Editorial
Cost is a significant factor when deciding whether to implement a new employee experience platform — or to develop what you currently have. With a sizable upfront cost followed by annual or weekly licenses to pay for many years, it is a considerable investment.
This means stakeholders want an indication of the return on investment before the project begins. Sometimes project teams get the green light to explore their options only to have a senior stakeholder question the expense once it’s well under way. Unfortunately, in the current climate we’re seeing this happen more often.
Below are some tips that will help strengthen your case for a new intranet.
Introduce What Intranets Can Do
Everyone’s past experiences of intranets will vary. Some people will have previously worked for a company with an intranet that perfectly addressed employee needs, delivering a superb employee experience. However, the experience of an outdated intranet that was updated once every few months will be seared into the memory of others.
It’s important to address what your stakeholders don’t know with an eye towards what will broadly benefit your organization. At this stage focus on what purposes intranets can fulfill and keep your organization’s strategy in the forefront of your mind.
To conduct relevant research to expand your own understanding, you could:
- Read product reviews. This will help you explore industry trends and identify solutions that might meet your needs.
- Explore competition winners. Step Two, Ragan, Nielsen Norman Group and Digital Impact are all excellent sources for case studies and an indication of what an intranet can deliver.
- Attend vendor workshops and webinars. Sign up for a few to get a sense of what capabilities exist and how they address business needs.
- Visit vendor websites. Client pages and screenshots / videos of the product in action will show what use cases the solution addresses.
Summarize your findings by presenting the benefits of intranet capabilities to your employees and your business overall. The ClearBox digital workplace framework will give you a structure to work through when forming your argument here, allowing you to focus on those areas that matter most.
Related Article: 5 Intranet Trends Redefining Employee Experience in 2023
Introduce Intranet Strengths that Matter to Stakeholders
Generally, your business case document will be presented to a group of stakeholders. This means discussing how an intranet could actively support the organizational strategies as an argument as to why you need an improved solution. However, if you know you need to persuade one particular person, it can help to identify what matters to them and address that in your argument.
For example, if you need to address someone in HR, explaining how intranets can assist with improving employee engagement (in provable, measurable ways such as through talent retention) is an effective argument to make. Perhaps their team receives a lot of calls with basic questions? Showing how improved reference materials can allow employees to self-serve and therefore save their team time, might also be an effective argument.
Or, if you need to make the argument to someone who leads a frontline workforce, show them you understand what makes frontline needs different. This also demonstrates your capabilities to effectively select a solid (single) alternative to a host of apps they’re expected to download now.
Identify Your Business Needs
You need to identify what your business needs are and how they can be addressed by an improved intranet. Conducting user research and forming an intranet strategy for the digital workplace and broader organizational strategy will help you here. Presenting this in a simple manner — whilst still showing the comprehensiveness of an intranet — makes for a convincing argument..
As you go along, ask whether your current solution(s) will address the needs you are uncovering. Highlight those that aren’t being addressed or wouldn’t easily be addressed by the current solution in future, as this is an effective argument for change.
For example, let’s say you uncover a desire that more people from across the business want to contribute local or departmental news. Is your current solution simple enough to allow inexperienced publishers to do this easily and create engaging articles at the end of it? What about the ‘air traffic control’ of many news stories hitting people at the same time?
Or perhaps you don’t want the intranet to become unloved again, so are thinking of longer-term solutions to avoid this in future. Do you have a vendor or partner in place that offers effective strategic advice at a sensible price? Or what about effective life cycle features? Does your current solution prompt people to review and replace content after a defined time?
Summarize Technology Options
Create a summary of technology options that will address the needs of the business using the research you’ve conducted. This doesn’t need to be a final short- or long-list of options — it can be as simple as a list of products addressing a key business need in an interesting manner. Including this information highlights that it is possible to address complex organizational needs in a straightforward way, exposing the gap between your current capabilities and what’s possible.
For example, you may wish to address the onboarding of new employees into the business in more sophisticated ways. ‘Drip campaigns’ from Firstup that trigger messages at defined times is a good example here:
Perhaps IT would like support with provisioning suitable project or other workspaces, such as in this example from Atlas:
Maybe you would like a capability for employee recognition, for example in Simpplr:
Or how about ideation, such as in Powell Software:
The market is filled with exciting features, but many of them won’t be relevant for you. Reread this post to select the examples that matter to you, your colleagues, the overall organization and to the stakeholder(s) you’re trying to persuade.
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A well-implemented and well-loved intranet is a hugely valuable tool to your business. Don’t be discouraged by any push-back you receive from your stakeholders — any arguments they make will have a counter-argument, and there are plenty of resources out there to help you.
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