Virgin Media O2
At a Glance
Sector: Telecommunications
Organisation: Virgin Media O2
People: Around 16,000 colleagues
Locations: Offices, retail stores and operational sites across the UK
Key Outcomes
+ One combined Me Portal following the merger of Virgin Media and O2
+ Around 350 SharePoint pages streamlined to 195
+ Radically simplified navigation and page design, built around how employees look for information
+ More accurate, relevant and easier-to-manage content
+ Delivered within existing SharePoint, using out-of-the-box functionality
Virgin Media O2
Reducing irritation by making the intranet a quieter place
The Challenge
Virgin Media and O2 had become one organisation, but employees were still navigating two separate intranets.
Research by Work Networks showed just how important the intranet was to everyday work. Of 478 survey respondents, 66% accessed it daily and 51% considered it critical or very important to their role. But the merger of two established intranets, with different content structures and different ways of finding information, wasn’t helping the employee experience or trust in the intranet content.
Three frustrations stood out: the intranet was difficult to browse and navigate, search returned irrelevant results and content could be inaccurate or out of date. Employees described wasting time looking for information, asking colleagues instead or relying on downloaded documents that might be outdated.
One comment captured the problem particularly well:
“Nothing has a date on it. So you don’t know if it’s a month old or 5 years. I tend to guess based on font type.”
Crucially, when employees ranked the changes that would make the biggest difference to their working day, information they could trust to be accurate and up to date came first. Better search came second.
This changed the emphasis of the project. Improving intranet search alone would simply help people reach questionable content more quickly. The underlying structure, content and governance needed to be fixed first.
The Solution
Work Networks started with the Me Portal. This is the heart of the VMO2 intranet: the place employees rely on for everyday information about pay, benefits, time off, support, career development, policies and HR.
Our guiding principle was ROI = Reduction of Irritation. Every confusing label, unnecessary click, outdated page or dead end, added friction to something that should be simple.
Research showed that 59% of employees began by browsing rather than searching, so we created a clear information hierarchy, designed to help people predict where information would be before they went looking for it.
The same thinking shaped the pages themselves. The VMO2 vision was to make the intranet “a quiet place. It should be designed to take the stress out of finding what you need, even if you don’t know where it is.”
That meant stripping away all unnecessary visual noise and concentrating on comprehension: clear summaries, straightforward language, collapsible sections, useful quick links and an obvious route to further help.
Importantly, none of this required new technology.
Work Networks designed and built the new experience using SharePoint out of the box, without additional plugins or subscriptions. Working closely with the Virgin Media O2 project team, we carried out employee research and testing, developed the information architecture, navigation and page templates, and built the new experience directly within SharePoint.
Approximately 350 pages were reduced to 195 by consolidating duplication, removing obsolete information and improving the content that remained.
The Impact
Six months after the initial employee survey, the new Me Portal went live in March 2024.
Employees now had one clear structure for everyday information, with content organised around their needs rather than the corporation behind it. The streamlined content made information easier to manage, while clearer ownership and governance created a stronger foundation for keeping it accurate and current.
The project also demonstrated how much could be achieved with existing technology. Rather than adding another platform or search tool, Work Networks and Virgin Media O2 improved the employee experience by addressing the fundamentals: content, structure, navigation and governance.
And there was an early sign that the Reduction of Irritation approach was working. Following launch, the People and Communications teams received unsolicited emails from employees thanking them for tidying up the intranet and making their working lives easier.
People rarely praise an intranet, but they do notice when the irritation stops and this is what VMO2, alongside Work Networks, delivered in abundance.