Five Must-Have Ingredients for Your Employee Intranet

Make your intranet relevant, current and useful

Many organizations rely on an intranet to serve as a core employee communication channel. After all, an effective intranet provides easy access to essential tools, lets everyone know what’s happening and allows employees to connect with one another.

But an intranet isn’t like The Field of Dreams—you can’t just build it and hope employees will come. In fact, your intranet requires constant attention to keep it relevant, current and useful. Here are the five elements an intranet needs to be effective:

1. Fresh and unique content

One of the biggest complaints about employee intranets is that the content is outdated or stale. Employees expect to find up-to-date information and tools on the intranet that they can’t get anywhere else. That’s why it’s important to keep posting fresh content that is relevant to employees—tell them something unique about the organization that The New York Times can’t provide.

Here are a few ways to generate fresh content:

• Build a news feed that aggregates relevant news stories from multiple sources
• Launch an editorial board to tap into what’s happening across the organization and identify leads
• Create a resource library where employees can access tools they need most

2. Useful resources

If you want employees to use the intranet, offer unique tools they can’t find anywhere else. Resources that help employees effectively manage their daily work have the biggest draw. For example, you could provide managers with an easy-to-navigate library of documents that they use most often.

Here are some other useful resources you can post on your intranet:

• App that allows shift employees to check their schedules and request time off
• Social media hub (create groups to discuss specific topics)
• Company-wide calendar
• Employee directory
• Cafeteria menus
• App to reserve conference rooms
• Employee handbook
• HR policies

3. Effective navigation and search

One of the biggest problems employees have with intranets is not being able to find what they need. That’s why it’s important to organize and name content based on the way employees look for it. Here are a few ways you can help employees navigate and search for the content they need:

• Move your navigation bar to the left/top corner of your intranet where most people look first
• Use keywords that are relevant to employees and tag content accordingly
• Ensure that headlines and links are short and descriptive so employees know what to expect
• Use breadcrumbs at the top of each page to help employees track where they are on the intranet
• Ensure your search function is in a prominent place at the top of each page

4. Collaboration and participation

Intranets can help you build a sense of community among employees and promote collaboration. By incorporating social media tools into your intranet, you enable employees to express themselves through comments or creating new content. Here are a few easy ways to boost employee collaboration and participation through social media:

• Add widgets. Embed widgets—mini web applications—into your intranet to enable employees to rate, share or subscribe to content. There are a lot of widgets you can download for free or for a minimal cost.
• Ask employees to contribute content. Keep your intranet content fresh by giving employees opportunities to share their own content, such as launching a quick poll or inviting employees to create and share their own videos on a compelling topic.
• Foster collaboration. Help employees across different campuses or regions feel more connected by promoting collaboration on your employee intranet. You can start by creating a microsite where employees can share ideas or ask questions about a specific business topic. Or enable employees to create online groups to collaborate on work projects.

5. Mobile-friendly and accessible

Mobile is today’s go-to tool: the first-place employees turn to for information and to get work done. So, you should consider making your intranet accessible (and easily scannable) from mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.

Consider a responsive (sometimes called “optimized”) intranet design so employees can get the information they need, and the full experience of the site, no matter what device they are on. With a responsive intranet, users don’t need to pinch/pull to resize content (e.g., fonts, images, etc.) or perform left/right panning. Icons and menu systems are turned into larger, more easy-to-use tools. A responsive site can be a stand-alone site (public or hidden on the web) or part of an existing intranet platform.

Measuring your intranet effectiveness

How do you know if your intranet is meeting employees’ needs? What pages or content are people visiting most? What improvements can be made? You can answer these questions by developing a clear employee communication measurement strategy for your intranet.

Here are four things you should do as part of your measurement strategy:

• Set objectives. Identify what you want to achieve as a result of your measurement efforts (e.g., understand if/how employees are reading intranet articles.)
• Select metrics to track. Here are five metrics most useful to track:
  • Top pages
  • Unique visitors and page views
  • Average visit duration
  • Traffic sources
  • Frequently searched keywords
• Program the right measurement tool. Consult with your IT team to find out what tools are available to collect the metrics you identified. One of the most popular tools is Google Analytics, a free service offered by Google that collects robust statistics about a website’s traffic and traffic sources.
• Analyze data and create the report. Get in the habit of reviewing stats on a monthly basis and comparing the data over time; this will help you understand what is working and what’s not working.