Interesting Elsewhere: Responsive design and #intranet stakeholder management

This week we’ve been looking at making our own sites more mobile-friendly. So in this edition of Interesting Elsewhere – the weekly round-up of thought-provoking reading from the Intranetizen team –  we’re taking a closer look at Responsive Design. We hope to bring you a blog post on the topic soon.

• Examples of great responsive design: Some examples of great – and very different – approaches to responsive layout and design.
• MyRoyalMail: This newly-launched extranet for Royal Mail staff is a great example of responsive design for employee engagement.
• How to handle menus in responsive design: Navigation menus are one of the most challenging elements of responsive design. This piece, from Usabilla, gives so straightforward tips of finger-friendly navigation.

Other blogs and articles that caught our eye this week:

• Is mobile the natural channel for intranet news?: James Robertson suggests corporate news can prosper when delivered to mobile devices, as employees can access them in downtime.
• Flexible workers are all sofa-sitting, brat-minding slackers: Chris Tubb brilliantly deconstructs lazy journalism about flexible working and asks why stories about flexible workers are so often illustrated by a picture of a worker holding a baby.
• How to build trust in virtual teams: Writing in Harvard Business Review this week, Keith Ferazzi asks if we can really build trust with collegues we’ve never met – and say the answer is yes, we can. He gives some sterling advice on making a success of virtual working. Essential reading for those establishing a truly digital workplace.
• HR doesn’t get enterprise 2.0 – but it should: Vin Jones reports from the HR Tech Conference in Chicago, and finds HR profession doesn’t understand what E2.0 can do for them when it comes to communication, employee performance, collaboration, etc. This drew nods of agreement on Twitter, with many asking what intranet professionals can do to better engage our colleagues in HR. Perhaps we could do with…
• Intranet Stakeholder Management:  The latest research paper from Martin White gives practical advice on engaging the diverse stakeholders on an intranet project. One to bookmark.
• Intranets – your not-so-new collaboration frontier:  Kimberly Samuelson makes the case for the social, collaborative intranet.
• The reality of enterprise collaboration in $1bn organisations: This summary of research from the Social Business Council finds adoption of social collaboration tools in large organisations has been slow. See also this piece from Dion Hinchcliffe: Enterprises struggle with social engagement.
• Six core digital workplace capabilities – designing with the workforce in mind:  In this excellent and detailed piece for CMSWire, Oscar Berg argues that social technologies need to be designed with the workplace in mind. This links nicely with our two earlier suggestions – if technology meets existing needs, it’s far more likely to be embraced by workers and deliver your business objectives.

And what made us laugh:

Pele out of Context:  Pele became one of the most famous men in the world through his incredible feats on the football field. But you’d never know if by looking at these photos.