INTRANET TOUR | Launching Synthesis @ Snøhetta

Well, welcome. My name is Susan Strom. I am the Chief Client Officer here at Knowledge Architecture and with me today is Chris Parsons, Founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture and Kate Grimes, Director at Snoheta. And you are joining us for an intranet tour where we share stories of how clients are using synthesis and synthesis AI search to help evolve and grow their AEC firms through Knowledge management. Chris, I'll hand it over to you.

We are really lucky to have Kate Grimes with us, the Director of Knowledge at Snoheta and in her role Kate oversees information technology, knowledge management and office operations for the US Studio of Snohetta. She is known for leading large complex projects, for fostering strong cross disciplinary partnerships and being a thoughtful and creative taking a thoughtful and creative approach to problem solving. I have personally had the pleasure of knowing Kate for well over a decade, going back to the early days of Knowledge Architecture and she just always impressed me with her really creative thinking, very thoughtful approach to her work. Just being a delightful kind of person to collaborate and talk with about knowledge management. She's been working in KM for a long time and I long hoped we would have the chance to work together directly. And that opportunity came in 2023 when Snohuda partnered with us to help us build their intranet which launched officially in February of 24. And I was super excited to welcome Kate and her team to our KA community. And now she's going to tell the story of how they approach that intranet project as well as give you a tour of their intranet which is called the Guide. After that we'll regroup for some Q and A. So with that I will turn things over to Kate.

Great. Thanks Chris. Thanks Susan. I'm glad to be here. Let me get into this really quickly. Hopefully you can all see my screen which will have content on it shortly. So first I just want to thank everyone for taking the time to join the tour today and I hope it's useful. I'm going to start by reiterating a little bit of the background that Chris just spoke about about Snohetta and my role there. The first thing to note is that Snhetta does maintain some separate parallel business operations between our two primary studios in Oslo and New York. So while we do collaborate on projects, we use different business information systems that aren't integrated with each other. And so as Chris pointed out, my scope of work is limited to Snoheta us and that's the scope that I'm going to be talking about today. I joined Snoheta in 2012 as the executive assistant to the founding partner. But my role was always broad and it has evolved as the company has grown and today I lead knowledge management and continue to supervise IT operations and manage our facilities. Our administrative support team and I work closely with HR to build our employee experience. When I joined Snoheta in 2012, the US office had been open for eight years and had grown from a small handful of employees to 35 people. As Chris said, I had previously been working in a knowledge management role at a different firm, and it was there that I first met Chris and learned about synthesis and I was very impressed by it. So while I was joining Snoheta, then in a different role, I was still really passionate about knowledge management and I pitched the idea of an intranet to Snoheta on the basis of establishing their single source of truth. And I invited Chris to present synthesis to the firm at that time. But back then it didn't really resonate with Snohetta as much as I had hoped. And the whys are several. But I think one of the reasons why if you'll jump back in time just for a little bit and recall that at that time in 2012, Facebook had only just gone public. And so this idea of posting to a wall as a way to share still felt trendy. And while it was popular for personal relationships, it wasn't necessarily the norm or a need in the context of business. And so since a prominent feature of synthesis even at that time was a wall of posts that employee could post and comment on and like, it looked to some like a trendy distraction. And so at that time, Snoheta passed on synthesis because it just didn't feel like the right fit back then. But time passed and by 2015, Snhetta US had grown by 60% and opened a second studio in San Francisco. Our information systems had become more complex and we also moved our New York studio location in that same year. Suddenly feeling a little bit lost at Snohetta, both physically and digitally was becoming a normal feeling. And so I pitched the idea again of a digital intranet and it still didn't take. But on the upside, at the start of Sorry, at The start of 2015, we hired our first HR professional who's still with us, and employee experience became a real focal point of our operational discussions at that point, which is when we released the first issue of this printed booklet called the Snoheta Guide. And this was intended to help orient employees as members of the Snowhead, a U.S. team. Now, when I saw the first draft of the Snowheaded guide booklet, I thought, this is like a concept model. And we love concept models. We love models, period. For example, we love to iterate, and it's part of our process of experimenting and developing and refining our ideas. So to me, this little booklet was like a concept model that demonstrated the company really did have a need to establish its single source of truth. And flipping through this first know how to guide booklet, I was really inspired to build the next iteration. I thought if I could just build a mock up of the look and feel of a digital intranet, perhaps then its value would be apparent. But it took three years before I could make time to build that mock up. And in those years, we reprinted that Snowhead a guide booklet two to three times. But by 2018, while we had continued to grow, our systems and studios hadn't changed dramatically. And I also gained a third team member in that year, which meant that I could finally carve out time. And whoa. I jumped ahead a little bit. But it meant that I could finally carve out time and take that opportunity to build my mock up of an intranet. And I did it on a password protected Squarespace site. I thought to myself as I was building it that if it was a success, we could even use it as our intranet for a little while and it might last us two years in my mind. And it was a success. We dubbed this the Snus Guide, which is an abbreviation of Snoheta Us. And it was received with a lot of enthusiasm. Our team almost immediately saw the practical value of a digital intranet. In fact, to keep up with the demand for information and resources, the Squarespace site grew faster than I anticipated. And I knew we would need to upgrade to a more effective intranet platform sooner than later, because this Squarespace proof of concept wouldn't withstand the test of time. So I resolved to find the right enterprise grade intranet platform and rebuild this by 2020. Ironically, or some would say unsurprisingly, what kept me from doing that was the effort it was to keep up with the demand for information and resources that this mockup on Squarespace had created. So two years passed, and 2020 snuck up on us all, literally and figuratively. And you know that story very well. So in the wake of what 2020 brought, I was stretched even more thin managing changes in IT facilities and administrative support, while also continuing to support our employees and their experience. So right at that moment, I really wished we had a great intranet platform that had Distributed contributor permissions. In little bits of spare time, I did my due diligence and I kicked the tires on various other platforms. Just a comparison shop. But I kept coming back to synthesis because it is the only solution that integrates out of the box with Deltec and Open Asset. And it's the only solution I found that is developed for and by people in our industry who speak our language and understand our business model. And it's the only solution I've seen that is backed by a team and a community as knowledgeable and passionate and dedicated as the team and community that Knowledge Architecture has formed. So in 2023, I pitched Synthesis once more to the Snohetta US leadership team. And this time I easily got unanimous, enthusiastic approval to move ahead. Leadership employees were all clamoring for a richer experience with easier access to information and resources. In September of 2023 we signed the agreement with KA and shortly thereafter we met with Susan and made a plan of action. And we jumped in. We only had a very small team of people available to work on the project. My internal launch team consisted of our senior IT specialist, our HR Director and our HR generalist. And we were backed by two executive sponsors, the Managing partner of Snoheta US and our cfo. Our directive was to focus on essential content and move quickly. And so Susan and KA helped us to audit our existing content and outline it based on a new information architecture. The architecture we adopted for the synthesis site is based closely on the recommended architecture that KA has developed over years working with clients like us in our industry. And so this content audit and outline and architecture were really critical tools for assembling the new synthesis site quickly and easily. Equipped with that outline, we gave ourselves five months from signing the agreement with Knowledge Architecture to launching our synthesis based intranet. Which brings us up to 2024 and I'll show you in just a minute the live content and talk a little bit more about rebuilding our intranet in synthesis. But as Chris said, the short story is we launched it at long last on February 14th of 2024. So this is the guide live and in person and we're currently looking at the homepage and the most prominent thing, perhaps the most important thing on the homepage is of course the wall of posts that every employee can contribute to and comment on and react to at this time. It's now an accepted and desirable norm to have this feature. So since the launch of the Guide, this is the central spot for all company communications. All company announcements and updates are posted here to the Guide. And then if we need to boost, we can promote a post and push it to email. And this has been critical in reducing the number of places employees need to look for information. Before the guide, any one of these announcements might be posted on our Squarespace site or might have been sent via email or posted on a company wide Slack channel. And that's because none of those platforms were completely satisfactory. So our team tended toward whichever platform they preferred and trusted. But now everyone in the company can post directly on the guide, and we've learned to trust that the information posted here can reach all employees and can easily be resurfaced. So in addition to official company communications, as you can see, we encourage employees to share project updates and interesting articles, upcoming events, or really anything else they'd like to share with their colleagues. I talked about how we wanted to prioritize essential content in order to facilitate an expedited launch. And what essential content is depends very much on the company. It's going to be different from one company to the next, but for us, the essential content is composed primarily of the content that you'll find under our home section, which describes what SNOHETA is and also what the guide is under our HR community. This describes our benefits, our policies, our procedures and our physical office space. And then our technology community describes our IT systems and provides paths to important tools and resources the team uses every day. So that is really what comprises the bulk of our essential content. And that was what we focused on for our launch. But some other things that are part that are very essential are our employee directory. And this is a feature of an intranet that I consider to be sorry that I consider to be so important that I actually had built out an employee directory on our mockup of Squarespace. I consider it important because it helps employees learn the names and faces of their colleagues more quickly when they're joining the firm. And IT can. A good employee directory hopefully can answer the question who do I talk to about and help people make connections in that way. And it also highlights the diverse personalities of our team. But the employee directory that I had built on Squarespace was clunky and difficult to maintain. Whereas with synthesis, each of these employee profiles is initiated when we activate a new employee's account in Microsoft and link it with their Deltec record. So based just on those existing business processes, it happens without extra steps for me or HR or IT to complete. The system also pulls key data points from Deltec, like the employee's preferred name, title, discipline and years with the company. But Employees can also personalize their profile by uploading their own picture and maintaining their own record of their experience in education. The icing on the cake is the way synthesis links all the posts that the employee has either written or been tagged in here with their profile, and it also automatically builds the list of projects they've worked on based on their timesheet data in Deltec. But even more than that, the filters and saved views allow us to create these saved views of companies functional groups, so that you can drill down into the employee directory and really learn what all people are involved with. Another element of the intranet that seems like an imperative for a company like ours is the Project Directory. And this was something that I knew I couldn't build and maintain in our mockup because it would have required so much extensive manual data entry, and it also would have required me to duplicate data, which I don't like to do. So in this case, because synthesis is integrated with Deltec and Open Asset, we only have to indicate with a check mark in the Deltec project record that we would like a project to appear on the guide. And then as long as we've entered the relevant project data in Deltec and uploaded images to the matching record in Open Asset, the directory here on the guide syncs all of that information and delivers a beautiful project profile. That means data only has to be entered and updated in one place in Deltec, and that is key to establishing the company's single source of truth. Just like the employee directory, a project profile is linked to any posts in which that project has been tagged, as well as to all of the employees, past and present who worked on the project. One thing some of you may note is that this Project Directory doesn't show our full portfolio of work. And that's because like the rest of our content, we prioritize populating and cleaning up the data on projects for which we had the best documentation. Part of my ongoing work now is to gather data about our back catalog of projects, and also to establish processes for populating and maintaining the data and images for active and future projects. But this abridged Project Directory has illustrated so much the value of having good data in a centralized database that this makes it easier for me to campaign for those better data management processes. As I said, another aspect of our essential content is our HR and Office section, which contains the essential information you need as an employee of Snohetta us. This is a lot of the first content that we had documented on the Snus guy, and a lot of this content we were able to just copy and paste from Squarespace to synthesis, and we took the opportunity to refresh the content as we were migrating it. While this information was all there in the SNUS Guide in Squarespace, the notable difference here on the guide is the navigation. It's much more intuitive thanks to the information architecture that KA brought to the table. And the fact that they were able to make that strong recommendation about how to organize this content in an intuitive way was a huge leg up for us. It saved me the trouble of doing a lot of card sorting and tree tests to get to the bottom of that. And this mega menu also makes it easier for employees to see where they're going with fewer clicks if they choose to navigate. Technology is another one of those areas that we wanted to focus on for launch, and the reason is because we get more questions about IT software and technology resources than we do about general company operations. So Emmett, our IT specialist, not only transferred the content that we had on the old SNUS Guide, but also took a good amount of time during the five months leading up to launch to develop a lot of new technology content. And then while I didn't call it out as essential content, the learning section was also something that we wanted to go to launch with, even though it's a bit light. The reason is because we had Shortly before moving into this synthesis project, we had developed a new mentorship program and featured it on the SNUS Guide. So we wanted to make sure that the learning section was here so that we could also feature the mentorship program on the new intranet and it wouldn't get lost. The mentorship program now appears here under Learning and it is all the same content that we had on this new skyd, but it looks much better on synthesis and is easier to read. But even more than that, this list of mentors that you can see over here on the right, whereas on the SNUS Guide mockup this was a hand typed list of names. Now here on synthesis, this is pulling directly from our employee directory and automatically showing any employee who has volunteered to be one of our mentors. Similarly, a page that I was able to build on synthesis in probably two minutes is this list of our licensed employees. All I had to do was provision a new page and then drop a view of our employee directory in here, filtered for any employee who has an active license recorded in Deltec. And this adds value. But like I said, it took two minutes for me to build this page. So that's the bulk of what we had defined as our essential content. That we made sure was there for launch in February of 2024, but since that time we've been able to add a lot of new content to the guide. And the Projects in Practice community is one of those spaces that barely had any content in it at all at launch, just because there wasn't a lot of content that we had developed in Squarespace that would fill out this section. However, I knew there were a lot of ideas for it, as well as a lot of content on our network drives that could be adapted for for intranet content here after launch. And so everything in this section has largely been developed in the past year. One example is under Design Making and Models. The designer who leads our model shop and our model making practice has started a series of posts that are all collected under the heading Model Throwback Thursday. And this means every Thursday he posts a picture of a model from our archive that highlights different methods of model making and reminds us weekly of the value of thinking and designing physically with real materials in the real world. And similarly, he and I have been working together to start building a model library as a reference tool. It's organized first by method of making, but we can also attach information about the materials, the project it's related to, and other metadata that can enable users to browse this library for inspiration the next time they are thinking about building models. Another section that we've spent a lot of time building out over the past year is project management, and prior to the launch of the guide, all of our project management information was represented by collections of templates on our network drives at best. So it was not only difficult for project leaders to find consistent information about project management, but all of that was also obscured from non project leaders, which made it difficult to onboard new project leaders. And it was also really hiding an important part of our practice. But in the past year I've been able to work with different stakeholders, including accounting and project leaders to build out these resources for project management on the guide. And now not only do project leaders have access to this information, but everyone else can see and learn from it as well. By the same token, our standards and codes also used to just be collections of documents on network drives that were difficult to find, difficult to navigate, and completely unknown to many people. Since launching the guide, the team who owns that content have been able to easily load those documents to the guide and make this information findable and navigable. And they didn't have to invest a lot of effort into restructuring and rebuilding those documents because the document library function of synthesis allows them to Simply load these PDFs and all of the contents of these PDFs are now searchable by the guide. And as a result, we now have this delightfully punchy set of AutoCAD standards that are useful and fun to land on. We've also done work in the past year to build out content in the marketing section, including a library of templates. This is one of the most requested features I have ever gotten since launching the first mockup of a digital digital intranet. But this would have been difficult to maintain in squarespace. And this is another feature that is made easier because of the document library function. So now we have been able to easily upload these templates to one place. They're very findable and they're easy to update in this one place. Similarly, all of the brand assets that everyone needs access to as they're assembling documents and proposals are here in one place and easy to browse and find. And then one other element of the marketing section that's interesting, and it's a bit of a work in progress, is our proposal archive. This is something I was asked for for many years to build a repository of all of the proposals that we've ever submitt. And with this document library function, it was easy for me to upload PDFs and it's easy to continue loading more PDFs as we unearth them. And one reason this is important for us is because we don't have a central marketing team that's assembling our proposals. Instead, one of our directors or project leaders is always assigned to a pursuit and is responsible for putting the proposal together. So what this library does is it provides a look at useful precedents and also lessons learned that those leaders can look back at to learn from. So you can see it can be grouped by a number of different features of each of these proposals to make it easier to browse. That's a lot of the content that I wanted to share with you today, but I also want to give you a little look at AI search, which is a newer feature of synthesis and is still in public beta. And this is a feature that we haven't even made available to all of our employees yet. It is still in a testing phase, but I'll show you some samples of searches that I've queued up and talk about how it's working. So one question that I get asked a lot all the time is how to charge time for particular things, especially for more overhead initiatives. And I've been seeing in searches a lot the question how Do I charge time for the annual anti harassment training that everyone has to complete around this time of year? So you can see I've asked the question in natural language, how do I charge time for EZ Lamar? And it has gone out and found that information and given me the answer that I need for my timesheet. Another great feature of synthesis that's relatively new is the fact that any video uploaded to the platform is automatically transcribed, and that means all the text of the transcription is searchable. So in this case, we upload recordings of all of our all staff meetings to the guide and they're transcribed, which means that when I ask the question, what was discussed in the monthly meetings in January of this year, I get a short description of each of those meetings. One thing to notice is you can see there are little citations at the end of these search results, and there can be more than one citation. And each of those citations links back to the source where the search has pulled that information and synthesized it. Another common question that comes up at any company is just the question of who should I talk to about Fill in the blank. And so in this case, I've asked IT who can I talk to about standards and codes? And IT has directed me to talk to the person at our company who is the resource we've identified, who works with standards and codes. I talk a lot because I do work with it, and I talk a lot about how a tool like the intranet and knowledge management can help reduce friction by making answers to questions that are commonly recurring easier to get at. And so in this example, this is a question that our IT team gets asked repeatedly over the past many years. And so our IT specialist has documented this answer. And now you can see, when I ask the question, how can I share my Miro board with external colleagues? I get the answer that he would have given me if I had opened a new IT ticket, which makes it easier and hopefully reduces IT tickets. And then of course, projects are the core of our business. So everyone always has questions about projects. And in this case I've asked, what awards has Far Rockaway won? And the search has been able to go and look at the project profile for the Far Rockaway Library and can return the answer about the awards that this project has won. So those are a few examples. I will say, like I said, we're still testing and some search results are better than others. What we find is a lot of the less successful search results have less to do with the technology and more to do with the information that we've actually provided in the guide. So when there's missing information, sometimes we get less successful search results. And so part of our testing process is to identify those opportunities that we have to influence the search results by adding better information. And that is my tour. I hope it was helpful and I'm happy to answer questions.

Kate, that was awesome. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome.

You doing not only the story, but then the tour, I think it helped us all get a good sense of what you've been building at Snoheta. One of the things that for folks that know Snowhead, it's a very creative company and I'm curious how you kind of knowledge management sometimes can be about getting some agreeing on standards and kind of consistency, but you've also got this room for autonomy and creative nature. So how do you balance those two things?

Yeah, first of all, just apologies if anyone can hear my dog dreaming in the background. But yes, to answer that question, it's an interesting experience as I'm encountering different writing styles and ways that everybody is structuring the content that they're developing. You know, with the mock up in Squarespace, there were only few contributors and so everything had to kind of be mediated through those few people. And now that I can distribute permissions where we're finding that there are all kinds of different styles coming forward. And so while I want everyone to own what they're developing, we also want to maintain enough consistency in our terminology and style and structure to make sure that the user experience is good. And in that way, it's much like other design projects for the sake of our users, we need wayfinding and look and feel to all coordinate and work well, even if they're designed or built by different people. So I'm planning to develop a visual style guide for the guide, and I'm also working on programming our Grammarly software that we use with writing style standards, which include common vocabulary and abbreviations, and making those tools available is going to allow content stakeholders to work with autonomy while maintaining the consistency that we need.

That's an awesome answer. That makes this makes a whole lot of sense. One of the things that I've seen that people want to know is how much time did it take to not only build the guide, but then continue maintaining the guide and kind of who are the different people and how they spend time? Kind of take us through the kind of investment there.

Sure. Well, I mean, in order to build this version of the guide, it really did take only the 5 months and not full time 5 months. I have a lot of other responsibilities and as I showed, there's only a few team members who were involved in building this with me during those five months just due to availability. So I would say it took 30% of my time over those five months to get it set up. But as an ongoing thing, it's now much more distributed. There are. I am not working on this full time. I'm working on many other projects. But even when I'm not working on it, new content is being added, either by posts, which anyone can do, or because I've been able to distribute permissions now to other stakeholders and. And knowledge holders throughout the firm. And so they're able to build their content in it directly. Which means that's just the classic many hands makes light work lesson. It is developing every day, but not through direct effort on my part, always.

To spend that kind of time, your time, other people's time, obviously your executive sponsors, you mentioned your managing director and cfo, Elaine and Oscar. They had to have hopes and dreams for what synthesis would do for Snohetta. Like, what were those hopes and dreams and did they come true? Did you think they got what they hoped for in investing your time and effort in building the guide? Sure.

Fair question. One of the biggest hopes was to really reduce the number of places employees would need to look for information. And one reason for that is because having important information scattered across all the different platforms that any company accumulates, it creates an atmosphere where it starts to feel intentionally exclusive because then only employees who are in the know are able to find information. And then as that company information starts to be disseminated through whisper networks, it gets changed and misrepresented along the way. And all of that was happening to us. So the dream for the Guide is that it could be inclusive and that employees would trust that they have the same access to information as their peers, which is ultimately empowering for everyone. Did it come true? It's certainly starting to. Over the first year that the Guide has been live, I have personally witnessed quite a few and sometimes surprisingly, aha. Moments in which I've heard employees at literally all levels of the company exclaim that they never realized we had a particular resource or a document or even a benefit, and that they discovered it through the guide.

Excellent. You talked about multiple systems and there were a couple questions around open asset that I'm going to try and weave together. One of the questions was kind of, how do you tell employees when to go to open asset, when to go to synthesis, and the related Question from Jeanette is why did you have the model images library on the intranet versus Open Asset? So maybe we can kind of broadly kind of talk about the relationship between the two platforms.

Sure, Fair questions, both of them. So the first question, my answer is always go to the guide first. And it's because I'm trying to build it that way. And I really want people to embrace the idea that for their sake, the guide should be the first stop and can be the first stop. And when they don't find what they're looking for on the guide, then I want them to come and talk to me or to other stakeholders so that we can work on fixing that. But there are other reasons why I can tell them to go to the guide first. The first one is that the guide search, the synthesis search, but I'll call it the guide can actually search visual search assets on Open Asset. So if I'm looking for images of stairs, I can go to the guide and I can type in stairs and I will get image results directly from Open Asset, even if they aren't associated with projects in our directory or elsewhere on the site. And that's just part of the integration that you all have built with Open Asset. And then when I click into any of those results, if I need more, if I need to go download that image in different resolution or get more out of it, I can click through from the guide to Open Asset. So now nobody has to ask me what's the URL for Open Asset anymore? Because if they go to the guide first, they can always get there. And the reason we built the model library the way that we did is because of the ability to in synthesis, attach the different metadata and create those filtered views, which is not as successful, I would say, in Open Asset. And so it's kind of an experiment. And I ask myself the same question, honestly every time I land on that page, why have we done it this way? But I've experimented a few times to build the same way to build the same thing in Open Asset or do it differently and just hasn't worked as easily.

Great. There's an interesting question around the video recordings of meetings that you mentioned to make them searchable. Well, I'm sure the only reason you record them is not to make them searchable. It's a side by product. So you record some meetings and share them on the guide. How do you delineate this from Keith? How do you delineate between meetings you capture for content versus those you don't?

Interesting question. I don't know that I do delineate between those that I capture for content versus those that I don't. I. I wouldn't upload any videos to the guide that I didn't think of as content is my answer to that.

You record and others you don't correct.

Or there are recordings that we don't upload to the guide because they are, you know, because I don't consider them content. So the only things that I do upload to the guide are things that I, I think bring value to the community on the guide. But there's a lot of that.

Okay. Brody asked a question. When posting news or blog entries, where does media come from and how is it auto formatted for consistency? So I'm assuming Brody means images, videos, documents, those kind of things.

Right. So that's a functionality of the stream that you all have built is that you've made it easy to. Either there's, you know, buttons that allow any user to upload images from their computer or upload videos from the computer. So when an employee is making one of those posts, they're using that functionality to upload images or videos directly to their post. And then the formatting from consistency comes largely from the design of the synthesis platform. I'm not sure I can answer better than that. Did that answer the questions?

I think so. So you're not spending a lot of time thinking about formatting and layout, right? That's kind of handled for you. You're just focused on creating compelling content that matters that follows Snehada's standards. Ish.

Yeah. Yes. I mean, yes, absolutely. I mean, one of the beautiful things about the post stream is that I really am not sweating the layout or the formatting of that. There are heading styles and body styles, and the images can only go in a few places because of the design of the platform. So posts tend to have a consistent look and feel with very little effort on our part.

You adjust styles to match your brand one time, right?

Exactly.

We got a couple AI search questions. The first one is how much time you spend curating search results produced by AI search. Maybe expand curating to kind of reviewing and then kind of improving content behind the scenes. What's that effort look like?

Sure. I'll be honest. We're doing casual testing right now and I tend to look at that about once a week and do a little bit of consideration of the results that I'm seeing come through. And I either depending on the type of result and the type of action that I see necessary, I might take immediate action to fix some sort of information gap that is revealed by the search, or I might add it to a list of things that we need to get to and sort of fix before we do launch AI Search wide. We haven't gotten into a really concerted and measured testing phase yet. That is something that we're planning to do later this summer after a few other things that we're working on. Great.

And the other AI search question was, I like this one. If AI search had been available when you initiated building the guide, would it have affected your approach to organizing the site and navigation?

Absolutely, Absolutely. So one of the things, and I've talked about this with Chris and Susan recently, is in the decision that we made to do an expedited launch and really focus on particular types of information rather than trying to fill it full of more documentation sooner or like as part of that launch. The reason that I felt comfortable doing that is because of my experience with traditional search. I knew that people would search and not find everything that they were looking for, but that I could keep an open conversation with them to let them know that we're always adding new content. And if what they search for today isn't there, it may be there tomorrow. And perhaps it will be there tomorrow because they searched for it and because they know that they searched for it. And that seemed like a reasonable approach. And so I also imagined that we could take time to sort of fill in the project directory, for example, with more projects, a little bit at a time, over a longer period. But since experiencing AI Search, which has happened since the launch, I know for sure that I would make some different decisions, because with AI Search, you don't always just get a zero result. You can. You have the possibility of getting a result that is potentially inaccurate or misleading because it's only connecting some of the dots and therefore it's drawing a picture based on the dots that it has access to and the information that we've provided. And it's the wrong picture because of all the missing dots, if you think of it like that. And therefore that has caused me to reconsider the way that we're going to go after the project, the project directory, for example, and fill in all of that missing data. And I'm going to do that in a much more compressed, intense project that's going to take a lot more of my focus rather than the long drawn out one that we had originally planned when we launched with a partially incomplete project directory.

So do you think that if you would. So if you're starting over, do you think you would have had still a five month project that was much more intense in terms of effort, or do you think you would have taken longer?

That's a good question. I think we probably would have done still an intense, an intense, shorter project, but it probably would have taken us more than five months because of the human resources we had available to to work on the project. So probably still short and intense, but longer than five months.

Switching gears completely, you mentioned kind of Slack email but also posts how has the Guide changed the way the Office uses Slack and email?

Well, the email I think is the one that has changed most significantly so far. And that is, you know, it used to be that the all Office email was the way that the company kind of communicated things officially, and now the company posts all official communications to the Guide first and then we only selectively promote certain of those announcements so that they would land in email boxes. So all Office emails have technically dropped to nearly zero. We use our All Office distribution list more for Calendar invites, almost exclusively for Calendar invites at this point than anything else. So that's been dramatic and it's nice because if an all Office email was sent out before, it was hard to find that again if you kind of lost track of it and needed to get back to it. And now because we use the Guide as the first channel of company communication, if you lose track of it, you can always find it much more easily than if it had been an email. Slack was a harder one that gets at personal habits and even has it's impacted by just the way our mobile phones are designed. It's so easy to pull a photo from a photo roll and share it directly to Slack, and that functionality doesn't yet exist for synthesis. So while you can post from your mobile device, it's not quite as direct and easy as Slack and therefore convincing our team to share photos from project sites to the Guide first before Slack has been and still is a challenge. The best tool that we've found to work against that is peer pressure. When peers are asking for those to be sent to the Guide rather than Slack, then it starts to change. And we have seen that habit change quite a bit over the past year, but it's something that we're still working on. What I foresee in the future is that we will make significant changes to the way Slack is structured. And the reason for that is because our employees do ask to make even bigger strides in sort of quieting all the different channels that come at us and give us a focused stream.

Marjana asked a Good question about reviewing content for quality. So she asked about posts, but I might just expand that into pages and other pieces of content on the guide. One of the things you a benefit of the kind of Squarespace mockup is that you were the only editor, so you knew exactly what went into it. And now you've got more editors, which is what you wanted. How are you kind of maintaining quality control with more editors?

Yeah, I mean, right now I'm not a gatekeeper. I distribute contributor permissions to people who need them. And that means that those, those people don't have to bring me all their content and go over it with me before they post it in the areas that they have permissions for. But because it's still a relatively new tool and I am a strong and well known leader of it, people tend to bring their content to me and brainstorm it with me. So I don't know what that's going to look like in several years from now when people have become more accustomed to it. What I'm hoping is that because we work closely together now to develop those things, that in several years time they will all be, you know, working to the same ends and each community manager will be maintaining that quality in their community themselves. That's what I see and that's what I'll try to build. But right now it's, it's very much Kate. I want to brainstorm how I'm going to add this content and will you help me review it?

Right, that makes sense. I think we have time for two more questions. I'm going to take one of them, but I'll ask that last. And so Becca asked if you could talk a little bit about onboarding employees into the guide when you launched. So was it a free for all? We have this new thing. Go explore it. Did you present it? Did you have a structured training schedule? How did you roll it out?

We had a presentation. So on February 14th we had a lunch and an all staff meeting and I gave a tour with the other team members who had helped me build it. We gave a tour of what we had built and talked about how to use it and demoed things like how to use it on your mobile and how to make it your homepage. And we talked a little bit about the whys and wherefores of it all. And then I, you know, I did a lot of campaigning over the next couple of months trying to make sure that different people were posting. I would, I don't anymore, have to do a lot of work to get people to Post information. I'll do a nudge periodically here and there like, oh, that should go. You should post that on the guide. Back then I was doing a lot more just to get, just to get that party started and get people thinking that way. So I was consciously going around to different groups and departments and asking them to brainstorm what they could put up on the guide. So it was largely one presentation and then a little bit of campaigning in the background until it started to take off. And we developed champions, kind of influencers in the company who are at all levels. And now I see them doing that work amongst themselves, just saying, saying to each other, like, oh, look for that on the guide or post that on the guide.

And what's the kind of bringing them in? Do you use the guide for onboarding? Vice versa? How do you teach them the guide during onboarding?

Yeah, yeah. So our HR team actually does that. They had taken on that responsibility even when we had the snooze guide. Our HR team had incorporated it into the early days of orienting a new employee as they sit and have a specific meeting where they give them a tour of the Internet and talk about what it is, why it is, what they can find there, and they're the ones who actually show new employees how to use it. So we do have a section in the welcome area of the guide that's kind of a, a checklist of things for new employees to explore and do, including setting up their profile and how to use, how to use the mobile device. And so in the earliest days of a new team member joining, our HR team sits with an employee and goes over all of that with them.

Great. Okay, one last lightning question. What's next for the guide? Any kind of upcoming improvements or features or what do you, what are you thinking of dreaming about now? And your dog, what is your dog dreaming about for the guide?

My dog, yeah. I'd love to know what he's dreaming about. So one of the things, kind of a little fun thing, and it came out of preparing this Internet tour, is looking back at that snowheaded guide booklet that I showed early on. I was reminded of all the character that we had given it with hands drawn like icons and expressive things. And that in focusing on a lot of the practicalities of developing the mock up and the guide and building it for functionality, some of those characterful things were scuttled. And so I am inspired by this to go back and try to bring some of that character now back into the digital form of the guide. So I'm going to work on getting hand drawn icons in there to replace some of the more icons and give it a little bit more of that texture. So that's a little fun thing. But the other thing that I'm really excited for is the learning management system that is in the works, which is going to be kind of a complement for synthesis because we really want to put a lot of intentionality into building more learning and development programs at the company and I know that that tool is going to help make that easier for us.

Oh good. We're excited about building it too. So I can't thank you enough for like all the thought and care you put into not only this presentation, but the work you've done at Snoheta with the guide. So the comments have been really great in the chat. I don't know if you've seen any of that. Probably not, but people really appreciative of what you've shared with us. For those watching, we're going to post the recording of this Internet tour on our website and on the online K community and send it out via email next week. So thank you all for coming and all of your great questions. And once again, thank you to Kate.

Thank you.