Winner of Modern Intranet of the Year 2023 – MetLife 

DWG is pleased to announce that the 2023 winner of Modern Intranet of the Year is MetLife, as revealed by DWG Director of Research, Elizabeth Marsh, in a special live awards event on September 5. 

Now in their seventh year, the awards are produced by DWG and celebrate organizations and practitioners that have excelled in creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments. The Modern Intranet of the Year category recognizes the modern intranets that make employees’ working days more convenient and manageable by connecting them to information, tasks and people. These intranets are personalized and available anywhere they’re needed, offering an amazing user experience. Find out about previous winners in the awards Hall of Fame and our free report Celebrating the best digital workplaces: 5-year trends from DWG’s awards. 

Following the deliberations of our panel of independent judges, MetLife won Modern Intranet of the Year 2023 for the success of its modern intranet, myMetLife, which has become a central feature of employee experience and sports innovative features that significantly enhance its usefulness and appeal. 

Commenting on MetLife’s win at the award ceremony, Elizabeth Marsh said: “myMetLife clearly plays a key role in the overall employee experience and its innovative features and use of AI to support areas such as talent management and internal collaboration really wowed the judging panel. The team behind this advanced intranet is highly strategic, responsive to user needs, well connected to key stakeholders, and focused on making a real impact with its work.” 

The centre of the employee work experience

MetLife’s Digital Channels team caught the attention of the judges initially for its successful work in positioning the organization’s digital workplace front door, myMetLife, right at the heart of the employee experience. As one judge commented: 

“This intranet team seeks to infuse the company’s purpose and strategic messaging via a simplified digital experience that improves employee efficiency and productivity.” 

As such, myMetLife has been key to helping the company navigate significant organizational change as well as in supporting a shift to hybrid working. Basing its strategy on MetLife’s three strategic pillars – Focus, Simplify and Differentiate – ensures that it is tightly aligned with company purpose. In parallel, a set of guiding principles such as ‘eliminate redundancy’, ‘make it findable’, and ‘leverage metrics to make informed decisions’, underpin continual improvements to the user experience. 

Governance for myMetLife centres on an established Digital Workplace Council with representation from across IT, HR, Procurement and Communications to ensure strategic alignment, as well as a number of key teams involved in day-to-day governance. In one judge’s words: 

“It’s nice to see an established, cross-organizational governance council, and I really like that the group is looking 1 to 2 years ahead not just for the digital workplace, but also for external factors that have direct impacts or present opportunities for their digital experience.” 

Personalized news and guided collaboration experience

Iterative enhancements and ongoing feedback help keep the Digital Channels team close to the real needs of employees. myMetLife’s news capabilities are critical to supporting strategic messaging and delivering targeted news consistently across a range of channels, with simple and clean design, clickable strategic news themes, and article keywords that promote engagement. Engagement with news content and related social features is up year-on-year.  

To support a smoother collaboration journey, the team has developed a collaboration tools wizard and chatbot that provides employees with a guided experience to help them find the right collaboration tool(s) based on their audience and scenario. With collaboration tool proliferation and end-user confusion common in so many organizations, this was a feature the judges particularly appreciated. 

AI-based talent recommendations

The MyPath tool, an internal talent marketplace, provides AI-based recommendations to match people in the organization with people, projects and positions based on their skills, experiences and ambitions. The tool helps to curate project and networking opportunities for individual employees that align with what they want to achieve in their career at MetLife. Among other benefits, MyPath enables talent to be sourced quickly based on the skills needed to get critical work done. There is also tracking of time commitment for employees participating in initiatives over and above their day jobs and this data is helping to improve planning and reduce redundancies where possible. 

Kate Morse, VP Strategic Communications Lead at MetLife, commented on what it means for the team to win the award: “This award is such an honor for our team. It’s a testament to the cross functional group’s hard work, dedication, and collaborative nature. They are tireless in their efforts to elevate our intranet to consistently find ways to deepen connections and improve our employee experience. The countless incremental improvements over the years are what has allowed us to get to this point. I could not be more proud of their work, and I know this award is great motivation to stay curious and find innovative ways to continue to deliver a dynamic digital experience.”      

The Digital Workplace of the Year Awards, produced by DWG, celebrate those organizations and practitioners who have excelled at creating well-executed, high-performing digital workplace environments. 

The awards provide the perfect opportunity for you and your organization to share your digital workplace achievements with peers and to gain global, industry recognition! 

The entry and judgement criteria for these awards are underpinned by the collective knowledge and experience of DWG research, benchmarking and expertise plus extensive industry insights. Nominations for the 2024 awards will open early 2024 – watch out on our website for more details. 

Find out more about the awards and previous winners: 

• Celebrating the best digital workplaces – 5-year trends from DWG’s awards 
• Winner of Modern Intranet of the Year 2022 – SAP 
• Organizations recognized in Modern Intranet of the Year 2022 award 

Categorised in: Digital workplace, Digital Workplace of the Year Awards