Intranets have many different functions and capabilities to help improve employee engagement at an individual level, and companies at an organizational level. If you make the intranet truly essential for your end users, the benefits will be firmly felt at an organizational level too. Here are some ways you can ensure your intranet will be loved by employees!
Focus on everyday tasks
Internal communications are an important function of the intranet, but most employees primarily want to use the intranet to be able to get their job done.
Making the intranet a place where the majority of employees can complete common tasks means that your intranet will become an essential destination for your workforce.
There are various ways to achieve a more task-focused intranet, depending on the capability of your intranet software package. Some examples include:
- Creating a navigation or information architecture that guides employees towards tasks
- Adding content with clearly written explanations of how tasks can be completed. Adding task-related widgets to the homepage
- Adding links to different applications so the intranet is a gateway to the wider set of digital tools across the company
- Creating navigation aids such as landing pages, indexes or special “how to” areas that aid task management
Seek out business opportunities
While inevitably the focus of central intranet teams is managing key areas and internal communications-led content such as news, don’t neglect other parts of your organization! Some of the most important activities actually happen in local business areas and within different groups.
Seek out opportunities for the intranet to make a real difference to the way people work. Search for different groups, and spend time with them to understand their needs and pain points. Inevitably some problems that can be easily solved through the intranet will emerge.
Make it mobile
Employees use their mobile devices inside and outside work. In fact most people feel completely lost without their smartphone! Make it a priority to optimize your social intranet for mobile devices.
There may well be technical and security constraints to negotiate, but having a truly mobile intranet is well worth the effort. It is extremely popular with users and tends to produce a more streamlined employee experience that is firmly focused on their needs.
Mobile intranets also truly open the intranet to the entire workforce, especially when it is available on employees’ personal devices.
This is critical in organizations which have a high proportion of remote employees in locations such as factories and retail units or who are constantly on the move and do not have access to a computer during the day.
Use personalization to drive relevancy
When employees log into the intranet they want to see content that is relevant to them. If they can’t, they’ll stop visiting! Intranet allows personalization to deliver content that is relevant based on an individual’s profile. A person is far more likely to read content that is targeted to them based on their role, location, country, region, function, or even line of business.
If they can also see a personalized social feed based on the membership of groups or communities and who they follow, this makes the whole intranet experience even better!
Delivering targeted content does have its challenges, including managing the data to make it happen, but such personalized content leads to a far better employee experience, and ultimately higher adoption.
Organize content for ease of access and searchability
Studies have shown that employees waste hours each week trying to find resources they need. Poor searchability represents a huge drain on productivity, in addition to being profoundly frustrating. An intranet that contributes to these concerns is not a good intranet.
Make sure your employees can find the content they need. Structure the intranet navigation or areas of the site around the way employees think and do things, rather than to reflect how your organization is structured.
Use sensible labels so items are easier to find. Create navigational aids like indexes or highly structured landing pages. If your intranet search has features that can improve it, enable them.
Encourage site owners and authors to tag content and everybody to tag conversations so they are easier to find. To encourage discovery, use special widgets to promote suggested or popular content on the homepage.
By making a number of changes you can ramp up searchability. Every minute of time you save your employees makes your intranet more essential!
What We Learned
- Focus on everyday tasks
- Seek out business opportunities
- Make it mobile
- Use personalization to drive relevancy
- Organize content for ease of access and searchability
