Organizations have an intranet to engage employees and keep them connected – the difference is how each company uses it. Typically, intranets have been used as a hub to store information like employee news and events, HR documents, and presentations and marketing materials about company products and services. However, according to Quora, the use of company intranets have been steadily evolving into more of a social intranet that is more visually appealing and engaging. If you’re trying to build a more transparent culture or just keep your employees informed, here are a few ways to ensure you’re getting the most out of your intranet:
Make Sure It Contains Useful Information
This may seem like a no-brainer, but the first step is making sure your intranet contains information that is relevant for your employees. I’ve seen a lot of intranet sites that have useful information for some departments, and nothing for others. The best include information for all departments as the key function of an intranet is to make employees lives easier. Additionally, it is so important to make sure all the information is updated and current. In many cases, documents that are years old and no longer relevant can get in the way of more important and relevant information. Every company is different, but it’s common practice to remove documents and information that is older than one year.
Make Sure It’s Visually Appealing
There are many intranets out there that look like glorified Excel spreadsheets with text-heavy pages. While this does provide the content your employees are looking for, this is not the best way to present the information. The most effective intranets follow a similar formatting of your company’s external website and branding. Including pictures, videos, hyperlinks, and colorful page breaks are a great way to customize your intranet to make it more visually appealing. While this may not be feasible on all your pages, concentrating on the main pages of your site, like the homepage and other highly viewed pages, will not only make the site easier to use, but also increase your employee engagement. Employees are far more likely to spend time exploring pages and content if what they’re looking at is visually appealing. While the overall content is what ultimately drives employees to visit your intranet, the visual design will help keep them there to explore other areas of your site.
Make Sure It Encourages Employee Engagement
Once you draw employees to your intranet with useful information and visually appealing pages, it’s the perfect opportunity to promote new content. For example, new product information, company events, blog posts, external website updates, and even social media posts are perfect things to share with your employee base. Sharing this type of content will not only help your employees feel like they are part of one big team, it will also put the most relevant and important information right at you’re their fingertips, ultimately increasing employee engagement with your intranet, as well as with your company website and social channels externally.
How do Know if your Tactics are Effective?
Before you begin making updates to your intranet, it’s important to gauge your current viewership. Programs like Google Analytics can be paired with your intranet to make it easy to track pageviews, time spent on pages, and even exit and bounce rates. Once you have your baseline metrics, start to make updates and see what strategies are effective. Every company will be different, but you’ll be able to see direct correlations to changes that increase pageviews and changes that don’t. Announcing your intranet changes as well as updated content through company communications is always a great way to drive traffic directly to your site!
Enhancing your company’s intranet will take time and it should not be done alone. It’s important to collaborate with your marketing and communications team as well as your HR department. The sooner you start the discussion, the sooner you can begin to get the most out of your intranet!
- Are you Getting the Most out of Your Company’s Intranet? - August 22, 2018
- Internal Communications Positive Impact on Company Culture - March 30, 2017
