What makes a quality intranet?

The company intranet has come a long way over the years, and even more so in the last three years as our teams have switched to home or hybrid working.

Beyond the tech used, the purpose of an intranet has changed dramatically. It’s no longer just a comms tool - it’s the face of your digital workplace. It’s the system that informs and connects team members, no matter where they work or the role they’re in. 

BUT … a poor intranet is also the face of a poor employee experience. Putting time, effort, and money into an intranet upfront is worth the resource expense. In the longer run, you won’t spend as much time and money ‘fixing’ it, but you’ll support your employees to be more productive and engaged.

So what makes an intranet work well? Here’s a few of our top tips from years of experience in developing and working with a variety of intranets across different platforms and industries.

Updated regularly

People need a reason to keep coming back. If the same news story is on the homepage for days or weeks at a time, it will become ‘white noise’. When you do eventually update it, it’s more likely to be ignored because people have learned not to bother looking there.

So, have a regular posting routine - set yourself parameters like a minimum of two news stories a week, a maximum of 1-2 per day. Also, look at your stats and find out when people are accessing the platform - use that as your time to post your news to maximise your chances of engagement.

Excellent search functionality

The number-one reason people use an intranet is to find something or someone. If your search isn’t set up correctly, or you’re not using good metadata, or it links to outdated databases, it’s incredibly frustrating for people to use.

Your goal is to connect people with information and with each other, so having a great search functionality is key. If people can rely on the search functionality, it also means they’ll continue to use the intranet as their ‘one source of truth’, decreasing the chances of misinformation circulating.

Seamlessly integrated with other systems

The intranet is often the gateway to a number of other systems and databases, or can be the home of process workflows. Through the research you’ll do before you plan out your intranet, you’ll uncover what other systems and processes people use, and how you can make it easy for people to access those through your intranet. You’ll also then know what needs to connect with other systems.

Why is this important? An intranet should be a ‘one stop shop’ for your people. It slows us down when we have to open and close a bunch of different platforms, instead of just clicking on what we need from an intranet home page.

Also, if people know the intranet is the gateway to the platforms they need, they’ll go there every day … increasing your readership of your news stories!

Enables employee networking and knowledge sharing

Now more than ever it’s critical for workplaces to provide connections between employees. Working from home or working across different states or countries has its challenges, and we can reduce some of that friction through creating intranets than enable connections and knowledge sharing.

For example, you could integrate Yammer into your SharePoint intranet home page that displays latest posts / questions from employees across your organisation. 

Also, make it easy for people to share information from your intranet to fellow team mates - a simple ‘share this page’ button will enable this.

Accessible any time, any place, any device

Hybrid, mobile workforces are here to stay. We do so much work on our personal devices now (probably more than we should, but that’s for another day!), that it makes sense your intranet should also be accessible on any device.

The challenge here is always security settings - onerous settings that require people to enter a password and authenticate themselves every single time they want to access the intranet will mean it simply won’t be used. Where you can, simplify these processes - perhaps only require an employee to login every few days or weeks.

Relevant and useful news and information

If you didn’t have a dog and weren’t interested at all in dogs, would you keep coming back to a website that only had information about dogs? Probably not! The same goes for your content - if it’s only relevant and useful for a handful of people, then nobody else will engage. 

Have some parameters around the news that goes on the homepage (eg, it must be relevant to the majority of team people) and / or set up your intranet so it shows news that is relevant to particular people. For example, you could tag a news article as ‘customer care’, and that article will only show for those team members whose profile aligns with that tag.

Strong sense of ownership

When it’s everyone’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s responsibility. That applies to taking out the rubbish every week, and to updating the intranet! 

There should be a clear understanding of who owns what section of the intranet. For example, the Comms Team would own the news on the home page, and maybe the general navigation and layout. However, the HR team would own the career and EAP pages, and it’s their responsibility to update them.

Clear, robust governance framework

Ultimately, a great intranet only works if you have a great governance framework in place. This includes not only roles and responsibilities around different sections of your intranet, but also the guiding principles and parameters. For example, what content gets posted and when; who has review and approval rights; templates and styles to be used, and so on. This framework implementation works best when you have a community of editors who meet regularly to discuss any changes and suggestions.

Feedback mechanism

Speaking of suggestions, your intranet should be a living, breathing beast that evolves and responds to employees’ needs. So make sure there’s an easy-to-find ‘suggestion box’ on the home page where people can share their feedback on what’s working and what’s not, what else they’d like easy access to, or any technical issues they may have spotted. Chances are, one person’s frustrations are probably shared by dozens more!