What is an intranet?
A tech infrastructure person might call an intranet an “internal network”. If you ask a marketing person, they’re likely to say “internal website.” Ask employees, and too often the response is “that thing we don’t use unless we need to”.
Truth is that an intranet is all those things — and more.
To help you create an outstanding intranet that becomes a valuable channel for employee communication, keep these facts about an outstanding intranet in mind:
1. It Has One Purpose
The best intranets — meaning those that are well-used — give employees access to wide range support, encouragement, tools, and guidance. It helps them do their job.
Yes, an intranet’s fundamental purpose is to help employees do the best possible job they can. Most times, when employees get those things, they grow engaged, loyal, and natural ambassadors of the company.
The biggest mistake companies make when developing intranets is to make it about engagement. Engagement is a by-product. It comes from how you present the information, tools, services, etc. that employees need.
Another way to describe the purpose of an intranet: it solves employees’ problems in a variety of ways.
For example:
- Dashboard with links to applications and/or web-based tools the employee is authorized to use
- Easy access to employee directory — ideally with notes about kinds of situations each employee can help with
- Mechanism to quickly share knowledge, ask questions, provide feedback
- Direct access to health and safety information
- Repository of internal documents such as:
- product descriptions
- customer service processes and scripts
- internal announcements and articles
- external articles about the company and industry
- Search function
- HR forms
- content and context of current and past marketing campaigns
- links to industry information and associations
Don’t underestimate the time and energy that can be wasted looking for information, people, documents, and news.
An intranet should help make it easy for an employee to find the right answer when they have a problem.
2. There’s a Captive Audience
You know your intranet’s audience: employees. But don’t let that lull you into complacency. There’s little that can undermine the value of an intranet than an attitude of “they have to look at it”.
No. They don’t.
Employees will turn to word of mouth, personal repositories, and rumors to get what they need if an intranet is difficult to navigate, visually unappealing, out of date, or lacking relevant content.
There will also be low usage if you don’t understand who is using the intranet. “Employees” isn’t a good enough answer. For your external site, you wouldn’t say your users are “customers”. You’d describe the characteristic of frequent or ideal users. For example, you might have two kinds of users: “women and men, aged 25-35, pet owners” and “owners of businesses specialize in dog grooming, pet-sitting, or pet supplies”. You probably can also describe your audience by region or purchasing behavior.
Internal audience segmentation can be done by location, work environment (e.g. office, factory, on the road), job function, tenure, and more. An outstanding intranet serves as many segments of the employee population as possible.
Another critical aspect to serving this captive audience is acknowledging that some segments will know more about a particular topic than others. This is important to context, which you need to provide with all information, documentation, and news posted on an intranet.
For example, if you release the most recent sales results, you have to add context through commentary to make that valuable information. But keep it real. The folks in Sales will know more of the behind-the-scenes scoop than everyone else. If you “spin” the context too much, you risk eroding the trust and engagement of that Sales team.
3. It’s a “Pull” Communication Channel
It’s critical to remember than an intranet is a channel from which employees pull information, access to tools, etc. Even in organizations where signing into the intranet is required for access to necessary applications, content can’t be pushed to users. The only exception is onscreen alerts that some organizations use in case of emergency.
Creating an outstanding intranet means never forgetting that employees will go to it when they need something. When they have a problem to solve.
At its core, it’s an on-demand channel. At times, and certainly in the early stages of adoption, you’ll drive people to your intranet through push channels such as email and town hall meetings. But a hallmark of an outstanding intranet is consistent usage without push notifications.
In other words, if people use it as a reliable source of accurate and relevant information, tools, guidance, and so on, you’ve got an effective intranet.
4. Not Every Employee Can Use It
This fact of intranets relates back to audience segmentation. Some companies have people without consistent or frequent access to a computer.
Examples of this segment of employees include drivers, retail staff, warehouse staff, and maintenance teams.
Knowing the percentage of employees who can easily and consistently access the intranet is essential for two reasons:
- It helps you know what other channels you need for important messages, content, and tools. For example, you can’t only have an online employee handbook if there are employees with unreliable access to the intranet.
- It enables you to get true measurements of usage. For example, you might determine that only 30% of employees are using the intranet. But if you know that only 80% have regular access, that outcome is more positive. In an organization of 100 employees, that’s the difference between 30% adoption and 37.5%. Neither is ideal. But one number is more accurate and useful than the other.
5. There’s No Comparison
There are no industry standards for intranet usage. You can’t compare stats about your site to those from organizations with the same number of employees. Or those in the same industry.
Why? Because every intranet truly is unique. You can use the same software or platform as other organizations but how you use it will be different. A company’s culture, resources, structure, focus, and commitment to employee communication will influence what your intranet offers.
So, how can you know if your intranet is performing? Measure what matters. Measure against your own historical data.
Any marketer will tell you that with external websites, the number of visitors isn’t as important as the number of people who buy something. After all, making sales is the goal.
Apply that same thinking to measuring the effectiveness of an intranet. It doesn’t matter if 90% of employees click on the notice about signing up for mandatory training. What matters is the number of employees who sign up for that training without needing to be reminded or chased down. The goal of the notice was compliance. Was that achieved?
Or in the case of an article about a product launch, you could get 100% of people viewing the page. How many understand the key features and why the new product is valuable to customers? The goal is awareness. If inaccurate information circulates or employees ask questions that were answered in the article, the goal wasn’t achieved.
The key best practices for measuring an intranet’s performance are:
- Collect usage data over 3 to establish a baseline. Make notice of any notable campaigns to increase usage since that would skew results.
- At a minimum, collect:
- Total visitors
- Unique visitors
- Average visit duration
- Slice the data by:
- Day, week, month
- Region (if applicable)
- Time of day, week, month
- Know the number and percentage of employees who have easy, regular access to the intranet
- Ask business units with an interest in outcomes (e.g. IT, HR, marketing) related to specific content to track:
- Compliance rates
- Lack of awareness
- Errors and rework
- Time and resources spent on any follow-up communication
- Questions and issues raised at team level
- Conduct a brief intranet survey once a year to gain insight into the employee experience. The goal is to discover if employees:
- Trust the accuracy and relevance of content
- Find it easy to find what they need
- Use the intranet without prompt
6. It Has Dedicated Governance
Once launched, intranets become entities that must be fed. Every outstanding intranet has a dedicated “owner” and the commitment and input of key stakeholders. Under the leadership of the accountable area (often corporate communications, HR, or marketing) the group:
- Establishes and follows guidelines for the scope of content, portals, and functionality
- Has frequent constructive discussions about prioritizing enhancements and using resources
- Gathers and assesses quantitative and qualitative measurement
- Maintains a rolling one-year plan for maintenance and archiving of content
7. It’s Current
Well-used and effective intranets don’t stagnate. They evolve with the organization and technological advancements.
It’s as simple as that.
One Step at a Time
Look at the descriptions of award-winning intranets. You’ll see that none of them has every bell and whistle. Yet, they are giving their employees a great resource.
To get your intranet from good to great, identify what you do best and where you need the most improvement. Continue doing what you do well. Put focus and resources on the gap.
Use measurement and governance to deliver valuable resources to employees today and tomorrow.
