Best Practices
| Overview | Source | Ideas to Actions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profiles | It’s massively important therefore to have well populated, accurate, and up-to-date profiles for employees. The staff directory is often considered a ‘given’ for an intranet; however, to be truly valuable to employees, it needs to go beyond a list of names and telephone numbers. Intranet profiles, therefore, must be:
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| Enterprise Search | Effective intranet search functionality, therefore, calls for:
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| Processes | Moving paper forms into the electronic environment of the intranet is another important step to make your intranet the place where people can get work done. | ||
| Homepage | Every intranet that wants to have high adoption rates needs to create homepages where the content changes frequently (ideally, daily or even more frequently if it can be managed.) It should show information that is not only relevant to topics being discussed across the company, but it also tailored to the individual. | ||
| Employee Recognition | A peer-to-peer recognition tool empowers your users to take ownership for recognising and rewarding one another can not only provide a much-needed boost to morale and engagement, but also give users the means to take ownership of their intranet. | ||
| Put recognition on the home page. | |||
| Team Areas | Organizations are recognizing the demand for more collaborative ways of working and ‘agile’ teams of individuals who are connected by a project or a purpose, rather than a function. These could range from conferences being planned for to marketing campaigns being managed and office moves facilitated. Ensuring there are easy-to-create and dedicated spaces for these teams to communicate and work together is vital. Team areas that people can manage and dispose of themselves. | ||
| Two-way Communication | Social tools and a diverse range of content areas and types are key to achieve this. Including functionality such as the ability to Like, Share, and Comment all empower users to interact and engage with content. Informal content types such as blogs encourage user-generated content and empower users with their own voice. Discussion or idea forums are a hugely powerful way to tap into employee feedback, innovations, or to provide a ‘check and test’ point. | ||
| Leverage the power of social. | |||
| Culture | An intranet should reflect this corporate brand and culture, reminding people every day what they are aiming towards, bringing them together and connecting them to their organization. It will also provide new starters with a platform to accelerate their acclimatization to their new role and company environment as a whole. | ||
Put people and culture at the heart of your intranet. Put photo gallery at the bottom of the home page, people will scroll down to see people-centric content. Leadership has to model the behaviour they want to see on the intranet. | |||
Move or create leadership blogs on your intranet. It’ll encourage people to interact, and your employees are always interested in getting insight into leadership’s perspectives and personalities. One pro tip: keep the content human. Build your intranet based on your organizations’ goals and needs, not on what you think other organizations are doing. Intranets may seem generic, but a good intranet takes into consideration your industry and its specific challenges. Have your leadership team and executives commit to using the tool. Town halls and key initiatives are great ways for leadership to exercise the tool in visible ways. | /perspectives/10-tips-building-intranet-employees-will-actually-use/ | ||
| Governance | Well, to reach the heights of indispensable, vital, business tool, there must be a clear, well-defined road map. This will state what are the goals of the intranet are, and what benchmarking will occur to record and show this achievement. Beyond this, to implement these plans, you need governance. How your intranet will work must be thought through. There should be content standards that explain how content should be added and maintained. There needs to be a process to cover new starters and their onboarding to the intranet. There should also be ‘look and feel’ rules that cover which widgets, colours and images should be used. Will your intranet pages look the same? Do you have a corporate style for documents? Will there be a standard ‘work’ photo for everyone’s profile, or can people add their own? Will having a well-populated profile page be a requirement that people are appraised on? | ||
| Content authors training, style and content guidelines. | |||
Plan for governance. Do it before roll-out, too. Don’t turn your intranet into a content and file jungle. | /perspectives/10-tips-building-intranet-employees-will-actually-use/ | ||
| Successful intranets benefit from executive sponsorship as part of a strong governance model. | https://www.ragan.com/4-keys-to-building-and-maintaining-a-successful-intranet/ | ||
Multi-department steering committee. Every quarter send a quick survey asking your users for three things your intranet should START DOING and three things your intranet should STOP DOING. Make it simple. When you get the results, share the data and insights with the company. Learn from it. And do something about it. | |||
| Mobile | Mobile optimisation can include the ability to submit photos via a mobile phone. | ||
| Make sure it’s mobile-friendly technologies and that the mobile experience is carefully planned around key scenarios that your users need to accomplish. Ensure to test on several different platforms and in various environments. Make sure it’s search-friendly and that team sites are easy to find and navigate across devices. | /perspectives/10-tips-building-intranet-employees-will-actually-use/ |