A main complaint people make about their company intranet is, “We spent lots of money on a workplace solution and it’s not working the way it’s supposed to.”
Perhaps the usage data is showing a drastic drop — people just aren’t using the intranet. Anecdotal evidence may also corroborate that the site just isn’t working well.
If that sounds like your situation, take hope. People don’t stop using an intranet for no reason. When you dig deeper, these reasons emerge and become solvable problems.
It’s often possible to turn around a struggling company intranet by optimizing the solution for your situation and focusing on improving the user experience.
Here are five ways to bring new life to your company intranet.
- Better management of day-to-day activity: When users abandon a company intranet, it’s usually because it doesn’t provide them any content utility. It’s a content management problem, not a user problem. When content is stale, outdated and hard to find, usage drops off.To turn this problem around, cultivate executive support for the intranet. When you have buy-in from the top, executives are more willing to put the time, money and people in place to make the intranet successful. This encourages employees to use it, grow it and maintain it.
- Manage expectations: The problem usually comes back to a mismatch of expectations. Users thought you were going to do something with the intranet, but you decided to do something else instead, and didn’t communicate in a way that aligned with expectations.We all have expectations about products we buy or work we’re having done, and when the reality doesn’t match them, it leaves us feeling bad. People are better able to take bad news if you’re upfront and honest with them, and provide the rationale for why it’s going to work differently than originally planned. There’s such a thing as too many meetings, but never too much communication.
- Clarify your goals and business objectives: Make you’re sure building on a strong foundation. Ideally, you should know the top four to eight objectives you want to accomplish with the intranet, but that’s seldom the case. Writing good business objectives isn’t a small task; you need to specify what the goal is, why you’re pursuing it and how you’re going to measure it.When you have this foundation, it’s easier to manage expectations about what the solution is designed to do and what it doesn’t do. This way, if your platform does need a technology upgrade, for example, everyone is clear on why.
- Develop a sound information governance strategy: People usually know they need governance for a company intranet to be successful, but they don’t know how to do it well. Your governance plan should define who’s responsible for making sure the intranet doesn’t fall off the map. Who “owns” the site, and what processes are in place to make sure that it’s kept up to date?Many people make great governance plans and don’t follow through — that’s not an easy fix. Success depends largely on having the right people in the right place, so consider appointing a designated knowledge management person and assign other responsibilities as needed.
- Upgrade the infrastructure: In some cases, you may need to upgrade the intranet platform or provide new functionalities. But be careful in making these technology changes — the true problem is usually somewhere else. People think they need the latest bells and whistles to make their intranet work again, but if you put your existing content mess in a shiny new package, you’re going to experience the same problem. New platforms also bring new problems that didn’t exist before.Don’t migrate your mess. Before you migrate your content to a new platform, go through an intensive discovery process to make sure you’re optimizing your content and not just upgrading without solving problems.
If your company intranet is going downhill, you have an opportunity to turn it around by using some combination of these five solutions. The business benefit of revitalizing your intranet depends on what your organization wants to accomplish.
For instance, your main goal might be to improve communication with your field staff, or to improve social interaction between remote workers. Other common benefits include increased employee productivity due to improved document management and findability.
Learn more about turning your intranet around by downloading our free e-book, Designing A User-Centered Intranet For SharePoint Online.
