Editorial
After email, the intranet is our longest serving digital space. Drawing its inspiration from the internet, the intranet became the place to publish information that was solely for the consumption of employees. Traditionally, the intranet was structured to mimic the organization. The “modern” intranet suggests a change from pushing information to staff, to one of placing the employee at the center, reacting to employee pull and maximizing the employee experience.
Swoop Analytics recently completed our second annual benchmarking of SharePoint Online intranets, Microsoft’s modern intranet solution. In this year’s study we analyzed how 20 organizations were using their modern intranet. We analyzed more than 177,000 intranet users, 57,000 intranet news pages and more than 37,000 content pages over a three-month period. We found intranet visitors spent as little as seven minutes a day on the intranet and as little as 18 seconds reading news per day. The attention economy has come to the intranet, placing increased pressures on those that author its content.
Microsoft delineates news pages and content pages, which in our study is one source of dyslexia. The intranet is now demanding skill at writing attention-grabbing news articles, carefully crafted policies, instructional guides and directories, and more — all that can be effectively consumed in minutes, if not seconds. This is the modern intranet.
The Challenges of Modern Intranets
Digital communications provider Firstup offers the following criteria for a modern intranet:
- Provides a positive employee experience.
- Integrates systems and applications.
- Offers true mobile reach and support.
- Complements cloud office solutions.
- Offers personalization.
Vendors offering modern intranet solutions will happily tick each of these criteria off. It’s not, however, the feature list but the usage list that dictates whether the modern intranet goals are actually being met.
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A positive employee experience tops the list. A narrow interpretation might be “I enjoyed the experience of using the intranet” to the broader one of “The intranet has helped me feel more engaged with the organization.” But can “readership” be interpreted as “engagement”?
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A common aspiration is the intranet serves as a portal to all other employee applications. We found many organizations used the intranet as the home page for web access. But is the portal simply a directory or a destination?
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Not all employees are deskbound. If the aspiration is to reach all employees where they work, mobile access is a must. Or is it?
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The digital world is rapidly moving to the cloud, a prerequisite for agile applications. But how ready are organizations to migrate their intranets to the cloud?
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Personalization has long been a calling card for internet marketing. The better the targeting, the stronger the sales. But do intranets really have the same needs?
The Growing Demands of Employee Engagement
While intranets have long hosted news, our study showed that news pages now occupy some 50% more pages than traditional content pages. The organizational need for greater levels of employee engagement has led to the focus on news, and especially the type of news that encourages employees to engage in two-way dialog. One-way information flow no longer counts as true employee engagement.
This is not to say that content pages are no longer important. In fact, we found these pages, by far, attracted the most readership, with some 87% of employees visiting content pages as opposed to 60% reading news pages. Our study suggests that employees treat content pages as a given. They expect such pages to provide access to up-to-date policies, work process and if they are lucky, a level of personalization to their specific needs, as well as access to work applications. Poorly maintained content pages can negatively impact employee engagement, but the feedback loops can be long, often relying on periodic surveying.
For SharePoint Online intranets, we found the socialization of intranet content, an essential element for a modern intranet, was more likely occurring in Viva Engage. Our multi-channel analysis found that intranet audiences were most correlated with the Viva Engage users. We heard from our post analysis interviews that some organizations had actually turned off the discussion features to ensure that “two-way” engagement was centered on Viva Engage and not SharePoint Online. For SharePoint Online, the socialization of the intranet incorporates Viva Engage.
Related Article: Will SharePoint Online Disrupt the Intranet Market?
Is an Intranet a Portal or a Destination?
For SharePoint Online we undertook a multi-channel analysis to identify how the readership audience might overlap with other digital channels. We evaluated the use of SharePoint intranet, Outlook email, Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams meeting participation.
Specifically, we looked at five organizations from our benchmarking sample for which we had Microsoft 365 usage data. We looked at the correlation between people who were active readers of the intranet and their relative activity on Outlook email, Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams meetings. For example, if a person is very active on email, and very active on the intranet, then we record that as a correlation:
The strong overlap between the intranet audiences and Viva Engage users has already been noted. There was also a weaker correlation with employees who were frequent Microsoft Teams meeting attendees. We found only one organization with an overlap with email readers. The results indicate a need to draw email readers into the intranet. It also suggests cross-posting between the intranet, Viva Engage, and Microsoft Teams to strengthen employee engagement.
Related Article: 5 Intranet Trends Redefining Employee Experience in 2024
Mobile Support
Our study found over 98% of employees access the intranet via their desktop computer, down from 99% in 2023. The results question a focus on mobile support. In our post-analysis interviews, we found one organization specifically targeted its frontline staff with mobile access but still struggled to get above 10% mobile usage.
Cloud or No Cloud?
SharePoint Online is Microsoft’s intranet cloud solution. Some 80% of SharePoint intranets are now hosted in the cloud and some 67% of intranets overall are now hosted in the cloud. It appears the integrations and ease of updates have intranets rapidly moving to the cloud.
Personalization
This is perhaps the most challenging modernization factor. Comparing a consumer audience with an enterprise one is fraught. For the consumer audience we don’t accurately know the potential audience. For the intranet we can easily identify the potential audience as all employees. Our study found gaining the attention of employees who even do visit can be as challenging as attracting a consumer audience.
Visitors spend a median of seven minutes a day on the intranet and a miserly 18 seconds reading news, according to our study. We found employees tend to allocate a time budget for the intranet, largely unaffected by the volume of new content available. Our post analysis interviews, however, revealed that longer human interest news articles could engage readers for longer periods.
In an attempt to personalize news, organizations are drawing on a growing number of news creators/editors. Localized news is seen as a means for reaching globally distributed audiences. The trade-off, however, is that many of these editors are not professional writers, and therefore likely to lack the communication skills required to attract and target a hard-to-reach audience.
Related Show: How Comcast Transformed Digital Chaos Into an Award-Winning Employee Experience
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A Community Approach Required
The modern intranet is, by definition, multi-faceted. It demands an eclectic mix of skills and practices. The attention economy is demanding fine-tuned content creation skills, rarely found in a single role. It will require a community led approach for success, likely led by the now natural owners: the internal communications function.
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