Grid:home
Intranet Management in the Utilities Industry
My current role involves managing the award-winning intranet “Grid:home” at National Grid, a global leader in the Utilities sector in the UK and Northeast USA. Additional comms-related priorities include UX/UI design and digital channel specialism for newsletters, digital signage, and social media. I bring a specific focus on governance, content strategy, and better employee experience for both field and office-based workers. From my perspective, the user always comes first.
Built for the field
Grid:home includes a mobile-responsive companion app for field workers, available on iOS and Android with targeted news, resources, tools, and safety information by role, location, and way-of-working. The app was recognized at the Unite conference hosted by Unity for bringing critical information to an underserved workforce. Since launch, engagement from the field force has risen from 2% to over 60%, measured as meaningful activity beyond the homepage, including quick access to safety resources, everyday tools, and incident reporting to support safe, reliable operations.
Grid:home 2.0
Beginning in 2023, we began gathering and analyzing feedback on how our end users were using the platform and what needed improvement. Combining this feedback with key analytics helped us launch the second iteration, commonly known as Grid:home 2.0. As part of the 2.0 initiative, we created seven distinct site templates for different intranet content goals—from quick, simple solutions to experiences designed for the highest level of engagement.
The template above is our “Support” template, designed for quick and easy access to critical information. A key element of this solution is the contextual searchable banner, which scrolls only related topics and pages. There is additional space reserved for change communications, a dynamic link card widget to direct users to categorized knowledge articles, a document rollup integrated to a related SharePoint site, and a section for related stories, events, and videos.
