Building an Intranet Your Employees Will Want to Use

Is it time to reassess the effectiveness of your intranet? Simply having content that exists isn't always enough. Creating a usable (Dare we say, enjoyable?) intranet can develop higher productivity, deeper involvement, and richer ideas for your organization.

Content on your intranet will usually be relevant to internal operations; this could include company policies, employee directories, training materials, message boards, or announcements. Intranets need to maintain a high level of communication, collaboration, security, and adaptability. Explore our best practices and insider tips to find out how.

Intranet Best Practices

Don't underestimate the power of efficiency and performance. Even for internal sites, these principles can make or break the success of your system.

Define Stakeholders and Top Tasks

First, determine the groups of people that will be using your intranet—these are your stakeholders. This might be employees, students, faculty and staff, or others. Most user types will have a distinct set of clearances and needs. If you don’t know the top tasks for each audience, conduct an informal poll of each group to ensure your intranet is serving those needs.

Prioritize Usability

• Human-centric features: Never lose sight of the reason for creating an intranet: your employees. If the content isn’t helping them to work at a higher caliber, then what’s it doing on your intranet? Create avenues to make connections, complete tasks, and reduce stress. Always invite feedback to improve.
• Intuitive navigation: Strive to get the right information to the right people at just the right time. With a thoughtful, organized structure, employees can find what they need on the intranet with minimal friction.
• Wayfinding: Use markers and terms that your audience will be familiar with. Optimize the search functionality to ensure that employees can easily find what they are looking for.
• Personalization: With many modern tools for customization, intranets can be optimized even at the individual level. This allows the user to tailor their own experience, finding necessary items more quickly and eliminating those that are irrelevant.

Avoid Duplicating Information

Information that is available on a public site should not be replicated on your intranet. The risk of having information in two places is that it’s harder to keep updated, and users may get confused by outdated information. Having one “source of truth” and linking to it is a better option.

Emphasize Brand Cohesion

Your brand is not just for your customers. Internal websites should match the public-facing brand, tone, and message of your company. Not only will this contribute to overall credibility, but it will also help streamline your own processes. Establishing a rulebook for consistent voice, style, and vision allows you to seamlessly distribute the effort of content creation across team members.

Maintaining Your Intranet

Maintaining the content of an intranet is crucial for ensuring that it remains relevant, useful, and engaging. This may involve assessing existing content as well as planning ahead to keep information fresh.

Conducting an Audit

Use analytics to identify which content is being accessed frequently and which is not. Use this data to improve the relevance and quality of the content. Any pages not viewed in the past year are candidates for the archive.

You can also use search queries to:

• Identify information that stakeholders are having trouble finding
• Improve discoverability of these items
• Find out the terminology that your audience is using

Accessibility

Make sure that content is accessible to all employees, including those with disabilities. Adhere to general web accessibility principles laid out by W3C.

Creating a Workflow

Appoint a content manager responsible for overseeing the intranet. You’ll want to set up a workflow so that the editor-in-chief is reviewing everything that is posted to the intranet. This will eliminate duplicative content, ensure that content is thoughtfully placed, and keep the user experience frustration-free.

Identify exemplar pages that demonstrate your ideal format. Finally, create a content calendar to outline what content will be updated and when.

Interested in developing your own intranet? Don't be shy, let us help you! Get in touch with our team today.