AI capabilities to make leadership more accessible, information more actionable, and culture more connected.

Renewal by Andersen

Renewal by Andersen is the window and door replacement division of Andersen Corporation, one of the largest window and door manufacturers in North America. Its workforce spans field sales teams, installation crews, and corporate staff across hundreds of locations. Keeping everyone connected to the same information is an operational challenge with real consequences.

Sean Sutton and Evan Zimmerman are the IT leaders behind The Link, Renewal by Andersen’s Simpplr intranet. Their work goes well beyond platform maintenance. Together they manage system architecture, permissions, automations, and configurations, continuously refining the experience to match how employees actually work. When issues arise — backend problems, integration challenges, user-impacting bugs — they resolve them quickly, often before employees notice.

Photo caption: Sean Sutton, Sr. IT Manager , and Evan Zimmerman, IT Business Analyst, Renewal by Andersen

Their most significant contribution has been bringing Link Chat to life, a native messaging tool that gives employees instant access to resources and streamlines daily tasks across every role. For such a distributed workforce, reducing that friction has a direct effect on how quickly people can do their jobs.

The Link has become mission-critical in the truest sense. Executives access it first thing each morning for productivity status reports. Manufacturing teams rely on it daily to track lead times and line output. When the platform goes down, the organization feels it immediately.

Sutton and Zimmerman have built a platform their colleagues depend on, and they keep making it better.

“Sean and Evan’s partnership drives stability, innovation, and excellence across the platform, enabling a digital employee experience that truly empowers the entire organization.” — Chandler Mines, Marketing Communications Manager

Texas Mutual Insurance Company

As the state’s leading provider of workers’ compensation insurance, Texas Mutual is committed to building a stronger, safer Texas. When the company created its first Chief Transformation Officer role in 2024, it signaled a deliberate shift in how Texas Mutual approaches modernization, treating it as a cultural and operational priority.

Greg Carter is that CTO. In March 2025, he launched the CTO Hub on their Simpplr intranet, TXM Today, and organized it around three transformation pillars: people, process, and technology. Each section of the CTO Hub connects employees to the initiatives, tools, and wins that sit under those pillars — from Lean methodology and continuous improvement to AI adoption and workforce development.

The CTO Hub’s most-read feature is Greg’s Blog Corner, where he publishes regular, plain-language posts that break down complex transformation concepts and tie strategic shifts back to how employees work. The format has generated sustained two-way dialogue, with employees submitting feedback, ideas, and responses directly on the platform.

Quarterly business impact reports published on the CTO Hub make business progress visible across Claims, Premium Audit, Financial Services, Underwriting, and the enterprise, tracking both hard and soft cost savings by the numbers.

Since launching in March 2025, the CTO Hub has become the most popular and fastest-growing site in TXM Today’s history.

The numbers reflect how quickly employees embraced it:

• Popularity score of 412,475, with 25,764 content views and 8,555 dashboard views
• 2,204 reactions, 267 posts and comments, 70 replies, and 171 favorites
• 73,000+ employee interactions with ChatTXM, Texas Mutual’s internal AI assistant, accessible through the CTO Hub

“Greg’s transparent style encourages embracing modernization, inspires cross-team engagement, and ensures transformation is seen as something that works for and with our people.” — Jeremy Windham, Senior Communications Specialist

Foster cross-functional collaboration

Breaking down silos yields powerful results. The winners of the Best HR and Comms Partnership demonstrate what happens when Human Resources and Internal Communication teams collaborate strategically on initiatives from improving retention to increasing intranet engagement by creating cohesive employee experiences.

FIRST Global Brand Experience Agency

FIRST Global Brand Experience Agency produces live events and brand experiences for clients across financial services, technology, media, aerospace, healthcare, and professional services. With more than 850 team members across nine countries, the agency manages over 34,000 events annually. 

Supporting a global operation of this magnitude required a shift from individual, localized tools toward a more unified digital ecosystem. The agency faced several global challenges, including disconnected systems, inconsistent messaging, and fragmented information scattered across multiple tools. 

In response, the Internal Communication and People & Culture teams joined forces to address the problem. They treated the solution as a cultural transformation rather than a software implementation. They mapped the employee journey to identify friction points and built purpose-built hubs directly into the workflow. This culminated in the launch of FIRST Hub, backed by a structured change management framework designed to maximize and sustain long-term adoption. 

The rollout began with specialized hubs dedicated to core pillars of the workforce experience. The Onboarding Hub, built with the People Operations team, guides new hires through their first 90 days. The Recognition Hub, developed with the Talent Engagement team, drives peer-to-peer appreciation across the global workforce.

Together, the two hubs succeeded at their goal:

• 4,430 content views on the Onboarding Hub since April 2024
• 622 recognition posts and 1,778 recognitions on the Recognition Hub
• 62% of team members actively participating in recognition within eight months

The teams’ most significant collaboration is FIRST 365, a unified framework that brought year-end assessments, performance reviews, compensation, and goal-setting under one orchestrated program. People & Culture’s operational data and Internal Communication’s content expertise combined to simplify a complex process into a cohesive employee experience.

FIRST 365 delivered measurable results:

• 85% monthly intranet logins during the performance cycle
• 35% year-over-year reduction in internal communications volume
• 40% decrease in learning module fatigue
• 119% increase in goals entered

“By unifying our expertise, HR and Internal Communication have built a connected global workforce and established a new standard for organizational excellence.” — Jeremy Woolf, VP, Internal Communication

Pikeville Medical Center

Pikeville Medical Center (PMC) is a regional hospital serving communities across eastern Kentucky. Keeping clinical and administrative staff engaged and connected is a persistent challenge in healthcare, where turnover carries consequences well beyond operational cost.

PMC’s organizational structure gave the team a built-in advantage. HR and Internal Communication fall under the same division, led by the senior vice president and chief legal officer. When PMC launched its Simpplr intranet, the Pulse, HR, internal comms, and nursing leadership partnered on a shared strategy built around retention.

The Pulse became the single destination where employees access daily operational systems, see recognition, hear from leadership, and submit feedback. That consolidation gave the partnership a direct line between leadership action and employee visibility. 

Leaders used the platform to communicate changes, respond to employee feedback, and document the tangible actions that followed. Quarterly pulse surveys tracked engagement throughout, with improvement across every metric in the most recent results.

The outcomes reflect a workforce that noticed the difference:

• 2% reduction in turnover from October 2024 to October 2025
• 88% adoption rate to date
• Improvement across every metric in the most recent quarterly engagement survey

“By combining the place to recognize, engage, and hear from PMC into the same location, our employees access systems required for daily operations. They have been able to see how our leaders have enhanced communication, asked for feedback, heard their voices, and made tangible changes to operations.” — Stacie Taylor, VP, Communications

Promote internal partnerships for intranet success

These award winners demonstrate how strategic leadership and collaboration can transform intranets from basic information repositories into assets that drive meaningful business outcomes. They used Simpplr’s modern intranet to create digital workplaces where information flows freely, collaboration thrives, and employees connect to purpose.

Whether through executives who model engagement or HR and comms teams who create cohesive employee experiences, leadership is the foundation of intranet excellence. 

Ready to learn how Simpplr can help you drive engagement and deliver measurable results? Request a demo today.